Computational Intelligence - February 2015 - 11

1982 when I was an organizing committee member for the 1982 IEEE
Symposium on Information Theory. I
was involved for the first time in a
Computational Intelligence conference
when being an executive committee
member of the 1st FUZZ-IEEE conference held in San Diego in 1992, a
remarkable milestone for the Computational Intelligence field. Fuzzy systems
being my original domain of expertise, I
have served many times in FUZZ-IEEE
conference committees, for instance in
the recent years as a program chair in
2010 and 2013 and a conference chair
in 2012. This gave me the opportunity
to contribute to the organization of
IEEE WCCI congresses in Barcelona
and in Brisbane. In addition, I have also
been concerned with the IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, as the general chair of IEEE SSCI
2011 held in Paris, and the honorary
chair of IEEE SSCI 2013 in Singapore.
All these experiences gave me a view
of the hard work done by all our conference organizers and the difficulties they
can encounter. We will never be able to
thank them enough for their dedication
to our community. I have also seen
expectations and needs of all attendees
and I can assure that we are doing our
best to maintain the highest standards.
The most important component of
our conferences is their scientific quality.
We have always paid the highest attention to a very strict reviewing process,
the acceptance or rejection decisions
being made by program and conference
chairs, with the help of technical cochairs bringing specialized expertise, on
the basis of expert reviewer reports. We
will do our best to still improve the
online reviewing system to give the best
possible support to decisions. So-called
conflict of interest papers, submitted by
program and conference chairs as well as
technical co-chairs, are reviewed independently by a specific committee to
ensure an ethical management. Plagiarism detection has been incorporated in
the acceptance decision for several years
to avoid redundancy in publications,
even in the case where the redundancy is
limited to papers of the same authors, in

such a way that all accepted papers show
only innovative and unpublished results.
The decision between oral presentations vs posters has been an issue discussed in the conference committee, at
the instigation of several past conference
chairs. Both types of presentation have
their qualities and their drawbacks, oral
presentations being more appreciated in
some professional environments for the
visibility they may bring when a large
audience is present, posters providing a
unique opportunity to have a long discussion with other participants especially interested in the presented topic. In
the future, we will give a choice to
authors between oral and poster presentations, and we will encourage poster
presenters to enrich their presentations
with new media and online demonstrations. Complementing classic oral presentations, posters will more and more
prove their capacity to be rich and interesting and will win in visibility.
The IEEE World Congress of Computational Intelligence, held on even
years, has been an exceptional assembly
of the Computational Intelligence community since 1994. It is a unique opportunity to see all the CIS components,
their specificities as well as their common points of interest, their synergies
and the strength of their mutual fertilization. IEEE WCCI highlights the
three flagship conferences of Computational Intelligence Society: the IEEE
International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE), the IEEE Congress
on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE
CEC) and the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN),
which are all organized autonomously
on odd years. A remarkable component
of IEEE WCCI is the organization of
hybrid sessions common to the three
conferences, outlining research topics
approached by CIS members by means
of a variety of computational intelligence techniques. The next IEEE
WCCI will be held in Vancouver, Canada, in July 2016.
The IEEE Symposium Series on
Computational Intelligence constitutes a
special framework gathering together
each time more than twenty workshops

and symposia. The general and program
chairs lead the group of workshop and
symposium organizers in a collaborative
way to obtain a synergy between topics
and between sub-communities of Computational Intelligence Society. From
now on, the technical committee for
IEEE SSCI will officially include all the
workshop and symposium chairs. It is
worth pointing out that IEEE SSCI provides them with a common organizational platform, leaving them with the
only charge of scientific aspects and the
role of attracting members of their scientific communities to make their workshops and symposia successful. For
participants, the interest of the IEEE
SSCI structure is multiple. Not only are
they offered exceptional networking
opportunities with their scientific community within the workshop or symposium they choose, but they are also
fortunate in having access to all other
workshops and symposia, in particular to
all keynote talks and tutorials, in addition
to plenary lectures of common interest.
IEEE SSCI is held every year around
December and this year it will be organized in Cape Town, South Africa.
In addition to these major events,
several conferences of smaller size on
focused areas are organized autonomously to harmoniously and efficiently complete the spectrum of the CIS core
activities. Let us mention IEEE CIFEr
on Financial Engineering and Economics, IEEE CIBCB on Bioinformatics and
Computational Biology, IEEE CIVEMSA on Virtual Environments for Measurement Systems and Applications,
IEEE ICDL-EpiRob on Development
and Learning & Epigenetic Robotics,
IEEE CISDA on Security and Defense
Applications, and IEEE DSAA on Data
Sciences and Advanced Analytics. The
cases of IEEE CIVEMSA and ICDLEpiRob are two examples of a successful
uniting of complementary topics and
communities associated for a stronger
and richer conference. Besides these
conferences sponsored by CIS, various
other conferences are handled by local
organizations and technically co-sponsored by CIS, enabling us to extend our
outreach to other topics or countries.

february 2015 | Ieee ComputatIonal IntellIgenCe magazIne

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Computational Intelligence - February 2015