IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine - February 2020 - 10

Society
Society
Briefs

Marley M.B.R. Vellasco
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
(PUC-Rio) BRAZIL

IEEE CIS VP-Conferences Vision Statement

I

t is my pleasure and a great honor to
serve as Vice President for Conferences of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS). High-quality
conferences are indeed one of the main
opportunities for researchers and students
to present their work and create an innovative networking environment. Together
with Conference Committee members, I
will put all my effort into continuing the
excellent work done by previous VP
Conferences in the past years, ensuring
the best environment to conference organizers so they can provide attendees an
excellent experience both in terms of
scientific content and networking.
One of my first activities related to
the IEEE CIS was the creation of the
Rio Chapter in 2011, serving as the
founding Chapter Chair for five consecutive years. During these years, I organized several invited talks to publicize
the Computational Intelligence area and
the IEEE CIS mission.
However, attending and organizing
conferences have always been one of my
priorities. After organizing special sessions
and being a member of the organizing
committee of various international conferences, my first experience as General
Chair was in 2005, of the Fifth International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent
Systems, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Specifically for IEEE CIS, my involvement in the organization of conferences
started in 2011, as International Chair for
South & Central America of IJCNN
2011, in San Jose, USA, and Program
Chair of IJCNN 2013, in Dallas, culminating as General Chair of IEEE WCCI

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCI.2019.2954574
Date of current version: 10 January 2020

10

2018 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. More
recently, I have served in different CIS
Conference Committees, first as Chair of
the IEEE CIS Technically Co-Sponsored
Conferences Sub-Committee and then as
Chair of the Finance Sub-Committee, in
addition to being a member of the IEEE
CIS Bid Sub-Committee and the Strategic Planning Sub-Committee. These
previous experiences allowed me to better understand how CIS runs its flagship
conferences and technical cosponsored
conferences. They also gave me a better
idea of the difficulties encountered by
conferences organizers, from the preparation of bids and budgets, to the final
organization of the approved conference.
Organizing a conference involves a lot
of time and dedication. CIS will be
eternally grateful to the volunteer work
of the General Chairs and all organizing
committee members who have put a lot
of effort to keep the high standard of
our conferences.
Based on the excellent work done by
Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier and Gary
Fogel in recent years, as the past VP-Conferences, the structure of the Conference
Committee will be maintained with the
following sub-committees:
❏ Future Conferences
❏ Conference Finance
❏ Conference Bids
❏ Technical Co-Sponsorships
❏ Conference Activities and Communications
❏ Strategic Planning
All these sub-committees have key
roles in the organization, planning and
definition of new strategies for CIS
conferences.
Future Conferences Sub-committee is
responsible to plan future CIS events,

IEEE COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE MAGAZINE | FEBRUARY 2020

looking for proposals for either the society's main conferences, such as the IEEE
World Congress on Computational Intelligence (IEEE WCCI) and the IEEE
Symposium Series on Computational
Intelligence (IEEE SSCI), or other smaller
size but, nonetheless, important conferences that complete the spectrum of the
CIS core activities. Some of these smaller
conferences include 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, IEEE BESC on Behavioral, Economics, and Socio-Cultural Computing,
and IEEE DSAA on Data Sciences and
Advanced Analytics. The IEEE World
Congress of Computational Intelligence
(IEEE WCCI), on the other hand, is the
largest technical event organized by CIS.
IEEE WCCI, held on even years, congregates researchers and students from all areas
under the Computational Intelligence
roof, hosting the three flagship conferences
of CIS: the International Joint Conference
on Neural Networks (IJCNN), the IEEE
International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE), and the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation
(IEEE CEC), which are separately organized in odd years. IEEE WCCI encourages cross-fertilization of ideas among
the three big areas of CIS and provides
a forum for intellectuals from all over
the world to discuss and present their
research findings on computational intelligence. IEEE WCCI also incorporates
special sessions on cross-disciplinary and
IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine - February 2020

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