The event is a combination of the LMC Conference on Emerging Technology, which is the first out of two conferences in the activities under the Project “Build Capacity through LMC for Digital Economy” funded by the Mekong-Lancang Cooperation Special Fund, and the former annual Optical character recognition and Natural language processing technologies for ASEAN languages (ONA), which is now enlarging its scope toward the ASEAN Conference on Emerging Technologies (ACET).

It all started with optical character recognition in 2017 and building a venue for exchanging the newest insights. Since then ONA was held every year bringing together researchers from Cambodia and beyond to exchange the latest findings. Nowadays, digital technologies go far beyond OCR and NLP. To reflect the volatile and rapid trends and changes in digital technologies, ONA was upgraded and extended to ASEAN Conference on Emerging Technologies. The overarching goal of the update is to engage with more researchers from different digital technology fields and bring innovation to the public and private sectors. It is about connecting researchers, and knowledge and building applications for smarter societies.