The ICIT-2019 was opened by SSTU Acting Rector Dr. Oleg Afonin, who spoke about the digitalization of education and research being the most important components of national development. Dr. Oleg Afonin also noticed that the conference is designed to promote the integration of Russian education into the world educational space, to encourage the development and globalization of engineering and IT education.

The conference program included a plenary session and three sections: “Models, methods and approaches in the decision-making system”, “Mathematical modeling in science and production”, “Smart city technologies”. The speakers presented the reports containing the results of their practical work and the latest achievements in research in the fields of the conference topics. For each topic were active discussions.

ICIT-2019 organizing committee chair Dr.Olga Dolinina, director of the SSTU Institute of Applied Information Technologies and Communications: “Everyone who was participating in the ICIT-2019 could get acquainted with the most promising areas of the IT industry and modern research in the field of decision making systems. We heard interesting reports on technologies of the smart city, theory of information processing, coding systems, theory of automatic control and regulation, and also on ontologies, a modern area of intelligent systems development”.

Conference proceedings editor, Dr. Vadim Zhmud, professor of Novosibirsk State Technical University: “In 2019 for the first time in ICIT history the conference proceedings will be published by the international publishing house Springer – volume title ‘Recent Research in Control Engineering and Decision Making’ of the Springer series "Studies in Systems, Decision and Control" (SSDC). This series is indexed by SCOPUS and many other international citation databases. This means that the proceedings of the conference were included in the world scientific ratings and will be useful to researchers all over the world”.

Tatyana Buldakova, professor of Bauman Moscow State Technical University, noted the high level of conference organization. Foreign participants were offered the opportunity to make online presentations and participate in discussions. This experience should be used in all forthcoming events of this format.

Alexander Yurin, researcher of Matrosov Institute for System Dynamics and Control Theory of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences: “For me, the conference is an opportunity to talk with colleagues, famous in their research field and get ideas for future work, to make sure that the IT sphere remains in trend. In addition, I would be able to share the experience with my colleagues at laboratory seminars and conferences in my institute”.

Plenary session presentations:

New Broadband Receiver for Software Defined Radio and Radio Frequency Identification Systems	Models and methods of ontological data analysis	Design of controllers for complex objects. New structures and optimization methods
Combined Intellectual & Petri Net with Priorities Approach to the Waste Disposal in the Smart City	Modern challenges of coding theory

Since 2012 Yuri Gagarin State Technical University of Saratov organizes the International Conference on Information Technologies: Information and Communication Technologies for Research and Industry (ICIT) in Saratov, Russia. The first one was held under the umbrella of the International Network for Engineering Education and Research (iNEER). The ICIT-2012 in Saratov was the 27th conference in the series sponsored by iNEER that started in 1994. It also was the first time ever that the conference was held in Russia. The event took place on June 6-9, 2012. The conference included 3 plenary sessions and 22 regular sessions with oral presentations, panel discussions and poster presentations. More than 400 researchers, IT teachers, representatives of industry and business, employees of educational institutions from various countries discussed the problems of ICT in research and industry, development and globalization of engineering education, IT innovations for education and science, sustainable development and technogenic change and many other things. The conference proceedings were published as a book of abstracts (hard copy) and as an electronic collection of full-text papers (CD). The selected papers were included in the iNEER annual "Innovations 2012" book.

The next ICIT was held in SSTU on January 27-29, 2014. The conference was focused on 4 main problems: development of the ICT qualifications (international approach), IT for education, IT for research and industry, and social impact of IT. The ICIT-2014 welcomed the participants from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belorussia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Spain, Italy and other countries. The conference proceedings included full-text papers and were published as a book.

By 2016, the third conference set up a tradition of holding an ICIT in Saratov. Participants from Russia, CIS countries and Europe came to SSTU in August 25-26, 2016 to exchange ideas and discuss various aspects of information technologies in modern world. The main topics were: automatic control and signal processing, telecommunications, cognitive systems, neural systems, robotics, knowledge based decision making systems, information systems for industry and research, ICT for smart city, international ICT qualifications framework, social impact of information technologies. The conference proceedings included full-text papers and were published as a book.

The ICIT-2017 welcomed 317 participants from 12 countries in September 21-22, 2017 and served as a discussion area for the actual ICT topics: artificial intelligence, automation control theory, smart city technologies, security, cloud computing, virtual reality. The conference proceedings included full-text papers and were published as a book.