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SMCS Technical Committee on Soft Computing
Myriad of Activities and Lessons Learned
1. Introduction
It was more than 20 years ago when Lotfi A. Zadeh introduced the term of Soft Computing [1,2] to refer a group of engineering methods and algorithms to obtain inexact solutions to computationally hard tasks, such as function approximation, approximate reasoning and global optimization, for which there is no known algorithm that can compute an exact solution in polynomial time. At this time, neural network (NN), evolutionary computation (EC) and fuzzy logic (FL) have already matured as independent research disciplines. Then, practitioners and theoreticians noted the seemingly unlimited ability of hybridization of these methods in order to compliment the weakness of individual methods.
The first wave came in the late 80's by the developments in combining NN with FL, followed by EC approaches to optimize NN and FL systems. There were other characteristics as well and one was their sensitivity for the effort-precision trade-off, while solving real world problems. Success in the industry and other applications revealed that soft computing methods ensure higher precision, given higher effort in the related search or modeling, be it larger population sizes and larger number of generations in a genetic algorithm to get closer to the global optimum, be it larger number of neurons in an NN to achieve a better approximation of a target function, or the use of finer fuzzy granulation to come more close to an exact representation of a system.
Last but not least, all these algorithms took somehow inspiration from nature, in case of EC or NN even patronizing their naming. Over the years, soft computing continued to mature and today the field has much emerged, with new power tools like swarm intelligence, differential evolution etc. A quick retrieval of the keyword of Soft Computing through popular academic indexes finds 9,959 entries in Elsevier's Scopus, 23,054 in IEEE Xplore, 76,561 in the ACM Digital Library and 134,737 in Springer Link. Google scholar even lists 230,000 available online documents on this topic from the academic field.
Thinking about Soft Computing is always about practical solutions to real-world problems. The late Prof. Yasuhiko Dote has once characterized soft computing as a Transdisciplinary Science and Technology [3]. Many fields took benefit from the vast suite of algorithms that have been developed. We can only name a few: web intelligence, social networks, knowledge discovery, biophysics, industrial design, urban facility management, image processing and pattern recognition, medical diagnosis, system control, communication networks, information and network security, combinatorial optimization, robotics, up to arts and social studies.
As usual, the tremendous growth is accompanied by numerous academic activities. These days, many top ranked journals and high quality conferences in the computer science field have a soft computing theme. Moreover, there is a new generation of young researchers who find the ideas and concepts of soft computing compelling enough to devote their master and doctoral thesis topics.
2. TC on SC: Leadership, Evolution and Objectives
The Technical Committee on Soft Computing (TC on SC) is the representation of this huge line of research within the IEEE SMC Society (SMCS). Our primary goal is to provide an excellent forum for exchanging ideas among Soft Computing researchers and engineers through scientific events, such as organizing special sessions at SMC annual conferences, organizing/supporting high quality international conferences and workshops and editing special issues for SMCS's publications.
Hideyuki Takagi was the Chair of TC on SC during the period 1998-2004 following the former SMCS President, Mike Smith; Tadahiko Murata and Michael Hanss became the Chairs during 2004-2008 followed by Ajith Abraham, Mario Koppen and Hideyuki Takagi, since 2008.
Technical activities of TC on SC had focused on organizing Special Sessions (SS's) at SMC annual conferences till 2008, but have expanded to not only organizing SS's but also supporting conferences, providing services to TC members through Web tools, and supporting students and young researchers by organizing Summer Schools, since we had three TC Chairs in 2008. We describe them in detail in Sections 3 and 4.
One example of our long and continuous activity is shown in the statistics of organizing SS's at annual SMC conferences. Our SS on Soft Computing collected 24, 46, 34, 36, 32, 43, 26, 37, 40, 31, and 35 papers at SMC2002 - SMC2012, respectively. These are the champion numbers at each SMC20XX except SMC2008. For all these activities, the TC on SC received the IEEE Most Active SMC Technical Committee Award in 2006 and 2009.
3. TC Management Strategies: How Have We Done and What?
We are the biggest SMCS TC and had a membership of over 150 members originating from 30 countries at the end of 2012. We would not have been able to cope up with a huge TC and a myriad of activities without the efforts of our TC members and having strict procedures to maintain the quality and reliability in the long run.
We are taking the below strategies to keep our high activities:
- maintaining own portal site,
- screening active TC members by an annual renewal system,
- advertising TC using social networking system (SNS), and
- advertising TC and recruiting new TC members at conferences supported by the TC on SC.
We are maintaining our own TC portal site [4] to provide service to the TC members and promote the TC to public besides our official web page [5] under the SMCS official site. The services include providing the conference information that our TC supports, our past annual TC activities reports, research interests of our TC members, and the "Join us!" web page for recruiting new TC members. As our TC members are quite many and spread all over the world, most of them do not know each other. This web page helps our TC members to know who is in their same research areas and contact each other, which may be the start of new joint research and increase our new TC activities. We also provide our TC members a bulletin board system (BBS), Google Group, for internal discussions. Figure 1 illustrates some screen captures of the TC on SC online joining portal.
We have a simple online annual renewal system and force our TC members to renew their TC membership every year. One of the TC problems is having ghost members whose names are kept in spite of their low activities. To screen such TC members with low activities, we force all our TC members to show their explicit intention to continue to keep their TC membership by clicking a renewal URL every year. It means that all our 150 TC members are active as they explicitly showed their willingness to join our TC on SC in 2012.
We have a group of TC on SC in LinkedIn, which also improves the visibility of SMCS and TC on SC among various LinkedIn members / groups, especially from the industry. Actually, we recruited several our TC members through this channel.
At every SMC annual conferences, we do a recruitment drive by having a TC promotional poster since SMC2006 and delivering recruitment cards to the attendees of our SS on Soft Computing. Since these attendees are interested in presentations at SS on Soft Computing, it is very likely that they are interested in the TC on SC, and we recruited several TC members.
We also conduct SMCS promotional talks and TC recruitment during some of the conferences where the TC is deeply involved. TC on SC has many active members who are in the Organization Committees of several conferences as illustrated in Section 4. This is a good opportunity for our TC on SC to promote TC activities. Taking advantage of these opportunities, we have given short promotion talks at the start of these conferences and our SS's and recruited several of our TC members.
Figure 1. Joining the TC on SC is few clicks away!
1. Introduction
It was more than 20 years ago when Lotfi A. Zadeh introduced the term of Soft Computing [1,2] to refer a group of engineering methods and algorithms to obtain inexact solutions to computationally hard tasks, such as function approximation, approximate reasoning and global optimization, for which there is no known algorithm that can compute an exact solution in polynomial time. At this time, neural network (NN), evolutionary computation (EC) and fuzzy logic (FL) have already matured as independent research disciplines. Then, practitioners and theoreticians noted the seemingly unlimited ability of hybridization of these methods in order to compliment the weakness of individual methods.
The first wave came in the late 80's by the developments in combining NN with FL, followed by EC approaches to optimize NN and FL systems. There were other characteristics as well and one was their sensitivity for the effort-precision trade-off, while solving real world problems. Success in the industry and other applications revealed that soft computing methods ensure higher precision, given higher effort in the related search or modeling, be it larger population sizes and larger number of generations in a genetic algorithm to get closer to the global optimum, be it larger number of neurons in an NN to achieve a better approximation of a target function, or the use of finer fuzzy granulation to come more close to an exact representation of a system.
Last but not least, all these algorithms took somehow inspiration from nature, in case of EC or NN even patronizing their naming. Over the years, soft computing continued to mature and today the field has much emerged, with new power tools like swarm intelligence, differential evolution etc. A quick retrieval of the keyword of Soft Computing through popular academic indexes finds 9,959 entries in Elsevier's Scopus, 23,054 in IEEE Xplore, 76,561 in the ACM Digital Library and 134,737 in Springer Link. Google scholar even lists 230,000 available online documents on this topic from the academic field.
Thinking about Soft Computing is always about practical solutions to real-world problems. The late Prof. Yasuhiko Dote has once characterized soft computing as a Transdisciplinary Science and Technology [3]. Many fields took benefit from the vast suite of algorithms that have been developed. We can only name a few: web intelligence, social networks, knowledge discovery, biophysics, industrial design, urban facility management, image processing and pattern recognition, medical diagnosis, system control, communication networks, information and network security, combinatorial optimization, robotics, up to arts and social studies.
As usual, the tremendous growth is accompanied by numerous academic activities. These days, many top ranked journals and high quality conferences in the computer science field have a soft computing theme. Moreover, there is a new generation of young researchers who find the ideas and concepts of soft computing compelling enough to devote their master and doctoral thesis topics.
2. TC on SC: Leadership, Evolution and Objectives
The Technical Committee on Soft Computing (TC on SC) is the representation of this huge line of research within the IEEE SMC Society (SMCS). Our primary goal is to provide an excellent forum for exchanging ideas among Soft Computing researchers and engineers through scientific events, such as organizing special sessions at SMC annual conferences, organizing/supporting high quality international conferences and workshops and editing special issues for SMCS's publications.
Hideyuki Takagi was the Chair of TC on SC during the period 1998-2004 following the former SMCS President, Mike Smith; Tadahiko Murata and Michael Hanss became the Chairs during 2004-2008 followed by Ajith Abraham, Mario Koppen and Hideyuki Takagi, since 2008.
Technical activities of TC on SC had focused on organizing Special Sessions (SS's) at SMC annual conferences till 2008, but have expanded to not only organizing SS's but also supporting conferences, providing services to TC members through Web tools, and supporting students and young researchers by organizing Summer Schools, since we had three TC Chairs in 2008. We describe them in detail in Sections 3 and 4.
One example of our long and continuous activity is shown in the statistics of organizing SS's at annual SMC conferences. Our SS on Soft Computing collected 24, 46, 34, 36, 32, 43, 26, 37, 40, 31, and 35 papers at SMC2002 - SMC2012, respectively. These are the champion numbers at each SMC20XX except SMC2008. For all these activities, the TC on SC received the IEEE Most Active SMC Technical Committee Award in 2006 and 2009.
3. TC Management Strategies: How Have We Done and What?
We are the biggest SMCS TC and had a membership of over 150 members originating from 30 countries at the end of 2012. We would not have been able to cope up with a huge TC and a myriad of activities without the efforts of our TC members and having strict procedures to maintain the quality and reliability in the long run.
We are taking the below strategies to keep our high activities:
- maintaining own portal site,
- screening active TC members by an annual renewal system,
- advertising TC using social networking system (SNS), and
- advertising TC and recruiting new TC members at conferences supported by the TC on SC.
We are maintaining our own TC portal site [4] to provide service to the TC members and promote the TC to public besides our official web page [5] under the SMCS official site. The services include providing the conference information that our TC supports, our past annual TC activities reports, research interests of our TC members, and the "Join us!" web page for recruiting new TC members. As our TC members are quite many and spread all over the world, most of them do not know each other. This web page helps our TC members to know who is in their same research areas and contact each other, which may be the start of new joint research and increase our new TC activities. We also provide our TC members a bulletin board system (BBS), Google Group, for internal discussions. Figure 1 illustrates some screen captures of the TC on SC online joining portal.
We have a simple online annual renewal system and force our TC members to renew their TC membership every year. One of the TC problems is having ghost members whose names are kept in spite of their low activities. To screen such TC members with low activities, we force all our TC members to show their explicit intention to continue to keep their TC membership by clicking a renewal URL every year. It means that all our 150 TC members are active as they explicitly showed their willingness to join our TC on SC in 2012.
We have a group of TC on SC in LinkedIn, which also improves the visibility of SMCS and TC on SC among various LinkedIn members / groups, especially from the industry. Actually, we recruited several our TC members through this channel.
At every SMC annual conferences, we do a recruitment drive by having a TC promotional poster since SMC2006 and delivering recruitment cards to the attendees of our SS on Soft Computing. Since these attendees are interested in presentations at SS on Soft Computing, it is very likely that they are interested in the TC on SC, and we recruited several TC members.
We also conduct SMCS promotional talks and TC recruitment during some of the conferences where the TC is deeply involved. TC on SC has many active members who are in the Organization Committees of several conferences as illustrated in Section 4. This is a good opportunity for our TC on SC to promote TC activities. Taking advantage of these opportunities, we have given short promotion talks at the start of these conferences and our SS's and recruited several of our TC members.
Figure 1. Joining the TC on SC is few clicks away!
4. Technical Contributions During 2012
During 2012, the TC on SC organized 40 conferences sponsored by SMCS and different IEEE organizational units. During recent years, TC on SC is also trying to put more emphasis on organizing events in developing countries; for example, 3 events in India, 3 in Brazil and 1 in Mexico in 2012. We try to get our TC members actively involved by contributing papers, be program committee members and reviewers.
Here is a quick snapshot of the technical activities:
TC on SC supported 4 conferences with SMCS technical sponsorship:
- World Automation Congress 2012 (WAC2012), Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, June 24 - 28
- 4th Int. Conf. on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems (INCoS2012), in Bucharest, Romania, Sept. 19-21
- 5th Int. Conf. on Emerging Trends in Engineering & Technology (ICETET2012), in Kobe, Japan, Nov. 5-7
- 6th Int. Conf. on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems and 13th Int. Symposium on Advanced Intelligent Systems (SCIS-ISIS2012), in Kobe, Japan, Nov. 20-24, 2012.
TC on SC supported 22 conferences with SMCS Chapter's sponsorship: among them are SOCO2012, SISY2012, NaBIC2012, CASoN2012, NWeSP2012, IAS2012, WICT 2012, ISDA2012, SoCPaR2012 and HIS2012. Besides supporting these SMCS-related conferences, TC on SC members played major roles in the Organization Committees of 12 conferences with other IEEE Organizational Unit sponsorships, like WCCI2012, ICGEC2012, AINA2012, IBICA2012 etc..
The TC on SC has organized two SS's at conferences with SMCS full sponsorship, and the SS on Soft Computing at SMC2012 received 35 papers.
The TC on SC organized the first Cybernetics Summer School (CSS2012) in Ostrava, Czech Republic during Aug. 31 - Sept. 4, 2012 [6]. Some of our TC members were lecturers and gave educational talks to students for over 25 hours.
5. Future Plans
Among many plans, the TC on SC will continue to organize SS's at SMCS flagship conferences, as well as staying involved in major Soft Computing conference cycles. The first Cybernetics Summer School was a great success, and further Summer Schools are in planning. A main focus is to stronger link young researchers with expert senior researchers, and thus to help shaping their future carrier and gaining knowledge. The website will be expanded by further communication facilities, making use of social networking services, thus helping to make membership in the TC on SC more than a plain database entry but its website an often visited portal page of personal choice.
References
[1] History of BISC Seminar:
http://www-bisc.cs.berkeley.edu/BISCProgram/default.htm
[2] L.A. Zadeh, Fuzzy Logic, Neural Networks, and Soft Computing, Communication of the ACM, March 1994, Vol. 37 No. 3, pages 77-84.
[3] IEEE Int. Workshop on Soft Computing as Transdisciplinary Science and Technology (WSTST'05), Muroran, Japan. Advances in Soft Computing, 29, Springer 2005.
[4] https://sites.google.com/site/smcsoftcomputing/
[5] http://www.ieeesmc.org/technicalcommittess/tc_sc.html
[6] http://www.cs.vsb.cz/arg/worconf/css/
