Title :Modeling Vagueness & Mathematics for Uncertainty

Speaker : Paul P.Wang
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Pratt School of Engineering
Duke University

Editorial Affiliations

-Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, Member of Advisory Board, John Wiley Publishers
-Policy Analysis and Information Systems, Area Editor, Plenum Publishing Corp., Fuzzy Mathematics, Editorial Board
-Advisory Editor, The Journal of Fuzzy Mathematics, International Fuzzy Mathematics Institute, Los Angeles, California, USA, since 1991.
-Bulletin Pour Les Sous Enserbles Flous et leur Applications Correspondents Etrangers
-Editor-in-Chief, Information Sciences-An International Journal, North Holland, Elsevier Publishing Company
-Three Journals: (i) Computer Theory & Informatics, (ii) Intelligent Systems, (iii) Applications.
-Member, Advisory Editorial Board, Fuzzy Optimization and Decision-Making, Editor-in-Chief, Shu- Cherng Fang, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA (Kluwer Academic Publishers) 2000 to Present.

Professional Background

1960-62 Instructor in Electrical Engineering Dept., University of New Brunswick.
1962-65 Graduate and Research Assistant, E.E. Dept., Ohio State University.
1965-68 Member of Technical Staff, Bell Laboratories, Inc., Holmdel, N.J.,
(Communication Systems Research, Operations Research and Modern Control Theory).
1968-70 Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, Duke University
1970-75 Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Duke University
1974-75 Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of Massachusetts
1975-present Professor of Electrical Engineering, Duke University
Consulting Activities
1962: (Summer) Gibbs & Hill Consulting Co., New York City, (Electrical Power Plant Design)
1969-72: Consultant, Safeguard ABM, Western Electric Co., (Reliability, OR Models, Quality Control)
1974-75: Operation Researcher, Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, Duke Medical Center, (Statistical Pattern Recognition)
1975-76: Consultant, Emerson ElectricWorld Headquarters at St. Louis (Advanced F-5E Fighter Plane, Optimal Estimation and Digital Control Systems).
1976: Researcher, Research Department, Grumman Aerospace Corporation, (Highly Reliable Systems).
1977-Present: Member, Board of Directors, Knowledge Systems Institute, Chicago.
1977-78: Consultant to Assistant Secretary of the State of North Carolina on energy Matters.
1977-79: Investigator, behavioral Neuropharmacology Laboratory, Duke Medical Center.
1978-89: Consultant, Western Electrical Co., (Kalman Filter design for Naval Surface Ships Navigation).
1980-90: Consultant, LORD Corporation (Touch Sensors, Robotics)
1986-2000 Advisor and Distinguished Lecture Chair to Computer Science Department, Tamkang University, Taiwan, Republic of China.
1990-91: Summers, ASEE-NASA Fellow, Langley Space Research Center, NASA.
1991-Present: Member, Board of Directors, Intelligent Machines, Inc., Sunnyvale, California.
2000-Present: Member of advisory board, Gravidata, Inc., a start-up information company with 20 employees.
2000-Present: Advisor for EICA, Equipo de Investigacion en Computo Artificial, Universidad Anahuac de Xalapa, Mexico
Grants and Awards
1968-76: Principal Investigator and Associate Investigator on research projects supported by Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA.
1972-74: Faculty Fellow, ASEE-NASA (Goddard Space Flight Center).
1978: Lecture Chair in Mathematical System Theory, Tamkang College, Taiwan, Republic of China.
1981 & 1982 Distinguished National Professorship at Huazhong University of Science and Technology and other Universities, Ministry of Education, People’s Republic of China.
1988-Present: Hing Hua University, Honorary Board Member, University Foundation
1993-97: NSF and EPRI Research Grant
1993-96: CANON, Inc., Japan Research Center
1995-99: Holiday Inn World Wide Research Grant.
1997-Present: Director, Cooperative Research program between Duke University and Yuan Ze University.
1998-Present: Southwest Jiao Tung University, Advising Professor.
1998-2001: Visiting Chair Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, Yuan Ze University.
1999-2000: Cross Century Outstanding Scholar Award in Fuzzy Logic by Chinese Oversea Talents Foundation, Republic of China. (pure gold Chinese painting, etc.).
2000-2003 Co-Investigator (Principal Investigator, Erich Jarvis, Ph.D., Duke University Medical Center, Department of Neurobiology), Klingenstein Fund, 2000-EJ. Whitehall Foundation and Packard Foundation.
Professional Affiliations
Founder: Association for Intelligent Machinery.
Joint Conference on Information Sciences.
Fuzzy Theory and Technology Conference (7th, 2000).
Member: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Association for Computing Machinery
Classification Society
Pattern Recognition Society
North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society
Honorary member, Hing Hua Technical University Educational Foundation.

Abstract:

In modeling the real world,physical or mental,one must cope with the issue of modeling the vagueness.Classical mathematics simply does not cope very well with the required vagueness modeling because it has been designed for preciseness.Philosophers have had recognized this issue for a long long time,but this issue has been neglected by most disciplines other than philosophers.

Only recently,the focus of research in intelligent systems and complex systems have brought this issue to the center stage.This issue is particularly important to information and communication fields,even though the issue is applicable to all fields of research.Chronologically,the philosophers recognized the importance of this issue first,the scientists ,physical or social,and engineers,especially computers,also recognize this.One may now conclude that mathematics for uncertainty is absolutely necessary for us to break the deadlock.

In this talk,the definitions of the "uncertainty","mathematics of for uncertainty" will be given by studying the history of mathematical research.The motivation for this subset of classical mathematics will be given.The relationship of the new and old would also be explored.In particular,their influence in research and job opportunity will also be examined.

So far as the vagueness is concerned,two important researchers,William James and Charles Sanders Peirce are of paramount important!Their contributions are indeed huge!Thanks to their philosophical debate,a society called "Society for Mathematics of Uncertainty" was founded on global basis.One of the thrusts in this speech is to illustrate many examples in order to explain the advantage of such a society with the objective of advancing this significant research area in speedy manner. It is also important to take advantage of many failure examples in order to learn what one should do it right in the future,especially the confrontation with vagueness head on,not just to recognize the phenomena! This is of particular important after half century of research in artificial intelligence.

In conjunction with the development of the mathematics of uncertainty,especially those yet to be invented,we must also change the value system in information technology research and education systems.The impact to economics,the optimization in the sense of overall system with multiple constraints,conflicts and social need should be brought to the front.Students ought to be taught the importance of the quality assurance reliability,survivability,endurance,human value,rather than those topics of which the classical mathematics becomes the only glass ceiling,to name only a few examples.

Title: The Development of e-Science Enabling Technologies and Applications on EGEE Grid Infrastructure

Abstract:

EGEE is the world largest multi-disciplinary grid infrastructure built ever so far, composed of over 80,000 CPU cores and tens of petabytes of storage in 300 sites around the world. It provides sustainable Grid services available to users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week that enables the building of reliable and scalable scientific applications ranging from high energy physics and life sciences to geology and computational chemistry.

KISTI has been an official partner of the EU-funded EGEE project since 2006. Among the many EGEE activities, KISTI has been actively engaged in Grid operation and management, and Grid applications. Since late 2007, we has been contributing to ALICE computing by operating an ALICE Tier2 center in KISTI. The KISTI ALICE Tier2 center currently processes about 400 MC simulation jobs per day that come from CERN. Recently, we have been actively involved in the development of AMGA that has been used as a metadata catalogue service for many scientific applications in the field of High Energy Physics and Biomedical Science. We have also been participating in the EGEE WISDOM project, an international initiative aiming to develop new drugs for neglected and emerging diseases with a particular focus on malaria and avian flu.

In this talk, I will introduce the EGEE project and KISTI's activities relevant to EGEE including the operation of ALICE Tier2 center, new developments of AGMA and the WISDOM data challenge against diabetes recently carried out by KISTI.

Bio:

Soonwook Hwang is a principal researcher at Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), responsible for the research and development of enabling Grid technologies for e-Science in KISTI e-Science Division. His research interest is in Grid computing and e-Science with a particular focus onwp enabling technologies for e-Science, Grid middleware, Grid PSE systems, data management on the Grid and Grid workflow systems. He received his BS and MS from Seoul National University in Korea, in 1990 and in 1995, respectively and got his Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Southern California in 2003 under the supervision of Dr. Carl Kesselman, one of the authorities in grid technologies.

He used to be a visiting scholar at Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in the US, involved in the development of the Pegasus workflow system. He also worked for the Japanese National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) in 2004, which aims to develop grid middleware for a next-generation CyberScience infrastructure in Japan. In 2006 he joined KISTI as chief architect for Korea's national e-Science project. He is now leading the international collaboration with EGEE in KISTI.

Dr. Ngoc Thanh Nguyen
Institute of Information Science and Engineering, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland)

Invited talk title:Advanced Aspects of Knowledge Inconsistency Processing

Summary:
Inconsistent Knowledge Processing deals with methods not for removing inconsistency, but for reconciling inconsistent content of knowledge from different autonomous sources. The aspects of Knowledge Inconsistency may be considered on two levels: syntactic and semantic. On the syntactic level inconsistency is treated in the same way as for contradictory of logic formulas. On the semantic level, on the other hand, inconsistency appears when these formulas are interpreted in some concrete real world. For solving a large number of conflicts, and especially, for resolving inconsistency of knowledge on semantic level, consensus methods have been shown to be useful. The integration process in case of inconsistency often needs conflict resolution. For realizing this task we define first a set of postulates which are intuitive conditions for integration, next we analyze the postulates referring to their dependencies and independencies and work out the algorithms for integration process. In this talk the following elements will be presented: Measures for knowledge inconsistency; Consensus theory as a tool for conflict resolution; Syntactic & semantic levels of inconsistency; A model for knowledge integration; Expert knowledge integration and finally the practical aspects and applications.

Short bio:
Ngoc Thanh Nguyen (Ph.D., D.Sc.) currently works as a professor of Computer Science at Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland. His scientific interests consist of knowledge integration methods, intelligent technologies for conflict resolution, inconsistent knowledge processing, multi-agent systems, collective intelligence and E-learning methods. He has edited 10 special issues in international journals, two books and three conference proceedings. He is the author of 4 monographs and about 130 other publications. His latest monograph entitled "Advanced Methods for Inconsistent Knowledge Management" has been published by Springer this year. He serves as Co-editor of book series "Computational Intelligence and its Applications (COMIA)" for IGI Global Publishers. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, Associate Editor of International Journal of Computer Science & Applications; Journal of Information Knowledge System Management and KES Journal and a member of Editorial Boards of several other prestigious international journals such as Journal of Applied Intelligence and Journal of Universal Computer Science. He has been a General Chair, Program Chair, Program Co-chair for several international conferences in Artificial Intelligence. He is the Chair of KES symposium series on Agent and Multi-agent Systems. He is the Chair of Ph.D. Committee of the Institute of Information Science and Engineering, Wroclaw University of Technology. He is a Member of Ph.D. Thesis Examiners Register of University of South Australia. He is a Member of the Interdisciplinary Committee for Preparatory FP7 Grants in Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. He is a Senior Member of ACM, a Member of IFIP WG 7.2 and several other international scientific societies.
For details please visit his homepage:
http://www.iit.pwr.wroc.pl/~nguyen/eng_index.html

Dr. Duane P. Truex III
Computer Information Systems,J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, USA

Dropping Your Tools: the Diversification of the Research Agenda in understanding the Impact of the
Convergence of Information Technology in Organizations

Summary:The debate between protagonists of different theoretical approaches continues in the Information Systems field, with little prospect of resolution.
The debate is typically characterized by tendentious arguments as advocates from each approach offer a somewhat one-sided condemnation of other approaches.
A recent debate in the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS) illustrates the manner in which IS researchers are polarized into opposing camps, each tending to view the other as inferior. Ironically further polarization is occurring in the manner various groups of IS scholars are simultaneously calling for order, discipline and clearer notions of the "core of the discipline" while other scholars call for greater research diversity. In order to overcome this polarization we advocate a strategy recommended by Weick (1996): Drop your tools, hold your concepts lightly and update them frequently.
Three reasons for dropping our theoretical tools are suggested as a means for moving forward, both for individual researchers as well as for the research community as a whole.

Short bio: Duane Truex is interested in the social impacts of ISD especially the impact on workers and how emergent properties of organizations may be reflected in emergent ISD. Truex is active in the IFIP 8.2 community. He is an Associate Editor for the Information Systems Journal, has co-edited two special issues of The Database for Advances in Information Systems and is on the on the editorial board of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, the Journal of Communication, Information Technology & Work and the Online Journal of International Case Analysis.

An Associate Professor in the Computer Information Systems (CIS) department the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, USA, he has held visiting international posts as a Leverhulme Research Fellow in the United Kingdom at the University of Salford, England and a visiting Full Research Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Nantes, France. In the United States he has held posts at Binghamton University, Florida International University, and Cornell University.

His work has been published in the Communications of the ACM, Accounting Management and Information Technologies, The Database for Advances in Information Systems, the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS), le journal de la Societ®¶ d°ØInformation et Management (SIM), the Information Systems Journal (ISJ), the Journal of Arts Management and Law, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and forty assorted IFIP transactions and edited books and conference proceedings. In July 2004 he published an edited book entitled "Information Systems Research: Relevant Theory and Informed Practice" published by Kluwer Academic Press.

Rajiv Kishore, Ph.D.
State University of New York at Buffalo, New York, USA

Convergence and Globalization:
Impacts and Implications of the Global Collaboration Platform on Global Outsourcing
By Rajiv Kishore, Ph.D.
State University of New York at Buffalo, New York, USA
The beginning of the confluence of the telecommunication technologies and information technologies occurred sometime in the early 1960s when the seeds of the Internet were first sown. This merger of the two technologies continued strengthening and achieved a major milestone in the 1990s with the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the web browser, and the connection of the now ubiquitous PC to the Internet. Further convergence occurred with the development of a wide variety of new technologies and software applications, including e-mail, file sharing, workflow, search engines, instant messaging, voice over IP (VOIP), Internet video conferencing, etc., and it spawned the first truly global platform with vastly superior capabilities for communication and collaboration than ever before. The rapid growth in global outsourcing of IT and IT-enabled services, also termed as offshoring, that we have seen in the last decade has been propelled in no small measure by this global collaboration platform. In my presentation, I will examine how this coalescing of communication and information technologies has shaped the global outsourcing phenomenon. I will also discuss some implications of the global collaboration platform for the global outsourcing field and those who work in it. I will also explore the new capabilities that client and vendor organizations may need to develop to use this convergence to the fullest extent to their advantage.

Short bio:

Rajiv Kishore
State University of New York at Buffalo
325N Jacobs Management Center
Buffalo, New York 14260-4000, USA

Ph.D. (Computer Information Systems), Georgia State University
M.S. (Computer Information Systems), Georgia State University
M.T. (Technical), IIT Madras, India
B.E. (Industrial Engineering), University of Roorkee, India

Dr. Kishore's primary research interest is in improving organizational and IT performance through the effective management of global IT and business process outsourcing projects, agile methods for business process analysis and integration, and technology and innovation management. He received a multi-year research grant as a co-principal investigator from the National Science Foundation for conducting research in the IT outsourcing area. Dr. Kishore has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and refereed proceedings and has presented his research at various international, national, and regional conferences. He has also consulted with a number of large companies including BellSouth, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, Clearnet Communications (Canada), Dun and Bradstreet Software, IBM, and Pioneer-Standard Electronics. He continues to regularly consult and speak to industry and professional groups. Dr. Kishore is also the co-editor-in-chief of JITTA (www.jitta.org), a scholarly information systems journal.