Meeting Report

2015 IEEE International Conference on Systems,

Man and Cybernetics Conference Report

The 2015 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC 2015) was held

at City University of Hong Kong from 9 October to 12 October. Hong Kong, the Pearl of the East, is

Asia’s premier world city, and its culture represents a fusion of East and West. The main

conference venue was the recently completed Academic 3 building at the University. With its

modern appearance that evokes the image of a ship sailing smoothly in the air, and its spacious

interior design which includes a 600-seat lecture theater with state-of-the-art facilities, the new

academic building provided an ideal environment for the SMC 2015 attendees to participate in the

various conference activities, and to interact with their academic peers.

Being the flagship conference of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (SMCS), SMC

is a premier forum featuring an extraordinarily wide coverage of many themes. These themes are

related to theories and technologies for integrating human intelligence with machine intelligence to

accomplish complex information processing tasks typically present in large and highly automated

systems. The theme chosen for the 2015 conference, “Big Data Analytics for Human-Centric

Systems”, highlights this focus and also echoes the increasing interest in this area in the general

society. As we see ubiquitous presence of sensors making large volumes of data continuously

available, we also see the limitations of known methods to extract actionable insights from such

data in a manner that is timely and tolerant to system imperfections. The conference successfully

engaged the SMC community to address these issues, and to craft new discoveries and

applications that will shape how society views and uses big data.

Technical Program

The presentations in the conference were divided into three main technical tracks focusing on

Systems Science and Engineering, Human-Machine Systems, and Cybernetics respectively.

Within each track there are also many special sessions dedicated to selected topics. The program

was developed from 407 papers selected for oral presentations and 141 for poster presentations.

In terms of the number of papers per track, we had 254 from Cybernetics, 147 from Human-

Machine Systems, and 147 from Systems Science and Engineering. A total of 582 participants

from 35 countries attended the conference. The technical program was the result of many months

of dedicated work of 949 program committee members and 772 reviewers together with the

Program Co-Chairs.

The program also featured three invited keynote speakers: Jack L. Gallant of UC Berkeley, Piotr

Mirowski of Google DeepMind, Xizhao Wang of the Big Data Institute, Shenzhen University and the

2014 Norbert Wiener Award recipient, Fei-Yue Wang of the National University of Defense

Technology. Jack Gallant summarized ongoing work in his laboratory that uses a data-driven

system identification approach to reverse-engineer the human brain, which might enable us to

design artificial systems with the same capabilities. He described how remarkable improvements

in the quality of the models and the quality of brain decoding may soon make it possible to create

powerful brain-based computer interfaces based on measurements of covert, internal thought.

Piotr Mirowski spoke on an area of intense research in big data analysis - understanding human

language in the presence of web-scale text corpora and sensory data. Natural language provides a

key link between human and machine that can bring human-machine interaction to the next level.

Exciting new products with these capabilities are just beginning to emerge in the market place.

Xizhao Wang discussed some key and timely issues of learning from big data with uncertainty,

focusing on the impact of handling uncertainty on model simplification. He elaborated on various

ways in which representing, processing and interpretation of uncertainty impact the performance of

learning from big data. Fei-Yue Wang, the recipient of the 2014 Norbert Wiener Award, shared his

personal journey of parallel cybernetics in the three worlds of cyber-social-physical systems under

the philosophical influence of Norbert Wiener and Karl Popper.

The three tutorials focused on topics of timely interest, including the applications of brain-machine

interfaces, the design and evaluation of shared control systems, and the introduction of the

adversarial machine learning framework. Two webinars, with one focusing on resilient

interconnected micro energy grids and the other on cyber-physical cloud systems, were also

presented. In addition, a Workshop on Brain Machine Interface (BMI) Systems was organized, and

its theme this year was “The Human-in-the-Loop: BMI, Haptics, Big Data, and Shared Control”.

The workshop featured two lectures and three panel discussions. José del R. Millán of Ecole

Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne spoke about the importance of incorporating perceptual

feedback in designing a control strategy for motor neuroprosthetics, and Jack Gallant, our keynote

speaker, discussed how to apply a Bayesian framework to decode brain activity, such that

subjective mental states can be effectively inferred. The panel discussions focus on important

topics in brain-machine interface, which include how to transfer research results into real-world

applications, how to develop robust and high-performance BMI systems, and how to foster

collaboration among BMI researchers.

The main SMCS committee meetings, including the technical committee chairs meeting,

publications committee meeting, and the associate editors’ meeting, were held during the

conference. In addition, a pre-conference Board of Governors meeting was conducted for the first

time through VoIP. Lunch events were also organized for the technical committee chairs, chapter

chairs, associate editors, and the main SMCS committees.

Social Events

The welcome reception was held at the City Top Restaurant on the evening of 9 October. The

restaurant commands a superb view of the CityU campus, and the event serves as a great prelude

to the conference. The attendees enjoyed a wide selection of Chinese and Western food while

they interacted with their peers.

The conference banquet was held on the evening of 11 October at Jade Garden, a famous

restaurant in Hong Kong. To reflect the Eastern tradition of Hong Kong, the banquet started with a

lion dance, and the attendees enjoyed a Chinese music performance by the CityU Chinese

Orchestra during the dinner. The highlight of the event was the award presentation ceremony. The

awards recognize outstanding contributions to a broad range of SMCS activities, including service

to the Society, local chapter organization, technical committee activity co-ordination, and editorship

service to the Society’s publications. During the ceremony, the Norbert Wiener Award, which is

the primary research award of SMCS, was presented to Mengchu Zhou, for his fundamental

contributions to the area of Petri net theory and applications to discrete event systems. This was

followed by the announcement and presentation of the best conference paper award and best

conference student paper award. The complete list of award recipients can be found at the SMCS

Awards web page (http://www.ieeesmc.org/about-smcs/awards).

The post-conference tour on the afternoon of 12 October featured a visit to the Tian Tan Buddha

and Po Lin Monastery on the Lantau Island. Sitting at the top of a hill and measuring 34 meters in

height, the Tian Tan Buddha is an impressive sight and attracted a large number of visitors every

year. Attendees enthusiastically climbed the 268 steps to reach the statue. They also enjoyed a

walk along the nearby Wisdom Path, which is lined with a series of wooden monuments featuring

Chinese verses, and a visit to the Ngong Ping Village. The tour concluded the four-day conference

on a high note.

We would like to express our gratitude to all volunteers and participants in making the event a great

success.

Prof. Sam Kwong,

City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, IEEE SMC 2015 General Chair