NOVEMBER 2011 | IEEE COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE MAGAZINE 19

Conference Reports

Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier University Pierre et Marie Curie, FRANCE

2011 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence

In April 2011, Paris hosted the third IEEE Symposium Series on Com-putational Intelligence, SSCI 2011.

Organized in Europe for the first time, after Honolulu in 2007 and Nashville in 2009, the participants had the oppor-tunity to visit some of the most repre-sentative places in the city of lights, where social events and high quality scientific presentations competed for the success of the meeting. Spri ng was rather cool, but this did not prevent the delegates from capturing the charms of the city and go home with exciting photos and hearty memories.

Over 30 symposia and workshops were held in a single location to enable cross-fertilization between all major fac-ets of Computational Intelligence repre-sented in SSCI 2011, from theory to applications, on a large spectrum from cognition to industry-oriented domains.

Almost 780 delegates from 57 coun-tries, approximately half of which from Europe, a quarter from America, and a quarter from Asia, Australia and the Pacific, had the opportunity to meet renowned specialists of Computational Intelligence.

The venue of the conference was a building within the Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7 University) called “La Halle aux farines”, in the central Pari-sian 13th arrondissement, on the South bank of the river Seine. Sixteen rooms were used for sessions and meetings,

from amphitheaters for the largest to a small room for the technical committee meetings, to suit the number of expect-ed attendees for all symposia and work-shops.

Lunches were served in the cafeteria of the university where all participants could choose their timing and meals so as to meet members of their preferred domain and others.

Coffee breaks were made available in three rooms with beverages and cookies remaining at the disposal of the attendees at any time during the fol-lowing sessions.

Demonstrations were made by the French company Aldebaran Robotics at the Tuesday and Wednesday coffee breaks where they presented their humanoid robot Nao, which is able to interact autonomously and is equipped with high level programming capacities with its Choregraphe software.

The s ympo s ium s e r i e s wa s focused on providing opportunities for all participants to interact with colleagues of their domains of inter-est and other domains in a synergetic approach, in order to establish links between symposia and workshops and to develop cooperation in the whole Computational Intelligence community, breeding multidisci-plinary research focused on funda-mental and applied aspects.

Technical ProgramThe scientific program gathered 35 symposia and workshops, the highest number ever obtained. Each of them

was managed by a chair or co-chairs, who invited international program committee members and provided a list of reviewers.

Submissions were attached by their author(s) to one of the 35 events. They were carefully selected through a strict review process handled on the EDAS web system, on the basis of at least three anonymous reviewer reports per paper. Papers were assigned by (co)-chairs of each event to reviewers, either chosen in the event list of reviewers itself, or in the list of any other event. (Co)-chairs rec-ommended a decision for each paper to the SSCI general chair and final notifi-cation acceptance or rejection was based on consensus. Conflicts of interest due to papers co-authored by (co)-chairs were managed independently of the EDAS system in a strict anonymity of reviewers.

Plagiarism was monitored by means of the procedure available on the EDAS system and additional checking. Papers subject to self-plagiarism as well as external plagiarism were rejected.

A total of 585 papers were selected for oral presentation, and 59 as posters. For three of the events, the final number of accepted papers was too small to war-rant an autonomous organization, thus they were merged with three other events on related topics of interest.

The largest number of accepted oral presentations, from 47 to 26, were reached by ADPRL 2011, CIDM 2011, IEEE ALIFE 2011, SIS 2011, IEEE MCDM 2011 and SDE 2011, in decreasing order.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCI.2011.942580 Date of publication: 20 October 2011

20 IEEE COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER 2011

The technical program was prepared over four days, from Tuesday to Friday with registration starting on Monday. The (co)-chairs were asked to split the sets of accepted oral presentations into sessions. Slots were allocated to sessions in a compact series, so that there was no delay between sessions and they were concentrated over a minimal number of days for each event. In addition, slots were spread regularly over the four days, so that every slot was associated with approximately the same number of 10 to 12 parallel sessions.

The scientific quality of all the sym-posia and workshops was enhanced by the organization of keynotes, tutorials and panels. An exceptional number of specialists were invited to give lectures. A total of 24 keynotes and 20 tutorials were offered to the attendees, and many of

them were recorded at the IEEE CIS Multimedia Tutorials Sub-Committee’s request. The technical program was pre-pared in such a way that no more than one keynote and two tutorials were scheduled at the same time. Consequent-ly, it was possible for scientists discovering the Computational Intelligence field to be introduced to all its aspects in a very comprehensive manner, with lectures over the four days. In addition, six panels were organized on specific topics of interest and open problems.

PostersAmong the 35 symposia and work-shops, 16 held poster sessions, the larg-est organized by CIDM. Nearly 60 contributions were presented as posters, in 8 sessions held during coffee breaks in a friendly and interactive environ-

ment. Posters from different symposia and workshop were presented simulta-neously during two consecutive (half-hour long) coffee breaks in one single room providing enough time to all participants to explore not only their domain of expertise, but also closely related workshops and symposia. Poster sessions played a key role in the quest for multi-disciplinary synergies and collaborations. Crowds during the ses-sions and groups discussing long after the breaks ended were evidence of the success of the poster sessions.

Social EventsSeveral social events gave the partici-pants the opportunity to socialize in a nice environment.

The welcome reception was held in the reception hall of the Hôtel de Ville (Paris City Hall), in the evening of Tues-day, April 12. Before being welcomed by a representative of the Mayor, attendees had the opportunity to visit several reception rooms of the monument.

They were then offered champagne, various drinks and snacks in the main hall.

The banquet was held during a cruise on the river Seine on Wednesday, April 13. All participants were invited to attend and three boats were available, departing from the wharf “Port de la Bourdonnais” on the Left Bank of the river Seine, not far from the Eiffel Tower. After a drink, dinner was served as the boat made a leisurely two-hour cruise during which the delegates had a chance to discover the beautiful banks of the river Seine and admire a succes-sion of prestigious monuments.

An award ceremony was organized during the cruise and three members of the Computational Intelligence Society were presented awards by IEEE CIS President Gary Yen: Hans Zim-mermann, from Germany, was the recipient of the 2011 IEEE CIS Fuzzy Pioneer award, Oscar Cordón, from Spain, received the 2011 IEEE CIS Outstanding Early Career award, and the IEEE Grade of Fellow was awarded to Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier, from France.

The team of local organizers and a symposium chair at the banquet.

Presentation in one of the SSCI sessions.

NOVEMBER 2011 | IEEE COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE MAGAZINE 21

Go CompetitionSeveral years ago, machines were still losing against strong amateur Go players. Recent developments in computer Go have allowed machines to compete against professional players, with a small handicap in the machines’ favour.

The IEEE SSCI 2011 held a human vs. computer Go competition in Paris, on April 13 and 14, with National Uni-versity of Tainan (NUTN), Taiwan, the INRIA team TAO, France, and Grid5000 to provide servers for the Go program MoGoTW.

On the first day, MoGoTW broke a new world record by winning the first 13 by 13 game against the professional Go player Ping-Chiang Chou (5P), with handicap 3 and reversed komi of 3.5. It also won 3 out of 4 games of Blind Go in 9 by 9. In games with random initial positions of 180 stones, MoGoTW won 2 out of 3 games against a strong ama-teur player. On non-standard initial positions computers can beat a very strong amateur level in 19319.

These results show that, even though machines have not reached the level of human professional Go players yet, the gap between the two is shrinking.

In order to enhance the fun in Go playing through human interaction with computer programs and to stimulate the research and development of computer Go programs, a panel and an invited ses-sion were also organized to highlight the ongoing research on Computational Intelligence approaches as well as their applications on game domains.

Grants and AwardsIEEE CIS awarded a total of 16 student grants among 48 eligible student appli-cants, for participants coming from Can-ada, Brazil, USA, Portugal, Finland, UK, Australia and Tunisia. In addition, one travel grant was awarded to a researcher from a developing country.

Best paper and best student paper awards were organized by several of the symposia and workshops. To avoid any possible conflict of interest, it had been decided that papers co-authored by an event chair or co-chair were not allowed to compete for awards in their event.

The list of winners was announced in an awards session on Thursday afternoon and is available on http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~ssci2011/. The second part of the awards session was devoted to the announcement of the Go-competition winners.

Women in Computational IntelligenceOn Thursday, April 14, a joint meeting was held at the IEEE SSCI 2011 hosted by the IEEE Women in Computational Intelligence sub-committee and the Women in Engineering France Section.

The highlight of the meeting was a presentation by Professor Donna Hud-son who is currently Director of Aca-demic Research and Technology at University of California, San Francisco, Professor of Clinical and Translational Informatics (UCSF) and Professor, Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley/UCSF. Professor Hudson provided an in-depth view of women’s progressions and positions within the IEEE using her own experiences. She offered sound advice on how to under-take career development and spent a considerable amount of time answering questions from the audience.

Following Professor Hudson, a short presentation was given by Dr Keeley Crockett on the Women in Computa-tional Intelligence Sub-committee. The

presentation highlighted past and future events hosted by WCI, including the dinner at WCCI 2010 and the receptions at CEC 2011, IJCNN 2011 and FUZZ-IEEE 2011. In addition, the ongoing activities of the WCI were presented including coaching and mentoring, sup-port for young researchers, applying for Grants, transferring research into Indus-try and help in organizing special ses-sions at CIS sponsored conferences.

A final presentation was given by Dr Laura Marti, President of the IEEE Women in Engineering France Section Affinity Group. The presentation focused on the work and activities of the IEEE WIE French Section including scientific events, WIEF seminar series and upcoming meetings at Engineering conferences.

A friendly cocktail reception was then held where participants had the opportunity to chat and network.

AcknowledgmentsThe organizers, General Committee members and Chairs of the symposia/workshops, are thankful to the sponsors of the conference, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris 6, Université Paris-Diderot, Cap Digital Business Cluster, Mair ie de Par is and the company Aldebaran Robotics, as well as

Reception in the City Hall.

22 IEEE COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER 2011

the IEEE France Section that actively collaborated with the organization.

They would like to acknowledge the efficient support of the IEEE Computa-tional Intelligence Society Officers and the

IEEE CIS Technical Committees and Task Forces who participated in the organiza-tion and management of all the symposia and workshops to gather the communi-ty, and make IEEE SSCI 2011 a success.

The next Symposium Series in Computational Intelligence will be held in 2013 in Singapore. For more details, see http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/epnsugan/index_files/SSCI2013/.

The FUZZ-IEEE is one of the premier international conferences in the field of fuzzy sets and sys-

tems. The 2011 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE 2011) was held at the Grand Hyatt Taipei, Taiwan, from June 27 to 30, 2011; it was held in Taiwan for the first time. The FUZZ-IEEE 2011 marks the 20th conference of the FUZZ-IEEE series. Sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) and co-organized by Taiwan’s National Science Council (NSC), Ministry of Education, and Bureau of Foreign Trade, FUZZ-IEEE 2011 brought together researchers and practitioners from all over the world to exchange ideas on a whole range of research and applications in fuzzy systems and soft computing.

This year, there were a total of 358 papers accepted for oral presentation and 82 for poster presentation, out of 618 submissions from 58 different coun-tries. Paper submissions were reviewed by at least three reviewers, with no specific treatment given to papers submitted for special sessions. The IEEE CIS travel grants program provided travel grants to assist 10 IEEE CIS student members to attend the confer-ence to present their papers.

The accepted papers’ first authors’ countries of origin were 25.4%, 19%,

7%, 5.2%, 5%, 4.3%, 3.8%, 3.1%, and 3.1% of authors from Taiwan, Japan, USA, China, UK, Spain, France, Australia, and Italy respectively. The distribution of the attendees’ countries was as follows: 25.2 % from Taiwan, 23.2% from Japan, 5.9% from USA, 5.2% from Spain, 4.8% from UK, 4.13% from China, 4.13% from France, 2.98% from Australia, and the remaining 28.3% from the other countries.

FUZZ-IEEE 2011 consisted of 5 workshops, 18 regular sessions, 43 special sessions, and 4 poster sessions, covering both traditional and emerging topics on the whole range of research and applica-tions in fuzzy systems and soft comput-ing. In addition to the normal paper presentations, FUZZ-IEEE 2011 held a forum on fuzzy theory and applications on June 26 in southern Taiwan and the technical program of FUZZ-IEEE 2011 included the following:

❏ Five tutorials:• Evolutionary multi-objective

design of fuzzy rule-based systems by Rafael Alcala

• Interpolative fuzzy rule bases by László Koczy

• Theoretical and practical aspects of type-2 fuzzy systems: Part 1 by Jerry Mendel

• Theoretical and practical aspects of type-2 fuzzy systems: Part 2 by Hani Hagras

• Towards a unified framework for intelligent robotics by Honghai Liu and Naoyuki Kubota

❏ Three keynote speeches:

• Inferring disease related gene-gene interactions: a fuzzy logic based approach by Nikhil Pal

• Fuzzy approaches to information fusion by Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier

• Soft computing for hard pattern recognition problems by Paul Gader

❏ Two plenary speeches:• Type-2 fuzzy sets and systems:

challenges and misconceptions by Jerry Mendel

• Soft computing in prognostics and hea l th management (PHM) applications: a case study in anomaly detection by Piero Bon-issone

❏ Three invited speeches:• Acceleration and Scalability for

c-Means Clustering by James Bezdek• Activity Summarization from 3D

Video Systems in an Eldercare Environment by Jim Keller

• Casual Communication between Robots and Humans based on Robot Technology Middleware and Multimedia Recognition by Kaoru Hirota

❏ Three panel sessions:• Interpolation and approximation

in fuzzy rule bases chaired by Lás-zló Koczy

• Computing with words chaired by Nikhil Pal

• Birth and evolution of fuzzy logic chaired by James Bezdek

❏ One fuzzy competition organized by Task Force on Competitions of the

Chin-Teng Lin, National Chiao Tung University, TAIWANand Chang-Shing Lee, National University of Tainan, TAIWAN

FUZZ-IEEE 2011

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCI.2011.942579 Date of publication: 20 October 2011