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IFSA/NAFIPS/SMC
Open Forum
ON THE FUTURE OF SOFT COMPUTING
Wednesday, July 25, 2001
13:30 - 17:30
Many activities involve the management of uncertain information ranging from the prediction of financial data to the understanding of biological or behavioral activity. The resulting data is always incomplete, poorly recorded, inconsistent, and often faulty. In addition, most of the data relies on subjective perceptions and is therefore inherently imprecise. Soft computing provides technologies for dealing with imprecise information using fuzzy logic, neural networks, evolutionary computation, and other intelligent system technologies.
This event, open to all registered delegates at IFSA/NAFIPS 2001, will provide an open forum so that a distinguished panel of experts and the audience can discuss and exchange their thoughts, concerns and ideas about soft computing. These panel members, drawn from industry, universities, R&D laboratories and institutes, and funding agencies, will also explore the future of soft computing. Issues such as the future needs and applications for soft computing in telecommunications, financial engineering, biotechnology, and the Internet will be addressed. Also, the direction of research funding, emerging research, and other professional interests related to soft computing will be emphasized.
The audience will be strongly encouraged to participate in this open forum and the panel will focus on issues, comments, and concerns of the audience and the soft computing community in general. Other issues to be discussed will be solicited by e-mail from IFSA and NAFIPS members as well as from other researchers worldwide. At the conclusion of the forum, a reception will be held to encourage additional exchange of ideas, networking, and to also provide an opportunity for the audience to meet the panel members.
Moderator:
Lotfi A. Zadeh, BISC, University of California at Berkeley (Professor and
IFSA/NAFIPS 2001 Pleanry Speaker)
Panel Members:
- John Farrell, Harris Corp., USA (Information Assurance Design Lead)
- David Fogel, Natural Selection, Inc., USA (Chief Executive Officer)
- Gregg Garrison, Hanseatic Group Inc., USA (Head of Marketing)
- David Patterson, Tripos Inc., USA (Senior Fellow)
- Michio Sugeno, Brain Science Institute, Japan (Laboratory Head and IFSA/NAFIPS 2001 Plenary Speaker)
- I. B. Turksen, University of Toronto, Canada (Professor and IFSA/NAFIPS 2001 Plenary Speaker)
- Paul Werbos, National Science Foundation, USA (Program Director)
- Hans-Jürgen Zimmermann, Aachen Institute of Technology (Professor Emeritus)
Organizing Committee:
- Michael Berthold, Tripos Inc. (IFSA/NAFIPS 2001 Workshop Organizing
Committee Chair and Publicity Chair)
- William Gruver, Simon Fraser University (IFSA/NAFIPS 2001 General Co-Chair)
- Lawrence O. Hall, University of South Florida (IFSA/NAFIPS 2001
Program Chair)
- Michael Smith, University of California at Berkeley (IFSA/NAFIPS
2001 General Co-Chair)
Biographies of the Panel Members:
Lotfi Zadeh is a Professor in the Department of EECS, University of California at Berkeley. In addition, he is serving as the Director of BISC (Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing). He is an alumnus of the University of Teheran, MIT and Columbia University. He held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ; MIT; IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, CA; SRI International, Menlo Park, CA; and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. His earlier work was concerned in the main with systems analysis, decision analysis and information systems. His current research is focused on fuzzy logic, computing with words and soft computing, which is a coalition of fuzzy logic, neurocomputing, evolutionary computing, probabilistic computing and parts of machine learning. The guiding principle of soft computing is that, in general, better solutions can be obtained by employing the constituent methodologies of soft computing in combination rather than in stand-alone mode.
John Farrell holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a M.S. in Computer Science from University of South Florida. As part of his studies he developed a rule partitioning program for parallel Expert Systems, and a Fuzzy Marine Bio-assessment Expert System. He joined Harris Corporation in 1995 where he has worked on several software projects, including an Expert System based NRL system and a real time expert system for a status and control system. He has spent the last 3 years in the development of a Fuzzy system for correlating Information Assurance data obtained from 3rd party security software tools.
David Fogel is chief executive officer of Natural Selection, Inc., La Jolla, CA. He has been applying computational intelligence methods to real problems for 16 years. Dr. Fogel is the founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation and is the author of over 200 publications in computational intelligence, including six books. Most recently, he published "How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics," co-authored by Z. Michalewicz (Springer, 2001). He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1999. Dr. Fogel is general chairman of the 2002 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, to be held May 12-17, 2002 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Gregg Garrison is a graduate of the University of New Mexico, earning both a MBA in Finance and International Management and a MA in Latin American Studies (Economics and Political Science). During his studies, Mr. Garrison worked for Hanseatic Group on strategic marketing, a proposed international joint venture and a comparison of Hanseatic's financial methodology against other technical systems. He has also worked with Hanseatic and an academic institute to study non-linear systems, neural nets, financial engineering and other alternative approaches in finance and economics. Since 1998, Mr. Garrison has been Head of Marketing of Hanseatic's services to individual and institutional clients.
David Patterson holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science and an M.S. in Systems Science from Washington University in St. Louis. He was a Senior Research Scientist with the Center for Air Pollution Impact and Trend Analysis from 1976 until joining Tripos in 1986. His positions have included Product Manager for QSAR and Senior Director of New Products prior to being promoted to Senior Fellow in March 1996. His current focus is on bringing recent data mining advances into the field of drug discovery.
Michio Sugeno received his doctorate from the Department of Physics, University of Tokyo and served as Research Associate, Associate Professor and Full Professor at the Department of Control Engineering and Department of Systems Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is Head of the Laboratory for Language-Based Intelligent Systems, Brain Science Institute, RIKEN in Wako, Japan. Dr. Sugeno is the recipient of the Pioneer Award from the IEEE Neural Network Council in 2000.
I. B. Türksen received his Ph.D. degree in Systems Management and Operations Research in 1969 from the University of Pittsburgh, PA. He is Professor of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto and Director of the Information and Intelligent Systems Laboratory. Previously he was Visiting Research Professor of the Laboratory for International Fuzzy Engineering, Chair of Fuzzy Theory at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and a Visiting Research Professor at the University of South Florida and Bilkent University. Currently he is the President of IFSA. His current research interests are on the foundations of fuzzy sets and logics, in particular on Type 2 fuzzy knowledge representation and reasoning, fuzzy truth tables and fuzzy normal forms, and on applications of intelligent manufacturing and process system models, and management decision support system models for analysis diagnosis, prediction and intelligent control.
Paul Werbos holds degrees from Harvard and the London School of Economics in economics international political systems, applied mathematics with a major in quantum physics and a minor in decision and control, and applied mathematics with an interdisciplinary PhD thesis. He taught courses at Maryland in quantitative methods and global futures and performed research in intelligent systems for policy application. He worked at the Department of Energy evaluating and developing a wide range of energy forecasting models. In 1989 he joined NSF as a program director in the ECS Division with emphasis on Neuroengineering. Within the NSF Knowledge Modeling and Computational Intelligence area, his main goal is to maximize the development and dissemination of step-by-step advances in systems design that will lead to an understanding and replication of the general kind of learning-based intelligence.
Hans-Jürgen Zimmermann is Professor Emeritus at the Aachen Institute of Technology and Scientific Director of the European Laboratory for Intelligent Techniques Engineering. He holds honorary doctorate degrees from the Free University of Brussels and the Abo Akademi University, Finland. He has been actively pursuing research in fuzzy set theory and its applications since 1972. His current research interests include fuzzy mathematical programming, fuzzy control, fuzzy expert systems, fuzzy data analysis, and their application to various areas, such as, strategic planning, managerial decision making, and concurrent engineering. He supervises industrial projects in which these methods are applied to industrial problems. He is also responsible for two software houses engaged in operations research and intelligent software solutions.
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