IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine - February 2018 - 4

CIS Society Officers
President - Nikhil R. Pal,
Indian Statistical Institute, INDIA
Past President - Pablo A. Estévez,
University of Chile, CHILE
Vice President - Conferences - Bernadette
Bouchon-Meunier, University Pierre et Marie
Curie, FRANCE
Vice President - Education - Simon M. Lucas,
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Vice President - Finances - Enrique H. Ruspini,
USA
Vice President - Members Activities -
Pau-Choo (Julia) Chung, National Cheng
Kung University,TAIWAN
Vice President - Publications - Jim Keller,
University of Missouri, USA
Vice President - Technical Activities -
Hussein Abbass, University of New South Wales,
AUSTRALIA
Publication Editors
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks
and Learning Systems
Haibo He, University of Rhode Island, USA
IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems
Jon Garibaldi, University of Nottingham, UK
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
Kay Chen Tan, City University of Hong Kong,
HONG KONG
IEEE Transactions on Games
Julian Togelius, New York University, USA
IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and
Developmental Systems
Yaochu Jin, University of Surrey, UK
IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in
Computational Intelligence
Yew Soon Ong, Nanyang Technological University,
SINGAPORE
Administrative Committee
Term ending in 2018:
Piero P. Bonissone, Piero P Bonissone
Analytics LLC, USA
Carlos A. Coello Coello, CINVESTAV-IPN,
MEXICO
Barbara Hammer, Bielefeld University,
GERMANY
Alice E. Smith, Auburn University, USA
Jacek M. Zurada, University of Louisville, USA
Term ending in 2019:
Cesare Alippi, Politecnico di Milano, ITALY
James C. Bezdek, USA
Gary B. Fogel, Natural Selection, Inc., USA
Hisao Ishibuchi, Southern University of Science
and Technology, CHINA, and Osaka Prefecture
University, JAPAN
Kay Chen Tan, City University of Hong Kong,
HONG KONG
Term ending in 2020:
Janusz Kacprzyk, Polish Academy of Sciences,
POLAND
Sanaz Mostaghim, Otto von Guericke University
of Magdeburg, GERMANY
Christian Wagner, University of Nottingham, UK
Ronald R.Yager, Iona College, USA
Gary G.Yen, Oklahoma State University, USA
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCI.2017. 2778398

Nikhil R. Pal
Indian Statistical
Institute, INDIA

President's
Message

Some Haphazard Thoughts

t is a great honor and privilege for me to serve as the President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS),
beginning from January 2018. I am deeply grateful to the
Administrative Committee for electing me and providing with
this great opportunity to serve our membership. Our society is
in a great shape because of dedicated services of our past presidents, the outgoing president, and our volunteers. When I
began my journey in CIS (then known as Neural Network Council) as a reviewer of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, I never thought that I would be in
this position someday. I must mention that I would not be writing this message
unless there was a great scientist proposing a revolutionary concept fifty three
years ago. We lost him recently. Things will remain incomplete unless I pay my
tribute to him.
Last year, on September 6, the world lost a great scientist, philosopher, thinker,
and above all a great human being, Prof. Lotfi A. Zadeh. This is a great loss to the
scientific community, and in particular to the CIS. Prof. Zadeh, the father of fuzzy
logic, introduced the concept of fuzzy sets in a seminal paper [1] in 1965. He
explained how ambiguity/fuzziness that we, the human being, use in a routine
manner can be modelled mathematically, processed by computer, and used in
solving practical problems. Fuzzy sets and systems are one of the main pillars of
Computational Intelligence (CI). Today, the impact of his 1965 paper can be seen
in widely different areas from subway trains, satellite control, medical image analysis, to consumer products like washing machine and camcorder. Prof. Zadeh was
very intimately related to us, to our society, and he will continue to remain so in
our heart.
I have already mentioned that our society is in a great shape, but time brings new
challenges to be addressed and always there are scopes for further improvement. In my
opinion, computational intelligence involves biology/nature-inspired computational
systems that can acquire/learn knowledge from data and/or augment its knowledge
interacting with its environment to make decisions and/or develop human-like cognitive and reasoning skills to solve problems. CI provides technologies for solving real
life problems. The field of interest of CIS is the theory, design, application, and development of biologically and linguistically motivated computational paradigms emphasizing neural networks, connectionist systems, genetic algorithms, evolutionary
programming, fuzzy systems, and hybrid intelligent systems in which these paradigms
are contained.
CI technologies have come a long way with plenty of success stories, yet there are
ample opportunities to explore and enhance their capabilities to develop truly "intelligent machines". We have machines that can recognize images, answer queries, drive a
car, alert for a possible heart attack, or help to plan journey on a busy traffic. We have

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCI.2017.2773738
Date of publication: 10 January 2018

IEEE ComputatIonal IntEllIgEnCE magazInE | FEbruary 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine - February 2018