Conferences and Meetings Committee Report - IEEE Systems, Man ...

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Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society 

Board of Governors Meeting Agenda 

Delta Centre-Ville 

Montreal, Canada 

Sunday October 7, 2007 

0800 Breakfast (Continental in meeting room) 

0830 Welcome, introductions, additions/changes to agenda 

0840 Minutes of October 2006 BOG meeting and resultant actions (Ferat Sahin) 

0900 President’s report (Larry Hall) 

0920 Treasurer’s report (Philip Chen) 

0940 Conferences and Meetings Committee report, key points and motions (T.T. 

Lee) 

1015 Coffee break 

1030 SMC07 report (Ferial El-Hawary) 

1040 SMC08 report (Jim Poo) 

1100 Technical Activities Committee report, key points and motions (Hideyuki 

Takagi) 

1130 Publications Committee report, key points and motions (Michael Berthold) 

1200 Lunch 

1300 Transactions Part A report (Don Brown) 

1315 Transactions Part B report (Diane Cook) 

1330 Transactions Part C report (Vlad Marik) 

1345 Long Range Planning and Finance (Daniel Yeung)

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1400 Membership and Student Activities Committee report, key points and 

motions (MuDer Jeng) 

1420 Discussion of opportunities for improvements, retaining and attracting 

members, student programs, industrial activities (all) 

1430 Coffee break 

1500 Strategic Planning (Larry Hall and Executive Committee) 

1630 Nominations report and election of Vice Presidents (Bill Gruver) 

1710 Discussion of opportunities for improvements and budget (all) 

1720 Awards report (Mike Smith and T.T. Lee) 

1730 Adjournment to reception 

1930 Dinner TBA

Attendees 

First Name Last Name Position 

Julie Adams Member At Large 

Ellen Bass Member At Large 

Michael Berthold VP Publications 

Pierre Borne Member At Large 

C. Philip Chen Treasurer / Member At Large 

Ferial El-Hawari SMC 2007 Organizer 

Dimitar Filev Member At Large 

Dmitry Goldgof Member At Large 

Bill Gruver Jr. Past President 

Larry Hall President 

Cathy M. Helgason Member At Large 

Mo Jamshidi Member At Large 

MuDer Jeng VP Membership and Student Activities 

Dilip Kotak Member At Large 

T.-T. Lee VP Conferences and Meetings 

Vladimir Marik EIC TSMC-C 

Jim Poo SMC 2008 Organizer 

Stuart Rubin Member At Large 

Imre Rudas Member At Large 

Ferat Sahin Secretary 

Mike Smith Sr. Past President 

Hideyuki Takagi VP Technical Activities 

Edward Tunstel Member At Large 

Chi-Hsu Wang Member At Large 

Xi-Zhao Wang Member At Large 

Margot P.C. Weijnen Member At Large 

Daniel Yeung VP LRPF / President-Elect 

MengChu Zhou Managing Editor, TSMC-C

0800 0830 Breakfast (Continental in meeting room) 

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0830 - 0840 Welcome, introductions, additions/changes to agenda 

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0840 - 0900 Minutes of October 2006 BOG meeting and resultant actions (Ferat 

Sahin) 

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Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society 

Minutes of the Board of Governors Meeting 

Grand Hotel 

Taipei, Taiwan 

October 7, 2006 

The meeting was called to order by the President at 8:35 AM. 

Attendees: 

Regrets: 

Guest: 

Ellen Bass, Michael Berthold, Philip Chen, Su-Ching Chen, Ferial El-Hawari, 

Dimitar Filev, Bill Gruver, Larry Hall, Keith Hipel, Mo Jamshidi, MuDer Jeng, 

Dilip Kotak, T.-T. Lee, Vladimir Marik, Ferat Sahin, Mike Smith, Hideyuki 

Takagi, Wil Thissen, Edward Tunstel, Chi-Hsu Wang, Hong Yan, Daniel Yeung, 

MengChu Zhou. 

Irving Engelson, Ljiljana Trajkovic, Stuart Rubin, Julie A. Adams, Pierre Borne, 

Diane Cook, Don Brown. 

Jim Poo, Hong Su, Saied Nahavandi 

Approval of BoG and ExCom Meeting Minutes 

1. Motion: (Bill Gruver) to approve the BoG 2005 meeting minutes. Mike Smith seconded. No 

discussion. Motion carried unanimously. 

2. Motion: (Bill Gruver) to approve the 2006 ExCom meeting minutes. Wil Thissen seconded 

the motion. Motion is passed unanimously. 

President's Report (Larry Hall) 

3. Larry Hall presented his president's report. He stated that the society is healthy financially. 

We have transferred $1 Million to the reserves this year. He stated that closing conferences is 

an issue. We need to close our conferences faster. We still have not closed the SMC 2003 

conference. 

4. Discussion: Wil Thissen stated that they have prepared everything but internal auditors had 

some issues in transferring the audit to the IEEE. Ellen Bass stated that maybe we need to 

have administrative person who helps our society in these issues. If we can do a little better 

with our transactions, we may be able to do that. 

5. Larry Hall stated that we need to have a better impact factor so that we can increase the 

downloads. Good review articles have a good impact on increasing the downloads. 

Membership is up a little. 

6. Discussion: MuDer Jeng stated that the membership is increased from 3600 to 3800 this year. 

Edward Tunstel asked whether we have a reason for this increase. Bill Gruver stated that one 

thing is different is that we have increased the number of chapters. Larry Hall stated 

Management society is becoming management council and they are asking us to be a 

member. The membership would cost us $5000 one time. They stated that we can get back 

about $6000 in four years so there seems to be little downside. Wil Thissen stated that SMC 

members would have access to Management Council transactions. 

7. Motion: (Mike Smith) SMC join the engineering management council and pay the $5000 

one-time fee. Keith Hipel seconded.

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8. Discussion: Philip Chen asked what is the benefit of joining EMC? Larry Hall stated that our 

members will have access to their publications. In addition, we will have joint activities. 

Mike Smith stated that they have 5000 members and we can increase our SMC membership 

through EMC. Bill Gruver stated that he supports the idea and wanted to say that IEEE has 

not approved this yet. Ellen Bass stated that she supports it but she does not understand the 

benefits completely. Larry Hall stated that councils are made up of societies. They do not 

have members. That's the main difference. They can have conferences and journals but 

cannot have members. Now, they can even have chapters. Phillip Chen asked how the 

councils make money? Larry Hall stated councils have their own reserves. We are supporting 

the Systems Council with $5000. Let's say they made $8000 from their journals. Then, they 

will pay us back. Wil Thissen stated that we will have access to their journals. They also have 

engineering management review, which is open to everyone. 

9. Approve 16, No Opposition. Motion is carried unanimously. 

10. Larry stated that we have turned in our Society review material for the October 20 review. 

11. Wil Thissen stated that we should have mentioned the activities not related to IEEE such as 

INCOSE. That could have helped. 

12. Larry stated that there was a limited time. Thus, the focus was given to the IEEE related 

activities. 

Treasurer's Report (Dilip Kotak) 

13. Dilip Kotak presented the treasurer's report. He stated that our transactions and conference 

are doing better than we expected. We estimate $250K surplus not including the IEEE 

interest income. Thus, the society is doing well financially. 

14. Discussion: Mo Jamshidi asked an explanation for the discrepancy between 2000 and 2001 in 

the line called conference in the table in section 1. Dilip Kotak stated that there are 

conferences that are not closed. For example, we received the surplus for the SMC 2003 

conference recently. Thus, they are not included in the year 2003. So, each column may not 

be the exact representation of the corresponding year. Larry Hall stated that increase in the 

conference revenues are mainly because of good management of the starting of new meetings 

by Mo Jamshidi. Mike Smith stated September the 11th event happened and it had a bad 

impact on our conference revenues. Since we are recovering from it now, we are having 

larger conference revenues. Phillip Chen asked how we calculate the numbers for the years 

2006 and 2007? Larry Hall: These are projections done by IEEE. Dilip Kotak stated that 

IEEE applies inflation factor on the items that does not change year to year. Thus, these are 

just the projections based on the past activity. Wil Thissen asked about the initiatives? Larry 

Hall stated that we need champions for the initiatives. Will Thissen stated that in the future 

we should find the champions first. Then, we should plan for the initiatives. Larry Hall stated 

that he completely agrees and plans to do that this year. Dilip Kotak stated that we need to 

find champions and ask them to prepare a proposal for the proposed initiatives. We can use 

up to 3% of the cumulative surplus. 

Conferences and Meetings Committee Report (T. T. Lee) 

15. T.T. Lee presented the conferences and meetings report. He presented the list of newly 

approved conferences and co-sponsored conferences. BTAS 2007 and CME 2007 were 

removed from the lists since the budgets were not approved by the CMC members. SPECS 

2007 and ICTE 2007 are added to the technical co-sponsored conferences. He presented the 

fully sponsored conferences and their closing status. In the co-sponsored conference, we are 

still waiting CMC to approve the CME 2007 conference. 

16. Motion: (TT Lee) The BoG approves the budget for the ICNSC 2008 budget. 

17. MengChu Zhou seconded. Motion carried unanimously.

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18. Discussion: Mo Jamshidi: In the future, I would like to look into improving the process for 

frequently happening conferences which should have a faster and regular way of approval. 

Let's try to differentiate our own conferences better and in a fast track. Edward Tunstel stated 

that it might be a good idea if the CMC members transfer the corporate knowledge/memory 

to the new CMC members. Larry Hall stated that if it is possible we should be able to do it. 

Dilip Kotak stated that we can do it during the annual conference. 

19. Motion: (Edward Tunstel) at the SMC 2007 annual conference we have a meeting with CMC 

members and the upcoming conference organizers to transfer the corporate knowledge and 

SMC will only pay the charges for the extra night hotel and meals for the participants. 

20. Mike Smith seconded. Motion passes unanimously. 

SMC 2006 (T. T. Lee) 

21. T.T. Lee presented the status of SMC 2006. We had 70% acceptance rate. We have four 

plenary speakers and tutorials starting on Sunday. He also presented social programs and 

award ceremonies. 

22. Discussion: Keith Hipel asked how many registrations we had. T T Lee stated that the 

registrations are about 800. Bill Gruver stated that what can we do to do a better job for the 

tutorials. Philip Chen stated that some conferences put the tutorials in a CD and sell the CD 

for about $50. He suggested that we may do the same. Hideyuki Takagi stated that tutorials 

are a strategic issue rather than moneymaking tools. We should be careful about it. 

SMC 2007 (Ferial El-Hawary) 

23. Ferial El-Hawary presented the status of the SMC 2007 conference. She summarized the 

hotel, surrounding places and activities, conference theme, final call for paper, key volunteer 

recruiting, the conference website, program committee chair, tutorials, and budget. 

24. Discussion: o Jamshidi: What is the bottom line? What is the number of papers and the 

surplus? Larry Hall stated that we need to make sure the hotel can hold all the participants. 

Mo Jamshidi stated that the charge by the management company was not in the budget. Larry 

Hall stated that the budget was revised multiple times. It may have been there. 

SMC 2008 Report (A.N. Poo and G.S. Hong) 

25. A.N. Poo and G.S. Hong presented the SMC 2008 plans. G.S. Hong presented the projected 

conference site, Singapore, technical committees, conference chairs, and technical program 

area chairs, exhibitions, tutorials, social programs, and conference venue. 

SMC 2011 Proposal (Edward Tunstel and Saied Nahavandi) 

26. Edward Tunstel and Saied Nahavandi presented the two conference proposals for SMC 

2011:Orlando and Alaska. They presented conference venues for both locations, surrounding 

places and events, hotel rates, and organizing committees. 

27. Discussion: Mo Jamshidi stated that the local organizers in Anchorage are very active and 

this is critical for the success of the conference. 

28. Motion: Larry Hall. The BoG prefers to hold the 2011 annual conference in Anchorage, 

Alaska. 

29. Mo Jamshidi seconded. Motion is passed unanimously. 

30. Discussion: MengChu Zhou stated that they are working on a proposal for the annual 

conference in 2012 in Xian, China. 

VP-TA Report (Hideyuki Takagi) 

31. Hideyuki Takagi presented the technical activities report covering objectives and actions on 

TC characteristics, strategic planning, webpages, IT tools, and TC promotion event. He has 

presented the IT tools in detail explaining how they could be used by the TC members. He

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also summarized the TC activities. Six new technical committees have been created and one 

TC is terminated (TC on Intelligent Communications). He stated that 190 papers are 

collected by the TC members in SMC 2006. He also summarized the technical issues for the 

conferences. 

32. Hideyuki Takagi stated that the motions approved at BoG2005 should be revised in the 

following manner. 

33. Motion: (Hideyuki Takagi) Each TC must contribute to SMCS by at least one of (1) 

organizing SMCS sponsored conferences/workshops, (2) organizing special session(s) at least 

one of the SMCS sponsored conferences, or (3) serving with other significant contributions. 

34. Mike Smith seconded. Motion is passed unanimously. 

35. Discussion: Ellen Bass stated that the motion should be specific to the conferences. 

36. Motion: (Hideyuki Takagi) As a long term goal, each TC should plan to organize, within a 

period of 5 years, at least one special issue in a journal (preferably in one of the SMC 

publications), one workshop or local conference (preferably in collaboration with at least one 

SMC chapter), and/or one collaborative project with industry. 

37. Mike Smith seconded. Motion is passed unanimously. 

VP Publications Report (Michael Berthold) 

38. Michael Berthold presented the publications report. He reported on clarifying the focus of the 

transactions, increasing the impact factor of the transactions, the IEEE legacy program, and 

consideration for having open access to some selected or all papers. He stated that Part A 

needs a new editor. 

39. Discussion: Mike Smith asked whether we have candidate in mind for the EIC of Part A. 

SMC Transactions Part A (Ellen Bass) 

40. Ellen Bass presented the report on transactions Part A on behalf of Don Brown. She 

summarized the objectives such as increasing impact factor and increasing membership. The 

quality of the papers has been increased and the acceptance rate is about 15%. The impact 

factor of Part A is about 0.9. Part A will re-focus on systems engineering and human factors. 

She also presented issues such as devoting issues devoted to human factors and systems 

engineering. There is a backlog of 4.5 months. 

41. Larry Hall stated that in the report the acceptance rate is given as 30% even though 

presentation says 15%. 

42. Philip Chen stated that Robotics and Automation society is preparing a journal on Robot and 

Human interactions. 

SMC Transactions Part B (Larry Hall) 

43. Larry Hall presented the Part B report. He presented the numbers on the acceptance rate. 

2006 acceptance rate is 12% mainly because we have a lot of submissions. Editorial board 

has been increased by 9 new AEs. The current backlog is about 3-4 months. He also 

presented the major topics of the papers submitted to Part B. Couple of new special issues in 

the areas of biorobotics and biomechatronics. Impact factor is increasing steadily. The target 

is 2.0 impact factor in 3 years. The journal ranks in the top 1/5 in Control, 1/3 in Cybernetics, 

and 1/2 in AI. 

SMC Transactions Part C (Vladimir Marik) 

44. Vladimir Marik presented report for transactions Part C. He stated that Part C had 13 new 

AEs. He presented backlog of papers and presented an analysis of the problem. The actions to 

correct the issue are shortening the turnaround times by AEs, publishing more special issues. 

There will be 6 special issues in 2006. He also presented actions to increase the impact factor 

such as reduce the time between submission and the printing of the papers, to print accepted

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papers via IEEE Xplore, and to ask AEs to be more proactive in looking for attractive 

application papers. He also presented actions on journal orientation such as preference to 

industry-oriented papers and reject the pseudo-applications. He also presented statistics such 

as average review time was 3.29 months in 2005 and 2.76 months for 2006 as of August 

2006. The acceptance rate is around 20% and they will try to maintain the quality. He also 

stated that he had a lot of issues because of the migration from MC v 1.8 to v.3. Everybody 

complains about the system. Every email is read and copy/pasted by the EIC and it is very 

time consuming. Backlog is starting to reduce because we cleaned up all the papers in 2004 

and 2005. 

45. Discussion: Bill Gruver asked whether all the AEs are SMC members? Vladimir Marik 

stated that every new AE is an SMC member but he is not asking the current AEs about their 

memberships. Mike Smith stated that AEs should be chosen based on the merit and the 

membership. There could be very good AEs who are not even IEEE members. 

46. Motion: (Larry Hall) SMC invest to reduce the backlog in Part C contingent upon the budget. 

47. Bill Gruver seconded. 

48. Discussion: Dilip Kotak stated that we have $40K for publication enhancement. We can 

make it to be a special initiative so that it does not appear on the SMC budget separately. This 

way IEEE will not be unhappy. Mike Smith stated that the acceptance rate should be lowered 

to help in backlog. 

49. Motion as amended (Bill Gruver): SMC invest to reduce the backlog in Part C up to 200 

pages. 

50. Michael Berthold seconded. 

51. Approve 16, Oppose 1. Motion is passed. 

VP LRPF Report (Daniel Yeung) 

52. Daniel Yeung presented the report for long range planning and finance. He presented a 

SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat) on in the field of Systems. System 

council could become a threat society. He stated that in the strength we have three 

established TCs and experts within SMC. As weakness, we do not have enough visibility 

(conferences and journals). He sees that there is an opportunity since human factors/ human 

machine systems is not claimed as FOI. In cybernetics, he stressed that we have strong and 

active TC’s as a strength but conferences and journals are not of top quality. In the 

conferences, the strength is the well run annual conference with full paper review. He 

presented a weakness on the annual conference as not reflecting FOI. Our strength in 

publications is the increase in the submissions, shorter submission to publication time, and 

lower acceptance rates. Part B and Part A are doing very good in number of submissions, 

acceptance rate etc. Main weakness in publications is lower impact factors. He also 

presented SWOT analysis for membership and finance. 

53. Motion: (Daniel Yeung) Require that each special initiative must have a clearly identified 

Champion and action plan including expected and measurable results. 

54. Bill Gruver seconded. 

55. Discussion: Mike Smith It is very difficult to get a champion because of the budget 

deadlines. Thus, we need to say "should" instead of "must". Bill Gruver stated that if we are 

going to have initiatives, we need to plan in advance and have strong initiatives. Dilip Kotak 

stated you cannot wait until the last minute of the ExCom meeting for a special initiatives. 

We need to plan better and timely. Larry Hall stated that both Dilip Kotak and Mike Smith

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are correct. The motion will tie the hands of the next president. We should really include 

"should" in the motion instead of "must". Michael Berthold stated that it should really tie the 

hands of the president so that they have to plan in advance. Mike Smith stated that most of 

the time we do not know how much money we have in the budget until the end of the ExCom 

meeting. 

56. Approve 6, Oppose 9, Abstain 2. Motion did not pass. 

57. Motion: (Mike Smith) Require that each special initiative must have a clearly identified 

Champion and action plan including expected and measurable results. 

58. No second. Motion dies on the floor. 

Membership and Student Activities Report (MuDer Jeng) 

59. MuDer Jeng presented his report on membership and student activities. He presented the 

objectives and actions. He also mentioned the membership promotion exhibition in 2006. 

New members will get a Polo T-shirt after becoming SMC members. During the conference, 

a member service center will be set up. Membership has increased by 2.2%. This is a good 

number considering membership increase in IEEE is 0.3%. Student reception will be held in 

SMC 2006. Student members are increased by 3.5%. He stated that China initiative has been 

successful. As a result of that initiative, we have three chapters in China. 

60. Motion: (MuDer Jeng) To establish the SMC Chapter of the Year Award. A certificate and 

$1000 will be rewarded to the chapter and the award will be presented during the annual 

conference. The SMC Awards committee will solicit nominations for the award. A call for 

nominations will be publicized in the e-Newsletter. 

61. MengChu Zhou seconded. 

62. Motion Amended (Mike Smith) To establish the SMC Chapter of the Year Award. A 

certificate and $1000 will be rewarded to the chapter and the award will be presented during 

the annual conference. The SMC Awards committee will solicit nominations for the award. A 

call for nominations will be publicized in the e-Newsletter. 

63. MengChu Zhou seconded. 


65. Mo Jamshidi thanked MuDer Jeng for the fantastic job he has done. 

Discussion of opportunities for improvements, retaining and attracting members, 

student programs, and industrial activities. (All) 

66. Mike Smith stated that we need to focus on membership in US. He stated that we are ignoring 

the US membership base. 

67. Dimitar Filev volunteered to help MuDer Jeng in increasing membership in the US. 

68. Wil Thissen stated we need to approach non-IEEE people and/or organizations which are 

active in our FOI in order to attract them to become IEEE SMC members. 

Governance (Larry Hall) 

69. Larry Hall presented his reports in Governance. He stated that SMC needs to better focus on 

"3 areas", suggesting that we have vice presidents for Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. He 

also stated that we would reduce the executive committee size by making the editors voting 

members of the board of governors, but not the executive committee. Each VP would be a 

voice in the area to TAB for us. Advocates for Systems and Human-machine systems are 

important for us to clearly establish our leadership in those areas. 

70. Motion: (Daniel Yeung) The three EIC's will become voting members of the BoG, but cease 

to be voting members of the ExCom. 

71. Mo Jamshidi seconded

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72. Discussion: Keith Hipel stated that EICs are very important for he success of our society. I 

am hesitant to remove them from ExCom. Larry Hall stated that we are just switching their 

voting place. They will still be invited to ExCom meetings. Ferat Sahin stated that this motion 

will cause us to change the bylaws. Larry Hall stated that IEEE definitely needs to approve 

this change. They may not agree with the motion. 

73. Motion: (Michael Berthold) move the motion to be postponed. 

74. No second. Motion dies on the floor. 


76. Motion: (Daniel Yeung) To replace the current VP Technical Activities position by three new 

Vice Presidents, one for each of the three technical areas: Systems Engineering, Man, and 

Cybernetics. 

77. Motion Amended: (Mo Jamshidi) To replace the current VP Technical Activities position by 

three new Vice Presidents, one for each of the three technical areas: Systems Engineering, 

Human and Machine Systems, and Cybernetics. 

78. Discussion: Members voiced their concerns, support, or opposition to the motion. 

79. Motion Amended: (Keith Hipel) To replace the current VP Technical Activities position by 

three new Vice Presidents, one for each of the three technical areas. 


Society Review (Mike Smith) 

81. Mike Smith thanked Larry Hall and Daniel Yeung on preparing the Society review. 

82. Larry Hall stated that an e-Newsletter evaluation was added to the Society Review document. 

Nominations Report (Bill Gruver) 

83. Bill Gruver summarized the procedure for the determination of the nominees. He explained 

the criteria that could be used to determine the members' choice. 

84. Mo Jamshidi, T.T. Lee, and Daniel Yeung presented their candidate statements. They have 

presented their plans to improve the SMC society as a whole and laid their plan of actions. 

85. Mo Jamshidi withdrew his candidacy for president-elect. 

86. Daniel Yeung is elected as the president-elect for the year 2007. 

87. Bill Gruver presented the nominees for Member-at-Large. 

88. Final slate of the candidates is due November 9 2006. 

Awards Report (Mike Smith) 

89. Mike Smith presented his award reports. 

90. Mo Jamshidi moved the motion to adjourn. 

91. Wil Thissen seconded. Motion is passed unanimously. 

92. Meeting is adjourned at 6.25 pm.

0900 - 0920 President’s report (Larry Hall) 

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Presidents Report 

We have gotten feedback on the society review and the periodicals review. The comments on 

the society review were positive in many ways. There was a concern expressed about the 

overlap with the Systems Council and the fact that we did not seem to be concerned about that. 

In our response, we noted that we are in fact concerned about it, had raised concerns at TAB 

where they were uniformly dismissed and had put some information on our concerns in the 

original document which we strengthened. 

There were positive comments about how we integrate student activities into our conference. 

There were positive comments about our web pages and Kudos to Bill and Cash for getting them 

set up and keeping them looking good and being informative. They liked our broad international 

membership. They expressed concerns about the broadness of the society scope. An issue for 

us is to make sure our members find unique value in belonging to our society and outsiders see 

the uniqueness of the society. The Society review report has been approved by TAB. 

We have sent out the final response to the periodicals review. The committee was concerned 

about the impact factor of all of our journals. We need to make sure we attract and accept only 

high-quality papers that are likely to be cited. We also need to be sure that the papers are 

published in a timely way. The focus of the review was on Part B where, using numbers that 

cannot be re-created, the committee had serious concerns about the time for review and time for 

publication. Using the actual numbers, our response shows that the time to review has about 3.2 

months for first review and most final decisions are done in about 4-7 months. Our time to 

publication is not as good as for many transactions and needs to be improved. We need to do 

rapid posting for all transactions (it had been failing for B though we currently have pre-prints 

published, but works for other societies). There was also great concern about our policy of 

returning papers for being out of scope/low quality without getting reviews. We noted that authors 

can ask to have the paper reviewed as is. We do have a problem with the number of 

submissions being very large. 

I would note that there were improvements in the impact factor of all three of our transactions this 

year. The impact factor of the IEEE Transactions on SMC Part B has now reached 1.5 as it 

continues to improve. 

Don Brown has completed two terms as Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on SMC Part A: 

Systems and Humans. He has stabilized the transactions. He has started the process of having 

separate issues contain all human machine systems papers and then all systems engineering 

papers. On behalf of the Society, thank you very much Don! We now have the difficult task of 

replacing Don. We have a set of candidates and will seek your comments. 

Diane Cook has stated her intention to step down as EIC of Part B. She would like to step down 

at the end of the year, but is willing to stay on a little longer until we get a new EIC in place and is 

willing to serve as a co-EIC to help with the transition if necessary. We have just gotten an 

advertisement out for the position. Some excellent candidates have been identified. We also 

hope to have a person to put in place by January. Your comments and help will be sought. 

Finally, I would like to thank Diane for her service. She has done an excellent job and the impact 

factor has steadily improved! So, thank you Diane! 

The Systems Journal has its first set of articles in XPLORE 

(http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocpreprint.jsp?isnumber=4267004&Submit3=View+Articles&punu 

mber=4267003). They look similar to what we publish in A/C to me. Perhaps some of you can 

clarify any existing differences. It is on paper a competitor for A and C with complete overlap in 

scope. We raised objections about this but the council won the day by arguing councils must 

have publications. 

As we have moved to the new revenue formula for transactions, we must carefully monitor the

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situation with our revenues. They were projected to go down last year, but did not go down as 

much as expected (see surplus). It's projected to go down again this year because they are 

based on downloads and ours do not appear as strong as other societies. Also, part of the 

Society's support for IEEE infrastructure is now coming from publication revenue. A hypothesis 

on how to increase revenue is to publish high-impact papers more timely than anyone else. 

Other hypotheses/approaches, are welcome. 

Membership has recently stabilized and gone up just a little bit. This is great and MuDer is to be 

complimented. Our distinguished lecturer program has begun to get quite active and this is very 

good. We have incorporated a significant number of new local chapters, which is a very good 

thing. This includes new chapters in China and some joint chapters in North America. 

Daniel has updated our constitution and bylaws for approval by TAB. In addition to the changes 

approved by the BOG creating Vice Presidents for each of our technical areas, and changing the 

duties of our editors in chief, we are adapting to reflect IEEE best practices. The changes 

havebeen announced through our newsletter. We hope to have this approved at TAB in 

November. There still remain some IEEE best practices to add into our Constitution and bylaws. 

The IEEE changed the rules on what happens to surplus monies. This turns out to be a good 

thing for us this year as we had a surplus of about $300,000 last year before stock market 

returns. This was unplanned, as Bill had built a deficit budget because we typically cannot spend 

any of the money that would go into the surplus. However, this year, and perhaps going forward, 

we are allowed to spend 50% of the surplus money from the year before in the current fiscal year 

(excluding positive market returns). So, we have about $150,000 available to spend and the 

current plans are to primarily spend this to reduce our page backlogs in our transactions (it looks 

like we would need well over $200,000 to take care of all the backlog). We also need to have the 

Editors and Vice President for Publications work with us to prevent buildup of these backlogs. 

As you know, we are, for the first time, supporting the travel of our Board of Governors to the 

annual meeting of the BOG. There has been long debate in the society, but we hope to have all 

of our Board of Governors members at our meeting and have everyone motivated to work 

towards the well-being of the society. We ask that travel be on the lowest cost airline with limits 

which are the same as for our distinguished lecturer program based on distance traveled. 

The executive committee has been working on strategic planning. There is a half-day meeting 

scheduled right before the Board of Governors meeting. We will have some suggestions to 

propose. From preliminary discussions, one possibility is to make it the norm to have three main 

tracks at our major conference. That is, one for systems engineering, one for human machine 

systems and one for cybernetics. This will help people better understand the three areas we 

cover and give them the opportunity to clarify where their work fits. It also would dovetail nicely 

with the responsibilities for the Vice Presidents in each of the technical areas. We would like to 

consider having our best transactions paper included with our conference proceedings as a 

member benefit. It would also provide some visibility to the transactions. We are considering 

some scope clarifications to make our transactions more clearly unique and enable authors to 

fully follow what should be submitted. It is my belief that people primarily know us by our 

publications and conferences. Therefore, we need to make these distinctive and of the highest 

quality. A niche conference within our areas may well be an important step towards doing this. 

All suggestions are welcome. 

In summary, I would say the society faces challenges in making sure that people both within and 

outside of the IEEE understand we have a unique niche, direct competition in publication within 

the IEEE with the continuing effort to sunset publications, and a need to improve the impact factor 

and timeliness of our transactions. On the plus side, we continue to be fiscally sound with a 

strong reserve, membership appears to have stabilized, we have significantly expanded our 

chapters, the popularity of our Distinguished Lecturer program appears to be increasing, we have 

a restructuring plan in the process of implementation to compete and move forward and we have

a group of dedicated volunteers who give freely of their time and talents to move the society 

forward. 

17

0920 - 0940 Treasurer’s report (Philip Chen) 

18

Treasurer Report 

Philip Chen 

Oct. 07, 2007, IEEE SMC 2007 Montreal, Canada 

19 

Treasurer Summary 

• Society finance very healthy and need to be monitored very carefully 

• Investment has been increased for the last three years – accounts ~40 percentage of 

society net. 

• Reserve has been increased mainly comes from investment recently. 

• Conference Net is steady and may be increased more: Expense to Income ratio is about 

~78% or Conference Net is about ~22%. 

• Transactions Net steady decreased vs. Reserve, i.e., ~33%, 24%, 19%, 13%, 10%, 6%, 

5%. 

• Transactions Net steady increased vs. Annual Net, i.e., ~-96%, -235%, 85%, 76%, 56%, 

64%, 269%, 1150%. 

• Member number steady at around 3700. 

• Initiatives expense can be increased. 

1

Treasurer Report 

Philip Chen 

Oct. 07, 2007, IEEE SMC 2007 Montreal, Canada 

20 

The 2007 budget report summarizes the following items: 

• Contribution to Net Reserves from the following key units: 

o Transactions and Conferences 

o Interest/Investment 

1. Contribution to Net Reserves through Transactions, Conferences, and Interest/Investment 

Contribution to Net 

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 

Transaction A $218.5 $271.6 $278.0 $317.4 $267.0 $248.6 $136.9 $128.2 

Transaction B $170.4 $204.2 $192.0 $164.0 $222.0 $236.5 $150.7 $122.7 

Transaction C $19.1 $70.5 $86.5 $93.3 $65.8 $34.6 $13.8 ($14.7) 

Subtotal $408.0 $546.3 $556.5 $574.7 $554.8 $519.8 $301.4 $236.2 

Conference Events $82.5 $14.1 $18.7 $56.2 $233.1 $133.2 $128.8 $130.6 

Book Broker $190.6 $115.9 $114.3 $318.3 $491.7 $298.1 $507.0 $261.4 

Subtotal $273.1 $130.0 $133.0 $374.5 $724.8 $431.3 $635.8 $392.0 

Investment Returns ($94.7) $9.0 $388.0 $249.0 $203.3 $383.1 $0.0 $0.0 

Other Operations 

Total Net 

($1,011.5) 

($425.1) 

($917.3) 

($232.0) 

($426.0) 

$651.5 

($443.7) 

$754.5 

($482.4) 

$1,000.5 

($519.4) 

$814.8 

($825.1) 

$112.0 

($615.7) 

$12.5 

Prior Year Reserves $1,462.1 $1,887.2 $1,655.2 $2,306.7 $3,061.2 $4,061.7 $4,876.5 $4,988.5 

Total Reserves $1,887.2 $1,655.2 $2,306.7 $3,061.2 $4,061.7 $4,876.5 $4,988.5 $5,001.0 

% of Total 

Reserves 

Transaction A 11.6% 16.4% 12.1% 10.4% 6.6% 5.1% 2.7% 2.6% 

Transaction B 9.0% 12.3% 8.3% 5.4% 5.5% 4.9% 3.0% 2.5% 

Transaction C 1.0% 4.3% 3.7% 3.0% 1.6% 0.7% 0.3% -0.3% 

Publications (A, B, & C) 21.6% 33.0% 24.1% 18.8% 13.7% 10.7% 6.0% 4.7% 

Conference Events 4.4% 0.9% 0.8% 1.8% 5.7% 2.7% 2.6% 2.6% 

Book Broker 10.1% 7.0% 5.0% 10.4% 12.1% 6.1% 10.2% 5.2% 

Investment Returns -5.0% 0.5% 16.8% 8.1% 5.0% 7.9% 0.0% 0.0% 

Annual Net 

Investment Returns 22.3% -3.9% 59.6% 33.0% 20.3% 47.0% 0.0% 0.0% 

2. Conference Expense vs. Income 


2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 

Conference Income $766.1 $98.5 $321.6 $1,162.3 $901.4 $705.6 $636.1 $681.5 

Conference Expenses $681.2 $59.7 $294.7 $1,082.5 $641.0 $560.4 $495.8 $539.0 

Conference Net $84.9 $38.8 $26.9 $79.8 $260.4 $145.1 $140.3 $142.5 

Expense as % Income 88.9% 60.6% 91.6% 93.1% 71.1% 79.4% 77.9% 79.1% 

3. Membership Contribution 


2 

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 

Membership $32,200 $32,600 $31,000 $30,400 $27,800 $28,007 $37,530 $38,100 

Membership Fee $9 $9 $9 $9 $9 $12 $12 $12 

Student 662 684 673 625 554 600 400 489 

Higher Grades 3,533 3,416 3,120 2,872 2,847 2,893 2,800 2,793 

Total 4,350 4,364 4,061 3,763 3,650 3,731 3,605 3,708

21 

1) 

2) 

3) 

NEW 2007 INITIATIVES/CARRYOVER 

FROM PRIOR YEAR 

Project New 

Initiatives: 

Carry 

over Proposed $ 

Cost Center/ 

Account 

Number Ongoing Onetime 

Publications 

Enhancements X $ 40,000.00 01900-40851 X 

Web-based Meetings and 

Lectures X $15,000.00 01900-49990 X 

4) China Initiative X $20,000.00 01900-40851 X 

Total of all initiatives $ 75,000.00 

NEW 2008 INITIATIVES/CARRYOVER 

FROM PRIOR YEAR 

Cost Center/ 

Project New 

Carry 

over Proposed $ 

Account 

Number Ongoing Onetime 

1) 

Publications 

Enhancements X $30,000.00 01900-40851 

2) 

Web-based Meetings and 

Lectures X $ 5,000.00 01900-49990 

3) New technical VP's X $24,000.00 01900-40841 

4) Governance changes X $40,000.00 01900-40898 

5) 

Chapter/Membership 

development X $15,000.00 01900-40851 

Total of all initiatives $114,000.00 

3

22 

Initiative Expenditure Guideline 

3% of Total Reserve Balance (2 years ago) and meet 50% of Previous Operation Surplus, where Operation Surplus = Total Net – Interest & Investment 

4

23 

Appendix: Summary of Conference 

Conf Date Conf # 

Conferen 

ce Title Proj Code Soc 

Society Share - Budgeted 

Conference Budget 

Financial Rcvd 

Society 

Financial 

Share Revenue Expense Net Revenue Expense Net 

2007 (Reference Only) 

4/15/2007 12117 2007 IEEE 07NSC SMC 100.0% 66,180 54,790 11,390 66,180 54,790 11,390 

4/16/2007 12295 2007 IEEE 07SOS SMC 75.0% 69,650 55,900 13,750 52,238 41,925 10,313 

4/27/2007 12378 2007 IEEE 07SIE SMC 50.0% 31,312 30,270 1,042 15,656 15,135 521 

5/23/2007 12530 2007 IEEE/ 07CME SMC 25.0% 198,769 127,019 71,750 49,692 31,755 17,938 

6/20/2007 12509 2007 IEEE 07IAA SMC 70.0% 50,545 39,720 10,825 35,382 27,804 7,578 

6/24/2007 12141 NAFIPS 20 7750 SMC 100.0% 62,950 52,625 10,325 62,950 52,625 10,325 

8/13/2007 12681 2007 IEEE 07IRI SMC 100.0% 53,500 47,500 6,000 53,500 47,500 6,000 

9/26/2007 12172 2007 First I 07BTA SMC 100.0% 47,125 36,500 10,625 47,125 36,500 10,625 

10/7/2007 10662 2007 IEEE 07SMC SMC 100.0% 308,150 247,395 60,755 308,150 247,395 60,755 

11/18/2007 12630 2007 IEEE 07GSI SMC 100.0% 0 0 0 0 0 0 

ABOVE THIS LINE FOR INFORMATION ONLY 

2008 2008 Conference Budget Society Share of Conference Budg 

6/25/2007 12070 2008 IEEE 08DHM SMC 100.0% 161,750 139,800 21,950 161,750 139,800 21,950 

4/6/2008 12679 2008 IEEE 08NSC SMC 100.0% 109,200 86,800 22,400 109,200 86,800 22,400 

2008 IEEE 08SOS SMC 75.0% 57,268 47,474 9,795 42,951 35,605 7,346 

2008 IEEE 08SIE SMC 50.0% 28,862 28,418 444 14,431 14,209 222 

2008 IEEE 08IAA SMC 70.0% 54,857 41,365 13,492 38,400 28,956 9,444 

NAFIPS 20 08750 SMC 100.0% 49,654 45,909 3,745 49,654 45,909 3,745 

2008 IEEE 08IRI SMC 100.0% 52,561 47,218 5,342 52,561 47,218 5,342 

2008 IEEE 08SMC SMC 100.0% 353,034 285,250 67,784 353,034 285,250 67,784 

Add other here SMC 100.0% 0 0 0 0 0 0 



TOTAL 2008 BUDGET (see instructions tab - enter these amounts in cost c 821,981 683,747 138,233 

5

FOR THE PERIOD ENDING DECEMBER 31, 2008 

BUSINESS UNIT - 0280 SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS SOCIETY - DIVISION X 

24 

COST CENTER - 01900 COMMITTEE & OTHER 

PRIOR YEAR ACTUALS 

ACCOUNT 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 

NUMBER ACTUALSACTUALS ACTUALS ACTUALS ACTUALS ACTUALS BUDGET BUDGET 

Inter-society Transfer 30900X011X 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

Miscellaneous Revenue 3869900000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.7 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

Total Income 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.7 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

Executive Office Expense 4081000000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

Presidents Office 4081500000 3.0 5.4 10.1 11.3 12.2 14.8 20.0 30.0 

Adcom Committee (Board of Governors 4082100000 9.8 7.9 10.3 11.0 2.6 8.4 60.0 75.0 

Adcom Hq Expense 4082200000 0.0 0.5 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.2 

Chapter Committee 4083100000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.5 0.0 0.5 

Distinguished Lecturer 4083300000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.4 0.0 20.0 

Technical Committee 4084100000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.5 10.0 24.0 

Membership Committee 4085100000 7.1 17.1 0.0 11.4 16.1 14.2 95.0 60.0 

Membership Hq Expense 4085200000 4.1 4.0 2.9 3.7 3.6 4.1 4.0 4.1 

Executive Committee 4086100000 3.6 3.2 14.0 26.9 50.2 26.7 45.0 27.3 

Awards Committee Expense 4087100000 0.0 0.0 0.0 4.7 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

Awards Hq Expense 4087200000 8.6 0.2 4.7 6.4 4.6 3.0 5.0 5.0 

Fellowships-Graduate Comm Exp 4088100000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

Education Committee Exp. 4089100000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

Other Committee Expense 4089800000 18.0 0.7 1.5 0.3 15.2 0.0 20.0 40.0 

Other Committee Expense HQ 4089900000 (1.0) 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

Equipment Rent 41315DELLX 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.7 0.0 1.7 

1st Class Postage 4200500000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 4.2 0.0 4.3 

Express Carriers 4205000000 0.0 0.7 2.0 3.5 2.5 0.9 3.0 0.9 

Unidentified & Miscellaneous 4999000000 (0.1) 0.0 0.7 0.4 0.2 0.0 11.0 16.0 

Prior Year Exp Adjustment 4999500000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

Member Services 5001500000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 2.7 0.0 3.0 6.0 

Pursvc-Mailroom (NJ) 5016000000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.2 

Pursvc-Other (Systems Council) 50190XSYSX 8.0 1.0 0.0 1.2 5.8 5.0 5.0 0.0 

Pur/Svcs-Technology Management Cou 50190X014X 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 5.0 

Pur Svc Awards 5046000000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.6 0.0 0.0 

Pursvc-Societies & C 5070000000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.0 

Rmbsvc-Mem Svcs 6002200000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 (0.1) 0.0 0.0 

Total Expense 61.1 40.7 46.2 81.0 115.7 86.6 281.0 320.2 

6

2008 IEEE S/C BUDGET 

FOR THE PERIOD ENDING DECEMBER 31, 2008 

BUS UNIT - 0280 

{SET "WORKSHE 

PRIOR YEAR ACTUALS 

SUMMARY BY COST CENTER 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 

ACTUALS ACTUALS ACTUALS ACTUALS ACTUALS ACTUALS BUDGET BUDGET 

00100 INTEREST INCOME 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

00751 TRANS ON SMC - PART A 353.7 441.4 429.7 453.6 416.9 422.2 346.4 314.7 

00752 TRANS ON SMC - PART B 351.5 388.7 374.4 467.6 411.7 430.2 369.3 334.6 

00753 TRANS ON SMC - PART C 148.4 166.2 187.3 198.9 177.7 181.6 153.8 135.2 

00754 SMC FEES 0.0 0.0 0.0 30.3 27.8 28.0 37.5 38.1 

00755 SMC SOCIETY MEMBER DIGITAL LIBRARY 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

01499 PERIODICAL RELATED - OTHER 1.0 0.5 1.3 1.6 1.6 0.7 1.6 0.7 

01500 NEWSLETTERS 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

01600 NON PERIODICAL 1.8 0.0 (3.0) 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

01700 MEETINGS/CONFERENCES 766.1 98.5 321.6 1,162.3 901.4 1,003.7 1,143.1 942.9 

01701 CONFERENCE - RELATED 0.0 0.0 0.0 (1.5) 0.2 0.6 0.0 0.6 

01702 GRANTS 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

01800 ADMINISTRATION 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

01900 COMMITTEE & OTHER 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.7 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

TOTAL INCOME 1,622.5 1,095.3 1,311.3 2,313.5 1,937.2 2,067.1 2,051.8 1,766.7 

00100 RMBSVC INTEREST INCOME 94.7 (0.9) 0.0 (249.0) (203.3) (383.1) 0.0 0.0 

00751 TRANS ON SMC - PART A 135.2 169.8 151.7 136.2 149.8 173.7 209.6 192.5 

00752 TRANS ON SMC - PART B 181.1 184.5 182.4 303.6 189.7 193.6 218.6 214.8 

00753 TRANS ON SMC - PART C 129.3 95.7 100.8 105.6 111.9 147.0 140.0 151.3 

00754 SMC FEES 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

00755 SMC SOCIETY MEMBER DIGITAL LIBRARY 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 5.5 

01499 PERIODICAL RELATED - OTHER 25.4 62.6 34.1 9.8 34.1 6.1 6.7 8.1 

01500 NEWSLETTERS 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0 4.4 0.0 7.0 7.0 

01600 NON PERIODICAL 3.0 3.9 5.1 5.3 4.5 26.2 5.4 6.6 

01700 MEETINGS/CONFERENCES 490.6 (56.2) 180.4 764.2 149.3 560.4 495.8 539.0 

01701 CONFERENCE - RELATED 2.4 24.7 8.2 22.1 27.5 12.5 11.5 12.5 

01702 GRANTS 4.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

01800 ADMINISTRATION 920.8 802.5 (49.4) 380.2 353.1 429.2 564.2 296.8 

01900 COMMITTEE & OTHER 61.1 40.7 46.2 81.0 115.7 86.6 281.0 320.2 

TOTAL EXPENSE/RMBSVC 2,047.6 1,327.3 660.5 1,559.0 936.7 1,252.2 1,939.8 1,754.2 

TOTAL NET (425.1) (232.0) 651.5 754.5 1,000.5 814.8 112.0 12.5 

25 

7

0940 - 1015 Conferences and Meetings Committee report, key points and 

motions (T.T. Lee) 

26

Conferences and Meetings Committee Report 

T. T. Lee 

Edward W. Tunstel 

September 4, 2007 

Membership 

Julie A. Adams, julie.a.adams@vanderbilt.edu 

Stuart Rubin, stuart.rubin@navy.mil 

Edward.W.Tunstel, Edward.W.Tunstel@jpl.nasa.gov 

Hideyuki Takagi, takagi@design.kyushu-u.ac.jp 

Wil Thissen, w.a.h.thissen@tbm.tudelft.nl 

Mo Jamshidi, moj@wacong.org 

Philip Chen, Philip.Chen@utsa.edu 

Objectives 

• Objective 1: Develop a good procedure to approve conference budget 

• Objective 2: Ensure increased conference quality and organization 

• Objective 3: Assist VP Membership with membership recruitment at the 

conferences 

• Objective 4: Create a long-term strategy for incorporating tutorials and 

workshops. 

• Objective 5: Develop process for incorporating exhibits into the SMC annual 

conference 

• Objective 6: Explore other methods for quality improvements 

• Objective 7: Utilize poster sessions 

• Objective 8: Establish criteria for SMC involvement for meetings with other 

organizations 

• Objective 9: Establish a formal mechanism for efficiently collecting 

conference reports

Plan to Achieve Objectives 

Objective 1: 

1. Establish guidelines to sponsor conferences from Long Range Planning (significance 

and relevance) and Finance (budget constraint). 

2. Approve the application for sponsorship of conferences in a timely and efficient way 

based on guidelines in the strategic plan for conferences. 

Objective 2: 

1. Seek feedback and evaluations from conference participants (to improve coming 

conferences in the future) 

2. Update the Conference Operation Manual by imposing responsibilities for 

conferences which fail to close their financials in a timely manner and in accordance 

with IEEE policy. 

3. Impose penalties on conferences which fail to close their financials in a timely 

manner and in accordance with IEEE policy as set forth in the Conference Operation 

Manual. 

Objective 3: 

1. Develop a procedure to encourage all conference attendees to join SMC during 

meeting. 

2. Enhance interactions between the participants and various conference activities. 

Objective 4: 

Identify emerging technologies, technologies with critical importance, and topics with 

greater attractions to the SMC community suitable for inclusion as tutorials and 

workshops based on suggestions from technical committees. 

Objective 5: 

Establish long-term partnership with international corporations with willingness to 

sponsor, for which exhibit space are reserved with priorities.

Objective 6: 

1. Seek feedback and evaluations from conference participants (to improve coming 

conferences in the future) 

2. Seek input from general chair and program chair of SMC sponsored conferences. 

Objective 7: 

1. Trade off between broader participation and paper quality. 

2. Address objectives set by the conference organizers to suit various needs of the 

participants. 

3. Prevent interference of no-show papers 

Objective 8: 

Establish guidelines for SMC involvement from Long Range Planning and Finance. 

Objective 9: 

1. Revise the manual of the SMC Society’s Conference and Meetings Policies, 

Procedures and Information by specifically indicating mandatory items for inclusion 

in the final report after the completion of the conference. 

2. Apply penalties for late submission of the conference report and final financial 

report.

A list of the newly approved conferences: 

The following are approved since October 2006. 

a). Fully Sponsored Conferences 

BTAS 2007 IEEE, Biometrics: Theory, Applications, and Systems 

GSIS 2007 IEEE, Grey Systems and Intelligent Services 

NAFIPS 2007 North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society 

SMC/IA 2007 IEEE, Soft Computing in Industrial Applications 

ICNSC 2008 IEEE, Networking, Sensing and Control 

BIBE 2007 IEEE Seventh International Conference on 

Bioinformatics and Bioengineering 

b). Co-sponsored Conferences 

CME 2007 Complex Medical Engineering 

SIEDS 2007 Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium 

IAW 2007 Information Assurance and Security Workshop 

Ro-Man 2007 IEEE, Robot and Human Interactive Communication 

c). Technical Co-sponsored conferences 

Bionetics 2007 Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information, & Computing Systems 

BioSurveillance 2007 NSF, BioSurveillance Systems and Case Studies 

CODS 2007 Complex Open Distributed Systems 

HoloMAS 2007 Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems 

HIS 2007 Hybrid Intelligent Systems 

ICABS 2007 Adaptive Business Systems 

ICIF 2007 Intl. Colloquium on Information Fusion 

ICMLA 2007 Machine Learning and Applications 

ICMLC 2007 Machine Learning and Cybernetics 

ICSSSM 2007 Service Systems and Service Management 

ICWAPR 2007 Wavelet Analysis and Pattern Recognition 

ISI 2007 IEEE, Intelligence and Security Informatics 

LINDI 2007 Symposium on Logistics and Industrial Informatics 

PAISI 2007 Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics 

RuleML 2007 Rule Interchange and Applications

SASO 2007 IEEE Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems 

SICE 2007 Soc. Instr. and Control Engineers Annual Conference 

SISY 2007 Symposium on Intelligent Systems and Informatics 

SOAS 2007 Self-Organization & Autonomous Systems in Computing & Communications 

SMAP 2007 Semantic Media Adaption and Personalization 

WESIC 2007 Workshop on European Scientific and Industrial Collaboration 

WISTP 2007 Workshop on Information Security Theory and Practices 

GEFS 2008 Workshop on Genetic and Evolving Fuzzy Systems 

HRI 2008 Human-Robotic Interaction 

ICSSSM 2008 Service Systems and Service Management 

IE 2008 IET, Intelligent Environments 

INFRA 2008 Infrastructure Systems and Services 

RFID 2008 IEEE RFID Conference 

2. Updated Conference Information sheet 

Attached. (ConfInfo_2007.xls) 

3. Report of Statistics for IEEE SMCS-sponsored Conference/Workshop that 

we have received thus far 

Attached. (ConfReports_Table_2007.xls -- table of statistics) 

(ConferenceReports_Aug19_2007.zip -- archive of reports received) 

Sponsorship requests for the following have been received and the approval 

process for them has started or will start soon. 

Fully Sponsored Conferences 

IRI 2007 

SMC 2008 

SoSE 2008 

Co-sponsored Conferences 

Portable 2008 

RO-MAN 2008

NAFIPS 2008 

Technically Co-sponsored conferences 

ICIAfS 2007 

IUC 2007 

ICINCO 2008

1. Fully Sponsored Conferences 

Conference Name Location Contact Name Comments/Closure 

SMC 2012 Asia -China Sharron Tang TBD (conference date) 

SMC 2011 North America TBD 

SMC 2010 Istanbul, Turkey Okyay Kaynak TBD (conference date) 

SMC 2009 San Antonio Philip Chen Date to have IEEE approval 

by: April, 2008 

SMC 2008 Singapore Jim Poo Aun Neow Date to have IEEE approval 

by: April, 2007 

SMC 2007 Montreal Ferial El-Hawary Date to be closed: Sept. 2008 

SMC 2006 Taiwan T.T. Lee Date to be closed: Sept., 2007 

SMC 2005 Big Island, Hawaii Mo Jamashidi Date to be closed: Sept., 2006 

SMC 2004 The Hague, Netherlands Wil Thissen Not Closed yet 

SMC 2003 Washington, DC MengChu Zhou Not Closed yet 

SMC 2002 Hammamet, Tunisia Abdel El Kamel Closed 

SMC 2001 Tucson, AZ Feiyue Wang Closed 

DHMS-2008 GREECE William A. Gruver Date approved: June 14, 2006 

ICNSC 2008 Guangzhou, China Derong Liu TBD 

ICNSC 2007 London Guoping Liu Date approved: June 30 2006 

ICNSC 2006 Ft. Lauderdale, FL MengChu Zhou Closed 

ICNSC 2005 Tuscon, AZ Fei-Yue Wang Closed 

ICNSC 2004 Taipei, Tawain T. T. Lee Closed 

IRI 2006 

Waikoloa, Big Island Stuart Rubin 

of Hawaii 

IRI 2005 Las Vegas, NV Stuart Rubin 

IRI 2004 Las Vegas, NV Stuart Rubin 

IRI 2003 Las Vegas, NV Stuart Rubin Closed 

NAFIPS 2005 Ann Arbor, MI Dimitar Filev Closed 

NAFIPS 2003 Chicago, IL Ellen Walker Closed 

NAFIPS 2002 New Orleans, LA Closed 

SMC/IA 2005 Espoo Finland Xiao-Zhi Gao 

SMC/IA 2003 Binghamton, NY Walker Land Closed 

SIEDS 2004 University of Virginia K. Preston White Closed 

SIEDS 2003 University of Virginia Peter Beling Closed 

SMCals 2006 Logan, Utah Seppo J. Ovaska 

SoSE 2006 Los Angeles, CA, USA Mo Jamshidi 

BTAS 2007 Washington DC Kevin W Bowye

2. Co-Sponsored Conferences 

Conference Name Location Contact Name Comments/Closure 

Winter Simulation Conference, 

WSC 2008 


WSC 2007 


WSC 2006 


WSC 2005 


WSC 2004 


WSC 2003 


WSC 2002 


WSC 2001 

Miami, FL Jeff Smith/Preston White Sponsorship percentage 8% 

Washingtin, DC Jeff Smith/Preston White Sponsorship percentage 8% 

Monterey, CA Jeff Smith/Preston White Sponsorship percentage 8% 

Lake Buena Vista, FL Jeff Smith/Preston White Sponsorship percentage 8% 

Washington, DC Jeff Smith/Preston White Sponsorship percentage 8% 

New Orleans, LA Maggie Johnson C Closed 

San Diego, CA Maggie Johnson C Closed 

Arlington, VA Preston White Closed 

Annual Information Assurance 

Workshop 2006 


Workshop 2005 


Workshop 2004 


Workshop 2003 


Workshop 2002 


Workshop 2001 

West Point, NY 

Wayne Scheppens 

West Point, NY Wayne Scheppens Sponsorship percentage 70% 

West Point, NY Wayne Scheppens Closed 




SIEDS 2006 University of Virginia Sponsorship percentage 25% 

SIEDS 2005 University of Virginia Stephen D. Patek Closed 

SIEDS 2002 University of Virginia Peter Beling Closed 

Ro-Man 2006 Herford Shire, Uk Bob Guscott Sponsorship percentage 25% 

Ro-Man 2005 Nashville, TN Ali Sekmen Closed 

DIS 2006 Prague, Czech Republic Vladimir Marik Sponsorship percentage 51% 

NAFIPS 2006 Montreal, Canada Kudret Demirli Sponsorship percentage 30% 

SIRI 2006 Hanoi, Vietnam Hoang Pham Sponsorship percentage 50% 

SoSE 2007 San Antonio, TX Mo Jamshidi Sponsorship percentage 75% 

CME 2007 Beijing JIngLong Wu 

ICSSSM 2004 

8th International Conference on 

Control, Automation, Robotics and 

Vision 

BICCIB 2005 

Seventth International Conference 

on Electronic Commerce 

ICMLA 2004 

IEEE Int Workshop on Soft Comp. 

in Indu. Applications 

Beijing, China 

Binghampton, NY

Report of Statistics for IEEE SMCS-sponsored Conference/Workshop 

Dear Conference/Workshop Organizer: 

Thank you for working with the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (SMCS) in its sponsorship of your 

conference/workshop. We would like to share news of successful conferences with our membership via the Society 

newsletter. Please complete this form to assist us in accurately reporting the outcome of your conference/workshop. Your 

completed form should be submitted to the SMCS Vice President of Conferences and Meetings, and the Conference 

Coordinator within two months after your conference/workshop. Your input will be very helpful to the IEEE SMCS. 

Regards, 

T. T. Lee, Vice President Conferences and Meetings (ttlee@cn.nctu.edu.tw) 

E. Tunstel, Conference Coordinator (tunstel@ieee.org) 

Submitter Name: 

Conference Role: 

Contact Information: 

(e-mail or address) 

Conference Title: 

Date(s): 

Location: 

Sponsorship Type: Fully sponsorship; Co-sponsorship ( ___%); Technical Cosponsorship 

# Attendees # Papers 

Submitted 

# Papers 

Accepted 

Accept 

Ratio (%) 

# Papers 

Presented 

# Tutorials # Exhibitors 

Attendee Countries Represented (and % if known, e.g., China 20%, USA 15%, etc): 

Comments and feedback:

Motions:

Appendix: All booked conferences: 

1. Fully Sponsored Conferences

Co-Sponsored Conferences

3. Technical Co-Sponsored Conferences

Contact Information 

Conference Publication Program 

Conference Name Location Contact Name Contact Email Date Projected Payment Actual Payment Notes 

ICMLC 2007 Hong Kong, China Daniel Yeung csdaniel@inet.polyu.edu.hk Aug. 19–22, 2007 appr. 11/15/2006 

Daniel Yeung, Xizhaocsdaniel@inet.polyu.edu.hk, 

ICMLC 2006 

Dalian, China 

Wang 

xizhaowang@ieee.org Aug. 13–16, 2006 


ICMLC 2005 

Guangzhou, China Wang 

xizhaowang@ieee.org Aug. 19–21, 2005 


ICMLC 2004 

Shanghai, China 

Wang 

xizhaowang@ieee.org Aug. 26–29, 2004 800 (1500) 


ICMLC 2003 

Xi'an, China 

Wang 

xizhaowang@ieee.org Nov. 2–5, 2003 650 (1000) 


ICMLC 2002 


Wang 

xizhaowang@ieee.org Nov. 4–5, 2002 550 (850) 

Winter Simulation Conference, WSC 2008 Miami, FL Jeff Smith/Preston W jsmith@eng.auburn.edu/kpwhite@Dec. 7–10, 2008 

Winter Simulation Conference, WSC 2007 Washington, DC Jeff Smith/Preston W jsmith@eng.auburn.edu/kpwhite@Dec. 9–12, 2007 

Winter Simulation Conference, WSC 2006 Monterey, CA Jeff Smith/Preston W jsmith@eng.auburn.edu/kpwhite@Dec. 3- 6, 2006 

ICSSSM 2008 Melbourne, Australia Jian Chen jchen@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn Jun. 30-Jul. 2, 2008 

ICSSSM 2007 Chengdu, China Jian Chen jchen@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn June 9-11, 2007 

ICSSSM 2006 Troyes, France Oct. 25-27, 2006 

ICSSSM 2005 Jian Chen jchen@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn June 13–15, 2005 

http://www.infotech.monash.ed 

u.au/about/news/conferences/ic 

sssm08/; appr. 7/4/07 

http://www.mgmt.uestc.edu.cn/i 

csssm07/; appr 11/7/06 

HRI 2008 (3rd Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction) Amsterdam, Netherlands Julie Adams julie.a.adams@vanderbilt.edu March 12-15, 2008 http://hri2008.org/l appr 2/15/07 

HRI 2007 (2nd Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction) Washington, DC Michael A. Goodrich mike@cs.byu.edu March 9–11, 2007 

HRI 2006 (1st Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction) Salta Lake City, UT Michael A. Goodrich mike@cs.byu.edu March 2–3, 2006 

2008 

GEFS 2008 

Witten-Bommerholz, 

Germany Frank Hoffmann frank.hoffmann@uni-dortmund.de Mar. 4-7, 2008 

http://www.gefs08.de; appr 

4/30/2007 

IE 2008 Seattle, WA Diane Cook cook@eecs.wsu.edu Jul. 21-22, 2008 appr 5/14/2007 

http://www.nginfra.nl/conferenc 

INFRA 2008 Rotterdam, The NetherlandsPetra Heijnen P.W.Heijnen@tudelft.nl Nov. 10-12, 2008 

e2008/; appr. 6/10/07 

RFID 2008 Las Vegas, NV Emily Sopensky e.sopensky@ieee.org Mar. 17-19, 2008 

2007 

ICSEM 2007 Haifa, Israel Dov Dori dori@ie.technion.ac.il March 20–23, 2007 

KIMAS 2007 

April 29-May 3, 2007 

http://www.ieee-rfid.org/2008; 

appr 7/4/07 

http://www.ieeeboston.org/kima 

s07.htm 

SPECTS 2007 

approved 9/21/2006 

SanDiego, CA Mohammad Obaidat obaidat@monmouth.edu July 16-18, 2007 

http://eia.udg.es/SPECTS2007/ 

http://www.icete.org/; req 

ICETE 2007 

Barcelona, Spain Mohammad Obaidat obaidat@monmouth.edu July 28-31, 2007 

9/30/06, appr 10/15/06 

http:/www.mlcri.hk/icwapr/; 

ICWAPR 2007 

Beijing, China Daniel Yeung csdaniel@inet.polyu.edu.hk Nov. 2-4, 2007 

appr. 11/27/2006 

http://www.smap2007.org/, 

SMAP 2007 

London, UK John Lee John.Lee@inet.polyu.edu.hk Dec. 17-18, 2007 

appr. 11/29/2006 

http://cyber.felk.cvut.cz/HoloMA 

HoloMAS 2007 

Regensburg, Germany Vlad Marik marik@labe.felk.cvut.cz Sep. 3-5, 2007 

S/2007/ 

http://www.cs.csubak.edu/~icml 

ICMLA 2007 

Cincinnati, OH Arif Wani awani@csub.edu Dec 13-15, 2007 

a/icmla07/ 

WISTP 2007 Crete, Greece Damien Sauveron damien.sauveron@xlim.fr May 9-11, 2007 

WESIC 2007 

Warsaw, Poland Mariusz Andrzejczak mandrzejczak@piap.pl Jun. 21-22, 2007 http://www.piap.pl/wesic07 

ICIF 2007 Xi'an, China X. Rong Li XLi@uno.edu Aug. 22-25, 2007 

http://projects.csail.mit.edu/sas 

SASO 2007 

Boston, MA J.P. Martin-Flatin jp.martin-flatin@ieee.org Jul. 9-11, 2007 

o2007/ 

SICE 2007 Kagawa, Japan Masami Namiki office_riji@sice.or.jp Sept. 17-20, 2007 

http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/ISI20 

ISI 2007 

New Brunswick, NJ Daniel Zeng zeng@email.arizona.edu May 23-24, 2007 

07/index.html; appr 3/25/07 

http://isi.se.cuhk.edu.hk/; appr 

PAISI 2007 

Chengdu, China Daniel Zeng zeng@email.arizona.edu Apr. 11-12, 2007 

3/25/07 

http://ai.arizona.edu/BIO2007/; 

BioSurveillance 2007 

New Brunswick, NJ Daniel Zeng zeng@email.arizona.edu 22-May-07 

appr 3/25/07 

CODS2007 / ICABS 2007 Chengdu, China Hua Tianfield h.tianfield@gcal.ac.uk July 22-24, 2007 

http://xiaglowresearch.org.uk/C 

ODS2007/;http://xiaglowresearc 

h.org.uk/ICABS2007/; appr. 

4/5/07 

SOAS 2007 Leipzig, Germany Hua Tianfield h.tianfield@gcal.ac.uk Sep. 24-27, 2007 

http://xiaglowresearch.org.uk/S 

OAS2007/; appr 4/7/07 

SISY 2007 Subotica, Serbia Imre Rudas rudas@bmf.hu, szakal@bmf.hu Aug. 24-25, 2007 

http://www.sice.or.jp/sice2007/; 

appr 4/14/07 

LINDI 2007 Wildau, Germany Imre Rudas rudas@bmf.hu, szakal@bmf.hu Sep. 13-15, 2007 

http://www.bmf.hu/conferences/ 

Lindi2007/; appr 4/14/07 

HIS 2007 Kaiserslautern, Germany Mario Koeppen mkoeppen@ieee.org Sep. 17-19, 2007 

http://his07.hybridsystem.com/; 

appr 5/28/07 

Bionetics 2007 Budapest, Hungary Falko Dressler 

dressler@informatik.unierlangen.de 

Dec. 10-12, 2007 

http://www.bionetics.org/; appr 

6/10/07 

RuleML 2007 Orlando, FL Adrian Paschke paschke@in.tum.de Oct. 25-26, 2007 

http://2007.ruleml.org/; appr 

8/6/07

2006 

e-Networks (11th International Workshop on Telework) Fredericton, Canada Mihaela Uliery ulieru@unb.ca August 28-31, 2006 approved in December 2005 

INES 2006 London, UK Imre J. Rudas rudas@bmf.hu June 26-28, 2006 http://www.ines-conf.org 

ICCC 2006 Helsinki, Finland-Tallinn, EstImre J. Rudas rudas@bmf.hu August 18-22, 2006 

EFS 2006 Lake District, UK Dimitar Filev dfilev@ford.com September 7–9, 2006 

Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems 2006 Prague, Czech Republic Vladimir Marik marik@labe.felk.cvut.cz June 15–16, 2006 

The 3rd IEEE Conference on Intelligent Systems (IEEE-IS 2006) Varna, Bulgaria Panagiotis Chountas chountp@wmin.ac.uk September 4–6, 2006 

ICARCV 2006 Singapore Lihua Xie elhxie@ntu.edu.sh December 5–8, 2006 

SPECTS 2006 Calgary, Alberta, Canada Mohammad Obaidat obaidat@monmouth.edu July 31–August 2, 2006 

ICETE 2006 Setubal, Portuga Mohammad Obaida obaidat@monmouth.edu August 7–10, 2006 

International Conference on Active Media Technology, AMT06 Brisbane, Australia Yuefeng Li y2.li@qut.edu.au June 7–9, 2006 

SICE-ICASE International Joint Conference Busan, Korea October 18–21, 2006 http://sice-iccas.org 

ICIA 2006 Colombo, Sri Lanka Sisil Kumarawadu sisil@elect.mrt.ac.lk December 15–17, 2006 http://www.icia2006.org 

SOAS 2006 Erfurt, Germany Huaglory Tainfield H.Tianfield@gcal.ac.uk September 18–21, 2006 http://www.soas2006.org/ 

Bionetics 2006 Cavalese, Italy Iacopo Carreras iacopo.carreras@create-net.org December 11–13, 2006 http://www.bionetics.org 

ISDA 2006 Jinan, Shandong, China Ajith Abraham ajith.abraham@ieee.org October 16–18, 2006 http://isda2006.ujn.edu.cn/ 

CESA 2006 Beijing, China Xianyi ZENG xianyi.zeng@ensait.fr October 4–6, 2006 http://cesa2006.ec-lille.fr/ 

ICMLA 2006 Orlando, FL Arif Wani awani@csub.edu December 14-15, 2006 http://www.cs.csubak.edu/~icml 

a/icmla06/icmla06.html 

2005 

ICSSM 2005 


Fifth International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems, HIS '05 Rio de Janeiro - Brazil Marley Vellasco marley@ele.puc-rio.br November 06–09, 2005 

INES 2005 Mediterranean Sea Imre J. Rudas rudas@bmf.hu September 16–19, 2005 

ICCC 2005 Mauritus Imre J. Rudas rudas@bmf.hu April 13–16, 2005 

MAPE 2005 Beijing, China Mengqi Zhou zhoumq@public3.bta.net.cn August 8–12, 2005 

ICMLA 2005 Los Angeles, CA Arif Wani awani@csub.edu December 15–17, 2005 

ICEC 2005 Delft, The Netherlands Janssen Marijn m.f.w.h.a.janssen@tbm.tudelft.nl Web page for ICEC 2005 shows no IEEE involvement 

Fourth IEEE International Symposium on Soft Computing as Transdisciplinary ScMuroran, Japan Seppo Ovaska ovaska@ieee.org May 25–27, 2005 

IEEE International Conference on Perception, Imaging and Net Vancouver, Canada W. Gruver gruver@cs.sfu.ca July 18–20, 2005 

BICCIB'2005 - From Biology to Computers & Back Banff, Alberta, Canada Dr. Petr Musilek musilek@ece.ualberta.ca May 10–12, 2005 

SPECTS 2005 Philadelphia, PA Mohammad Obaidat obaidat@monmouth.edu July 24–28, 2005 

International Conference on Active Media Technology, AMT05 Kagawa, Japan Hiroyuki Tarumi y2.li@qut.edu.au May 19–21, 2005 

2004 

NAFIPS 2004 Banff, Canada June 27-30, 2004 

ICEC 2004 Delft, the Netherlands henks@tbm.tudelft.nl 

2004 Int Conf Intelligent Mechatronics & Automation (ICIMA) Hong Zhang guo@eng.kagawa-u.ac.jp, zhang@cs.ualberta.ca 

The International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications Louisville, KY, Arif Wani awani@csub.edu Dec. 16–18, 2004 

Eighth International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICAKunming, China Meng Joo Er ICARCV@ntu.edu.sg Dec. 6–9, 2004 

2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics Shenyang, Liaoning, China Shugen Ma shugen@dse.ibaraki.ac.jp Sept. 6–10, 2004 Approved. No MOU. Hong Kong section cannot sponsor outside of Hong Kon 

SICE Annual Meeting Hokkaido, Japan Ryoji Ohba rohba@eng.hokudai.ac.jp August 4–6, 2004 

The 2nd International Symposium on Measurement, Analysis and Modeling of HuGenova, Italy Koji Ito ito@dis.titech.ac.jp June 14–16, 2004 

2003 

1 st Indian International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Hyderabad, India Andrew Sung sung@cs.nmt.edu December 18–20, 2003 

Hybrid Intelligent Systems 2003 Melbourne, Australia Ajith Abraham aa@cs.okstate.edu December 14–17, 2003 

Mario Köppen mario.koeppen@ipk.fhg.de 

International Symposium on Systems & Human Osaka, Japan Tatsuo Arai arai@sys.es.osaka-u.ac.jp November 19–20, 2003 

IEE People in Control 2003 Amsterdam Susan Bayliss SBayliss@iee.org.uk November 4–6, 2003 

3rd International Interdisciplinary Conference on Electronic Commerce Gdansk, Poland Bhanu Prasad prasad@cis.famu.edu November 13–15 2003 

2003 International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Beijing, China Mengqi Zhou October 26–29. 2003 

fourth annual Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems NIST, Maryland Elena Messina elena.messina@nist.gov September 16–18, 2003 

8th Online World Conference on Soft Computing in Industrial Applications On-line Seppo ovaska@ieee.org September, 2003 

International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics Xi-an, China Daniel Yueng csdaniel@inet.polyu.edu.hk November 13–15 2003 4,376.75 

Third International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications Tulsa, OK Ajith Abraham aa@cs.okstate.edu August 10–13, 2003 

International Conference on Computational Cybernetics (ICCC 2003) Siofok, Hungary Imre Rudas rudas@bmf.hu August 29–31, 2003 

SICE Annual Conference 2003 (Society of Instrument and Control Engineers) Fukui, Japan Koji Ito ito@dis.titech.ac.jp August 4–6, 2003 

IEEE NANO ‘03 San Francisco Meyya Meyyappan fcj@engr.uconn.edu August 12–14, 2003 

Computational Engineering in Systems Applications (CESA) France Pierre Borne Pierre.Borne@ec-lille.fr July 9–11, 2003 

International Conference on Robotics, Intelligent Systems and Signal Processing Changsha, Hunan, China Yunhui Liu May 19–24, 2003 3080.35 

Acronyms: 

AMT: International Conference on Active Media Technology 

BioSurveillance: NSF Workshop on BioSurveillance Systems and Case Studies 

BIONETICS: Bio Inspired mOdels of NEtwork, Information and Computing 

Systems 

EFS: Symposium on Evolving Fuzzy Systems 

CESA: Computational Engineering in Systems Applications 

CODS: International Conference on Complex Open Distributed Systems 

GEFS: International Workshop on Genetic and Evolving Fuzzy Systems 

HIS: International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems 

HoloMAS: International Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems 

HRI: Human-Robot Interaction 

ICABS: International Conference on Adaptive Business Systems 

ICARCV (also called ICARV) : International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision 

ICCC: International Conference on Computational Cybernetics 

ICEC: International Center for Electronic Commerce 

ICETE: International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications 

ICIA: International Conference on Information and Automation (…for Sustainability, aka ICIAfS) 

ICMLA: International Conference on Machine Learning and Application 

ICMLC: International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics 

ICSEM: International Workshop on Systems Engineering and Modeling 

ICSSSM: International Conference on Services, Systems and Service Management 

ICWAPR: International Conference on Wavelet Analysis and Pattern Recognition 

IE: IET International Conference on Intelligent Environments

INES: International Conference on Intelligent Engineering Systems 

INFRA: International Conference on Infrastructure Systems and Services 

ISDA: Intelligent Systems Design and Applications 

LINDI: International Symposium on Logistics and Industrial Informatics 

MAPE: International Symposium on Microwave, Antenna, Propagation and EMC Technologies for Wireless Communications 

NAFIPS: Conference of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society 

RFID: IEEE International RFID Conference 

RuleML: International Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications 

SOAS: International Conference on Self-Organization and Autonomic Systems in Computing and Communications 

SICE : Society of Instrument and Control Engineers 

SISY: International Symposium on Intelligent Systems and Informatics 

SMAP: International Workshop on Semantic Media Adaption and Personalization 

SOAS: International Conference on Self-Organization and Autonomic Systems in Computing and Communications 

SPECTS: Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems 

WISTP: Workshop in Information Security Theory and Practices

Conference 

/Workshop 

Sponsorship 

# Attendees 

# Papers 

Submitted 

# Papers 

Accepted 

Accept 

Ratio (%) 

IEEE SMC 2006 Full 705 1304 916 70.20% 

# Papers 

Presented # Tutorials # 

Exhibitors 

Oral 795; 

Poster 121 

1 5 

Attendee Countries 

Taiwan 33.6%; United States 

10.3%; Hong Kong 3.1%; 

Italy 2.4%; Australia 2.1%; 

Japan 27.1%; China 8.3%; 

Canada 3.6%; Germany 2.1%; 

Others Belgium, 7 4% Germany, The 

SMAP 2006 Tech Co-S 50 42 27 64 27 0 0 

Netherlands, Spain, United 

Kingdom, France, Slovakia, 

Czech Republic, Korea, Japan, 

Italy, Poland, Greece, Austria, 

Egypt, Ireland, Iran, Romania, 

USA Canada 

P.R. China; Taiwan; Hong Kong; 

PAISI 2007 Tech Co-S ~60 159 33 20.70% 30 1 0 Korea; USA; Singapore; 

Australia; New Zealand 

BioSurveillance 

Tech Co-S ~65 25 20 80% 20 0 0 USA; Canada; Taiwan; Japan 

2007 

USA; Korea; Canada; Israel; 

IEEE ISI 2007 Tech Co-S ~140 110 54 49% 54 0 0 

China; Taiwan; Australia; 

Denmark; Pakistan; Francel; 

Japan; Italy

1015 – 1030 Coffee break 

45

1030 - 1040 SMC07 report (Ferial El-Hawary) 

46

47 

Update on IEEE/SMC’2007 

IEEE INTERNATIONAL 

CONFERENCE ON 

SYSTEMS, MAN and 

CYBERNETICS 

Ferial El-Hawary,P.Eng., Ph.D. 

F.El-Hawary@ieee.org 

www.ferial.ca 

September, 2007 

Montreal

48 

LOCATION & DATE 

2007 IEEE International Conference 

on 

Systems, Man, and Cybernetics SMC'2007 

Smart Cooperative Systems and Cybernetics 

Advancing Knowledge and Security for Humanity 

October 7-10, 2007 

The Delta Centre-Ville, 777 University Street 

Montreal, Quebec, Canada 

www.deltahotels.com 

http://www.smc2007.org

The DELTA Center-Ville 

49

50 

CONFERENCE FACILITIES AND 

ATTRACTIONS 

 

 

 

 

Prestigious hotel with 711 guest rooms 

and suites. 

Located in the heart of downtown 

Montreal. 

Just steps to Old Montreal. 

Central to all Montreal Area Universities

53 

Tourism Information 

 

"Tourisme Montréal" 

http://www.tourisme-montreal.org/ 

 

http://www.montrealinternational.com/ 

 

http://www.montrealinternational.com/en 

/accueil/contacts.aspx

54 

Conference Organization 

 

General Chair: 

Mo El-Hawary, Dalhousie University, 

Halifax, N.S., Canada 

 

Organizing Committee Chair: 

Ferial El-Hawary, President 

BH Engineering Systems Ltd., Halifax, N.S., Canada 

 

Treasurer: 

Glen Rockett, F.C. O'Neill Scriven & Associates, 

Halifax, N.S., Canada

Conference Organization (Continued) 

55 

 

 

 

 

Program Committee Chair: 

Eugene Santos, Jr. 

Program Committee Co-Chairs: 

Liping Fang (Systems and Humans) 

Andreas Nürnberger (Cybernetics) 

Program Committee Vice Co-Chairs: 

(Contributed Sessions) 

Reza Soleymani 

Siamak Tafazoli 

Dimitar Filev 

Special Sessions Chair: 

Hideyuki Takagi 

Tutorial/ Workshop Co-Chairs : 

Amir Aghdam and Ferial El-Hawary

Conference Organization (Continue) 

56 

Local Arrangements Chair : 

Éric Germain 

 

Publicity Co-Chairs: 

Michel Desmarais and Jiming Liu 

Student Program Chair : 

Shahab Ardalan 

 

Publication Chair 

Wen-fang Xie 

Awards Committee Chair : 

Amir Aghdam

Conference Organization Status 

57 

Completed tasks Since October’06 

 

Web site designed and is up and running 

http://www.smc2007.org/ 

 

Monthly Teleconference Calls conducted. 

 

Paper status report follows

58 

Papers Registration as of Sept. 5, 07 

Papers Registered (to Date) : 646 

Total Paid, Camera Ready Papers: 643 

Regular papers Paid : 275 papers 

Regular papers unpaid: 30 papers 

34 Special sessions: 291 papers 

 

380 reviewers accepted assignments. 

 

1746 users on the system.

59 

Special Sessions (SS) 

Chair: Hideyuki TAKAGI 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16 of 26 SMC’s Technical Committees (TC) 

generated 142 paper 

Special Sessions: 291 papers 

3 Industrial special sessions organized. 

Special Session Organizers are responsible 

for reviewing papers in Session. 

Taipei’s 18 TC’s generated SS 

Hawaii’s 8 TC’s generated SS

60 

Update on IEEE SMC’07 

Final Program is now posted on the Website 

Invited Speakers 

 

Three Keynote Speakers 

STUDENTS ACTIVITIES 

Student paper competition 

Students Awards 

Total number of student papers 

nominated for awards: 221

61 

Local Arrangement Committee 

Chair: Eric Germain 

 

 

 

Meeting Facilities Subcommittee 

Hospitality and Guest Services 

Subcommittee 

Musical entertainment organized for 

Banquet, (20 minutes Presentation)

62 

Thanks 

Questions?


63

1040 – 1100 SMC08 report (Jim Poo) 

64

1100 -1130 Technical Activities Committee report, key points and motions 

(Hideyuki Takagi) 

65

66 

VP-TA Report for 2007 BoG 

Hideyuki TAKAGI 


1. Technical Committees 

1.1 TC Status since 2005 BoG 

(established) 

• 12/12/2005: TC on System of Systems (Philip Chen and Mark Johnson) 

• 01/28/2006: TC on Medical Mechatronics (Ming-Yih Lee and Chung-Hsien Kuo) 

• 02/16/2006: TC on Infrastructure Systems & Services (Margot Weijnen) 

• 03/01/2006: TC on Information Systems for Design and Marketing 

(Yukio Ohsawa and Katsutoshi Yada) 

• 03/12/2006: TC on Self-Organization and Cybernetics for Informatics (Huaglory Tianfield) 

• 08/16/2006: TC on Information Assurance & Intelligent Multimedia-Mobile Communications 

(Sos Agaian, Philip Chen, Joseph R. Guerci) 

■ 11/03/2006: TC on Intelligent Green Production Systems (Hossam A. Gabbar) 

■ 04/17/2007: TC on Enterprise Information Systems (Li Xu , Mengchu Zhou and Philip Chen) 

(terminated) 

• 07/22/2006: TC on Intelligent Communications (Ljiljana Trajkovic) 

■ 08/31/2007: TC on Control of Uncertain Systems (Nozha Zribi) 

(changed TC Chairs) 

■ 02/06/2007: TC on Industrial Applications (from Seppo J. Ovaska to Bernhard Sick) 

■ 03/08/2007: TC on 14. Control of Uncertain Systems (from Abdelkader El Kamel to Nozha Zribi) 

■ 09/04/2007: TC on System of Systems (from Philip Chen and Mark A. Johnson 

to Daniel Delaurentis and Mark A. Johnson) 

As of September, 2007, we have 26 TC's: 9, 3, and 14 TC's in the fields of Cybernetics, Human- 

Machine Systems, and Systems, respectively. Currently, two proposals for establishing TC's are 

being prepared. 

1.2 TC Activities in 2007 

1. TC Activity Report 

See TC reports at Appendix A. 

2. Organizing Special Sessions at SMC2007 

• TC contributed for SMC2007 very well. 

16 of 26 TC's collected 200 among 318 Special Sessions papers (63%) as of 3/24. 

For SMC2006, 18 of 25 TC's collected 190 among 411 SS's papers (46.2%); 

For SMC2005, 8 of 19 TC's collected about 95 papers. 

• The best TC's contributed for SMC2007 (as of 3/16) are: 

TC on Soft Computing (39 papers) 

TC on Conflict Resolution (20 papers) 

TC on System of Systems (17 papers) 

TC on Distributed Intelligent Systems (15 papers)

67 

3. Organizing Conferences 

13 TC's are/were involved in organizing 3 (F), 1 (C), and 12 (T), 

where (F), (C), and (T) are conferences/workshops with SMCS sponsorship of 

full-sponsorship, co-sponsorship, and technical co-sponsorship. 

2. Technical Map Project 

See its background, objectives, approach, and how useful in the VP-TA report for BoG2006. 

[Members] 

(m1) Michael Berthold (VP-Publications), 

(m2) Yukio Ohsawa (Chair of TC on Information System for Design and Marketing), 

(m3) Shusaku Tsumoto (who is preparing a proposal to establish TC on Granular Computing), 

(m4) M Siddique (a member of RI&UK Chapter), 

(m5) Bala P Amavasai (a member of RI&UK Chapter), 

(m6) Hideyuki Takagi (VP-TA) 

are working on the Technical Map Project using the below data: 

(1) paper titles presented at SMC1998 - SMC2006. 

(2) paper titles and abstracts presented in IEEE Trans. on SMC-A, B, and C in 1996 - early 2006. 

[Progress] 

We got three analysis reports, Appendix B shows them. 

(m1) Michael et al. applied text mining methods and made a report paper for SMC2007. See 

Appendix B1. 

(m3) Shusaku Tsumoto et al. applied different text mining methods and made a report. See 

Appendix B2. But, their analysis focuses on several aspects of data, and I am asking them to 

continue their analysis and focus on SMC technical trend. 

(m4) Siddique counted the # of Transaction papers in five categories in each year to view their ratio 

change. See Appendix B3. 

[Schedule in 2007] 

(1) We try to collect analysis from (m2) and further complete analysis from (m3). 

(2) We summarize all reports and show the strategic action plan for establishing new TCs, 

planning special issues, tutorials, special sessions, and/or workshops by the end of this year 

with the help of related ExCom officers, and 

(3) We pass the action plan to new ExCom in 2008. 

3. IT Tool Project 

See its background, approach, and how useful in the VP-TA report for BoG2006. 

We surveyed five kinds of IT tools to support the activities of TC's and Chapters: 

(1) Document Sharing Tool 

(2) Forum Tools 

(3) Web Conferencing Tool 

(4) Conference Management Tool 

(5) Mailing List

68 

Hong Yan and I surveyed the above tools in 2006 and 2007, we concluded that a commercial tool for 

the (3) and free tools for the others are effective and cost effective for supporting the activities of 

TC's and Chapters. The free tools include Google Document & Spreadsheet for the (1), Google 

Group for the (2) and (5), and Confman for the (4), for example. 

Ryota Yamada of Omron Corporation surveyed several web conference tools that are suitable for 

our TC's from their size and our budget points of view. Based on his recommendation for the (3) 

web conferencing tool, we discussed its commercial use at ExCom2007, and made a contract to use 

the below WebEx in June - Dec., 2007 for evaluation. 

Name: 

WebEx Meeting Center 

Company: WebEx Communications, Inc. 

URL: 

Function: 

http://www.webex.com/solutions/online-meeting-svc.html 

presentation (slides, document, spreadsheet, PDF), on-line white board, 

sharing desktop, viewing face images, voice communication. 

Max # of Participants: 15 (can be extended up to 500) 

# of web conferences: no limitation (max 5 conferences at the same time) 

monthly use limit: 13 hours * 30 days per month. 

So far, it was used for holding meeting of ExCom and the organization committee of SMCS 

sponsored conference, delivering SMCS Distinguish Lecturer talk to IR&UK Chapter members, 

and others. But, the Chairs of TC's, Chapters, and SMCS conference organizers are recommended 

to save their time and increase their activities by using this web conference system. 

4. Others 

4.1 TC Promotion Event at SMC2007 as well as a recruitment of SMCS membership held at 

SMC2006. 

4.2 Homework: revising Technical Operation Manual for introducing three-VP-TA system 

starting from 2008.

69 

Appendix A: 2007 September TC Activity Reports 

Report of TC's in Cybernetics Field 

Report of TC's in Human-Machine Field 

Report of TC's in Systems Field 

Appendix B: Preliminary Reports of Technical Map Project 

B1: Report from Prof. Berthold 

Kilian Thiel, Fabian Dill, Tobias Kötter, and Michael R. Berthold, 

"Towards Visual Exploration of Topic Shifts", Proc. of the SMC2007 

B2: IEEE Trans. of SMC Data Analysis by Prof. Tsumoto et al. 

B3: Report from Dr. Siddique

2007 Sept. SMCS TC Report 

70 

TC on 

Chair names 

I am a member of 

not only IEEE but 

also SMCS in 2007. 

(Y/N) 

# of TC 

members 

BESIDES 

Chairs 

Organizing 

Organizing Sessions: 

Conf./Workshops sponsored Name(s) of conf. / 

by SMCS: Their names with workshop(s) sponsored by 

sponsorship type of fullsponsorship 

(F), co- 

type of (F), (C), or (T). 

SMCS with sponsorship 

sponsership (C), or technical 

sponsership (T), 

respectively. 

TC Activities in 2007 

Other TC activities for 

SMC Society. 

Special Issues/review 

papers approved by 

Editor-In-Chief of IEEE 

Trans. on SMC. or 

published special 

issues/review papers. 

The # of your TC 

members whom 

you suceed to 

persuade to be 

2007 SMCS 

members from 

2006 non-SMCS 

members. 

(new evaluation!) 

# of TC meetings 

with WebEx, a 

web conference 

system, and 

evaluating it. 


INSTRUCTION 

Updare the 

# if 

necessary. 

Don't count 

Chairs, you. 

Pay youe attention to the 

evaluation terms. They 

are different from those in 

2007 March TC Report. 

your 2007 plan made in 

March, 2007 

Add (F), (C), or (T). 

Don't write conf.s without 

SMCS sponsorship 

Add (F), (C), or (T). 



Don't write others, such 

Specify name with as organizing sessions 

citation information. at conf.s without SMCS 

sponsorship. 

organizing 6th ICMLC(T) organizing SS at SMC2007 none none 

Update the # 

Please plan your 

TC meetings 

with WebEx. 

Xizhao Wang (Y), 

1 Computational Intelligence 

Wing Yin Ng (Y) 

11 

what your TC did in January, Organized 7th ICMLC(T), 

2007 - Aug., 2007 collected 10 papers for 

SMC2007(F) 

what your TC will do in 

Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 


March, 2007 

Organizing ICWAPR (T) 

organized 2 SS's at 

SMC2007 (F); organized 

two Tracks (Themes) at 

ICMLC2007 (T) 

organizing CompLife'07 (T) Special track or workshop none 

on computational life 

science at ICMLC2007 (T). 

Established 2 SMC 

student branch chapters. 

One in Shenzhen China 

and one in Hebei China 

none 

0 0 

Computational Life 

2 

Science 

Michael R. Berthold 

(Y) Hong Yan (Y) 

Daniel Yeung (Y) 

5 

what your TC did in January, 

2007 - Aug., 2007 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 


March, 2007 

organied a session on 

"Computation Life Science 

and Bioinformatics" at 

ICMLC07 (T). 

Hold CompLife'07 (T) in 

October. 

start working on workshop organizing SS at SMC2007 working for Special 

Issues at IEEE Trans. 

increaing # of TC 

members more than 20. 

Information Assurance & 

3 Intelligent Multimedia- 

Mobile Communications 

Sos Agaian (Y) 

Philip Chen (Y) 

Joseph R. Guerci (Y) 

18 


2007 - Aug., 2007 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 


March, 2007 

start working on workshop 

collected 6 papers for 

SMC2007(F); organizing SS 

at ICSoS2007 (C) 

working for Special 

Issues at IEEE Trans. 

organising special sessions 

in ICMLC 2007 

organing special session 

at Trans. on SMC-B. 







2 

Intelligent Internet 

4 


John W. T. Lee (Y) 

Xiaolong Wang (Y) 

Daming Shi (Y) 

11 


2007 - Aug., 2007 


SMC2007(F); Assisted the 

organization of ICMLC 

2007 (T), made special 

arrangement for SMC 

members to attend tutorials 

Added 4 members to TC 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 

organizing SMAP2007 (T) 

Start exploring the Continue to solicit more 

possibility with officials TC members 

responsible 


March, 2007 

IRI-2007 (F) add Industrial Funding IEEE SMC:C IRI 

Special Issue 2008 

Build novel Knowledge 

Acquisition system 

Knowledge Acquisition in 

5 

Intelligent Systems 

Stuart H. Rubin (Y) 

Michael H. Smith (Y) 

Shu-Ching Chen (Y) 

17 

what your TC did in January, IRI-2007 (F) 

2007 - Aug., 2007 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 


March, 2007 

organising 2007 Int. Conf. 

on Wavelet Analysis and 

Pattern, Recognition 

(ICWAPR2007) (T) 

(1) organising SSs for none 

ICMLC2007, (2) organising 

SSs for SMC2007 

IEEE SMC:C IRI 

Special Issue 2008 

Try to make a learning 

inductive decision support 

system. 

none 

0 

6 Machine Learning YuanYan Tang (Y) 5 


2007 - Aug., 2007 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 

ICWAPR2007 (T) 

(1) organised SSs for 

ICMLC2007, (2) collected 8 

papers for SMC2007(F) 


March, 2007 

ICMLC2007 organizing SS at SMC2007 orgamizing special none 

issues on Human-Media 

Interaction. 

7 Media Computing 

8 Medical Informatics 

Zhi-Qiang Liu (Y/N) 

Daniel Yeung (Y) 

Cathy M. Helgason (Y) 

Thomas H. Jobe (Y) 

8 

8 


2007 - Aug., 2007 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 

your 2007 plan made in none 

Sept., 2006 

what your TC did in Oct, 

2006 - March, 2007 


April, 2007 - Dec., 2007 


March, 2007 

organized Invited session for 

ICMLC2007 (T) 

organizing sessions at 

SMC2007 and IFSA2007 


SMC2007(F) 

none 

none Organizing SS at SMC 2007 none 

(F) 

none 

Organizing a joint 

workshop in Germany 

9 Soft Computing 

Tadahiko Murata (Y) 

Michael Hanss (Y) 

25 

what your TC did in January, none 

collected 43 papers for none none none none 

2007 - Aug., 2007 

SMC2007(F) 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 

none none none Organizing a joint 

workshop in Japan 

none 

none

71 

Five-Year Plan (They became options at BoG2006, but your plan are prefarable.) 

TC on 

2008 2009 2010 2011 

INSTRUCTION 

Please update your plan in white cells. 

organising 7th ICMLC; plan to organising 8th ICMLC organising 9th ICMLC organising 10th ICMLC 

organize a special issue of 

IEEE Tran. on SMC-B with the 

focus Inductive Learning with 

fuzzy representation 

1 Computational Intelligence organising 7th ICMLC; plan to organising 8th ICMLC organising 9th ICML organising 10th ICMLC 

organize a special issue of 

IEEE Tran. on SMC-B with the 

focus Inductive Learning with 

fuzzy representation 

Computational Life 

2 

Science 

organizing special issue at organize biological data 

Trans. on SMC; (T) organizing classification competition; 

special track or workshop at organizing special track or 

ICMLC08 (T) 

workshop at ICMLC09 (T) 

organizing special issue at organize biological data 

Trans. on SMC; (T) organizing classification competition; 

special track or workshop at organizing special track or 

ICMLC08 (T) 


organizing special track or 





workshop at ICMLC11(T) 


workshop at ICMLC11(T) 


3 Intelligent Multimedia- 

Mobile Communications 

Intelligent Internet 

4 


Organizing Int. Conf. on 


Multimedia-Mobile Intelligent 

Systems (F, C, or T) ; 

Organizing student 

paper/design competition at 

IA&MMIS2008; 



Multimedia-Mobile Intelligent 

Systems (F, C, or T) ; 

Organizing student 

organing a tutorial course at 

ICMLC2008. organizing an SS 

at SMC2008 

organing a tutorial course at 

ICMLC2008. organizing an SS 

at SMC2008 


Information Assurance and 

Digital Forensic Systems (F, 

C, or T) 



Digital Forensic Systems (F, 

C, or T) 

organizing a tutorial course at 

ICMLC2009. organizing an 

SS at SMC2009 

organizing a tutorial course at 

ICMLC2009. organizing an 

SS at SMC2009 



Multimedia-Mobile 

Intelligent Systems (F, C, or 

T) ; Organizing student 

paper/design competition at 

the IA&MMIS2010. 



Multimedia-Mobile 

Intelligent Systems (F, C, or 

T) ; Organizing student 

organing a workshop on Web 

Mining and Web Search. 

incresing # of TC members 

more than 50 

organing a workshop on Web 

Mining and Web Search. 

incresing # of TC members 

more than 50 



Digital Forensic Systems 2 

(F, C, or T). 



Digital Forensic Systems 2 

(F, C, or T). 

To organize a workshop on 

web searching and web 

mining 

To organize a workshop on 

web searching and web 

mining 

Knowledge Acquisition in 

5 

Intelligent Systems 

Organization of IRI-2007, 2008 

and Special Issue of SMC:C on 

IRI. 

Organization of Special Issue of 

IEEE Systems Journal for IRI- 

2007

72 


TC on 

INSTRUCTION 

10 Human-Computer 

Interaction 

Chair names # of TC 

I am a member of members 

not only IEEE but BESIDES 

also SMCS in 2007. Chairs 

(Y/N) 

Geb Thomas (Y) 

Ellen Bass (Y) 

Updare the # 

if necessary. 

Don't count 

Chairs, you. 

14 

Pay youe attention to the 

evaluation terms. They 

are different from those in 

2007 March TC Report. 

Organizing 

Conf./Workshops sponsored 

by SMCS: Their names with 

sponsorship type of fullsponsorship 

(F), cosponsership 

(C), or technical 


respectively. 

Add (F), (C), or (T). 



Organizing Sessions: 

Name(s) of conf. / 

workshop(s) sponsored by 

SMCS with sponsorship 

type of (F), (C), or (T). 

Add (F), (C), or (T). 



TC Activities in Oct, 2006 - December, 2007 

Special Issues/review 

papers approved by 

Editor-In-Chief of 

IEEE Trans. on SMC. 

or published special 


Specify name with 

citation information. 

Other TC activities for SMC 

Society. 

Don't write others, such as 

organizing sessions at 

conf.s without SMCS 

sponsorship. 


March, 2007 

none Organizing SS at SMC007 none a PC member at Human 

Robot Interaciton 2007 (T) 


2007 - Aug., 2007 


SMC2007(F); organized 3 

sessions of x papers at 

SIEDS '07 

J. Adams served as a PC 

member of Human Robot 

Interaction 2007 (T) 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 


March, 2007 

Organize SS in SMC2008 

and SIEDS '08 

1st Int. Workshop on Design Organizing SS in SMC007 none 

and Marketing in July or 

Aug (in USA or in Japan) 

(T) 

J. Adams and G. Thomas 

serve as a PC member of 

Human Robot Interaction 

2008 (T) 

Workshop on Manufacturing 

Designs, University of 

Tsukuba, Tokyo, Frbruary 

2007 (T: Technically 

sponsored by this TC) 

The # of your TC # of TC meetings 

members whom you with WebEx, a 

suceed to persuade to web conference 

be 2007 SMCS system, and 

members from 2006 evaluating it. 

non-SMCS members. (new evaluation!) 


Update the # 

0 0 

2 1 

Please plan your 

TC meetings with 

WebEx. 

Information System for 

11 

Design and Marketing 

Yukio Ohsawa (Y) 

Katsutoshi Yada (Y) 

12 


2007 - Aug., 2007 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 


March, 2007 

none 


SMC2007(F) 

Planning to organise 

workshops at London 

Middlesex University as 

co-sponsors on the TC 

interests 

none 

the TC executive are 

seeking sufficient 

quality contributions 

for a sepecial issue on 

Safety and Security 

Int. Workshop "Cubes for 

Innovation: Information 

Systems for Design and 

Marketing" ((T) of SMCS 

Japan Chapter). 

Workshop on Manufacturing 

Designs, University of 

Tsukuba, Tokyo, Feb. ((T) by 

this TC) 

Planning a special session on 

SSS at the SMC UK&RI 2007 

event 

Ali G. Hessami (Y) 

12 Systems Safety & Security Feng Hsu (Y) 

Ming Yu (Y) 

2 


2007 - Aug., 2007 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 

none none Dr. F. Hsu will be a PC 

Member of SMC 2007; 

email communications with 

TC members regarding annual 

planning of activities 

2 not started yet but 

intend to utilise 

none none none none 2 as above

73 


TC on 

2008 2009 2010 2011 

INSTRUCTION 

Please update your plan in white cells. 

none none none none 

10 Human-Computer 

Interaction 

Double the number of 

sponsored technical sessions (to 

4) at conference. Be a 

Technical Sponsor of HRI 2009 

Again double the number of 

sponsored techincal sessions 

at the conference (to 8). 

Sponsor a regular news 

letter/podcast highlighting 

members. Be a technical 

sponsor of HRI 2010 

Propose a special issue of 

Transactions highlighting 

area of interest to members 

Maintain quality of program. 

Information System for 

11 

Design and Marketing 

1) 2nd Int. Workshop on 1) organizing special issuse on 

Information Systems for Design ISDM at Trans. of SMC. 

and Marketing (ISDM) 2) 3rd Int. Workshop on 

technically or full sponsored by ISDM (F) or (T), or 

SMCS, or organizing SS in the organizing SS at SMC2009 

SMC conference 2008, 3) Autumnal School: ISDM 

2) Autumnal School: ISDM technically sponsored by 

technically sponsered by SMCS SMCS Japanese Chapter. 

Japan Cahapter 

1) Organizing SS in the SMC 

conference 2008, 2) publishing 

a book of "Data Mining for 

Design and Marketing," 3) 

Autumnal School: ISDM 

Technical Sponsered by SMC 

Japan Chapter. 

1) Organizing special issuse 

on ISDM at Trans. of SMC. 

2) organizing SS at SMC2009 

3) Autumnal School: ISDM 

technically sponsored by 

SMCS Japanese Chapter. 

1) publishing a book of 

"Systems for Design and 

Marketing"from IEEE Press. 

2) 4th Int. Workshop on 

ISDM (F) or (T), or 

organizing SS in the SMC 

conference 2010, 


(F) or (T) 

1) 4th Int. Workshop on 

ISDM technically or full 

sponsored by SMCS, or 

organizing SS in the SMC 

conference 2011, 


(T) or (F) 

1) Organizing SS in the SMC 1) Organizing SS in the SMC 

conference 2010, or 2nd Int. conference 2011, or 3rd Int. 

Workshop on ISDM (F) or Workshop on ISDM (F) or 

(T), 2)Autumnal School: (T), 2)Autumnal School: 

ISDM Technically sponsored ISDM Technically sponsored 

by SMCS Japan Chapter. by SMCS Japan Chapter. 

(1)Sponsor a Special Issue of A SSS stream at SMC-UK&RI (1) Sponsoring a special issue A SSS stream at SMC- 

Transactions; (2) Special annual conference; 

of Transactions Part A/B; (2) UK&RI annual conference; 

workshop at SMC 2007 on SSS; oraging SS for SMC2009 (F) 

(3) More special lectures in 

London, (4)oraging SS for 

SMC2008 (F) 

Sponsoring and running a 

workshop at SMC conference 

in UK&RI, (3) oraging SS for 

SMC2010 (F) 

oraging SS for SMC2011 (F) 

12 Systems Safety & Security Intend to organise a talk by Dr 

Feng Hsu in the UK as an 

invited guest 

extending the TC membership organising an Asia Pacific 

through talks in the UK & US. event on the SSS (F) 

Also, intend to organise a 

seminar by Prof. Ali Hessami 

in US at NASA as a quest 

speaker. 

organising a major SSS event 

in the UK (F)


74 

TC on 

Chair names 




(Y/N) 

# of TC 

members 

BESIDES 

Chairs 


Organizing Conf./WorkshopsOrganizing Sessions: Special Issues/review Other TC activities for 

sponsored by SMCS: Their Name(s) of conf. / papers approved by SMC Society. 

names with sponsorship type workshop(s) sponsored by Editor-In-Chief of IEEE 

of full-sponsorship (F), cosponsership 

SMCS with sponsorship Trans. on SMC. or 

(C), or technical type of (F), (C), or (T). 




respectively. 








LiPing Fang (Y) 

13 Conflict Resolution 4 

Keith W. Hipel (Y) 

Control of Uncertain 

14 


Terminated TC 

15 Discrete Event Systems 

Nozha Zribi (Y/N) 6 

Maria Pia Fanti (Y) 

MuDer Jeng (Y) 

11 


March, 2007 

none 

what your TC did in January, Liping Fang serves as a 

2007 - Aug., 2007 Program Committee Co- 

Chair for SMC 2007 (F). 

what your TC will do in none 

Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 

Organizing SSs at SMC 

2007 (F) 


SMC2007(F) 

none 

Liping Fang serves as a 

Program Committee Co- 

Chair for SMC 2007. 

A Review Paper by Keith W. Hipel will be 

Keith W. Hipel, et al., presenting a keynote 

IEEE Trans. on SMC-C, address at SMC 2007. 

37 (5), Sept. 2007. Keith W. Hipel is a 

member of the Panel on 

the Future of SMC: 

Application Domains and 

Research Methods. 

your 2007 plan made in none none none none 

March, 2007 


2007 - Aug., 2007 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 

your 2007 plan made in none 

orgaizing SS for Special issues on Organizing a DL talk 

March, 2007 

SMC2007(F), Organizing a "Engineering titled: "Deadlock Control 

SS at the IEEE ICRA Applications of Petri in Automated 

20007(T), Organizing a SS Nets" at IEEE Tran. on Manufacturing Systems", 

at the Int conf. ANIPLA 

20006 (T), Organizing a 

track at the IEEE CASE 

2007(T) 

SMC-C in 2007 by the lecturer MengChu 

Zhou.

75 


TC on 

2008 2009 2010 2011 

Organizing SS at SMC 2008 (F) Organizing SS at SMC 2009 (F) Organizing SS at SMC 2010 

(F) 

Organizing SS at SMC 2008 (F) 

Organizing SS at SMC 2009 (F) Organizing SS at SMC 2010 

(F) 

Organizing SS at SMC 2011 

(F) 

Organizing SS at SMC 2011 

(F) 

13 Conflict Resolution 

none none none none 

Control of Uncertain 

14 


Terminated TC 

organizing SS at the SMC2008 organizing SS at the SMC2009 

and other conf. sponsored by and other conf. sponsored by 

SMCS, organizinf distinguished SMCS 

lecture talks, organizing a 

workshop co-sponsored by 

SMCS 

organizing SS at the 

SMC2010 and other conf. 

sponsored by SMCS 




15 Discrete Event Systems 

organizing SS at the SMC2008 organizing SS at the SMC2009 

and other conf. sponsored by and other conf. sponsored by 

SMCS, organizinf distinguished SMCS 

lecture talks, organizing a 

workshop co-sponsored by 

SMCS 







Organizing DHMS08 in Athens; Organizing Int. Workshop on RoleOrganizing Int. Conf. on Organizing special sessions 

Organizing ss on Distributed Based Collaboration; Planning Distributed Intelligent at SMC2011. 

Intelligent Systems at SMC08; special sessions on Distributed Systems; Organizing special 

Submiting proposal for special Intelligent Systems at SMC2009 sessions at SMC2010. 

issues to Trans. on SMC-C 

Distributed Intelligent 

16 


DHMS 2008 in Athens, RFID 

2008 in Las Vegas, 

Organizing Int. Workshop on RoleOrganizing Int. Conf. on Organizing special sessions 

Based Collaboration; Planning 

special sessions on Distributed 

Distributed Intelligent 

Systems; Organizing special 

at SMC2011. 

Intelligent Systems at SMC2009 sessions at SMC2010. 

Organizing First IEEE SMC 

International Conference on EIS 

in late 2008 or middle 2009 

Enterprise Information 

17 


######################### ########################### (a) organize SSs at various (a) organize SSs at various 

SMC-sponsored conferences; SMC-sponsored conferences; 

(b) co-sponsor the IEEE Intl. (b) co-sponsor the IEEE Intl. 

Conf. on Intelligence and Conf. on Intelligence and 

Security Informatics; (c) cosponsor 

the Pacific Asia sponsor the Pacific Asia 

Security Informatics; (c) co- 

Workshop on Intelligence andWorkshop on Intelligence and 

Security Informatics; (d) 

organising 9th ICMLC 



18 Homeland Security 

######################### ########################### (a) organize SSs at various (a) organize SSs at various 

SMC-sponsored conferences; SMC-sponsored conferences; 

(b) co-sponsor the IEEE Intl. (b) co-sponsor the IEEE Intl. 

Conf. on Intelligence and Conf. on Intelligence and 

Security Informatics; (c) cosponsor 

the Pacific Asia sponsor the Pacific Asia 

Security Informatics; (c) co- 

Workshop on Intelligence andWorkshop on Intelligence and 





19 Industrial Applications 

organizing SMCals/08 (F) in 

Muroran, Japan 

organizing SMCia/08 (F) in organizing SMCals/09 (F), 

Muroran, Japan; organizing a possibly in Troy (NY), USA 

special issue of IEEE Tr SMC- 

B on "Intelligent Technical 

organizing SMCia/09 ((F) organizing SMCals/10 ((F) organizing SMCia/11 (F) 

organizing SMCia/10 (F), 

possibly in Bangkok, 

Thailand 

organizing SS for SMC2008 (F) none none 

organizing SMCals/11 (F) 

Infrastructure Systems & 

20 

Services

TC on 

Chair names 




(Y/N) 

# of TC 

members 

BESIDES 

Chairs 


Organizing Conf./WorkshopsOrganizing Sessions: Special Issues/review Other TC activities for 

sponsored by SMCS: Their Name(s) of conf. / papers approved by SMC Society. 

names with sponsorship type workshop(s) sponsored by Editor-In-Chief of IEEE 

of full-sponsorship (F), cosponsership 

SMCS with sponsorship Trans. on SMC. or 

(C), or technical type of (F), (C), or (T). 




respectively. 

76 








Intelligent Transportation 

21 


Tsu-Tian Lee (Y) 

7 


March, 2007 

Help organizing IEEE Int. organize 2 special sessions none 

Con. on Complex Medical for SMC'07 (F) 

Engineering (ICME2007) 

(C). 

what your TC did in January, Serve as Advisory Chair for collected 6+5 papers for 

2007 - Aug., 2007 ICME2007 and collected 6 

papers for the conference. 

SMC2007(F) 

orginize a special session 

for ICNSC'08(F) 


Collect 6 papers for 

Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 

ICNSC'08 (F) 


March, 2007 

organing Workshop on Organized SS at SMC2007; 

Intelligent Green Production Organized SS at Int. 

Systems ((F) SMCS Workshop on 

Hiroshima Chapter) Computational Intelligence 

& Application, ((F) SMC 

Hiroshima Chapter) 

none 

1 0 

Intelligent Green 

22 

Production Systems 

Hossam A. Gabbar (Y) 17 

what your TC did in January, organing Workshop on organied SS at 

2007 - Aug., 2007 Intelligent Green Production SMC2007(F) and 

Systems (May 23, 2007) ICMLC2007 (T) 

Okayama, Japan. (Sponsored 

by SMCS Hiroshima 

Chapter) 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 

Organized SS at Int. 

Workshop on 

Computational Intelligence 

& Application, Okayama, 

Dec-2006 (Sponsored 

SMC Hiroshima Chapter) 

Organize Certification 

Program on Green 

Production Systems and 

Obtain the required 

approvals from IEEE, 

SMCS 


March, 2007 

none oragning SS at SMC2007 none organized local 

workshops on design of 

medical device 

23 Medical Mechatronics 

Ming-Yih Lee (Y) 

Chung-Hsien Kuo (Y) 

31 


2007 - Aug., 2007 

Organized Special session 

on IEEE?SMC 2007, We 

invited 5 papers and 4 

papers were accepted for 

this SS; 

none 

1. Organized national 

student hands-on 

competition on medical 

device design; 

2.Organized workshops on 

Medical Robotics and 

intelligent wheelchair; 

3. Acted as inter advisory 

committee member to 

organize 2007 Design of 

Medical Device Conf (in 

MM, USA) 

5 persons: 

Dr. D.M. Lee, Dr. 

C.L. Tai, Dr. P.L. 

Yen, C.C. Cheng, and 

Y. Ting 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 

Technical sponsor 

Automation 2007 

conference in Taiwan 

continue to encourage 

more people to joint 

my TC 

0 


March, 2007 

Possibly serving for IEEE 

ICMA2007 (Int. Conf. on 

Mechatronics and 

Automation), in Harbin, 

China. (T) 

Will organize session(s) at 

2007 SMC Conference. 

none 

none 

Robotics and Intelligent 

24 

Sensing 

Hong Zhang (Y) 

10 


2007 - Aug., 2007 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 


March, 2007 

organizing the 3rd Int. Conf. 

on Self-Organization and 

Autonomic Systems in 

Computing and 

Communications (SOAS’ 

2007), Leipzig, Germany, 

September 2007 (T) 


SMC2007(F) 

Expression of interest in 

being involved in SMC 

2011 as program chair, 

working with Edward 

Tunstel and Saeid 

Nahavandi 

none none organising special issues 

to be published in 2007 of 

the International 

Transactions on Systems 

Science and Applications 

Took a quick tour 

Self-Organization and 

25 Cybernetics for 

Informatics 

Huaglory Tianfield (Y) 

40 

Service Systems and 

26 

Organizations 

Jian Chen (Y) 

10 

what your TC did in January, organize 

2007 - Aug., 2007 CODS2007/ICABS2007 

(T), Chengdu, China, July 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 


March, 2007 


2007 - Aug., 2007 

organize SOAS2007 (T), 

Leipzig, Germany, 

September 2007 

Organizing SSSM2007, 

Chengdu, China 

present a tutorial at SMC 

2007, Quebec 

organized the Conference on our TC sponsored a 

Service Systems and Service conference of Asian 

Management SSSM2007(T), Ebusiness Workshop(T) 

in Chengdu, China 

none none none 

2 (new) 

3 SMC members have 

joined our TC in 

2007 

0 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 


March, 2007 

organing Symposium on 

Complex Systems 2007 

organizing SS at SMC2007 none 

increasing TC members 

27 System of Systems 

Philip Chen (Y) 

Mark Johnson (Y/N) 

12 

what your TC did in January, organizing SoSE 2007 (C) 

2007 - Aug., 2007 Conference 


Sept, 2007 - Dec., 2007 

Collected 5 papers for 

SMC2007(C) 

none 

1 additional member; 

holding a TC meeting 

during SoSE2007 

none none working on to add another 

new member 

none


77 

TC on 

2008 2009 2010 2011 

organize two SSs for SMC'08. organie two SSs for SMC'09(F) organize two SSs for 

SMC'2010.(F) 

organize two SSs for 

SMC2011(F) 

Intelligent Transportation 

21 


organize two special sessions 

for SMC'08(F) 

Organize two special sessions for 

SMC'09(F). 

organize two special sessions organize two special sessions 

for SMC'10(F). Help for SMC'11(F). Help 

organize ICNSC'10 organize ICNSC'11 

Organize SS in SMC2008 and 

in Int. Workshop on 

Organize SS in SMC2009 and in Organize SS in SMC2010 

Int. Workshop on Computational and in Int. Workshop on 


and in Int. Workshop on 

Computational iIntelligence and iIntelligence and Applications Computational iIntelligence Computational iIntelligence 

Applications sponsored by 

SMC Hiroshima Chapter 

sponsored by SMC Hiroshima 

Chapter 

and Applications sponsored 

by SMC Hiroshima Chapter 



Intelligent Green 

22 

Production Systems 

Organize SS in SMC2008 and 

in Int. Workshop on 

Organize SS in SMC2009 and in Organize SS in SMC2010 

Int. Workshop on Computational and in Int. Workshop on 


and in Int. Workshop on 

Computational iIntelligence and iIntelligence and Applications Computational iIntelligence Computational iIntelligence 

Applications sponsored by 

SMC Hiroshima Chapter 

sponsored by SMC Hiroshima 

Chapter 





1.Organing national student 1.Organize local workshops on 

hands-on design competition on medical mechatronics; 2. 

medica mechatronics; 2. Organize SS on SMC 2009 

Organize SSD on SMC 2008 

Plan to organize SS in SMC 

2008. 

Plan to organize SS in SMC 2009.Plan to organize SS in SMC 

2010. 

1.Organize local workshops 1.Organize local workshops 

on medical mechatronics; 2. on medical mechatronics; 2. 

Organize SS on SMC 2010 Organize SS on SMC 2011 

Plan to organize SS in SMC 

2011. 

23 Medical Mechatronics 

Robotics and Intelligent 

24 

Sensing 

Organzing SSs at SMC 2008 

and update RIS TC 

membership. We may consider 

organizing a robotics track at 

SMC 2008, with the help of 

Profs. Edward Tuntsel and 

Zhao-Hui Liang. 

Will update membership of this 

TC soon. Will work on a more 

informative webpage as well. 

Will maintaining the momentum 

of organizing special sessions at 

SMC annual conferences. 

Organizing SSs at SMC2009. Cosponsorship 

of a conference and seek to guest edit a 

Organizing SSs at SMC2010, organing SSs at SMC2011 

needs the cooperation of the SMC special issue of TSMC-B on 

VP Conferences. 

Industrial Vision and Image 

Process, in 2009, 2010, or 

2011. 

Organizing SSs at SMC2009. Cosponsorship 

of a conference and seek to guest edit a 

Organizing SSs at SMC2010, organing SSs at SMC2011 

needs the cooperation of the SMC special issue of TSMC-B on 

VP Conferences. 

Industrial Vision and Image 

Process, in 2009, 2010, or 

2011 

Self-Organization and 

25 Cybernetics for 

Informatics 

(1) organizing the Annual Int. similar as in the left similar as in the left similar as in the left 

Conf. on Self-Organization and 

Autonomic Systems in 

Computing and Communications 

(T); (2) organising special 

issues to be published in the 

International Transactions on 

Systems Science and 

Applications; (3) organizing 

SSs at SMCS 2008; and (4) 

inviting other TC Chairs, if 

interested, to organize special 

issues on this journal. 

CODS2008, ICABS2008, 

SOAS2008 


SOAS2009 


SOAS2010 


SOAS2011 

Service Systems and 

26 

Organizations 

Organize a conference on Organize a conference on 

SSSM2008 

SSSM2009 

plan to organize 5th 

Organize a conference on 

International conference on SSSM2009 

Service Systems and Service 

Management (SSSM2008) 


SSSM2010 


SSSM2010 


SSSM2011 


SSSM2011 

27 System of Systems 

TC Meeting at SoSE2008 as a 

workshop; Plan to work 

together with TC on 

Infrastructure systems and 

service 

TC Meeting at SoSE2008 as a 

workshop; Plan to work 

together with TC on 

Infrastructure systems and 

service 

TC meeting at SoSE2009 as a 

workshop 

TC meeting and organing SS at 

SMC2009 

TC meeting at SoSE2009 as a 

workshop 

TC meeting and organing SS at 

SMC2009 

holding TC meeting at 

SOSE2010 as a workshop 

holding TC meeting and 

organing SS at SMC2010 




organing SS at SMC2010 

none 




organing SS at SMC2010

78 

Towards Visual Exploration of Topic Shifts 

Kilian Thiel, Fabian Dill, Tobias Kötter, and Michael R. Berthold 

Abstract— This paper presents two approaches to visually 

analyze the topic shift of a pool of documents over a given 

period of time. The first of the proposed methods is based 

on a multi-dimensional scaling algorithm, which places vectors 

representing terms occurring in certain years (periodfrequency-vectors) 

in a spatial, two-dimensional space. This 

kind of visualization enables the detection of terms occurring 

in documents, published in particular years, or terms spread 

over different years. The second method uses a graph based 

approach. Publishing dates of documents, as well as their terms 

are represented by the vertices of a graph. Terms related to a 

specific publishing year are connected to the vertex of the year 

via an edge. By usage of activation spreading techniques, terms 

frequently occurring in documents published in particular years 

can be discovered visually. We tested both approaches with 

2431 abstracts of papers published in the IEEE Transactions 

on SMC-A, SMC-B, and SMC-C in the years 1996 to 2006. 

Our experiments indicate that a number of interesting terms 

can be nicely separated in clumps according to individual years 

or periods of time. In addition, one can visualize the emergence 

of specific terms over certain periods of time and how these 

and other terms fade away again later. 

I. INTRODUCTION 

Publishers of scientific publications, computer linguists 

and many others find it interesting and often extremely 

valuable to know if and how the topics of their publications 

are changing and shifting over time. It is interesting, e.g. to 

detect which topics become untended over time, completely 

disappear and which are coming up newly. Also of prime 

interest is the detection of trends or transformations of a 

particular vocabulary. In order to achieve this, vast amounts 

of documents have to be analyzed in such a way that topics, 

relevant terms, or concepts can be revealed, as well as 

temporal changes of these. To complete this task manually 

simply would not be feasible in a reasonable amount of 

time if the number of documents is large. This means that 

automatic methods have to be found which are able to handle 

this task. In this paper, two methods are introduced aiming 

to visualize this kind of topic shift. 

The first of these methods is based on a visualization of 

relevant terms contained in the documents by means of a 

multi-dimensional scaling algorithm (MDS). In [1], concepts 

of documents are already visualized by a visualization of 

similarities (VOS) method, which is similar to a MDS 

visualization [2]; both methods try to preserve the proximity 

information of objects, when mapping them onto a usually 

two-dimensional space. The main difference to [1] is the 

Kilian Thiel, Fabian Dill, Tobias Kötter, and Michael R. 

Berthold are with the ALTANA-Chair for Bioinformatics 

and Information Mining, University of Konstanz, 78457 

Konstanz, Germany thiel@inf.uni-konstanz.de, 

berthold@inf.uni-konstanz.de 

representation of concepts or terms and their extraction. 

In our approach, the terms are extracted directly from the 

documents without the use of a thesaurus. The extracted 

terms are represented by period-frequency-vectors, explained 

in Section IV, and the distances between these vectors are 

then visualized. 

The second approach is based on a network model or 

graph, where the vertices represent information units such as 

authors, relevant terms regarding to a document, or the documents 

itself [3]. These vertices are connected via weighted 

edges to each other according to their relatedness. This can 

lead to big networks if many documents are analyzed. Since, 

in this paper, we focus on the shift of topics or concepts 

and the change of vocabulary, only this information is taken 

into account when creating such a network. This means that 

the units of information represented by the vertices are the 

most relevant terms as well as the publishing dates of the 

documents. Edges exist only between vertices representing 

terms and those representing publishing dates. To explore 

these networks, we use activation spreading techniques ([5], 

[6]). 

The paper is organized as follows: in the next Section, 

we briefly introduce the data which we used to test both 

approaches, as well as the preprocessing of the documents. 

In Section III, the multi-dimensional scaling method is 

described. In Section IV, the creation and the visualization of 

vectors representing terms occurring in certain years (periodfrequency-vectors) 

is explained. We subsequently explain in 

Section V the usage of the network model by means of 

exploration of the vocabulary occurring in particular periods 

and its shift. 

II. DATA 

To test our approaches for detecting topic shifts and 

change of vocabulary in documents, we use abstracts of 

scientific papers, since these abstracts can be accessed using 

bibliographic information services. In particular, we used 

abstracts and citation information of papers published in the 

IEEE Transactions on SMC-A, SMC-B, and SMC-C in the 

years 1996 to 2006. The data consist of 2431 abstracts, which 

translates to roughly 220 abstracts per year. 

A. Preprocessing and term extraction 

After parsing the abstracts, the text has to be tokenized. 

Additionally, part-of-speech (POS) tags are assigned to the 

tokens to be able to filter out particularly uninteresting partsof-speech, 

such as articles, and keep more relevant parts like 

nouns, verbs and adjectives. The software used to tag English

words is an implementation of a log-linear part-of-speech 

tagger using the Penn Treebank POS tag set ([7], [8]). 

1) Filtering: Three different filters are applied to exclude 

irrelevant characters and words: a punctuation filter which 

filters out punctuation marks, a stop word filter to filter out 

non informative words like “a”, “an”, “and”, “or” etc., as well 

as a POS tag filter to filter out irrelevant parts-of-speech like 

determiner. 

2) Stemming: In order to avoid treating words differently 

which occur in different flexions, e.g. verbs with different 

forms of conjugation or nouns with different forms of declension, 

all different flexions have to be detected and unified. 

To achieve this, stemming, which reduces the inflected words 

to their stem or base [9], is the appropriate method. Since 

we are dealing with English words only, we used the Porter 

stemmer algorithm [10]. 

3) Term extraction: The final step after filtering and 

stemming is the extraction of relevant terms of each document. 

Classifying a term as relevant can be done in several 

ways ([12], [13]). Here, the relative term frequency (tf), in 

combination with the inverse document frequency (idf), is 

used to identify the relevance of each term. The relative term 

frequency of a term t in document d is specified as follows: 

tf (t, d) = f d (t) 

a (d) , 

with f d (t) as the frequency of term t in document d and 

a (d) as the number of terms in d. The inverse document 

frequency of t is computed by: 

idf (t) = log 

( 

1 + N D 

f D (t) 

) 

, 

where N D specifies the number of all documents D and 

f D (t) the number of documents containing term t. 

To specify and extract the relevant terms with the help of 

these frequencies the tfidf value can be computed by simple 

multiplication of the two terms: 

tfidf = tf · idf. 

Terms with a low tfidf value will occur in most of the 

documents (small idf value) and/or they occur only rarely 

in the documents they are contained in (small tf value). 

By filtering them out, terms with average frequency are 

maintained. According to Zipf [11], these terms are most 

relevant. 

Subsequently, a threshold can be chosen, which determines 

if a term is classified as relevant or not, concerning to a 

document. On the other hand, a maximum number k of terms 

to extract can be specified and the k terms with the largest 

tfidf values are extracted. 

The 2431 abstracts including titles were tokenized into 

21279 tokens, after tagging, stemming and filtering 18160 

different words (stems) remained. We decided to extract 5000 

terms with the largest tfidf value out of these words, which is 

roughly twice the number of documents. This means that in 

average approximately two terms per document are extracted. 

In Section IV-A the reason why we haven chosen 5000 terms 

is described more detailed. 

The extraction of terms is an essential point in the detection 

of topic shifts, since here a topic is represented by 

extracted terms. If too few terms are extracted, many topics 

will be ignored. Further it is possible that whole documents 

will be ignored since no terms are extracted from them due 

to their low tfidf value. On the other hand, if only a small 

number of topics is of interest, a low k value can be a way 

to achieve this goal, at the cost of ignoring many terms and 

topics. If the k value is too large, too many irrelevant terms 

are extracted, complicating the detection of essential topics 

and their shift. The topic detection used here is a first attempt 

and leaves room for improvement, e.g. by applying extracted 

concepts as topics instead of terms. 

III. MULTI-DIMENSIONAL SCALING 

The projection of objects of high-dimensional spaces 

onto two or three dimensions causes a loss of proximity 

information. Multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) methods [14] 

try to preserve the pairwise distance between objects when 

mapping them to lower dimensional space by minimizing 

an appropriate error function. This means that the proximity 

information between objects is kept as accurately as possible. 

The reduction of dimensions allows the visualization of highdimensional 

points in a lower-dimensional space. 

The Sammon algorithm [15], is one of the best known 

multi-dimensional scaling methods, which computes such 

a mapping. For each object of the high-dimensional space 

⃗X i ∈ IR H , a spatial representation ⃗x i ∈ IR L in the 

lower-dimensional space (usually L = 2) has to be found 

(1 ≤ i ≤ N , with N as the number of objects). 

To maintain the proximity information between objects as 

close as possible, the individual positions and thereby the 

distances of two objects ⃗x i , ⃗x j in the low-dimensional space 

d ij = d ( ⃗x i , ⃗x j ) have to be approximated to the distances 

of two objects X ⃗ i , Xj ⃗ 

( in the high-dimensional space D ij = 

D ⃗Xi , X ⃗ ) 

j , which is: 

∀ i≠j : D ij ≈ d ij , 1 ≤ i, j ≤ N. 

Usually the Euclidean metric is used to measure these 

distances: 

H∑ 

Dij 2 = (X i,q − X j,q ) 2 , 

d 2 ij = 

q=1 

L∑ 

(x i,k − x j,k ) 2 . 

k=1 

To approximate the distances as best as possible, Sammon 

formulates a minimization problem of a cost function, which 

aggregates the weighted squared differences of the distances: 

E = 

N∑ 

i=1 j>i 

N∑ 

w ij (d ij − D ij ) 2 . 

79 

For each point ⃗x i that is randomly initialized, a steepest gradient 

method is applied at each step to iteratively minimize

80 

Fig. 1. Each of the 5000 dots represents a term described by a 11-dimensional period-frequency-bit-vector. Terms which appear in clumps, here surrounded 

by circles, occur in particular periods. A few noteworthy terms are indicated by arrows. 

the remaining cost E. Usually several iterations are needed 

by the algorithm, to converge to a local cost minimum. 

IV. PERIOD-FREQUENCY-VECTORS 

To apply multi-dimensional scaling to visualize the distribution 

of terms over the time periods and gain information 

about the shift of topics, the extracted terms are represented 

by period-frequency-vectors. A period-frequency-vector of 

a term is a vector consisting of frequencies of that term 

according to particular periods like years or months. For each 

period p i ∈ P of the set of all periods P = {p 1 , ..., p m }, the 

frequency f pi (t) (1 ≤ i ≤ m) of term t is determined by 

the aggregation of all occurrences of t in those documents, 

which are published in period p i . In the resulting periodfrequency-vector 

⃗ fp t , position i is set to this frequency value, 

i.e.: 

⃗fp t = (f p1 (t) , ..., f pm (t)) . 

In this setting the dimension of the period-frequency-vectors 

is 11 derived from the 11 years from 1996 to 2006. 

A. Visualization of the period-frequency-vectors 

The extracted terms represented by the period-frequencyvectors 

defined above can be visualized by the multidimensional 

scaling method described in Section III. 

The aim is to map the 11-dimensional period-frequencyvectors 

via MDS to two-dimensional objects, which can be 

displayed in a scatterplot. Terms occurring in a particular 

period only should appear close together in a clump well 

separated from terms occurring in other periods. For the 

visualization by means of MDS the important information 

of a term’s period-frequency-vector is the occurrence of a 

term in a particular period only, not its frequency. A different 

frequency of terms occurring in the same period of time only 

would result in a distance value greater than zero. This means 

that the visualized terms would not appear close together. 

Hence, the vectors are modified to bit-vectors, indicating 

whether a term occurs in a period or not. A vector ⃗ fp t 

representing term t 

⃗fp t = (f p1 (t) , ..., f pm (t)) 

is modified to the following bit-vector: 

with 

⃗fp ∗ t = (g p 1 

(t) , ..., g pm (t)) , 

{ 1 if fpi (t) > 0 

g pi (t) = 

0 else. 

In Figure 1 all 5000 terms are visualized, described 

by period-frequency-bit-vectors. Each dot displayed in the 

scatterplot represents one term. Terms appearing in the same 

period of time only are displayed close to each other, forming 

a clump. The 11 obvious clumps of Figure 1 are emphasized 

by the circles surrounding them. They represent each of the 

years from 1996 to 2006. The majority (3547) of the 5000 

different terms can be assigned to one of these 11 clumps 

alone. This means that the majority of the topics represented 

by the extracted terms changes from year to year and less 

than the half of the topics have been discussed over more 

than one year. 

The 11 clumps are positioned approximately in the middle 

of Figure 1. This is due to the fact, that the period-frequencyvectors 

of terms of different clumps all have the same 

distance ( √ 2) to each other, since they occur in only one 

year. Therefore, the final position of a clump inside the 

middle of the figure depends on the initialization of the 

2-dimensional points which is done by random. The year 

in which the terms of a clump are published has no effect 

on that. The period-frequency-vectors of terms occurring in 

more than one year are placed in ovals around the clumps

since their distance to terms in the middle is getting larger 

the more years they appear in. Terms occurring in all 11 

years are placed together at the left outer side of the figure. 

These terms build the 12th “clump” consisting of only 14 

terms. 

As expected, these terms are basically very general as they 

occur in many documents published in all of the years, in 

contrast to terms of the other 11 clumps which are more 

specific. For instance words like “alternatives”, “belief”, 

“algorithm” or “knowledge” are part of the 12th clump. 

On the other hand, there are words which occur only in 

specific years, e.g. “human-robotic”, “biometric”, “waveletbased” 

or “climate-change”. The latter is contained in a 

document about a model to predict climate-change impact 

on fish catch [16], published in the year 2005. In the 

former years, this term did not occur in any of the analyzed 

documents, which leads to the assumption that the interest of 

that topic in these periods was not that strong. Nowadays, in 

the year 2007, the climate-change debate is still under way. 

It remains to be seen, if the newly arisen debate on climate 

change will be reflected in the SMC publications 2007 or 

later. 

However, Figure 1 clearly shows that there is a change 

of vocabulary and a shift of topics over the analyzed years. 

Additionally, it can be seen that only ≈0.28% (14 terms) 

of the extracted vocabulary is used during all the years 

considered here. 

Further experiments showed that a reduction of the number 

k of extracted terms to 2500 or less leads to the complete 

disintegration of the 12th clump while the other 11 clumps 

remain. The idf value of most of the terms occurring in 

documents spread over all periods of time is lower than the 

value of most of the terms occurring only in documents of 

a certain year. This means that a small idf value leads to a 

lower tfidf value. When the k value is decreased these terms 

will be filtered out first. On the other hand, the increase of 

the k value implicates an increase of the terms assigned to 

the 12th clump, which are mostly very general. Since we 

wanted to show that there is a 12th clump but also keep it 

nearly as small as possible to avoid extraction of the general 

terms, we have chosen a k value of 5000. 

V. NETWORK APPROACH 

Another way to model the relations of documents is 

via a network or graph, where the information entities, 

like authors, terms, titles, or documents as a whole are 

represented as vertices and the relations between them, e.g. 

citations, authorship, containedness, or term cooccurrences 

as edges [3]. Additionally, edges can be weighted, indicating 

the relevance or strength of the modeled relation. 

The query processing and the exploration of these networks 

is usually done by spreading activation methods such 

as Branch-and-Bound search or Hopfield activation [4]. In 

spreading activation methods the vertices representing the 

terms of a query obtain an initial activation energy. This 

step is also called priming. The energy spreads across the 

network by following the outgoing edges, thereby activating 

the visited vertices with a part of the energy, depending on 

the weight of the edges. The activation spreading is stopped 

if either a certain number of activated vertices is reached, or 

the activation energy falls below a specified threshold. 

A. Visualization of topic shifts using network graphs 

81 

In our second approach we utilized the network described 

above to explore and visualize the change of vocabulary and 

the shift of topics. The extracted terms as well as the 11 

years from 1996 to 2006 are modeled as information units, 

i.e. vertices of the graph. The only kind of relationship 

represented as edges in the graph is the occurrence of a 

term in a certain year, i.e. a term occurring in a document 

published in a certain year establishes an edge between the 

year and the term. To obtain all the terms occurring in a 

particular year, the vertex of this year has to be primed, 

such that the activation is spread to adjacent vertices which 

represent the wanted terms. 

Figure 2 and Figure 3 visualize such a graph consisting 

of 511 vertices representing 500 terms and 11 years. Due 

to reasons of space we chose to display only a small 

graph. However, the implemented graph layout enables to 

efficiently visualize about 1000 to 2000 of vertices on a highresolution 

display. In order to reduce the number of vertices 

we extracted only 500 terms with the largest tfidf values. 

Additionally, terms which occur less than three times in a 

document are filtered out. As already described in section 

II-A.3 the restrictive filtering of terms has disadvantages like 

only considering terms with the highest average frequency 

and ignoring other terms. 

The layout of the graph places the vertices representing 

years in a shell around the center. Those terms which are 

connected to one year only are placed in an arc around the 

vertex of the corresponding year on the outside of the shell. 

Terms which occur in more than one year are placed in the 

inside of the shell. A force-directed layout pushes the terms 

towards the vertices of the corresponding years, leading to a 

positioning in the geometric center of them. 

Figure 2 shows the graph with 500 terms and 11 years 

from 1996 to 2006. Positively activated vertices are visualized 

by black circles, negatively activated by white circles 

and vertices without activation are colored gray. In this 

graph the years 2004, 2005, and 2006 are positively primed 

and 1996 and 1997 are negatively primed. As one can 

see terms like “regression”, “fuzzy-logic”, “fuzziness” and 

“fuzz” 1 etc. only occur in 1996 and 1997. More recently, 

terms like “svm”, “clustering”, “self-organizing”, “gene” and 

“e-business” appear in 2004, 2005 and 2006. The reason 

that the terms “fish” and “swarm” emerge in 2004 and 2005 

could be related to “climate-change” occurring in [16], which 

was found to be frequent in 2005 with the MDS approach 

described above. The gray vertices between the referring 

years represent more general terms frequently used in both 

sets of years, for example “synchronization”, “hierarchy”, 

and “discrimination”. 

1 Note that the terms represent the word stems only, hence the truncation.

In Figure 3 the same graph as in Figure 2 is displayed. 

The older years, ranging from 1996 to 2001, were primed 

negatively and the recent years from 2002 to 2006 were 

primed positively. Those terms occurring in both sets of years 

are activated positively and negatively which neutralizes the 

activation, hence they are colored gray. This setting clearly 

separates the inner shell into three regions: old, general, and 

recent terms, colored in white, gray and black, respectively. 

As described above, “old” terms like “fuzzy-logic” etc. 

can be detected in the years 1996 to 2001. Further it can be 

seen that more recent topics from the field of bioinformatics 

like “medical”, “tumor” “gene” and “fingerprint” appear in 

2003 and 2005. 

VI. CONCLUSIONS 

In this paper two methodologies were presented to visualize 

topic shifts and change of vocabulary of scientific 

papers. The first approach represented the preprocessed terms 

as period-frequency-vectors. These vectors are mapped onto 

a two-dimensional space, using a multi-dimensional scaling 

method and displayed in a scatterplot. This kind of visualization 

enables the detection of clumps of terms, which occur 

only in particular periods or over various periods. 

The second approach is based on a network model. The 

extracted terms as well as the periods are represented by 

vertices of a graph. The terms occurring in a certain period 

are connected to the referring vertex. Via spreading activation 

methods terms occurring in a certain period can be found by 

priming the period vertex. Using an appropriate layouting 

mechanism, this approach nicely visualizes the topic shift 

and a change of vocabulary. 

Whereas the first method allows the visualization of many 

(>10,000) terms, the second method is more restricted by 

the available space. However, the terms themselves and 

the overlap between several periods are perceived more 

conveniently and clearly with the network approach, since it 

supports interactive user exploration. Therefore this method 

can be favored if an appropriate method of topic extraction 

exists which extracts only a smaller number (

83 

Fig. 2. 

In this graph 1996 and 1997 are negatively primed and 2004 to 2006 are positively primed. 

Fig. 3. The years were divided into older years ranging from 1996 to 2001, primed negatively, and more recent years from 2002 to 2006, which were 

primed positively.

84 

IEEE Trans. of SMC Data 

Analysis 

Shusaku Tsumoto and Hidenao Abe 

Shimane Universitu, Japan 

Identifying Important Terms 

• Words from abstracts for each year 

• Deleting 

– Article 

– Pronoun 

– meaningless words (fuzzy, system, show, 

present, method etc.) 

1

85 

Top10 Terms for each year (Title) 

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 

num_sentences 165 num_sentences 177 num_sentences 233 num_sentences 233 num_sentences 226 num_sentences 214 

num_terms 115 num_terms 121 num_terms 158 num_terms 153 num_terms 165 num_terms 168 

design 0.17 design 0.22 robot 0.25 robust 0.20 design 0.28 robot 0.18 

petri 0.17 petri 0.20 design 0.25 logic 0.20 time 0.18 genetic 0.17 

nets 0.15 logic 0.15 genetic 0.20 robot 0.19 robot 0.18 design 0.17 

genetic 0.15 knowledge 0.15 multiple 0.16 petri 0.17 logic 0.18 logic 0.14 

robot 0.15 complex 0.15 nets 0.14 nets 0.16 petri 0.16 knowledge 0.13 

mobile 0.13 robot 0.15 robotic 0.14 techniques 0.14 genetic 0.16 structure 0.13 

knowledge 0.13 study 0.13 knowledge 0.13 rules 0.14 knowledge 0.15 novel 0.11 

vehicle 0.10 group 0.13 rule 0.12 unknown 0.14 nets 0.13 multiobjective 0.10 

i. 0.10 flexible 0.13 study 0.12 mobile 0.12 object 0.12 you 0.10 

time 0.10 time 0.10 logic 0.12 genetic 0.12 robust 0.12 rule 0.09 

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 

num_sentences 201 num_sentences 209 num_sentences 370 num_sentences 276 num_sentences 139 

num_terms 155 num_terms 174 num_terms 262 num_terms 207 num_terms 130 

design 0.24 3-d 0.21 design 0.24 mobile 0.14 design 0.18 

genetic 0.15 genetic 0.20 robust 0.18 genetic 0.14 study 0.18 

robot 0.14 design 0.16 hybrid 0.17 robot 0.14 knowledge 0.16 

knowledge 0.12 mobile 0.14 robot 0.16 robust 0.14 secure 0.15 

hybrid 0.12 multiple 0.14 genetic 0.16 design 0.12 through 0.13 

robust 0.12 flexible 0.12 through 0.14 knowledge 0.11 robust 0.13 

mobile 0.10 robust 0.12 time 0.13 multiple 0.11 genetic 0.11 

complex 0.10 study 0.12 service 0.13 robotic 0.11 flexible 0.11 

rules 0.10 services 0.12 recurrent 0.11 improved 0.10 output 0.11 

rule 0.08 petri 0.11 nets 0.11 time 0.10 group 0.11 

Top10 Terms for each year (Abst.) 

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 

num_senten 1064 num_senten 1211 num_senten 1571 num_senten 1537 num_senten 1509 num_senten 1467 

num_terms 906 num_terms 950 num_terms 1103 num_terms 1110 num_terms 1142 num_terms 1142 

rules 0.17 set 0.19 design 0.21 different 0.19 design 0.25 knowledge 0.17 

knowledge 0.16design 0.18robot 0.18rules 0.17time 0.21design 0.17 

design 0.15 time 0.15 set 0.18 time 0.17 given 0.16 time 0.17 

time 0.15 knowledge 0.14 knowledge 0.17 design 0.16 set 0.16 different 0.15 

set 0.15 different 0.14 rules 0.17 set 0.16 different 0.16 set 0.15 

developed 0.14 given 0.14 time 0.16 robot 0.14 rules 0.15 robot 0.14 

given 0.13 robot 0.14 different 0.16 rule 0.14 knowledge 0.14 rules 0.13 

structure 0.12 developed 0.12 scheme 0.15 developed 0.13 scheme 0.12 given 0.13 

when 0.12 structure 0.12 when 0.15 techniques 0.13 under 0.12 logic 0.12 

robot 0.11 technique 0.11 first 0.14 structure 0.13 first 0.12 structure 0.12 

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 

num_senten 1463 num_senten 1562 num_senten 2748 num_senten 2040 num_senten 1056 

num_terms 1119 num_terms 1203 num_terms 1646 num_terms 1342 num_terms 980 

design 0.22 set 0.18 set 0.23 time 0.22 knowledge 0.17 

set 0.18 different 0.18 design 0.23 design 0.19 when 0.13 

knowledge 0.16 design 0.16 different 0.21 when 0.19 different 0.13 

time 0.15 rules 0.14 time 0.21 knowledge 0.18 time 0.13 

scheme 0.14 time 0.13 when 0.16 different 0.18 study 0.13 

different 0.13 object 0.13 structure 0.16 set 0.18 how 0.12 

developed 0.13 service 0.13 first 0.16 robot 0.15 where 0.11 

when 0.12 techniques 0.12 through 0.14 first 0.14 design 0.11 

structure 0.12 3-d 0.12 knowledge 0.14 developed 0.14 first 0.10 

robot 0.11 developed 0.12 rules 0.14 given 0.14 level 0.10 

2

86 

Configuration of Mining Methods 

• Mining Algorithms 

– Decision Tree (J4.8) 

– SVM (SMO: Sequential Minimal Optimization) 

– Naïve Bayes 

– Bayesian Net (K2 Search) 

– k-NN (k=5) 

– OneR 

• Implementation 

– Weka 3.4.8a 

– Sun Microsystems Java 1.5.0(revision 11-b03) 

• Parameters 

– Used default values of Weka 

Dataset Schema 

• Attributes 

– # of Author(s) 

– Characters of the title 

– Words of the title 

– Words of the abstract 

– Top10 Important Terms from abstracts 

– Country 

•Class 

– Part (A/B/C) 

3

87 

Top node of decision trees 

1996 

1997 

1998 

1999 

2000 

2001 

Term_2 

(knowledge) 

Term_7 

(robot) 

Country 

Term_8 

(scheme) 

Country 

Term_1 

(knowledge) 

2002 

2003 

2004 

2005 

2006 

Country 

Term_7 

(service) 

#Author 

Country 

Country 

Decision tree for 2004 

#author 

root 

4 

A 

(343.86/118.86) 

Not exists 

“knowledge” 

Exists 

second 

C 

(20.14/9.0) 

Not exists 

“first” 

Exists 

third 

#Char of title 

69 

fourth 

B 

(2.0) 

B 

(2.0) 

A 

(2.0) 

* (classified instances/ill-classified instance) 

4

88 

Summary of decision trees 

Levels 

Root 

second 

third 

fourth 

fifth 

sixth 

seventh 

eighth 

1996 


“robot” 

Country 

“set” 

#Authors 

#Words of 

Abst. 

#Words of 

Abst. 

“given” 

“set” 

#Words of 

Title 

“time” 

#Char of 

Title 

1997 

“robot” 

Country 

#Words of 

Title 

“given” 

“structure” 

#Words of 

Abst. 

#Words of 

Title 

#Words of 

Abst. 

1998 

(13le 

vels) 

Country 

“time” 

“robot” 

“set” 

“rules” 

“first” 

#Char of 

Title 

#Words of 

Abst. 

#Words of 

Title 

“time” 

“robot” 

#Authors 

“rules” 

“set” 

#Words of 

Abst. 

“when” 

#Words of 

Title 

#Words of 

Title 

#Words of 

Abst. 

“time” 


Levels 

Root 

second 

third 

fourth 

fifth 

sixth 

seventh 

eighth 

1999 

(11le 

vels) 

“scheme” 

Country 

“Words of 

Abst. 

#Words of 

Abst. 

“different”” 


#Authors 

#Words of 

Title 

“rule” 

#Words of 

Title 

“time” 

#Words of 

Abst. 

#Authors 

“robot” 

#Char of 

Title 

“set” 

#Words of 

Title 

“rule” 

#Words of 

Abst. 

#Words of 

Abst. 

#Authors 

#Words of 

Title 

2000 

(10le 

vels) 

Country 

#Words of 

Abst. 

“first”” 

#Char of 

Title 

“time” 

#Authors 

#Char of 

Title 

“under” 

#Words of 

Title 

“time” 

“scheme” 

#Char of 

Title 

#Words of 

Title 

“scheme” 

“given” 

“set” 

“set” 

“different” 

#Char of 

Title 

#Authors 

“knowledge 

” 

5

89 


Levels 

Root 

second 

third 

fourth 

fifth 

sixth 

seventh 

eighth 

2001 

(10le 

vels) 


Country 

“robot” 

“rules” 

“logic” 

#Char of 

Title 

#Words of 

Abst. 


#authors 

“logic” 


“rules” 

“design” 

#Authors 

#Words of 

Abst. 

#Words of 

Title 

#Char of 

Title 

“time” 

“robot” 

#Char of 

Title 

#Words of 

Abst. 

#Words of 

Title 

#Authors 

“set” 

2002 

Country 


#Authors 

“design” 

“when” 

“developed” 

#Words of 

Title 

“when” 

#Words of 

Abst. 


“scheme” 

#Authors 


“design” 

“when” 

#Authors 

#Char of 

Title 


#Authors 


Levels 

Root 

second 

third 

fourth 

fifth 

sixth 

seventh 

eighth 

2003 

“service” 

Country 


“design” 

“set” 

“rules” 

“design” 

#Authors 

“techniques” 

“time” 

#Words of 

Abst. 

“time” 

“set” 

#Words 

of Title 


“object” 


#Char of 

Title 


“set” 

#Words of 

Title 

#Words of 

Abst. 

“set” 

#Words 

of Abst. 

#Words of 

Title 

2004 

#Authors 


“first” 

#Char of 

Title 

6

90 


Levels 

Root 

second 

third 

fourth 

fifth 

sixth 

seventh 

eighth 

2005 

(10le 

vels) 

Country 


“set” 

“given” 


“robot” 

“time” 

“design” 

#Char of 

Title 

“given” 

“design” 

#Words 

of Title 

“set” 

“knowledge 

” 

“when” 

#Char of 

Title 


#Char of 

Title 

“time” 

2006 

(10le 

vels) 

Country 

“study” 


“time” 


“when” 

#Words of 

Abst. 

#Authors 

“given” 


#Authors 

“set” 

#Words of 

Title 

“first” 

#Words of 

Abst. 

#Char of Title 

“time” 

#Words of 

Title 

“study” 

“how” 

#Words 

of Abst. 

“level” 

#Authors 

#Authors 

“where” 

Country List in decision trees 

year 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 

level third second root second root second root second root root 

USA Taiwan Italy UK Australia Korea Lebanon Iran UK UK 

india Korea Canada Italy Singapore Austria China Taiwan Belgium USA 

Taiwan Spain Taiwan Canada Taiwan Taiwan Netherland USA China Singapore 

Australia USA Hong Kong USA UK USA Japan China Taiwan Netherlands 

Japan France Japan Venezuera Canada UK USA UK Canada China 

Finland Hong Kong USA India China Japan Canada Australia Korea Taiwan 

Hungary Canada Philippines Taiwan India China Jordan Italy Japan Italy 

Singapore Australia Germany Singapore Turkey New ZealanTaiwan Japan Denmark Japan 

Belgium Italy Poland Japan USA India Korea Turkey USA France 

Spain Sweden India Spain Mexico Singapore France Canada Spain Australia 

New Zealand Netherland Serbia Greece Italy Israel Malaysia Greece Germany Greece 

Egypt India UK China Brazil Brazil Brazil Singapore Chile Canada 

Hong Kong Japan Spain Germany Greece Poland Argentina France Italy Spain 

Canada Greece ByelorussiaEcuadore Japan Finland Australia India Israel Finland 

UK South AfricFrance France Slovenia Pakistan Italy Malaysia France Hungary 

Ireland UK Netherland Israel Portugal Germany Israel Tunisia BangladeshGermany 

France Austria UAE Netherland Tunisia Australia SwitzerlandNorway SwitzerlandSweden 

Italy China Korea Brazil France Greece India Belgium India Israel 

Korea Singapore Greece South AfricEgypt Hungary Singapore Germany Philippines Korea 

Switzerland Lebanon Israel Finland Serbia Uruguay Spain Spain Turkey Brazil 

Germany Thailand Belgium New ZealanNetherland Italy Yugoslavia Serbia Australia Mexico 

Greece New ZealanAustralia Serbia Austria France UK Mexico Singapore Portugal 

Brazil Argentina Singapore Hong Kong Ireland Portugal Germany Korea Portugal New Zealan 

China Israel Turkey Palestina Spain Sweden Belgium Portugal Poland UAE 

Croatia Hungary China Austria Germany Turkey Mexico Denmark Algeria India 

Israel Turkey Pakistan Sweden Jordan Netherland Greece Thailand Slovenia 

South Africa Saudi Arabi Croatia South AfricCanada Finland Slovenia Tunisia 

Mexico Pakistan Israel SwitzerlandIndonesia Israel New Zealand 

Russia Malaysia Korea Bulgaria Hungary Sweden Greece 

Portugal Portugal Hong Kong Spain Sweden Chile Thailand 

Indonesia Algeria Belgium Croatia Netherlands Levabon 

Puerto RicoAustralia Lebanon Poland Iceland 

Turkey Denmark Thailand Chech 

Saudi Arabia Iran Romania 

New Zealand Denmark 

Argentina 

Iran 

7

91 

Selected Attribute by OneR 

1996 

1997 

1998 

1999 

2000 

2001 

Country 

Words 

of Abst. 

Words 

of Abst. 

Country 

Country 

#Char 

of Title 

2002 

2003 

2004 

2005 

2006 

Country 

Country 

#Author 

Country 

Country 

Accuracy Comparison without Terms 

(Averaged 100 times 10-fold CV) 

TransSMC1996 TransSMC1997 TransSMC1998 TransSMC1999 TransSMC2000 TransSMC2001 

AvgAcc SD AvgAcc SD AvgAcc SD AvgAcc SD AvgAcc SD AvgAcc SD 

J48 58.6 11.1 61.8 5.4 35.3 8.6 40.0 9.2 37.6 8.9 35.9 9.4 

SVM 60.2 10.9 64.2 10.5 32.9 7.6 47.6 8.7 44.0 8.9 41.5 8.6 

NaiveBayes 55.6 11.0 61.9 10.7 34.4 8.7 45.2 9.5 40.9 9.2 40.2 9.5 

BayesianNet 60.2 10.9 62.3 9.5 32.8 7.4 47.3 8.5 44.8 9.2 41.5 8.7 

k-NN 50.2 10.7 66.0 10.1 35.4 8.7 43.0 8.8 42.0 9.6 32.4 9.3 

OneR 55.5 11.3 59.6 10.5 41.4 10.4 45.6 8.9 43.8 9.3 43.5 9.8 

TransSMC2002 TransSMC2003 TransSMC2004 TransSMC2005 TransSMC2006 

AvgAcc SD AvgAcc SD AvgAcc SD AvgAcc SD AvgAcc SD 

J48 41.6 9.9 34.2 8.8 62.7 1.1 45.7 7.7 34.8 11.6 

SVM 44.5 9.1 43.2 9.3 61.4 2.6 54.0 6.4 48.3 12.7 

NaiveBayes 43.6 9.5 42.5 9.0 60.7 4.2 51.8 7.3 40.7 12.1 

BayesianNet 44.6 9.1 43.8 9.7 61.3 2.7 54.2 6.1 51.1 12.8 

k-NN 37.3 9.4 41.0 10.0 58.0 5.5 49.3 7.6 45.1 12.7 

OneR 43.5 8.7 37.6 9.0 60.8 3.5 54.0 6.4 46.0 12.2 

8

92 

Accuracy Comparison with Terms of Abst. 

(Averaged 50 times 10-fold CV) 

TransSMC1996 TransSMC1997 TransSMC1998 TransSMC1999 TransSMC2000 TransSMC2001 

Acc SD Acc SD Acc SD Acc SD Acc SD Acc SD 

J4.8 58.2 10.1 62.7 9.8 41.1 9.2 48.6 10.2 41.2 10.1 38.4 10.0 

SVM 63.9 10.1 67.0 10.1 39.0 9.3 50.2 9.5 47.4 9.0 40.1 9.2 

NaiveBayes 60.8 11.1 65.1 10.3 39.6 9.4 49.7 9.9 46.2 9.1 38.4 9.2 

BayesNet 64.5 10.8 66.2 9.9 39.8 9.5 51.2 9.6 48.2 9.4 39.9 10.0 

k-NN 58.8 11.7 61.1 11.1 40.5 9.1 49.7 9.3 43.5 10.1 32.4 9.2 

OneR 56.3 10.9 60.1 10.4 41.8 10.1 45.4 8.8 44.0 9.2 43.6 9.9 

TransSMC2002 TransSMC2003 TransSMC2004 TransSMC2005 TransSMC2006 

Acc SD Acc SD Acc SD Acc SD Acc SD 

J4.8 42.0 9.9 35.0 9.2 63.3 3.0 46.2 8.1 37.6 12.0 

SVM 40.6 9.5 41.6 8.7 61.6 2.3 54.0 6.5 40.3 12.6 

NaiveBayes 42.0 9.9 44.8 8.7 60.1 4.8 50.1 7.4 40.6 12.6 

BayesNet 38.9 9.6 41.6 9.4 59.8 4.2 55.0 7.0 44.1 13.2 

k-NN 36.0 10.0 42.3 9.7 59.2 5.5 46.5 7.0 39.7 12.0 

OneR 43.5 8.6 37.9 8.8 60.9 3.4 54.0 6.3 46.1 12.0 

9

Technical Categorization of Trans on SMC Part A, B, and C in 1996-2006 

Dr. Siddiue of University of Ulster, UK 

93 

His Comments: "I would like to say in this context that one does not get any clear idea about cybernetics, its main-areas and the relationship between them which are 

still under exploited in the transactions. SMC society should aim to strive towards establishing conceptual relationship between those sub-fields of Cybernetics. One 

can categorise the papers as unclassified in general." 

Year 

Papers 

A: 

Fuzzy-neural 

& hybrid sys. 

B: 

Evolutionary 

system: EA, 

Ant sys., PSO, 

SA, DE 

C: 

Identification, 

modelling, 

control; complex 

& bio-inspired sys 

D: 

Learning, reasoning, probabilistic & stochastic sys.; 

Bayesian, Belief, Decision nets; Uncertainty & Markov 

models; Segmentation, clustering, classification & pattern 

matching; Manufacturing, Robotics & System Eng. 

E: 

E-com, market, & business 

sys., Internet, web & 

ubiquitous computing. 

Total No % No % No % No % No % 

1996 165 50 30.30 10 6.06 0 0 102 61.818 3 1.818 

1997 177 54 30.50 4 2.259 26 14.689 93 52.54 1 0.564 

1998 233 81 34.77 13 5.58 17 7.29 122 52.36 0 0 

1999 223 88 39.46 5 2.24 19 8.52 111 49.775 0 0 

2000 226 59 26.10 11 4.867 28 12.389 118 52.212 10 4.424 

2001 214 63 29.439 7 3.271 10 4.672 132 61.62 2 0.934 

2002 201 46 22.885 13 6.467 15 7.462 127 63.184 0 0 

2003 209 37 17.703 13 6.22 18 8.612 120 57.416 21 10.047 

2004 370 104 28.108 21 5.675 19 5.135 208 56.216 18 4.864 

2005 277 41 14.801 34 12.274 16 5.776 179 64.62 7 2.527 

2006 140 22 15.714 12 8.571 4 2.857 75 53.571 27 19.285 

400 

100% 

350 

90% 

80% 

300 

70% 

250 

200 

150 

E 

D 

C 

B 

A 

60% 

50% 

40% 

E 

D 

C 

B 

A 

30% 

100 

20% 

50 

10% 

0 

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 

0% 

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

1130 – 1200 Publications Committee report, key points and motions (Michael 

Berthold) 

94

95 

2006/2007 highlights 

SMC VP Publications Report 

Michael Berthold 


• Search for EiC of part A over. 

• New system for personalized member notification: prototype going live in September 

• Download data from Xplore (ongoing): should be in our hands in late August… 

• Ongoing analysis of topic shifts (with VP TA) – see our SMC’07 paper (and VP TA 

report) among others 

• Backlog of all journals essentially removed. 

• Member benefits now include electronic access to all fully sponsored SMC 

conference in addition to our transactions. 

Objectives: 

• Objective 1: Explore Open Access Strategies 

o Page-per-page downloads 

o Best papers for free (limited time): financial vs. financial impact? 

o Enable authors to buy into open access for their paper themselves. 

• Objective 2: Raise impact factors of journals (ongoing) 

o Maintain brief turnaround time for all transactions 

o Keep monitoring page count and backlog of transactions 

o Implement notification strategy, personal messages that interest the 

individual (ongoing) 

o Continue to monitor download and topic trends: clarify focus/scope of 

transactions 

• Objective 3: Solidify Transaction Financials: 

o Optimize impact of changes in revenue formulae on our transactions 

financial status 

o Investigate electronic only publication for some (all) of our journals: saves 

money (especially part C?) 

• Objective 4: Ease regular monitoring: Setup reporting workflows for 

o Download impact/stats 

o Financials 

• Objective 5: Find suitable EiC for part B. 

• Objective 6: Publications Manual 

Remarks 

• Agreed (again) on rotating best Associate Editor award (2005: part B, 2006: C) 

• Would prefer to introduce best paper awards for each part of transactions

96 


• Objective 1: Monitor ongoing discussions and developments within IEEE – so far 

a clear strategy seems to be missing. I have proposed before that SMC could 

volunteer to try some ideas out – without much success. Will keep pushing. 

• Objective 2 & 3: The main issue related to our society’s transactions is focus, 

quick turn around time, and time-to-publishing. Together with the VP TA, we are 

working to more clearly define the scope of SMC by creating a technical map. 

This map can be used to refine the coverage of existing (or needed) TCs but will 

also serve to make sure that the transactions are targeting the right areas. We 

still need to get updated statistics on number of downloads (preferably broken 

down by issues/papers and user category).In general, we need to increase 

visibility of (a) the ability to access SMC papers electronically and (b) entice 

readers to download them via Xplore if possible. We are trying to boost this 

understanding through our notification system. 

• Objective 4: It is currently cumbersome if not impossible to get an overview over 

the state of our transactions. Much of the required data resides in Xplore or 

Manuscript Central. Setting up an – at least semi-automated – reporting workflow 

to generate the most important key statistics would help tremendously. A 

workflow engine exists, convenient, automated access to the relevant data is the 

current obstacle. 

• Objective 5: We still need to get an update on the manual’s status, revise and 

finalize it and get it posted on the web. This may be a good opportunity to get a 

BoG member involved – volunteers?

1200 - 1300 Lunch 

97

1300 – 1315 Transactions Part A report (Don Brown) 

98

1315 – 1330 Transactions Part B report (Diane Cook) 

99

100 

Editor-in-chief Report for the 

IEEE Transactions on SMC Part B: Cybernetics 

Diane Cook, Editor-in-chief 

Prabir Bhattacharya, Associate Editor-in-chief 

Associate Editors 

• Basak, Jayanta 

• Bensaid, Amine 

• Berthold, Michael 

• Bhattacharya, Prabir 

• Bloch, Isabelle 

• Bobrow, James 

• Chawla, Nitesh 

• de Queiroz, Marcio 

• De Wilde, Philippe 

• Dixon, Warren 

• Dorigo, Marco 

• Gan, John 

• Gao, Hiujin 

• Goldgof, Dmitry 

• Gomez Skarmeta, Antonio 

• Govindaraju, Venu 

• Hoffmann, Frank 

• Sanqing Hu 

• Huang, Guang-Bin 

• Huber, Manfred 

• Ishibuchi, Hisao 

• Qiang Ji 

• Jiang, Xiaoyi 

• Kargupta, Hillol 

• Karray, Fakhri 

• Lee, Doo Yong 

• Lee, T.H. 

• Li, Han-Xiong 

• Lin, Chin-Teng 

• Lynch, Bob 

• Murata, Tadahiko 

• Murino, Vittorio 

• Nuernberger, Andreas 

• Obaidat, Mohammad 

• Ong, Yew-Soon 

• Oommen, John 

• Pal, Nikhil 

• Pantic, Maja 

• Pedrycz, Witold 

• Qiao, Hong 

• Ratha, Nalini 

• Santos, Eugene 

• Sarkar, Sudeep 

• Sastry, Pidaparthy 

• Rastko Selmic 

• Shen, Qiang 

• Shi, Peng 

• Shimony, Solomon 

• Sick, Bernhard 

• Singh, Sameer 

• Su, Jianbo 

• Su, Shun-Feng 

• Takagi, Hideyuki 

• Takagi, Tomohiro 

• Tao, Chin Wang 

• Tayebi, Abdelhamid 

• Tsang, Eric 

• Thanos Vasilakos 

• Wang, Chi-Hsu 

• Wang, Jun 

• Wang, Wei-Yen 

• Wang, Wen June 

• Wang, Xizhao 

• Kevin Warwick 

• Xiong, Zixiang 

• Yang, Simon 

• Zeng, Xiaoqin 

• Zhang, Hong 

• Zhang, Qingfu 

• Zhao, Qiangfu 

• Zheng, Rong Yang 

• Zhu, Quing

101 

Objectives 

• Objective 1: Maintain brief turnaround time for reviews 

• Objective 2: Improve overall quality of transactions 

• Objective 3: Raise transactions impact factor 


• Objective 1: The average time from original paper submission to decision 

during the six month period from March 2007 to September 2007 was 6.5 

weeks. This number includes papers rejected by the EIC, which typically 

occurs within a few days. Excluding these papers the turnaround time 

was 11.8 weeks, is still within our goal of a 10-12 week turnaround period. 

Many of the papers with longer turnaround times are special issue papers, 

so we are meeting our goal with regular paper submissions. One source 

of slowdowns is that the Associate Editor is not kept automatically 

informed about papers until all of the reviews are in. Our editorial 

assistant will start contacting AEs when a sufficient number of reviews 

have been received and the outstanding reviews are past due. We feel 

this will further improve our turnaround time. 

• Objective 2: A primary reason for the fast turnaround time of the 

transactions is the hard work of our Associate Editors. We retired three 

AEs during the last six months. The number of submissions is still quite 

large. To prevent loads from becoming excessive (the average number of 

papers handled per AE in the past 12 months has been 13) we have 

added seven new ones. The new AEs are highlighted in italic font in the 

AE list. One new AE, Kevin Warwick was recruited specifically to handle 

papers in biological cybernetics, which we are targeting as a topic area of 

increasing interest for the transactions. This step is part of the continued 

objective to focus the topic area of papers appearing in the transactions to 

those that are closely related to the theme of cybernetics and to 

encourage those in emerging areas of cybernetics-related research. 

• Objective 2: The quality of papers appearing in SMC is improving. This 

has resulted in an increased number of submissions over the last few 

years, a trend which has continued the last six months. Because the page 

budget remains constant, the acceptance rate during the last six months 

has remained close to 10%. This prevents a backlog of papers in the 

publication queue and has maintained tight control of the papers being 

published. Approximately 39% of the submitted papers were rejected by 

the EIC as being out of scope of the journal or requiring an improved 

literature survey. In both of these cases the authors may choose to 

improve the paper (update the literature survey and/or justify the 

relevance to the transactions theme) and request the paper be sent out for 

external review. Screening papers in this way lightens the load for AEs by 

not forcing them to handle papers that would ultimately be rejected for 

reasons such as poor fit or lack of recent references / comparison.

102 

• Objective 3: The impact factor for 2006 was 1.538, which is up from 1.108 

in 2005, 1.052 in 2004 and 1.03 in 2003. The trend is highlighted in 

Figure 1. We have two very strong special issues due to appear in 2008, 

which should further improve this impact factor. Maintaining quick 

turnaround time and high quality papers will also further this increase. We 

finally negotiated electronic submission of final papers with IEEE. This 

process improves the time-to-publication, reduces the overhead of authors 

to assemble and ship final paper hard copies, and reduces errors related 

to mishandling shipped hard papers. 

1.8 

1.6 

1.4 

1.2 

1 

0.8 

0.6 

0.4 

0.2 

0 

2003 2004 2005 2007 

Impact factor 

Figure 1. Impact factor for SMCB plotted for 2003 through 2007.

103 

SMC B Trends 

Submissions 

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 

1/1-9/10 

Submissions 688 732 910 1058 1013 854 

Accept rate 33.8% 21.9% 22.5% 16.1% 12.0% 10.3% 

Accept 142 119 138 137 105 56 

Reject 315 425 450 716 698 368 

Withdraw 31 8 24 21 8 10 

Note: Starting in 2005, acceptance rate is calculated based on papers submitted during time window as 

(#papers accepted) / (# papers accepted) + (# papers rejected) 

Submissions by Month 

2003 

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Total 

71 73 55 53 72 60 732 

Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 

76 71 50 49 51 51 

2004 

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Total 

69 75 68 70 77 70 910 


66 86 77 79 87 86 

2005 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Total 

83 80 75 115 124 80 1058 


82 91 65 83 72 108 


74 69 93 121 139 67 1013 


87 65 74 66 86 72 


68 107 82 118 93 87 854 (estimated total for 2007: 1232) 


120 131 48

104 

Papers that went through more than one review 

3/1/2007 - 9/1/2007 

Review time for Days to submit Review time for Days to submit Review time for 

initial submission 1 st revision 1 st revision 2 nd revision 2 nd decision 

107 57.5 68.5 39.3 54.9 

Turnaround Time by Associate Editor 

Manuscripts between Mar 1, 2007 00:00:00 and Sep 1, 2007 23:59:59 

Associate Editor < 30 days 31-60 days 61-90 days 91-120 

days 

> 120 

days 

Ave days 

Azuaje, Francisco 4 2 4 0 0 43.6 days 

Basak, Jayanta 0 0 3 0 0 77.8 days 

Bensaid, Amine 0 0 1 0 1 103.5 days 

Berthold, Michael 0 0 0 1 0 102.3 days 

Bhattacharya, Prabir 1 2 4 0 0 62 days 

Bloch, Isabelle 0 0 2 0 0 77 days 

Bobrow, James 1 0 0 0 0 17 days 

Bowyer, Kevin 0 0 1 0 0 72.7 days 

Chawla, Nitesh 0 0 2 2 1 95.1 days 

Cook, Diane 1 0 0 0 0 0 days 

de Queiroz, Marcio 0 1 1 1 1 95.2 days 

De Wilde, Philippe 0 1 2 1 0 83.4 days 

Dixon, Warren 1 1 0 2 0 60.3 days 

Dorigo, Marco 0 1 1 1 1 94 days 

Gan, John 0 1 3 0 0 62.4 days 

Gao, Huijun 1 2 3 0 0 51.6 days 

Gomez Skarmeta, Antonio 0 0 4 0 0 74.7 days 

Gonzalez, Avelino 0 0 0 1 0 93.3 days 

Hoffmann, Frank 0 0 0 0 1 132.5 days 

Hu, Sanqing 0 0 5 0 0 76.7 days 

Huang, Guang-Bin 0 1 4 1 0 78 days 

Huber, Manfred 0 0 0 1 1 112.3 days 

Ishibuchi, Hisao 0 1 3 1 0 70.1 days 

Ji, Qiang 1 0 2 0 0 50.2 days 

Jiang, Xiaoyi 0 1 1 0 0 63.6 days 

Karray, Fakhri 1 0 0 0 2 92.1 days 

Lee, T.H. 0 0 2 0 1 105.3 days 

Lewis, Frank L. 4 2 4 0 0 47.3 days

105 

Li, Han-Xiong 1 0 5 1 0 65.3 days 

Lin, Chin-Teng 0 0 4 0 0 72.2 days 

Liu, Derong 4 0 0 0 0 12.9 days 

Lynch, Robert 0 0 1 0 0 84.4 days 

Murata, Tadahiko 0 0 0 0 1 135 days 

Nuernberger, Andreas 0 2 0 0 0 56.5 days 

Ong, Yew Soon 0 2 2 0 0 62.9 days 

Oommen, B. John 0 0 0 1 0 111.5 days 

Pal, Nikhil 0 1 0 0 0 49.3 days 

Pantic, Maja 0 0 1 4 2 111 days 

Pedrycz, Witold 0 0 1 1 0 86 days 

Pentland, Alex 0 0 1 5 0 91.7 days 

Qiao, Hong 1 0 1 1 2 98 days 

Ratha, Nalini 0 0 1 1 1 106.2 days 

Santos, Eugene 1 0 1 0 0 49.4 days 

Sarkar, Sudeep 2 0 0 0 0 25.5 days 

Sastry, Pidaparthy 0 0 1 1 1 100.1 days 

Shen, Qiang 0 2 0 1 0 63.3 days 

Shi, Peng 0 1 3 2 0 74.9 days 

Sick, Bernhard 0 0 0 1 1 128.1 days 

Singh, Sameer 0 0 1 0 0 74.9 days 

Su, Jianbo 0 3 2 0 0 60.4 days 

Su, Shun-Feng 0 0 2 1 0 82.9 days 

Sudkamp, Tom 0 0 1 1 0 83.1 days 

Takagi, Hideyuki 1 1 3 0 0 56.6 days 

Tao, Chin Wang 0 0 4 1 0 77.7 days 

Tayebi, Abdelhamid 0 1 1 1 0 71.1 days 

Vasilakos, Thanos 0 0 1 0 0 75.2 days 

Wang, Chi-Hsu 0 1 2 2 0 78.8 days 

Wang, Jun 0 0 3 0 1 96.8 days 

Wang, Wei-Yen 0 0 0 2 1 123.3 days 

Wang, Wen June 0 0 2 1 0 94.4 days 

Wang, Xizhao 1 0 2 0 1 73.2 days 

Yang, Simon 0 0 1 3 0 93.9 days 

Yang, Zheng Rong 1 0 1 0 0 38.9 days 

Zhang, Hong 0 0 0 1 0 107 days 

Zhang, Qingfu 1 0 0 3 0 80.8 days 

Zhao, Qiangfu 0 0 1 3 0 90.7 days 

Zhu, Quing 0 0 0 1 0 92.9 days 

Total 28 30 101 51 20 75.3 days

106 

Time from Submission to Decision - Phase Breakdown 

Submitted Manuscripts between Mar 1, 2007 00:00:00 and Sep 1, 2007 23:59:59 

Days from 

submission 

to EIC 

Days 

from 

EIC 

to 

AE 

Days 

from AE 

to 2 

referees 

agreed 

Days 

from 2 

referees 

agreed 

to 2 

reviews 

received 

Days from 2 

reviews 

received to AE 

recommendation 

Days from AE 

recommendation 

to final decision 

Total days from 

submission to 

final decision 

Average 1 2.9 11.4 51.3 22.5 0.3 45.4

107 

Financial Data 

The net income for SMCB in 2006 was $236.5k, and is projected to be at least 

$150.7k in 2007. The page budget was 1,430 in both 2006 and 2007. The 

figures below plot the number of pages published and net incomes for 2002 

through 2007. 

3000 

2500 

2548 

2000 

1500 

1000 

1044 

1436 1492 

1430 

Published 

pages 

500 

0 

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 

Figure 2. Number of published pages for SMCB plotted for 2003 through 2007. 

The value for 2007 reflects the budgeted amount, not actual published pages. 

250 

222 236.5 

200 

150 

100 

192 

164 

150.7 

Net (in 1,000 

dollars) 

50 

0 

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 

Figure 3. Net income SMCB plotted for 2003 through 2007. The value for 2007 

reflects the budgeted amount, not the actual net income.

1330 – 1345 Transactions Part C report (Vlad Marik) 

108

Report for IEEE Transactions on SMC 

Part C: Applications and Reviews 

109 

Vladimir MARIK, Editor-in-Chief 

MengChu ZHOU, Managing Editor 

20 August 2007 

Associate Editors 

A list of associate editors of IEEE Trans. on SMC: Part C (The persons who have become new associate 

editors since January 2005 are underlined): 7 editors from industry/defence. 

- N. O. ATTOH-OKINE 

- R.BRENNAN 

- T. BUSCH 

- B. CHAIB-DRAA 

- C.L.P. CHEN 

- J. CHEN 

- Shyi-Ming CHEN 

- M. FLETCHER 

- M. FUNABASHI 

- X. Guan 

- P. HORACEK 

- MuDer JENG 

- YAOCHU JIN 

- J. KEANE 

- A. W. LABIB 

- M. LAST 

- J. LAZANSKY 

- Xuelong LI 

- M. H. LIM 

- S. J. OVASKA 

- G. I. PAPADIMITRIOU 

- S. H. RUBIN 

- P. J. SANZ 

- L. B. SHEREMETOV 

- K. M. SIM 

- R. SUBBU 

- A. Min TJOA 

- E. TRUCCO 

- JIACUN WANG 

- ZIDONG WANG 

- Naiqi WU 

- Z. ZDRAHAL 

- Lei ZHANG 

1 AEs ending service, 1 new AE approved 

Objectives 

• Objective 1: 

To decrease the time from submission to publication, decrease the size of the backlog 


To create conditions for increasing the impact factor in the forthcoming 1-2 years 


To enhance the orientation of the journal towards industrial applications. 



o To reduce the time period between the paper submission and printing by speeding up all 

phases of the review process 

o To force the associate editors to be more pro-active and efficient 

o To ensure that the journal has 6 issues per year 

o To analyze the backlog and to detect pending papers

o To review and fix the deadlines for the special issues planned, To reduce the number of 

special issues to 2-3 per year 

o The number of papers accepted for a special issue are reduced to 6-8 high quality papers 

– this would increase the quality of the papers and provide opportunity to shorten the 

period between submission and printing. 

Progress: 

Some AEs quit. A new AE nominated. 

Schedule for special issues fixed for 2007 - we have identified that too many special issues 

per year might lead to the decrease of quality and increase of the backlog. The number of 

special issues reduced to 2-3 per year. Plan for special issues 2007-8 in progress. 

The number of papers for each special issue reduced to 6 to publish the quality applicationoriented 

papers 

The special attention is paid to the quality of the special issue’s papers by EIC, clarification 

of the potential conflict of interest of the guest editors. 

The number of volumes per year increased to 6, page-budget increased to1420 pages in 

2007 to reduce the backlog. 


o To invite leading specialists to prepare reviews with high and broad impact 

o Shorter “technical correspondences” and quality reviews are preferred 

o Recommendation are given to the authors to cite relevant papers from T-SMC 

o To ask AEs to be more proactive in looking for attractive application/ review papers 

o To review the target market 

Progress: 

The statements mentioned above were announced to the AEs, the positive shift in their 

efficiency is visible. 

Leading specialists (R. Brennan, A.Kusiak, K. Hipel, M. Jamshidi, J. Tien, Ch. White and 

others) personally invited to prepare reviews for SMC-C. An increase in submissions of 

reviews. 

1-2 review paper(s) on the relevant topics were included into each issue starting in 2007. 

Review type of papers have higher “hit” counts via Xplore as compared to Regular papers, 

greater interest from SMC professionals 

The impact factor has an increasing trend: 2004: 0.482, 2005: 0.706, 2006: 0.885 


o The industry oriented application papers will be processed with the highest preference, 

with a special attention given to them by the EIC and ME (we have already started to 

apply this policy). 

o The papers describing pseudo-applications will be rejected before the review – this 

would lower the load put on the AEs and would enable to concentrate the efforts to 

improving the quality of really interesting industrial papers (This policy was already 

implemented). 

o The new trend will be reflected in all negotiations concerning the newly proposed 

special issues (introduced). 

o EIC will personally contact the organizers of important industry oriented scientific 

events and the leaders of EU-funded projects and inform them about the opportunities 

offered by T-SMCC – personal touch is very important, e.g. discussion with prof. L. 

Camarinha-Matos (ECOLEAD project), prof. Nada Lavrac (SEVENPRO project) etc. 

110

Issues 

Page budget 

We managed to increase the page budget by 20% in 2005 (550 pages), and since 2006 the number of 

issues has increased from 4 to 6 (720 pages/per year), i.e. 31% page increase. Also in 2006 the page 

budget has been topped by 100 pages (820), i.e. 14% increase. The final approved plan for 2007 has 

resulted in 1420 pages. This enabled us to manage the backlog and to print all the accepted papers 

initially submitted in 2005 (of which hard copies already received) in Sep-Nov 07 issues, and 75% of 

2006-papers will be published in Nov 07/ Jan08. Planned budget for 2008: 720 pages. 

2005 2006 2007 2008 - plan 

no of issues 4 6 6 6 

page budget 550 820 1420 720 

Review type of papers 

Several leading specialists were asked to prepare review papers. Starting from 2007 we adopted the 

strategy of printing 1-2 review papers per issue. The Reviews are of greater interest to professionals, 

having more “hits” via Xplore web. The evaluation of reviewers is under a special attention of the EIC 

and the editorial board to speed up the review process and their publishing. 

2006: 25 reviews submitted, 8 accepted 

2007: 18 reviews submitted, 3 accepted, 4 under review (as of 31 Jul 07) 

Reviews printed in 2007: 

• Vol. 37/1, Jan 2007 

Toward Developing Data Warehousing Process Standards: An Ontology-Based 

Arun Sen, A. P. Sinha Review of Existing Methodologies 

P. G. Zhang Avoiding Pitfalls in Neural Network Research 

• Vol. 37/3, May 2007 

111 

Stephan K Chalup 

Machine Learning with AIBO Robots in the Four-Legged League of RoboCup 

• Vol. 37/4, July 2007 

Z.Tauber, Ze-Nian Li, 

M. S. Drew Review and Preview: Disocclusion by Inpainting for Image-based Rendering 

• Vol. 37/5, Sep 2007 

K. Hipel, M. Jamshidi, 

J. Tien, Ch. White 

R. Brennan 

Andrew Kusiak 

The Future of Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Application Domains and 

Research Methods 

Towards real-time distributed intelligent control: a survey of research themes 

and applications 

Computational Intelligence in Product Design Engineering: Review and Trends 

Reviews prepared for printing: Nov 2007/Jan 2008 

Vladimir S Lerner 

Information Systems Theory and Informational Macrodynamics 

H. Liu, H. Darabi, Pat Banerjee, J. Liu Survey of Wireless Indoor Positioning Techniques and Systems 

H. Ahn, YangQuan Chen, K. Moore Iterative learning control: survey and categorization 

K. Vergidis Business Process Analysis and Optimisation: Beyond Reengineering 

Yubin Yang, Hui Lin, Yao Zhang Content-based 3D Model Retrieval: A Survey 

Gene Identification: Classical and Computational Intelligence 

S. Bandyopadhyay 

Approaches

112 

Special issues published 

2006 (No. 36/1 -36/4) 

• Game-theoretic Analysis and Stochastic Simulation of Negotiation Agents 

Guest editor: Kwang Mong Sim, vol. 36/1, 2006, 8 papers +1 correspondence 

• Cognitive Informatics 

Guest Editors: Yingxu Wang, W. Kinsner, vol. 36/2, 2006, 7 papers + 2 correspondences 

• Engineering Autonomic Systems 

Guest Editors: Roy Sterritt, T. Bapty, vol.36/3, 2006, 8 papers + 1correspondence 

• Soft Computing in Industrial Applications 

Guest Editor: Steven W. Kercel, vol.36/4, 2006, 6 papers + 3 correspondences 

2007 

• Networking, Sensing, and Control 

Guest Editors: Fei-Yue Wang, Derong Liu, Simon X.Yang, Li Li, vol. 37/2, 8 papers 

• Engineering Applications on Petri Nets 

Guest Editors: MuDer Jeng, MengChu Zhou, vol. 37/4, 7 papers 

A plan for publishing special issues in 2008-9: 

1. Intelligent Computation for Bioinformatics (Zidong Wang, Xiaohui Liu) 

2. Enterprise Services Computing and Industrial Applications (Patrick C. K. Hung, Zoran Milosevic) 

3. Information Reuse and Integration (S. Rubin, Shu-Ching Chen) 

4. Multiagent and Holonic Techniques for Manufacturing Systems Applications and Technologies 

(V. Botti, A. Giret) – under negotiation 

Remark : 

Special issue on Service Systems and Service Management (Li Xu, John Warfield, Ling Li, Jian Chen) 

– cancelled due to the low quality of papers

Appendix 

The attached tables indicate the number of papers submitted in 2003 – 2007, and provide an overview 

regarding the acceptance/rejection ratio. 

113 

Table 1: Decision Ratio for Submissions, IEEE SMC part C 

*/ data as of 15 August 2007 

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 

Submissions 125 185 230 312 344 196 

Submission increase 141% 125% 136% 110% 

Accept (incl. minor revisions, excl. 

major revisions) 13 50 46 94 40+6 3+4 

Rejected after review 8 37 34 106 117 34 

Immediate Reject + withdrawn 90 86 143 82+28 135+29 80+12 

in review process / revised by authors 2 17 63 

Reject rate (incl. Imm reject) 84% 71% 80% 60% 73% 58% 

Accept rate (accept /submitted) 10% 27% 20% 28% 13% 4% 

Electronic submissions started in March 31, 2003. Until 2005 the majority of special issues were handled out of 

the Manuscript Central online system (these figures are not included in the above table). 

Table 2: Average Time from Submission to Decision - Phase Breakdown 

Papers to be peer reviewed 

Average no of months from 

Submission to 1st Decision 

Average no of months from 

Submission to Final Decision 

2005 2006 

3.45 3.58 

6.65 4.91 

Comments: Pares submitted to special issues are processed via MC submission system. Thus the selection of 

papers is under direct monitoring/management of the EIC of the whole review process. This prevents early 

detection of misconduct and secures the same standards for all papers submitted to our transactions. 

Unfortunately, the review of the special issues papers takes longer as the evaluation by the guest editors is done 

in batches, and any delays in one review process may influence the other papers.

114 

Table 3: 2008 IEEE S/C BUDGET 

TRANS ON SYSTEMS, MAN & CYBER: PART C 

ACCOUNT 2006 2007 2008 

NUMBER ACTUALS BUDGET BUDGET 

Total Income 181.6 153.8 140.2 

Total Printing Expenses 38.2 28.5 44.3 

Total Creation Expenses 98.5 105.7 115.0 

Total Electronic Expenses 8.7 4.3 6.9 

Total Other Expenses 1.6 1.6 1.3 

Total Expense/Purchased Services 147.0 140.0 167.4 

NET 34.6 13.8 -27.3 

Cost/Print Sub / USD 33.3 20.9 37.0

1345 - 1400 Long Range Planning and Finance (Daniel Yeung) 

115

116 

Long Range Planning and Finance Report 

Prepared by 

Daniel Yeung, Vice President of Long Range Planning and Finance 

7 October 2007 

Objectives 

1. Ensure that the Society’s Tactical and Operational plans are effectively 

implemented 

2. Improve the Society’s Governance 

3. Enhance the Society’s Financial position 


1. Revise the Tactical and Operational Plan (TOP) based on input from the VPs in 

collaboration with the ExCom and present the revision to the BoG for approval 

2. Develop recommendations for strengthening and clarifying the SMCS Constitutions 

and Bylaws in consultation with the ExCom and present them to the BoG for 

approval 

3. Develop recommendations for strengthening and repositioning the three 

Transactions in consultation with the ExCom and present them to the BoG for 

approval 

4. Develop recommendations for strengthening and repositioning our sponsored 

conferences in consultation with the ExCom and present them to the BoG for 

approval 

5. Develop recommendations for strategies to ensure a healthy membership growth in 

consultation with the ExCom and present them to the BoG for approval 

6. Develop recommendations for improving financial planning, budgeting and control, 

and present them to the BoG for approval. 

Issues and Motions 

1. Conferences 

We annually sponsor (as a full sponsor or technical co-sponsor) a large number of 

conferences which are well run and most of them produce healthy surpluses. 

However, many of these conferences are not perceived as the leading ones in the 

field, and the competition from many new conferences is very keen. We need to 

identify strategies to help improve the technical program of our conferences. One 

proposal to strengthen our annual conference is to have three tracks (Systems 

Engineering and Science, Human Machine Systems and Cybernetics). We also 

need to develop a knowledge base to support an efficient and smooth operation of 

our sponsored conferences. Another critical issue is to find ways to help conference 

organizers in meeting the 20% surplus requirement for SMC sponsored

117 

conferences. 

2. Publications 

The transactions’ backlog problem has been largely resolved, and our three 

transactions continue to show improvement in their impact factors, submission and 

acceptance rates. One major issue is the projected decline in transactions’ revenue 

and net income. Another critical issue is the re-scoping/focusing of our transactions. 

Strategic sessions have been planned to address these critical issues. 

3. Membership 

The trend of Membership number decline is reversed with a small increase. We 

should continue the strategy of forming new chapters and revitalizing inactive 

chapters. Region 10 continues to show a strong growth with new chapters 

established in Korea, Japan, China, and India. It is also encouraged to see new 

chapters/joint chapters set up in North America and Europe. 

A profile of growing student activities (including the GOLD members) has been 

developed under the leadership of the new Student Activities Coordinator Patrick 

Chan. Four Student Branch SMC Chapters have been established (Hebei 

University, Hong Kong, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, and 

Harbin Institute Technology Shenzhen Graduate School) and two more are being 

planned (Chongqing University and University of Waterloo). In supporting this 

initiative, the establishment of a Student Activity Committee is proposed. 

4. Technical Activities 

Increasingly our TCs have made significant contribution to conferences and local 

technical activities. The Technical Map project is expected to help identify technical 

trends which will be useful to strengthen our publications, conference organization, 

membership recruitment and chapter development. With our new governance 

structure now in place, technical activities will be further strengthened by the 

establishment of three VP (Technical Activities)’s: VP (Systems Engineering and 

Science), VP (Human Machine Systems) and VP (Cybernetics). The 26 diversified 

TCs will be led by a champion with a clear focus. 

5. Governance 

An amendment to the Society’s Constitutions and Bylaws which includes the 

change from one VP (TA) to three VP (TA)s, the addition of the three EICs to the 

BoG and the formalization of the voting by email, was approved by the IEEE TAB 

and the General Manager for approval in the June TAB meeting. It was announced 

in the Society’s June eNewsletter. The requirement of a 60 days notification period 

was met so it now goes into effect. Another amendment on the “Five Must-Haves 

on Constitutions and By-Laws” as required by the IEEE TAB (i.e., Quorum, Voting 

and Proxy Voting, Nominations and Appointments Committee, Petition signature 

requirements, and Insertion of “IEEE” before “Executive Director”) is being prepared 

in consultation with the ExCom and it will be presented to the BoG for approval.

6. Finance 

Our Society continues to enjoy a healthy cumulative surplus partly due to prudent 

budgetary control, partly attributed to the fact that most of our conferences generate 

reasonable surplus, and largely due to sizable investment returns. Although our 

conferences and transactions on a whole bring in positive income, a significant 

decline is projected for 2007, and a further decline in 2008. This is an alarming 

trend and we must develop action plan to reverse these trends. Strategic sessions 

for the ExCom members are planed to address theses critical issues. 

118

IEEE SMC Society 

Tactical and Operational Plan 

Goal 1: Publications 

February, 18, 2007 

119 

G = Goal, O = Objective, P =Project, T=Task 

G 1 

O 1.1 

Number Goal/Objective/Project/Task Leader/Champion Source 

Ensure clear focus and purpose of 

publications 

Establish clearer focus of papers and 

electronic publications with a 

strengthened industry related 

component (for part C, mainly) 

P 1.1.0 Create Technical Map of SMC 

P 1.1.1 

Clarify on the web page the scope of 

the SMC Transactions with 

explanations and examples 

T 1.1.1.1 TSMC-A scope 

T 1.1.1.1 TSMC-B scope 

T 1.1.1.1 TSMC-C scope 

P 1.1.2 

Strengthen the contents of the SMC e- 

Newsletter 

Deadline 

(dd/mm/yr) 

VP Publications SPTF3 4/05 12/31/07 

VP Publications 

VP Technical Act. 


SPTF3 4/05 12/31/07 

12/31/07 


EiC SMC-A 

EiC SMC-B 

EiC SMC-C 

SPTF3 4/05 12/31/07 

SPTF3 4/05 06/30/07 

SPTF3 4/05 06/30/07 

VP Publications 12/31/06 

T 1.1.2.1 Review other societies’ letters VP Publications 12/31/07 

Summary of Progress to 

Date (status, 

accomplishments, issues) 

in progress – with VP 

TA 

first results achieved. 

analysis ongoing 

involved new EiC 

clarified scope 

submitted 

progress ongoing 

(review papers 

promising) 

Editor working hard on 

this. 

Observe launch and 

inaugural issues of 

Systems “letters” 

journal – no news 

(new pub unlikely.)

P 1.1.3 

P 1.1.4 

P 1.1.5 

T 1.1.5.2 

O 1.2 

P 1.2.1 

P 1.2.2 

O 1.3 

P 1.3.1 

P 1.3.2 

Continue to strengthen industry 

component in publications (mainly 

part C) 

Review the appropriateness of the 

current publications and identify 

potential alternative opportunities 

Strengthen the scope, contents and 

management of the web site pages 

Investigate the use of multimedia 

components in SMC web pages 

Assure that TSMC-A properly reflects 

its scope and purpose 

Perform analysis of papers versus 

scope of TSMC-A 

Develop methodology to ensure 

Transactions A properly reflects 

TSMC-A scope and purpose 

Assure that Transactions B properly 

reflects its scope and purpose 

Perform analysis of papers versus 

scope of TSMC-B 


TSMC-B properly reflects scope 

and purpose 

O 1.4 Clarify Scope and purpose of TSMC-C 

P 1.4.1 

P 1.4.2 

P 1.4.3 

Establish and clarify purpose and 

scope of TSMC-C 

Perform analysis of papers 

versus scope of TSMC-C 


proper reflection of TSMC-C 

scope and purpose 

EiC SMC-C 

(V. Marik) 

President, 

VP Publications, 

Don Brown 

12/31/06 

SPTF3 4/05 6/30/06 


(P. Beling) 

Web Editor 

(D. Sabaz) 

SPTF3 4/05 6/30/06 



EiC SMC-A 

SPTF3 4/05 12/31/07 


EiC A (+ B, C) SPTF3 4/05 12/31/07 

See 1.3.2/1.4.3 


EiC SMC-B 

SPTF3 4/05 12/31/07 


EiC B 

SPTF3 4/05 12/31/07 


EiC B (+ A, C) SPTF3 4/05 12/31/07 

See 1.2.2/1.4.3 


EiC SMC-C SPTF3 4/05 12/31/07 


EiC C SPTF3 4/05 12/31/07 


EiC C 


EiC C (+A, B) 

See 1.2.2/1.3.2 

SPTF3 4/05 

SPTF3 4/05 

12/31/07 

12/31/07 

Cont. Monitor 120 

development of 

industrial papers 

(submission rates, 

quality) 

No changes made. New 

transaction not 

possible, split of part C 

Done, to the best of 

my knowledge. 

see “topic map” 

project. Started split 

issues (Systems, 

Humans) 

see “topic map” 

project. 

EiC working hard on 

attracting industrial 

papers 

New EiC reflects this 

already: strengthen 

industrial content



Goal 2: Conferences 


121 


G 2 

O 2.1 


P 2.1.1 

P 2.1.2 

P 2.1.3 

Enhance and Optimize Conference 

Operations 

Develop conference policies and 

procedures manual 

Develop SMCS conference policies and 

procedures to ensure proper oversight 

Develop process for preserving SMC 

conference corporate memory 

Ensure increased conference quality 

and organization 

VP Conferences 



Web Editor 


SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

Deadline 

(mm/dd/yr) 

Completed 

ongoing 

ongoing 


Date (status, 


Associated web 

document with 

abbreviated guidelines 

for seeking conference 

sponsorship is done. It 

will be approved by 

CMC . Then it will be 

posted on SMC web 

site. 

Document completed 

Database system in 

development 

Conference 

Management System 

will help paper 

submission, review 

management, 

announcements to 

authors, referees, 

program committee 

members, and

potential participants 122 

P 2.1.4 

O 2.2 

P 2.2.1 

P 2.2.2 

O 2.3 

P 2.3.1 

T 2.3.1.1 

T 2.3.1.2 

Assist VP Membership with 

membership recruitment at 

conferences 

Develop value-added conference 

activities 

Create a long-term strategy for 

incorporating tutorials and workshops 

Develop process for incorporating 

exhibits into the SMC annual 

conference 

Raise prestige of the annual and other 

“sponsored” meetings 

Improve quality of fully SMC 

sponsored meetings 

Establish acceptance based upon peer 

review of full papers 

Explore other methods for quality 

improvements (paper readability, 

VP Membership SPTF3 

4/05 








SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

Completed 

ongoing 

ongoing 

ongoing 

completed 

ongoing 

Provide a booth for 

membership 

developments. Provide 

gifts (T-shirts) for SMC 

members to sign off. 

Implemented for 

SMC06 

Identify emerging 

technologies, 

technologies with 

critical importance, 

and topics with greater 

attractions to the SMC 

community suitable for 

inclusion as tutorials 

and workshops base on 

suggestions from 

technical committees 

Establish long-term 

partnership with 

international 

incorporations with 

willingness to sponsor 

, for which exhibit 

space are reserved 

with priorities 

Overseeing proposals 

and budgets. 

Develop a time table 

for full sponsored 

conferences to follow 

up 

Implemented for SMC 

2005 

Collecting acceptance 

rate data for many SMC

acceptance rates) 

T 2.3.1.3 Utilize poster sessions VP Conferences 

P 2.3.2 

Establish criteria for SMC involvement 

for meetings with other organizations 


SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

completed 

ongoing 

related conferences 123 for 

comparison to SMC 

annual conference 

rates. Will explore any 

trends that suggest a 

rate policy for SMC 

conferences 

Implemented for 

SMC06 to reduce the 

number of no-shows 

Establish guidelines for 

SMC involvement from 

Long Range Planning 

and Finance



Goal 3: Membership 

March 14, 2007 

124 


G 3 


Ensure and Enhance Value of 

Membership 

O 3.1 Enhance SMC Relevance to Industry 

P 3.1.1 

T 3.1.1.1 

O 

3.2 

P 3.2.1 

T 3.2.1.1 

T 3.2.1.2 

Increase SMC appeal to people working 

in industry 

Enhance industry involvement in SMC 

membership and sponsored events 

Enhance SMC relevance to IEEE 

members world-wide 

Implement ongoing membership 

recruitment program 

Promote society membership at 

conferences 

Implement membership recruitment 

activities based upon IEEE Technical 

Interest Profiles 

VP Membership 

(MuDer Jeng) 

Industrial 

Relations 

Committee Chair 

(Stuart Rubin) 

Stuart Rubin 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

Deadline 

(mm/dd/yr) 

Stuart Rubin 08/31/07 

MuDer Jeng 

MuDer Jeng 

SPTF3 

4/05 

MuDer Jeng 10/31/07 

MuDer Jeng 10/31/07 

Summary of Progress to Date 

(status, accomplishments, 

issues) 

Hold a meeting of committee 

members at 2007 IEEE IRI 

to discuss issues for getting 

industry more involved in 

our society. 

Organize membership 

promotion exhibition at 

SMC2007. 

Cooperate with VP-TA to 

organize a membership 

recruitment/technical 

activities session at 

SMC2007.

P 3.2.2 Enhance the image of the society 

T 3.2.2.1 Hold a SMC logo contest MuDer Jeng 10/31/07 

O 3.3 

P 3.3.1 

Enhance relevance and value of SMC 

membership to students 

Increase membership appeal to 

students 

Student 

Activities 

Coordinator 

(Patrick Chan) 

Patrick Chan 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

T 3.3.1.1 Develop new student branch chapters Patrick Chan 12/31/07 

T 3.3.1.2 

T 3.3.1.3 

Establish a Student Activities 

Committee 

Set up a webpage under the SMC 

website for student members 

Patrick Chan 12/31/07 

Patrick Chan 12/31/07 

T 3.3.1.4 Establish SMC Student Identity Patrick Chan 12/31/07 

T 3.3.1.5 

Promote society student membership 

and activities at conferences Patrick Chan 12/31/07 

125 

Submit a proposal at 

Excom’07 for holding a 

contest to select a logo for 

the society. 

• Initially target 3-5 new 

student branch chapters in 

Region 10. 

• Plan to visit Xian, Beijing, 

Baoding, Guangzhou and 

Shenzhen during 2007. 

• The committee is chaired 

by the Student Activities 

Coordinator, and its 

members include all SMC 

student branch chapter 

chairs. 

• Its annual meeting is held 

at the SMC annual 

conference. 

• It has a representative at 

the BoG. 

Provide a channel for 

advertising the student 

activities and enhance the 

interaction between the 

society and the students. 

Create an “SMC student 

logo” 

Set up student booths at 

SMC07 and ICMLC07 in Hong 

Kong.

O 3.4 

P 3.4.1 

T 3.4.1.1 

O 3.5 

Enhance relevance of membership to 

GOLD members 

Increase appeal of SMCS to younger 

members 

Establish a GOLD member committee 

to promote Gold member activities 

Improve chapter development and 

activities 

GOLD Member 

Coordinator 

(Eugene Santos) 

Eugene Santos & 

Patrick Chan 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

Eugene Santos 12/31/07 

Chapter 

Coordinator 

(Ying Tang) 

P 3.5.1 Chapter development program Ying Tang 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

T 3.5.1.1 Develop new chapters Ying Tang 12/31/07 

126 

• The committee is chaired 

by the Gold Member 

Coordinator, and includes 

the Student Activities 

Coordinator and other 

proactive Gold members. 

• It will periodically 

announce information 

relevant to SMC GOLD 

members. 

• It will provide web-based 

information for GOLD 

members. 

• It will provide a process to 

handle GOLD memberrelated 

feedback and 

complaints. 

• 2 new chapters have been 

established since the last 

report was submitted, i.e., 

Shi JiaZhuang Chapter and 

Capital Region Chapter 

• 3 joint chapters are in the 

final approval stage to be 

established, i.e., Central 

Virginia Joint Chapter with 

EMBS; Albuquerque 

Section Joint Chapter with 

EMBS; and Coastal Los 

Angeles Section Joint 

Chapter with CIS and RAS 

• 10 potential chapters are 

under development, which

T. 3.5.1.2 Revitalize inactive chapters Ying Tang 12/31/07 

T 3.5.3.3 

Enhance communications among SMC 

Membership Committee, chapter chairs 

and SMC members 

Ying Tang 12/31/07 

have a broad coverage 127 in 

Americas, Asia and 

Europe. 

• We have identified 

potential candidates at the 

local level to revitalize 

Orlando and Milwaukee 

chapters, i.e., Dr. Mike 

Demblewski for the 

Orlando Chapter, Drs. 

Suresh Chalasani and Jay 

Bayne for the Milwaukee 

Chapter. 

• We have been working 

with the Connecticut 

Section to seek the 

possibility of having a 

joint chapter with RAS, 

Control, and Industrial 

Applications. 

• To stay a good contact 

with SMC chapters, we 

have requested chapter 

chairs to submit their 

status report twice a year. 

The recently-collected 

reports from 23 chapters 

indicate that a variety of 

activities (sponsored 

conferences, seminars, 

workshops, and 

distinguished lectures, 

etc.) were conducted, 

promoting science and 

engineering practices in 

the SMC society of the 

interest and recruiting 

more members. 

• We continue to introduce 

our local chapters and 

their activities in the SMC 

e-newsletters.

T 3.5.3.4 

Promote chapter activities 

Ying Tang 12/31/07 

• We provide financial 128 

support to local chapters, 

especially the newly 

established ones, helping 

them invite speakers, 

establish their newsletter 

and/or website. 

• We established the SMC 

Chapter of Year Award, set 

its operating procedure, 

and published its call for 

nomination in the SMC e- 

newsletter.



Goal 4: Governance 


129 


G 

Number 

4 

Goal/Objective/Project/Task 

Clarify SMCS Scope and Enhance 

Governance 

O 4.1 Examine relevance of current FOI 

P 4.1.1 

T 4.1.1.1 

Review and clarify the SMC broad Field of 

Interest (FOI) 

Identify what makes the FOI vulnerable 

to encroachment and take appropriate 

actions 

Leader/ 

Champion 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning 

Source 

SPTF3 4/05 

Deadline 

(dd/mm/yr) 

SPTF3 4/05 01/24/07 

Summary of Progress to Date 

(status, accomplishments, 

issues) 

• Completed as part of 

Society Review task 

SPTF3 4/05 31/10/2005 • Revised FOI was voted on at 

October BoG meeting. 

SPTF3 4/05 

T 4.1.1.2 

Clarify FOI to improve society identity 

and communication of FOI to 

membership 

SPTF3 4/05 

VP Long 

O 4.2 Enhance SMC governance structure 

Range 

Planning & 

SPTF3 4/05 

Finance 

Increase pool of prospective society 

P 4.2.1 leaders and volunteers’ access to 

leadership positions SPTF3 4/05 31/12/05 

• Some encroachment 

threats have been 

identified by the SPTF as 

part of the SWOT analysis. 

Discussion occurred on this 

issue is during the October 

8, 2005 BoG Strategic 

Planning Retreat. 

• Was discussed in detail at 

the Oct BoG series. 

• On-going 

• President’s messages in 

the eNewsletter to 

highlight opportunities for

President 

(W. Gruver) 

volunteer positions 130 

• Revised SMC web site and 

back cover of Transactions 

with all elected and 

appointed positions 

• 5 current members-atlarge 

appointed 

coordinators for chapters, 

student activities, 

publications, technical 

committees, and 

conferences 

P 4.2.2 Stream-line governance 

President 

(W. Gruver) 

SPTF3 4/05 

31/12/05 

• Operations Committee 

(OpCom) established to 

process key operational 

issues 

• Strategic Planning and 

Governance Committee 

established to develop 

recommendations on 

governance issues 

P 4.2.3 Improve regional representation on BoG 

President 

(W. Gruver) 

SPTF3 4/05 

31/10/05 

• Member from China 

appointed to fill vacancy 

on BoG 

• Nominations encouraged 

for members-at-large from 

under-represented regions 

• Coordinators appointed 

from Asia and Europe 

• Four VPs from Asia elected 

for 2006 

P 4.2.4 

T 4.2.4.1 

P 4.2.5 

Investigate reorganizing SMC 

organization model 

Investigate alternative operational 

organizational models (e.g., matrix 

organizations) 

Clarify FOI to improve society identity 

and 

Treasurer 

(D. Kotak) 

Treasurer 

(D. Kotak) 

SPTF3 4/05 

30/4/06 

SPTF3 4/05 

31/10/05 

SPTF3 4/05 31/12/05 

• On-hold 

• On-hold 

• Vision, mission and core 

values were developed

communication of FOI to membership 

President 

(W. Gruver) 

• Revised SMC website 131 

completed and on line. 

• Revised eNewsletter 

format completed and on 

line. 

P 4.2.6 

O 4.3 

P 4.3.1 

Increase knowledge of IEEE governance an 

activities among BoG members 

Ensure appropriate financial operations 

for sound governance 

Assure IEEE recommended reserve level 

is satisfied 

President 

(W. Gruver) 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning & 

Finance 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning & 

Finance 

SPTF3 4/05 31/12/05 

SPTF3 4/05 

SPTF3 4/05 

Annually 

during 

February 

• BoG Strategic Planning 

Retreat organized 

• Utilizing web based 

agendas for BoG, ExCom, 

and SPR meetings. 

• Frequent e-mail updates 

from President on key 

decisions and issues, e.g., 

Systems Council 

• President-elect and officers 

invited to TAB meetings 

• On-going 

P 4.3.2 

Establish reasonable volunteer expense 

reimbursement policy 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning & 

Finance 

SPTF3 4/05 9/10/2005 

• A policy was approved at 

the Oct. BoG Meeting 

O 4.4 Constitution and By-Laws update 

P 4.4.1 

A draft to be ready for the 4/07 ExCom 

meeting 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning & 

Finance 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning & 

Finance 

SMC 2006 

BoG 

Meeting 

Minutes 

31/08/07 

6/04/07 

• Change from one VP(TA) 

to 3 VP(TA)s 

• The EICs become voting 

members of BoG, bot no 

longer voting members of 

ExCom 

• Formalize email voting 

• Best practices including 

integration of student

activities into conferences, 132 

web page design and 

broad international 

representation 

P 4.4.2 

P 4.4.3 

O 4.5 

P 4.5.1 

P 4.5.2 

Submit proposed amendment to the TAB 

and the General manger of IEEE for 

approval 

Publish amendment in the eNewsletter 

for 60 days before it goes into effect 

Constitution and By-Laws update on IEEE 

TAB ‘Five Must Haves” 

A draft to be ready for the 10/07 ExCom 

meeting 

Submit proposed amendment to the TAB 

and the General manger of IEEE for 

approval 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning & 

Finance 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning & 

Finance 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning & 

Finance 

IEEE TAB 

Feb 2007 

memo on 

C&BL “5 

Must 

Haves” 

25/05/07 

30/06/07 

31/12/07 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning & 

7/10/07 

Finance 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning & 

Finance 15/10/07 

• Submitted to the TAB on 

3/5/07 and approved by 

TAB on 25/5/07 

• Announcement was sent 

to eNewsletter on 

15/06/07 for a 60-days 

notification period 

requirement. Since no 

objection is received as of 

31/08/07, the amended 

Constitutions and By-Laws 

now goes in to effect. 

• Quorum 

• Voting and Proxy Voting 

• Nominations and 

Appointments Committee 

• Petition signature 

requirements 

Insertion of “IEEE” before 

“Executive Director” 

P 4.5.3 

Publish amendment in the eNewsletter 

for 60 days before it goes into effect 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning & 

Finance 

31/10/07



Goal 5: Planning 


133 


Number 


G 5 Strategic and Operational Planning 

O 5.1 

P 5.1.1 

T 5.1.1.1 

Maintain ongoing Tactical and 

Operational Plans 

Develop, implement, and maintain SMC 

vision, mission, and value statements 

Evaluate potential problems and suggest 

solutions associated with incubating 

other societies and councils 

P 5.1.2 Develop a Tactical and Operational Plan 

P 5.1.3 

Develop an operations manual for the 

SMC Society 

Leader/Cham 

pion 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning 

(J. Adams) 

Chair SOIC 

(K. Hipel) 

Chair STPF 

(I. 

Engelson) 

SPTF Chair 

(I. 

Engelson) 

STPF Chair 

(I. 

Engelson) 

VP Long 

Range 

Planning 

(J. Adams) 

Source 

SPTF3 4/05 

SPTF3 4/05 

Deadline 

(dd/mm/yr) 

SPTF3 4/05 9/10/05 

SPTF3 4/05 1/10/05 

SPTF3 4/05 31/10/05 

SPTF3 4/05 31/12/06 


Date (status, 


• Task completed on July 

16 during SPTF meeting. 

It was presented for 

review and approved by 

the BoG during the 

October 2005 SP retreat 

and BoG meeting. 

• This issue was discussed 

at the SP Retreat on Oct 

8, 2005. 

• The Tactical and 

Operational Plan (TOP) 

was completed on July 16 

and turned over to the 

SOIC for implementation. 

• Conferences document 

has been discussed and 

submitted for posting on 

SMC Website. 

• I forgot to check on 

membership and Tech 

Activities documents.

P 5.1.4 

Verify financial viability of the SMC 


Treasurer 

(D. Kotak) 

SPTF3 4/05 

• On-going based 134 upon 

feedback from the BoG 

SP Retreat on Oct. 8, 

2005.



Goal 6: Technical Activities 

August 31, 2007 

135 


G 6 

O 6.1 

P 6.1 


T 6.1.3 

Ensure Sound Technical 

Activities 

Develop and restructure 

technical activities 

Sunset obsolete technical 

committees 

Redefine the Role of TC 

Steps 1 and 2 were done. 

Step 3 is moved to T.6.3.6 

VP Technical 

Activities 

VP Technical 

Activities 

VP Technical 

Activities 

VP-TA and 

TC Web Editor 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

Deadline 

(mm/dd/yr) 

9/30/2006 

9/30/2006 

6/30/06 

5/30/06 

Done 

Summary of Progress to Date (status, 


Done. 

Step 3 in T6.1.3 is moved to T.6.3.6 

• Consult TC chairs, BoG, and OpCom 

members on changing the role of 

TCs, i.e., Special Interest Groups 

Status: 

Step 1: Announce the concept and 

collect comments for TC 

characteristics: Done in 2005. 

Step 2: Encourage SMCS members to 

join TCs by promoting TC activities to 

the public: will be Done by TC 

Introduction web pages in January, 

2006. 

Step 3: Develop IT tools that help TC 

activities 

This Step 3 is moved to T.6.3.6. 

P 6.2 

Develop new and revitalize 

existing technical 

committees to provide 

Society products and 

services 

VP Technical 

Activities 

SPTF3 

4/05 

8/30/06 

• Will start project in mid August. 

• Initial draft plan ready by 8/05. 

Report: This task will be postponed 

to the middle of January, 2006 due to 

Seppo’s overloaded commitments.

T 6.2.1 Develop new TCs 

T 6.2.2 

T 6.2.3 

Review current process of 

creating new TCs 

Develop mechanisms for 

Identifying potential new 

TCs 

VP Technical 

Activities 

S. Ovaska 

S. Ovaska 

T 6.2.4 Revitalize existing TCs S. Ovaska 

T 6.2.5 

P 6.3 

T 6.3.4 

TC & SMCS promotion at 

SMC2006 

Increase TC involvement in 

all society activities 

(conferences, membership, 

and publications) 

Assess effectiveness of TC 

website 

VP-TA and VP- 

Membership 

H. Yan 

H. Yan 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

SPTF3 

4/05 

1/31/06 

Done 

1/31/06 

Done 

Done 

10/12/06 

done at 

SMC2006 

SPTF3 

4/05 Done 

SPTF3 

4/05 

Done 

Following establishing Five new 136TC's 

in 2006, 

the below TC was established in 

April, 2007 

TC on Enterprise Information 


Besides, we are developing two other 

TC's now. 

Status: 

S. Ovaska suggested "strategyoriented 

approach fused with 

Human-oriented approach" for 

creating new TCs in his report on 

1/17/06 

Status: 

S. Ovaska proposed the “TC Poster 

Session” for the annual SMC 

conferences to awake the interest of 

current and potental TC members, as 

well as to bring up ideas for new TCs 

Status: 

See above 

Have an event to increase TC 

members and SMCS membership with 

the joint VP-Membership 

We are planning same event at 

SMC2007. 

TCs have been asked to update their 

web pages, clearly stating their 

objectives and past and future 

activities. New TC web pages have 

been created and maintained. The 

web pages were formatted as posters 

and presented at SMC06 to promote 

TC activities. 

TCs have increased involvement in 

conference activities, especially in 

terms of publications, organizing SMC 

supported conferences and 

workshops and special sessions at 

the annual SMC conference. In the 

future, there is a need to seek 

industrial and commercial

sponsorships of TC activities. 137 

T 6.3.5 Prepare future plan H. Yan 

T 6.3.6 IT support for TC Activities 

H. Yan and 

H. Takagi 

SPTF3 

4/05 Done 

12/31/06 

9/30/07 

done 

T 6.3.7 TC members service from TC TC Coordinator 12/31/06 

P 6.4 Technical map 

T 6.4.1 

T 6.4.2 

T 6.4.3 

T 6.4.4 

T 6.4.5 

Analyzing technical trend in 

Transactions 

Analyzing technical trend in 

Conference sessions/papers 

making a technical map in 

SMC area 

TC creation based on the 

technical map 

Special Issues based on the 

technical map 

VP-TA and VP- 

Publications 

Y. Ohsawa, M. 

Berthold, S. 

Tsumoto, 

M.Siddique 

someone 

someone 

Editor-In-Chiefs 

9/30/07 

12/31/06 

9/30/07 

7/31/07 

9/30/07 

9/30/07 

12/31/07 

9/30/07 

12/31/07 

Feedback has been sought from TC 

chairs and BoG members. 

Improvements in TC web page and 

poster design have been made. 

Developing IT tools for TA Activities: 

on-line conference systems, mailing 

lists, BBS, etc. 

As conclusion, we introduced a 

commercial web conference system 

in 2007 and use other IT tools of free 

software such as Google 

Doc&Spreadsheet, Google Group, and 

others. 

Develop what TCs can provide their 

TC members to recruit new TC 

members 

Status: We collected analytical data 

of SMC trend from M. Berthold and M. 

Siddique. I got similar data from S. 

Tsumoto but asked to re-try. 

It will start after we collect all text 

mining results mentioned in the 

above. 

It will start after the 6.4.3 ends. 

It will start after the 6.4.3 ends.



Goal 7: Society Review/Periodical Review 


138 


G 7 

O 7.1 

Number 

P 7.1.1 


Society Review/Periodical 

Review 

Prepare a draft of the TAB 

Society Review Committee 

Report Form smc-Nov06- 

src 

Soc Review Committee & 

Report 

P 7.1.2 Field of Interest 

P 7.1.3 

P 7.1.4 

Mission, Core Values & 

Vision 

Strategic Goals, 

Objectives & Palns 

P 7.1.5 Governance 

P 7.1.5.1 BoG 

P 7.1.5.2 ExCom 

Leader/Champio 

n 

VP Long Range 

Planning & 

Finance 

President/VP 

LRPF 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Source 

Deadline 

(mm/dd/yr 

) 

smc28-Nov06-src 09/29/06 

smc28-Nov06-src 

Smc28-Nov06-src 







P 7.1.5.3 Technical Committees H. Takagi Smc28-Nov06-src 


Date (status, 


complete 

08/11/06 Task completed after 

gone through a number 

of revisions in 

responses to BoG 

members’ comments 

08/11/06 complete 







08/11/06 complete

P 7.1.6 

Interaction with TAB & 

IEEE 

Larry Hall/Bill 

Gruver/D. 

Yeung 


P 7.1.7 Conference T.T. Lee Smc28-Nov06-src 

P 7.1.8 Publications M. Berthold Smc28-Nov06-src 

P 7.1.8.1 

Financial & Subscription 

Information 

Berthold/Dilip 


P 7.1.9 membership MuDer Jeng Smc28-Nov06-src 

P 7.1.9.1 

S/C Dues & Other Member 

Costs 

MuDer Jeng 


P 7.1.10 Chapters MuDer Jeng Smc28-Nov06-src 

P 7.1.11 Education MuDer Jeng Smc28-Nov06-src 

P 7.1.12 Student Activities MuDer Jeng Smc28-Nov06-src 

P 7.1.13 Globalization Efforts MeDer Jeng Smc28-Nov06-src 

P 7.1.14 Awards & Recognition Mike Smith Smc28-Nov06-src 












139 

P 7.1.15 Finances 

P 7.1.16 Web Site 

P 7.1.17 

P 7.1.18 Summary 

P 7.1.19 

Long Term Goals/New 

Directions 

Best Practices. Actions, & 

Practices 

P 7.1.20 Previous Review 

O 7.2 

Review the Society 

Review document 

D. Yeung/Dilip 

Kotak 

Bill 

Gruver/Hong 

Yan 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Larry Hall/Mike 

Smith/D. 

Yeung 







Larry Hall Smc28-Nov06-src 09/23/06 







complete

O 7.3 

O 7.4 

O 7.5 

O 7.6 

O 7.7 

O 7.8 

O 7.9 

Revise the Society Review 

document & ready for BoG 

comments 

Produce the final version 

of the Society Review 

document 

Submit the final version to 

TAB SRC 

Receive Society Review 


Response to Society 

Review Report 

Receive Periodical Review 


Response to Periodical 

Review Report 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung) 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Larry Hall/D. 

Yeung 

Michael 

Berthold/EICs 

Larry 

Hall/Michael 

Berthold/EICs 

Smc28-Nov06-src 09/23/06 

Smc28-Nov06-src 09/23/06 

Smc28-Nov06-src 09/23/06 

Smc28_Nov06_from_sr 

c 

Smc28_Nov06_from_sr 

c 

smc28_nov06_from_PR 

C 

smc28_nov06_from_PR 

C 

01/05/07 

01/24/07 

03/01/07 

03/16/07 

complete 

complete 

complete 

complete 

complete 

complete 

Complete 

140

1400 1420 Membership and Student Activities Committee report, key points 

and motions (MuDer Jeng) 

141

142 

SMC VP Membership Report 

MuDer Jeng 


Objectives 

• Objective 1: Enhance SMC relevance to industry 

• Objective 2: Enhance SMC relevance to IEEE members world-wide 

• Objective 3: Enhance relevance & value of SMC membership to students 

• Objective 4: Enhance relevance of membership to GOLD members 

• Objective 5: Improve chapter development program and activities 



o Hold a meeting of committee members at 2007 IEEE IRI to discuss 

issues for getting industry more involved in our society. 


o To implement the membership recruitment program, we will hold a 

membership promotion exhibition at SMC2007. 

o We will cooperate with VP Technical Activities to hold a 

membership recruitment/technical activities session at SMC2007. 

o 73 submissions have been received for the SMC logo contest. A 

winner and a runner-up will be selected. 


o We will continue the tradition of holding a student paper competition 

at SMC2007. 

• More than 200 papers were nominated for this award. Amir 

Aghda, the SMC 2007 Awards Committee Chair, has 

selected ten of them based on review scores and comments. 

14 researchers with different backgrounds have been invited 

to be the panel of the judge of the second review. Finally five 

people accepted the invitation; one of them withdrew later for 

medical reasons. 

o 4 new chapters have established since the last report was 

submitted: 

• Hebei University, China 

• HIT Shenzhen Graduate School, China 

• National Taiwan Ocean University, Taiwan 

• National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, 

Taiwan 

o 5 student branch chapter are under development: 

• Chongqing University, China 

• National Central University, Taiwan 

• Sun Yat-Sen University, China 

• South China University of Technology, China 

• University of Waterloo, USA

143 

o We will establish a Student Activities Committee chaired by the 

Student Activities Coordinator, and its members include all SMC 

student branch chapter chairs. Its annual meeting is held at the 

SMC annual conference and has a representative at the BoG. 

o We will set up a webpage under the SMC website for student 

members. The design template of SMC student website will be 

ready by September. It will be similar to the SMC website. 

November 2007 will be the targeted completion date. This provides 

a channel for advertising the student activities and enhances the 

interaction between the society and the students. 

o To promote society student membership and activities at 

conferences, we will set up a student booth at SMC07. The student 

booth at SMC 2007 will be similar to the one that was used at 

ICMLC 2007. 


o To promote GOLD member activities, we will establish a GOLD 

member committee chaired by the GOLD Member Coordinator, and 

includes the Student Activities Coordinator and other proactive 

GOLD members. 

o We will provide an email-based forum to support GOLD members: 

periodic announcement of information relevant to SMC GOLD 

members, web-based information for GOLD members, and a 

process to handle GOLD member-related feedback and complaints. 


o Develop new chapters: 

5 new chapters have established since the last report was 

submitted, i.e., COASTAL LOS ANGELES SECTION JOINT 

CHAPTER, GUANGZHOU CHAPTER, NANJING SECTION 

CHAPTER, Seoul Section chapter and SMC Student 

Chapter at National Taiwan University of Science and 

Technology 

• 3 chapters are in the final approval stage to be established, 

i.e., Central Virginia Joint Chapter with EMBS; Albuquerque 

Section Joint Chapter with EMBS; and Detroit Chapter 

• The inactive Connecticut chapter will co-join the active CS 

chapter there. The process of changing the chapter status is 

undertaken. 

• 9 potential chapters are under development, which have a 

broad coverage in Americas, Asia and Europe. The detailed 

status is listed below. 

• Americas 

1. Mexico: its petition form with 12 member 

signatures has been completed and is waiting for 

the section approval.

2. Orlando area: with the help from Larry Hall, we 

plan to establish an Orlando area chapter with the 

base in Tampa. 

3. Arkansas: the original plan to have a SMC 

chapter in Central Arkansas is changed to extend 

this chapter to the entire Arkansas due to the 

shortage of IEEE members. The chapter petition 

is in the initial stage of collecting signatures. 

• Asia 

1. DAEJEON joint chapter with EMBS: the petition 

form with 12 member signatures has been 

completed and is waiting for the section approval. 

2. Bangalore chapter, Xi’an chapter, and Tainan 

chapter: the organizers are collecting member 

signatures for the chapter petition. 

• Europe 

1. Portugal chapter: the organizer is collecting 

member signatures currently. And the group at 

the local level is sponsoring the EPLA 2007 

conference. 

2. UK chapter: the petition is in the stage of 

collecting member signature. 

o Revitalize inactive chapters 

• Orlando Chapter: Dr. Mike Demblewski from the Orlando 

area had worked on the revitalization of the Orlando chapter. 

It turned out that most of the responses to his inquiry of 

supports were coming from the members in Tampa. After 

some conversations with Mike and Larry Hall, we have 

decided to have an Orlando area chapter with the base in 

Tampa. Currently, we are seeking the possibility of having 

this chapter joint with EMBS. 

• Drs. Suresh Chalasani and Jay Bayne have expressed the 

interests in revitalizing the Milwaukee Chapter. After some 

exploration, they did not get any support from our members 

there. Dr. Bayne indicated that the primary interests in 

Milwaukee are in biotechnology and manufacturing. So, we 

have been helping Jay get in touch with the Milwaukee 

section and the EMBS Chapter there. We try to co-join with 

the EMBS Chapter. 

• With the help of the Connecticut Section, we decided to cojoin 

the existing CS chapter. The current chair of the CS 

chapter, Dr. Sanjiv Rai is working on changing the chapter 

status. 

o Enhance communications among SMC Membership Committee, 

chapter chairs and SMC members 

144

• We continue to update all chapter information on the SMC 

website, including their recent activities. 

• We continue to introduce our local chapters and their 

activities in the SMC e-newsletters 

o Promote chapter activities 

• We provide financial support to local chapters, especially the 

newly established ones, helping them invite speakers, 

establish their newsletter and/or website. 

• We established the Outstanding SMC Chapter Award and 

set its operating procedure. 

145

1420 – 1430 Discussion of opportunities for improvements, retaining and 

attracting members, student programs, industrial activities (all) 

146


147

1500 - 1630 Strategic Planning (Larry Hall and ExCom Members) 

148

1630 - 1710 Nominations report and election of Vice Presidents (Bill Gruver) 

149

Nominations Report 

Bill Gruver, Nominations Committee Chair 


1. Nominations Committee 

As specified under Article I of the SMCS Bylaws, the Nominations Committee consists of 

the four most recent past presidents of the SMC Society: Bill Gruver, Mike Smith, Pierre 

Borne, and Dick Saeks. The Nominations Committee was chaired by the Jr. Past 

President, Bill Gruver. 

2. Nominees for 2008-09 Vice President Positions 

Candidates for Vice President positions were submitted to the Nominations Committee, 

and they were evaluated based on their 

• Contributions to the profession 

• Contributions to the SMC Society 

• Contributions to the IEEE 

• Qualifications for the position 

Based on nominations from the BoG and the general membership, the following slate of 

candidates is submitted for 2008-09 Vice Presidents: 

VP Conferences and Meetings 

Edward Tunstal 

Mengchu Zhou 


Michael Berthold 

Xizhao Wang 

VP Membership and Student Activities 

T.T. Lee 

Stuart Rubin 

VP Long Range Planning and Finance 

Ljiljana Trajkovic 

VP Systems Science and Engineering 

Philip Chen 

Wil Thissen 

VP Human-Machine Systems 

Ellen Bass 

VP Cybernetics 

Dimitar Filev 

Hideyuki Takagi

The election of the 2008-09 Vice Presidents will be held by secret ballot at the BoG 

Meeting on October 7, 2007. There are 29 voting members of the BoG which include the 

Sr. Past President, Jr. Past President, President, President-elect, 7 Vice Presidents, 3 

EICs, and 15 Members-at-Large. A majority vote of the voting members present 

(including proxies) shall be necessary for the conduct of business. The vote of a member 

of the BoG may be assigned to a proxy by written statement that is sent to the Secretary 

and a copy to the Nominations Chair prior to the BoG Meeting. No individual shall hold 

more than one proxy not counting any vote he/she may have in his/her own right. 

3. Nominees for 2008-10 Members-at-Large 

Candidates for 2008-10 Members-at-Large were submitted to the Nominations 

Committee, and these were evaluated based on the following: 

• Contributions to the profession 

• Contributions to the SMC Society 

• Contributions to the IEEE 

Taking into account the nominations from the BoG and other SMCS members to date, 

the following slate of candidates has been developed for 2008-10 Members-at-Large: 

• Jian Chen, China 

• Shyi-Ming Chen, Taiwan 

• Irving Engelson, USA 

• Ali Hessami, England 

• Mark Last, Israel 

• Seong-Whan Lee, Korea 

• Mark Mattingley-Scott, Germany 

• Ferat Sahin, USA 

• Hong Yan, Hong Kong 

• Hong Zhang, USA 

Until November 7, 2007, petition candidates will also be considered for which the 

signatures of 2% of SMCS active members are sent to the Secretary and a copy to the 

Nominations Chair. 

During the latter half of November, the IEEE will distribute ballots that may be submitted 

either electronically on the web or by mail. Five candidates receiving the highest number 

of votes will be elected.

Candidates for 2008-09 Vice Presidents 

CANDIDATE FOR VP MEMBERSHIP AND STUDENT ACTIVITIES 

Edward Tunstal – For more than 20 years I have contributed to the profession as a 

robotics and control researcher and practitioner. I maintain expertise in areas of robotics 

and intelligent computer-based systems with current research interests in mobile robot 

navigation, autonomous control, cooperative robotics, and applications of computational 

intelligence to autonomous systems synthesis and control. I have authored/co-authored 

over 100 journal, book chapter, and conference publications in these areas and I have 

edited 3 books and several journal special issues. During the past 18 years I have 

contributed professionally as researcher, technology developer, lead systems engineer, 

and manager of NASA research and space flight projects. My professional efforts have 

resulted in a diversity of contributions recognized by issuance of numerous NASA 

achievement and honor awards for robotics research innovations as well as robotic 

spacecraft flight system development and operations of Mars rover missions. 

Over the past 12 years, I have contributed to the IEEE by serving as a referee for IEEE 

Transactions (on SMC, Robotics and Automation, Fuzzy Systems, Neural Networks, and 

Evolutionary Computation) and as a member of IEEE international conference program 

committees, including service as Program Co-Chair for IEEE SMC 2005, Local 

Organizations Chair for IEEE ICRA 2008, and General Co-Chair for IEEE SMC 2011.I 

am an active member of the SMCS Technical Committee on Robotics and Intelligent 

Sensing and the Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Space 

Robotics. My most recent substantial contributions to the SMCS have been as 

Conference Coordinator as described above and as Program Co-Chair of the annual 

IEEE SMC conference in 2005 for which I managed and coordinated efforts of an 

international committee of over 200 members and contributed to several technical 

program quality enhancements including re-introduction of tutorials and focus on 

increased involvement of industry participants. 

Candidate Statement: I should be elected Vice President of Conferences and Meetings 

because of relevant, recent, and first hand experience, familiarity with SMCS conference 

policies and procedures, and demonstrated organizational and communication skills. For 

the past 2 years I have served as a SMCS Board of Governors Member-at-Large in the 

appointed role of Conference Coordinator in support of the Vice President for 

Conferences and Meetings (VPCM). In this capacity, I have been directly involved in 

processing requests and approvals for technical co-sponsorship of many SMC related 

conferences within and outside of IEEE.I have also coordinated the approval processes 

for proposal submitted to the VPCM for financial sponsorship and co-sponsorship by the 

SMCS. This involved direct interaction with members of the SMCS Conference and 

Meetings Committee and Board of Governors regarding conference proposal and budget 

reviews, and direct interfaces with conference organizers to ensure compliance with 

SMCS policies and procedures for conference organization. My service as Conference 

Coordinator has enabled the Society to transition from processing and approving 

conference sponsorships at one of two semi-annual face to face meetings to doing the 

same for may more conferences via a more streamlined and distributed process enabled 

by electronic communication. My efforts, organizational and communication skills, and 

attention to detail has facilitated the success of the electronic approval process, enabling 

greater efficiency and productivity in the Society’s support of repeating conferences as

well as new IEEE conferences of technical importance to the Society. During my service 

as Conference Coordinator I have also supported the VPCM in initiating a regular 

practice of collecting conference and meeting statistics for sponsored conferences that 

comprise data on actual conference outcomes of use to the Society and the IEEE. With 

this experience I have become familiar with strengths and weaknesses of our current 

policies or procedures and areas of support that would better serve experienced and 

new conference organizers. 

If elected, I would contribute to SMCS by chairing the Conferences and Meetings 

Committee in its formulation, guidance and evaluation of SMCS policies and programs 

regarding conferences and meetings. I would help to encourage the authorship and 

presentation of papers in the fields of interest of the SMCS, prepare recommendations 

for new conferences and organizing committees, and continue to help coordinate SMCS 

technical meeting activities .I would work as needed with other SMCS VPs and 

committees to plan, execute, and sponsor special interest meetings and workshops. 

Finally, I would maintain our current strengths in coordinating and managing conference 

and meeting activities while concentrating on eliminating weaknesses of our current 

practices to enhance the benefits of such activities to the Society and the IEEE. 

As Vice President of Conferences and Meetings, I will contribute to fostering progression 

of documented technical advances in SMC fields of interest from conference 

proceedings, to SMCS Transactions, and into practice for the benefit of society. I will 

provide results-oriented service, attention to detail, and dedication to achieving the goals 

of the SMCS and its membership. 

CANDIDATE FOR VP CONFERENCES AND MEETINGS 

Mengchu Zhou has been an Assistant, Associate and Full professor for the past 17 

years. He made numerous contributions to his research, teaching and service. He is a 

world-wide recognized expert in the area of Petri nets, discrete event systems, 

manufacturing automation, and life-cycle engineering. He published over 100 journal 

papers (majority at IEEE Transactions), over 150 conference proceeding papers, and 7 

books (monographs and edited volumes). He was invited to lecture in Australia, Canada, 

China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, and USA. 

Dr. Zhou has led or participated in over 30 research and education projects with total 

budget over $10M, funded by National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, 

Engineering Foundation, New Jersey Science and Technology Commission, and 

industry. He was the recipient of NSF’s Research Initiation Award, CIM University-LEAD 

Award by Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Perlis Research Award by NJIT, 

Humboldt Research Award for US Senior Scientists, Leadership Award and Academic 

Achievement Award by Chinese Association for Science and Technology-USA, Asian 

American Achievement Award by Asian American Heritage Council of New Jersey, 

Outstanding Contribution Award by IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) 

Society, and is a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE SMC Society. He was elected as Fellow 

of IEEE in 2003. 

Dr. Zhou is serving as Managing Editor of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and 

Cybernetics : Part C, General Chair of 2006 IEEE International Conference on

Networking, Sensing and Control, General Co-Chair of 2006 IEEE SMC annual 

conference, Founding General Co-Chair of 2004 IEEE International Conference on 

Networking, Sensing and Control, General Co-Chair of 2003 SMC annual conference, 

Program Co-Chair of 2001 IEEE SMC annual conference, Program Chair of 1998 IEEE 

SMC annual conference, and Program Vice-Chair of 1996 SMC annual conference. In 

the past dozen of years, he contributed to SMC Society in many ways. He was the 

frequent session organizers for almost every SMC annual conference since 1990. He 

served as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: 

Part A and Part B. He was the founding Chair of Discrete Event Systems Technical 

Committee of IEEE SMC Society. He was elected SMC Society BoG member twice. He 

served the Program or Organizing Committee for many IEEE SMC Society sponsored 

conferences. 

In addition to his service to the IEEE SMC Society, he contributed to IEEE via his many 

volunteering activities. He was Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics and 

Automation from 1997 to 2000 and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on 

Automation Science and Engineering since its inception in 2004, and currently Associate 

Editor of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. He was Program Chair of 1997 

IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, and 

Guest Editors for IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, and IEEE Transactions on 

Semiconductor Manufacturing. He chairs the Semiconductor Manufacturing Automation 

Technical Committee of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and is serving as the 

General Chair of 2008 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and 

Engineering. 

Candidate Statement: I have a vast amount of conference organization experience and 

well understand how to plan, organize and run a successful conference. I have worked 

in various capacities for IEEE, non-IEEE, international, national and regional 

conferences and events. The positions I have held included: Program Committee 

members, Organizing Committee members, Advisory Committee member, Steering 

Committee member, Session Chairs, Session Organizers, Registration Chair, Local 

Arrangement Chair, Publicity Chair, Registration Chair, Organized Session Chair, Track 

Chair, Advisory Committee Chair, Program Chair, and General Chair. I have networked 

widely with many professionals within SMC and IEEE and outside. I have also been 

dedicated and highly responsive. If elected, I will ensure as much as possible the 

success of every conference sponsored by IEEE SMC Society by providing timely 

guidance and suggestions to solve any problem the conference organizers may 

encounter to my best effort. I am willing to coach new conference organizers to plan and 

successfully hold a conference. I am also willing to help the SMC members, especially 

TC Chairs, to initiate new conferences and workshops. I will certainly lead the 

Conferences and Meetings Committee (CMC) to perform its duty effectively and 

efficiently. 

CANDIDATE FOR VP PUBLICATIONS

Michael Berthold has been a member of IEEE since 1994 and a member of the SMC 

Board of Governors since 2002. Since 2005 I am VP Publications for SMC. In the past I 

was president of NAFIPS, where I have pushed for the society’s electronic presence. I 

have been on the editorial board from the beginning of IDAJ, the first fully electronic 

journal published by Elsevier Science in 1998. I was also editor of the first electronically 

available LNCS volume in 1997. I am currently full professor and hold the Nycomed- 

Chair for Bioinformatics and Information at Konstanz University, Germany. 

During the past years I have been a founding member of the German chapter of SMC 

and I was involved (as General or Program Co-Chair) in a number of SMC co-sponsored 

conferences: CompLife05 and Complife06 as well as NAFIPS-07. 

Candidate Statement: Scientific publications have started to undergo dramatic changes 

in the past couple of years. Electronic availability is becoming increasingly important for 

the impact of articles and a recent investigation has shown that articles that are available 

freely online are much more likely to be cited. One reasons is that a lot of literature 

research is now done online and not by people actually sitting in libraries anymore. If a 

certain article is not quickly retrieved online another, similar one will be used instead. 

This has two dramatic impacts on the societies within IEEE: 

• the way revenues are calculated and distributed to societies no longer depends on 

the number of physical subscriptions but on rather complicated formulas combining 

subscriptions and download indicators. Note that these indicators are easy to 

manipulate, hard to understand and monitor and even harder to put into relation to 

scientific impact factors. SMC in particular will need to learn to monitor their “financial 

impact factors” carefully to avoid ugly financial surprises. 

• IEEE’s current policy is still hindering free access for online literature searches by 

restricting access to members only, offering no convenient method for IEEE 

members to have access to the entire IEEE library (due to the fragmentation into – 

sometimes competing – societies) and unattractive pricing models for smaller 

universities. Some Open Source business models experiments are encouraged but 

not yet really supported within IEEE. SMCs should be on the forefront of these 

developments to avoid being left behind. Also because, quite likely, successful open 

source avenues will ultimately lead to higher downloads. 

In addition to the above, more technological issues, SMC faces increasing pressure from 

competing societies both openly and via entrenchment of our traditional scope. In order 

to face this pressure SMC will not only need to protect its terrain but better define where 

the society’s core competencies lie. For this we need to carefully monitor the coverage 

of our transactions and determine the scientific but increasingly also financial impact of 

different areas of research. In addition to protecting the lucrative areas of interest we 

need to identify emerging topics to position our transactions ahead of the curve. It will be 

especially crucial to keep these objectives in mind over the coming two years when two 

of our transactions will also undergo changes in leadership (EiC Part A and Part B 

changing in early 2008). 

To address the challenges sketched above, I have, in my role as VP Publications 2006- 

2007 already started and participating in a number of central initiatives (among others): 

• Monitoring and mapping the scope and coverage of our transactions (TopicMap 

project, together with VP TA); 

• Establishment of a personalized member-notification system for appearing articles of 

personal interest (beta test forthcoming); and

• Analysis of download statistics (still ongoing due to numerous legal issues with IEEE 

headquarters and general non responsiveness of IEEE staff) 

Especially the latter two activities require close contacts and collaborations with IEEE 

Headquarters to actually get access to the necessary data. It took me quite some time to 

get in touch with the right people within IEEE and I expect this to help me considerably 

during a possible second term as VP Publications for the IEEE SMC Society. 

CANDIDATE FOR VP PUBLICATIONS 

Xi-Zhao Wang is currently a Member-at-Large on the Board of Governors of IEEE SMC 

Society, Chair of IEEE SMC Technical Committee on Computational Intelligence, and 

Chair of IEEE SMC Baoding Chapter, one of the first SMC chapters to be established in 

China. He has served as General Co-Chair for the SMC technically sponsored IEEE 

International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics for the past 5 years 

(2002 Beijing, 2003 Xian, 2004 Shanghai, 2005 Guangzhou, and 2006 Dalian). Dr. 

Wang is also currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on SMC and has 

previously served on the SMC Board of Governors. He received the SMC Outstanding 

Contribution Award in 2004 for accomplishments in chapter formation and conference 

organization and SMC’s Best Associate Editor Award in 2006 for being recognized as 

the Best Associate Editor of 2005 for exceptional contributions to managing publication 

reviews and providing decisions on them for the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, 

and Cybernetics. 

Dr. Wang received his PhD in computer science from the Harbin Institute of Technology 

in 1998. During 1998-2001 he was a research fellow at the Hong Kong Polytechnic 

University. Since 2002, he has been Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics 

and Computer Science at Hebei University in Baoding, China. Dr. Wang’s professional 

accomplishments during the past five years include the following: 32 publications related 

to his research area; 11 major research projects completed as Principle Investigator or 

Co-PI; supervised 29 PhD and Master students in applied mathematics and computer 

science who graduated, and currently supervising 22 graduate students in the same 

areas; Editorial Board member of the International Journal of Information Science, and 

an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on SMC, Part B: Cybernetics. He has also 

served as a reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on SMC, IEEE Transactions on Neural 

Networks, IEEE Transactions on PAMI, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, Fuzzy 

Sets and Systems, Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, and Information 

Science. 

Candidate Statement: If I am elected as a VP of Publications of SMCS, I will continue 

my contribution more efficiently to the Society in the following three aspects: 

• Promotion of quality of SMCS publications, membership of SMC society in China, 

• Organization of conferences technically sponsored by SMC; 

• Technical Committee and local chapter activities.


T. T. Lee received Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of 

Oklahoma, Norman, in 1975. He is currently President of National Taipei University of 

Technology and has served as Professor in Electrical Engineering, University of 

Kentucky, Dean of Research and Development at National Taiwan University of 

Technology, Chair Professor at National Chiao Tung University, and National Endow 

Chair of Ministry of Education at National Chiao Tung University. He has served on 

numerous editorial boards as associate editor, editor, or editor-in-chief. He is Fellow of 

IEEE, IEE (now IET), and NYAS, respectively. He has served as a Member-at-Large of 

the Board of Governors of the SMC Society. He established the SMC Technical 

Committee of Intelligent Transportation Systems. He has served as Member of 

Technical Program Committee and Member of Advisory Committee for many IEEE 

sponsored international conferences. He founded the International Conference on 

Networking, Sensing and Control in 2004 and served as General Chair, Advisory Co- 

Chair since then. He was General Chair for 2006 IEEE International Conference on 

Systems, Man and Cybernetics. He is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer and currently Vice 

President for Conference and Meetings of SMC Society. 

Candidate Statement: Members are central to the Society. Our officers are elected to 

serve their members. I have a vast amount experience with member services. 

Specifically, to better serve our members and local chapters, with the strong support and 

guidance by Mike, Larry and Bill, we restarted the newsletter in electronic form in 

January 2003. I served as the eNewsletter Editor of the SMC Society for three years. 

With less than $2,000 total budget, we were capable of editing the eNewsletter and 

maintaining the web site. I served as VP of Membership for two years (2004-2005). 

During that period, I worked closely with Bill and Muder in chapter and membership 

development. In addition, we launched our Distinguished Lecturer Program in 2004. 

Both the eNewsletter and Distinguished Lecturer Program are considered important 

benefits for our members. If I elected, I will work closely with VP Conferences and 

Meetings to provide timely services for our members and to form new chapters in many 

regions. 


Stuart H. Rubin (M’88 - SM’00) is a scientist at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems 

Center (SSC) in San Diego. He received the American Chemical Societies (ACS) Award 

for Outstanding Achievement as a high school chemistry student in 1972. He went on to 

receive a BS Magna Cum Laude in business from the University of Rhode Island, 

Kingston, RI in 1975; an MS in industrial and systems engineering from Ohio University 

in Athens, OH in 1977, an MS in computer science from Rutgers University in 

Piscataway, NJ in 1980, and a Ph.D. in computer and information science from Lehigh 

University in Bethlehem, PA in 1988. He became a tenured associate professor of 

computer science at Central Michigan University (CMU) subsequent to a multi-year 

sabbatical (at NOSC, WPAFB, and Arizona State University (ASU)). 

Dr. Rubin discovered and programmed the first known solution of the cryptoarithmetic 

problem in 1979. He was awarded the US Government Certificate of Merit in 1987 for his 

work on the Army’s VHSIC program (1980-1983). He received the Navy Award of Merit 

for Group Achievement in 2002. He was also a NOSC Summer Faculty (1989), an ONT 

Post-Doc Fellow tenured at NOSC (1990-1993), and an AFOSR Summer Faculty

(1995). In 2003, he was awarded the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society’s 

Outstanding Service Award. He received SSC-SD’s Conference Publication of the Year 

Award in 2007. 

Dr. Rubin chairs the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Technical Committee on 

Knowledge Acquisition in Intelligent Systems (http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~chens/ 

SMC_TC/TCwebpageGideline.html). In 2006, he and Professor Chen received the IEEE 

Most Active System, Man, and Cybernetics Technical Committee Award in Taiwan. Dr. 

Rubin is also an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and 

Cybernetics, Part C (Applications) as well as the International Journal of Modeling and 

Simulation, the International Journal of Industrial Engineering (IJIE), the Journal of 

Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics, and the International Journal of Software 

Reuse (IJSR). He is the founder and co-general chair of the IEEE International 

Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI) (http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~iri07/). 

Dr. Rubin previously served on the IEEE Advisory Committee and currently serves on 

the IEEE Board of Governors (BoG). He also serves as the IEEE SMC industrial as well 

as AAAI liaison. 

Candidate Statement: If elected, I will work closely with the SMC president to attract 

the broadest range of technically competent individuals. Our strength, as a society, 

depends on our heterogeneity and our professional competence. 

CANDIDATE FOR VP LONG RANGE PLANNING AND FINANCE 

Ljiljana Trajkovic (S'78 - M'86 - SM'95 - F'05) received the Dipl. Ing. degree from 

University of Pristina, Yugoslavia, in 1974, the M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering 

and computer engineering from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, in 1979 and 1981, 

respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of California 

at Los Angeles, in 1986. 

She is currently a Professor in the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser 

University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. From 1995 to 1997, she was a National 

Science Foundation (NSF) Visiting Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer 

Sciences Department, University of California, Berkeley. She was a Research Scientist 

at Bell Communications Research, Morristown, NJ, from 1990 to 1997, and a Member of 

the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, from 1988 to 1990. Her 

research interests include high-performance communication networks, control of 

communication systems, computer-aided circuit analysis and design, and theory of 

nonlinear circuits and dynamical systems. 

Dr. Trajkovic is currently President of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. She has 

served as a Member-at-Large of the Board of Governors, IEEE Systems, Man, and 

Cybernetics Society (2004 - 2006), SMC Conferences Coordinator (2005), was a 

member of the SMCS Strategic Planning Task Force (2004 - 2005), and contributed to 

the SMCS Tactical and Operational Plan that is currently in effect. She was a member of 

the Board of Governors of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (2001 - 2003 and 

2004 - 2005). She is Chair of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society joint Chapter of the 

Vancouver/Victoria Sections. She was Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on 

Nonlinear Circuits and Systems (1998). She served as General Co-Chair of NOLTA 

2007, Technical Program Co-Chair of SPECTS 2007 and SPECTS 2006, Technical

Program Co-Chair of ISCAS 2005, and Technical Program Chair and Vice General Co- 

Chair of ISCAS 2004. She served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on 

Circuits and Systems: I (2004 - 2005 and 1993 - 1995), the IEEE Transactions on 

Circuits and Systems: II (1999 - 2001 and 2002 - 2003), and the IEEE Circuits and 

Systems Magazine (2001 - 2003). Dr. Trajkovic is a Fellow of the IEEE. 

Candidate Statement: There are growing expectations within IEEE that volunteers need 

to generate financial gains (surplus/profit) from various IEEE membership activities such 

as conferences, symposia, workshops, and local technical meetings. Members and 

volunteers are often expected to serve the IEEE, rather than IEEE serving its members. 

If elected, I will advocate the goals of the SMC Society within the constraints imposed by 

the IEEE at IEEE Technical Activities Board (TAB) and various administrative meetings. 

I will also work on improving the SMC Society leadership, enhancing services to SMC 

members, emphasizing technical excellence, and establishing closer collaborations with 

other IEEE Societies. 

Leadership: I plan to encourage a change towards a friendly and congenial Society that 

is open, equitable, and accountable to all members. I will work with SMC Society VPs to 

enlist new volunteers from the ranks of all members, including young faculty members 

employed in academia, upcoming practicing engineers employed in industry, and 

prominent researchers who participate in SMC-sponsored conferences and publish in 

SMC journals and transactions. 

Membership services: We need to provide incentives for new members to join the 

Society by reaching to all potential members. The SMC Society needs to establish longterm 

programs to address the needs of its diverse membership across regions. Some 

IEEE members often cannot afford conference registration fees to have their papers 

published in IEEE-sponsored conferences, or the cost of expenses to attend IEEE 

technical meetings. The SMC Society should address this problem by establishing longterm 

strategies for its conferences and workshops that will generate revenues so that we 

could offer financial support to members from less advantaged regions. I plan to 

encourage SMC regional activities by spanning our Distinguished Lecturer Program 

across the boundaries of our Society, by providing incentives to active SMC Chapters 

through additional funding, and by providing Web access to resources, mailing lists, and 

membership databases so that SMC members may be served more effectively. The 

SMC Society also needs to establish grants and incentives to students to attend 

professional conferences, awards for best student conference papers, and online forums 

to help new members learn about resume writing, new job opportunities, available 

postdoctoral positions, new academic positions, and calls for grant proposals. 

Technical excellence: The SMC Society needs to attract researchers from the new and 

emerging areas. I will also encourage technical excellence by working to improve the 

quality of SMC-sponsored publications and by improving the paper review process, and 

by providing the online resources for our editorial boards, enhancing the reviewers 

database, improving the electronic review system, by recognizing diligent reviewers, and 

by establishing corporate memory of our sponsored and co-sponsored conferences 

(acceptance rates, number of papers, number of attendees). 

Collaboration with other IEEE Societies and Councils: The SMC Society Field of Interest 

is broad and thus our Society is often seen as too “academic” with little relevance to 

industry. New research topics (bio-engineering, life sciences, medical applications, and

wireless communications) are often addressed by other IEEE Societies before they are 

included in technical events sponsored by the SMC Society. We need to support and 

encourage new initiatives by providing financial support to workshops and symposia 

sponsored by the Society. Our Society would also benefit by fostering strategic 

relationships with other Societies, especially those that were originally incubated by the 

SMC Society. This may be achieved through co-sponsored technical meetings and 

publications and by encouraging collaboration among Chapters within IEEE Sections. 

CANDIDATE FOR VP SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING 

C. L. Philip Chen received his M.S. degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 

Michigan, U.S.A. in 1985, and his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette, 

Indiana, U.S.A., in 1988, both degrees in Electrical Engineering. He was with Wright 

State University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, from 1989 to 2002 

as an assistant, an associate, and a full professor before he joined the University of 

Texas, San Antonio, where he is currently a Professor and Chair of the Department of 

Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also has been the Associate Dean for 

Research and Graduate Studies of the College of Engineering. 

Dr. Chen has been a visiting research scientist at the Materials Directorate, U.S. Air 

Force Wright Lab. He has been a senior research fellow sponsored by the U.S. National 

Research Council and a research faculty fellow for NASA Glenn Research Center for 

several years. His current research interests include theoretical development in 

computational intelligence, intelligent systems, robotics and manufacturing automation, 

networking, diagnosis and prognosis, life prediction and life-extending control. He is an 

elected IEEE Fellow. 

Dr. Chen has been active in IEEE international conference services and publications. 

Currently, he is a member of IEEE SMC Board of Governors and Treasurer for that 

organization. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on SMC-C and IEEE 

Systems Journal. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu honor societies. He 

is the founding faculty advisor of IEEE Computer society student chapter and faculty 

advisor of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society at the University of Texas at San 

Antonio. 

Candidate Statement: For the last 20 years I have been actively involved in Systems 

Science and Engineering (SSE). During this time, I have been an active IEEE volunteer 

and continue to work in this area. Particularly, I am proud of economizing on many 

media publications in various conference meetings. SSE has played a pivot role in many 

IEEE technical areas. As we all know that Systems, Man, Cybernetics, and Society 

(SMCS) has been always the leading IEEE society in this area and SSE in SMCS will 

continue to maintain this tradition. I will strive to maintain the quality and standards of the 

SSE area for SMCS. 

If elected, I will work diligently with members of the Systems Science and Engineering 

Committee (SSEE) to promote SMCS in the SSE area and conduct technical activities 

specified in SMCS Bylaws 

In particular, as the VP of SSEE, I will seek to support and define the critical and unique 

role of SSE within SMCS.I will distinguish SSE within other IEEE systems related

societies and achieve cooperation between IEEE societies to gain mutual benefit, when 

there is a need. SSEE will coordinate with Technical Committees in the SSE area to 

develop a mechanism of collaboration through current advanced technologies and in the 

SMC annual meeting. In addition, I will solicit ideas and encourage participation in the 

creation of newly emerging SSE technical areas within in the SMCS. 

Active IEEE volunteerism has been an important part of my professional life. I began this 

volunteerism by reviewing many IEEE Transactions and conference papers and as the 

founding advisor for IEEE Computer Society student chapter at Wright State University 

from 1992-2000, I have participated in conference activities in different roles on a 

continuous basis. These include the Tutorials Chair and Technical Committee of the 

1994 IEEE Int'l Conf. on Neural Networks; in the IEEE World Congress on 

Computational Intelligence; Conference Co-Chair of the 1995 and the 1996 Int'l 

Conference on Neural Networks in Engineering; the Technical Committee of 1998- 2000 

and 2002-2005 IEEE/RSJ Int'l Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems; VCD 

Proceedings Chair and Organizing Committee, 2003-2005 for IEEE International 

Conference on Intelligence Robotics and Systems; Organizing Committee of 2001 and 

2006 IEEE Int'l Conference on Robotics and Automation; Publications Chair of 

IEEE/ASME 2005 Int’l Conferences on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics, (AIM 2005); 

Founding Program Co-Chair of 2006 IEEE SMC-System of Systems Engineering 

Conference; and Publications Chair and Organizing Committee of 2007 IEEE 

Automation Science and Engineering Conference. I co-founded three technical 

committees in SMCS -- System of Systems, Information Assurance and Intelligent 

Mobile Communication Systems, and Enterprise Information Systems. I also founded the 

SMC Central Texas Chapter in 2005. This year, we have doubled membership since 

initiation. I also serve as a member of Board of Governors for SMC and currently as 

Treasurer. 

CANDIDATE FOR VP SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING 

Will A. H. Thissen received the M Sc degree in Physics Engineering, and a PhD in 

Systems and Control Engineering, both from Eindhoven University of Technology, 

Netherlands. Subsequently, he worked as an assistant professor and senior scientist at 

the Systems Engineering Department, University of Virginia, United States. After 

returning to the Netherlands, he became head of the Policy Analysis department, Data 

Processing Division, at the Netherlands Ministry for Public Works and Water 

Management. After 5 years he returned to university research and teaching, to become 

a professor in Systems and Policy Analysis, Delft University of Technology. He is 

currently head of the Systems and Policy Analysis department, and co-director of the 

research program on Multi-Actor Systems. His current research interests are in the 

development and testing of systems approaches to the resolution of complex policy and 

design problems in multi-actor settings in which technology plays an important part. 

Particular themes include the modeling and analysis of long-term socio-technical 

transitions with a view to sustainability, dealing with uncertainties in system and policy 

design, and multi-actor/network models, with particular reference to infrastructure 

systems such as in the energy, water, and transport sectors.

He is a member of the IEEE SMC society, the IEEE Engineering Management Society 

(soon to become a council), INFORMS, the IAIA (International Association for Impact 

Assessment), and APPAM (association for Public Policy Analysis and Management). 

Since his graduation, Dr. Thissen has worked on the use of systems concepts, 

approaches and models to the resolution of complex socio-technical issues. He has 

published about a variety of subjects including global modeling, policy analysis for water 

resource management, systems approaches to problem formulation, ICT in the building 

industry, environmental impact assessment, systems engineering education, and 

systems approaches to infrastructures. He was a prime architect and co-founder of the 

successful innovative curriculum in systems engineering, policy analysis and 

management established in 1992 at the Delft University of Technology. He is currently 

co-leading the faculty’s interdisciplinary research program in multi-actor systems, and 

the subprogram on uncertainty and flexibility in infrastructure design and management. 

He has co-edited special issues on systems engineering education in the SMC 

Transactions (part C), and on strategic environmental assessment in Impact 

Assessment and Project Appraisal, and, recently, in the Environmental Impact 

Assessment Review. 

A member of the IEEE SMC society since 1997, he was a member of the AdCom (the 

predecessor of the BOG) from 1997-1999, and a member of the BOG from 2004-2006. 

He served the society as Vice President Publications in 2000-2001. Subsequently, he 

was Vice President Technical Activities in 2002 and 2003. He was General Chair of the 

IEEE SMC 2004 conference held in The Hague which attracted over 1000 participants, 

and resulted in a surplus of over 80K$. Currently, he is co-chairing, with Margot Weijnen, 

the organization of the SMC-sponsored 2008 conference on Infrastructure Systems and 

Services in Rotterdam. 

Candidate Statement: As a candidate for VP Systems Theory and Engineering, I 

contribute a broad background and interest in a variety of systems methods, concepts 

and approaches – ranging from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’. To that, I add managerial and 

organizational experience in a variety of settings, experience in other than IEEE related 

professional societies, and hands–on experience in and knowledge of a diversity of SMC 

organizational fields, including Publications, Technical Activities, and conference 

organization. 

If elected, I will work closely with the editors of the Transactions Parts A and C, and the 

Technical Committee Chairs, to improve the service to our members, and to enhance 

the quality and visibility of the society in this field. This will include stimulation of TC 

activities, stimulation of establishment of new TC’s where opportunities arise that fit the 

SMC profile, and sharpening the focus of our Transactions. 

In my view, it is of particular concern and importance to the future of the SMC society to 

strengthen and increase the visibility (in our publications, conferences and technical 

activities) of those areas in which the society has a certain uniqueness, and has the 

potential to develop this further and become ‘the’ recognized leader. In addition to the 

Human-Machine Systems field, I consider the formidable systems challenges facing 

society in fields like energy provision and consumption, climate change, transport, public 

and private service provision, and security and safety as prime candidates (see also the 

recent article in the SMC Transactions, Part C, by our colleagues Keith Hipel, Mo 

Jamshidi, Jim Tien and Chip White). These challenges relate to the need to adequately

and effectively deal with complexity, to the need to come to a synthesis of perspectives 

and insights from multiple disciplines (not only the technical ones but also the human, 

social and economic ones), and to the possibility and effectiveness of purposeful 

designs or interventions. 

While our society has, at present, a number of active TC’s in this field (such as Conflict 

Resolution, Service Systems, Enterprise Information Systems, Systems of Systems, 

Infrastructure Systems and Services, Homeland Security), their activities are not 

connected well enough and would need significant strengthening and broadening for the 

society to become the recognized leader in the field. 

When elected, while not neglecting the importance of other flourishing specializations, I 

will work with the VP Human-Machine Systems, TC Chairs, editors, and others, to in 

particular further develop this field, and to relate other, more purely systems technology 

oriented activities, to it. Of crucial importance to build momentum and critical mass will 

be to attract researchers and practitioners currently not connected to the SMC society to 

start participating in society activities and publish in our transactions. Another challenge 

is to forge alliances with societies and groups working on similar or related subjects, 

such the IEEE Systems Council, and the IEEE Engineering Management Council – and 

also not IEEE related groups such as INCOSE. 

While these are no simple tasks, they are worth trying! 

CANDIDATE FOR VP HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS 

Ellen Bass: .I have 24 years of industrial and academic experience in the analysis, 

design, and evaluation of systems for air transportation, bioinformatics, healthcare, 

meteorological, radar, and sonar applications. I was a systems engineer for IBM from 

1984-1992 and a research engineer for Search Technology, Inc. from 1995-2002. I am 

currently a member of the faculty of the Department of Systems and Information 

Engineering at the University of Virginia (UVa). My research involves model-based 

approaches to developing decision support systems and training for operators of 

complex real-time systems. I earned the B.S. Eng. in Bioengineering and the B. S. Econ. 

in Finance at the University of Pennsylvania; the M.S. in advanced technology from the 

State University of New York at Binghamton; and the Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from 

the Georgia Institute of Technology. I have authored over 90 technical publications. 

I have been a member of our society since 1998 and a senior member since 2003. I 

have served as an Associate Editor for Part A of the Transactions since 2002. I am a 

member of the Board of Governors and the co-Chair of the Human-Computer Interaction 

technical committee. I continue to serve on the annual SMCS conference program 

committee and in 2003 was the Special Sessions Chair. I was a judge for the Best 

Student Paper competition for IEEE SMC’05. I am increasing student participation 

through my involvement in the IEEE Systems & Information Engineering Design 

Symposium (SIEDS), which focuses on undergraduate design projects. I was the 

SIEDS’03 program co-chair, SIEDS’04 program chair, SIEDS’05 publications chair and 

am the finance chair for SIEDS ‘08. I have written successful grants to help support 

SIEDS financially.

For the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), I am the Program Chair Elect 

for the Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making Technical Group and the faculty 

advisor for the HFES student chapter at UVa. I am a member of the editorial board of the 

journal Human Factors. I am the faculty advisor of Girls Excited about Math and 

Science, an organization where undergraduates mentor middle school girls and engage 

them in math and science. I am a contributing editor for the International Journal of 

Applied Aviation Studies. As part of the duties of the National Academies Aeronautics 

and Space Engineering Board, I reviewed of the Integrated Plan for a Next Generation 

Air Transportation System. I also participated in National Research Council panels to 

review NASA’s Capability Roadmaps. 

Candidate Statement: To improve our society, I, as Vice President for Human Machine 

Systems, would lead the charge to renew the interest in this area. The society used to 

have a major presence in this area but over the years, the interest has waned. With 

renewed emphasis and leadership, 

SMCS can again be a more major player in this area. One major focus will be the human 

machine systems content of our transactions. With respect to the journals, there is an 

incorrect perception that the turnaround (which used to be poor) still is. I would work with 

the Editors of the SMCS Transactions Part A and Part C, and the Vice President of 

Publications to improve this perception and thereby increase quality and amount of 

Human Machine Systems content. This effort would also improve our transactions’ 

impact factors as better articles would be published. I would launch an effort to review 

our transactions’ histories to find people who used to publish human machine systems 

papers in our transactions and work to re-engage them. In addition, I would work with 

the editors, associate editors and technical committees to engage Ph.D. candidates and 

assistant professors who are currently not submitting to our journals and encourage 

them to submit to the journals as well as to review papers. I would encourage the journal 

editors to engage this “new blood” as associate editors. I would work with the Vice 

President of Publications, the editors, the technical committees, and the invited session 

chairs at the conferences to develop special issues on highly relevant topics that would 

improve both our content and our impact factor. I would encourage these special issue 

editors to solicit papers and reviews from people who have not traditionally submitted to 

our journals. 

Another major focus will be to support the human machine systems content at the 

conferences. Because many of the best sessions and workshops are organized by the 

technical groups, I will work with the Vice-President for Technical Activities to increase 

the number of human machine systems related technical committees. To improve the 

quality of the conferences, I will also work with the Vice President of Conferences and 

Meetings, conference organizers and the technical committees to engage good 

reviewers. I have already spoken with potential reviewers and they have told me that 

they are unwilling to review for our conferences because they fear that they will be 

assigned too many papers and papers far outside their expertise areas. Having been a 

reviewer, this is a very fair complaint. I will also work to implement better ways to limit 

the types and numbers of papers new reviewers are assigned. 

Another major area is the lack of human machine systems area participation in the 

distinguished lecturers program. I have already spoken with those inside and outside of 

the society about this omission and it leads to a perception of a lack of commitment by

the society to the human machine systems area. Engaging dynamic distinguished 

lecturers would help to turn this perception around and help with the other concerns 

already discussed above. 

In addition, I will survey the current human machine systems members and determine 

how else to improve our society. 

CANDIDATE FOR VP CYBERNETICS 

Dimitar P. Filev is a Senior Technical Leader in Intelligent Control & Information 

Systems with Ford Research & Advanced Engineering specializing in industrial 

intelligent systems and technologies for control, diagnostics and decision making. He is 

conducting research in systems theory and applications, modeling of complex systems, 

intelligent modeling and control and he has published 3 books, and over 180 articles in 

refereed journals and conference proceedings. He holds 14 granted U.S. patents and 

numerous foreign patents in the area of industrial intelligent systems. Dr. Filev was 

awarded 4 times with the Henry Ford Technology Award for R&D and implementation of 

advanced intelligent control technologies. He is Associate Editor of Int. J. of General 

Systems and Int. J. of Approximate Reasoning. He was Associate Editor of the IEEE 

Trans. on Fuzzy Systems (1996-2005) and Bioautomatica (1987-1991).He has been a 

reviewer for numerous journals and conferences, a program committee member of many 

conferences, general chair of the 2005 NAFIPS Annual Conference and the 2006 IEEE 

Symposium on Evolving Systems. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the 

IEEE Systems, Man & Cybernetics Society. Dr. Filev is a co-founder of the SMC Chapter 

in Michigan in 2007.He chairs the IEEE CIS Task Force on Intelligent Vehicle Systems. 

He is the President of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society 

(NAFIPS). Dr. Filev received his PhD. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Czech 

Technical University in Prague in 1979. 

Candidate Statement: Since its introduction as the "science of control and 

communication in the animal and the machine," (N. Wiener) cybernetics remained one of 

the most fundamental concepts in science and engineering. Cybernetics never 

developed as a separate field with its specific theory, methodology and instrumentarium 

but rather created the foundation for spreading the concepts and ideas of the general 

principles governing systems organization, control, and evolution to other research 

areas. It has significantly influenced and stimulated a wide variety of research disciplines 

related to the broad area of machine intelligence such as control theory, AI, decision 

making, game theory, machine learning, human-machine systems, chaos theory, 

knowledge engineering, soft computing, computational intelligence, etc. This 

foundational function of cybernetics determined the role of the IEEE SMC Society as a 

birthplace of new research fields, scientific communities and societies. We can hardly 

foresee a different role for the cybernetics in the future. Therefore, our efforts in the 

cybernetics chapter of the SMC Society should be focused towards promoting 

metadisciplinary activities and initiatives. 

I believe that the SMC Society that is supposed to support and enforce the cybernetics 

as a fundamental scientific discipline should expand its traditional focus area. In my 

view, this can be realized by expanding the scope, membership and activities of the 

cybernetics chapter of our society in several directions. First, I envision an expansion 

from the hard (mechanical and electrical) engineering systems towards attracting the so-

called soft system area (linguistics, cognitive and emotional intelligence, psychology, 

social networking, to name a few). A brief overview of our cybernetics-related technical 

committees and conference sessions shows that they are mostly targeted towards 

engineering aspects, e.g. computational intelligence, soft computing, internet and media 

computing, but have relatively limited reach to the so-called "second-order cybernetics", 

i.e. the application of cybernetics principles and concepts to social, psychological, life 

sciences, and other soft sciences. New interdisciplinary research topics can significantly 

enrich the cybernetics activities of the SMC society. We can encourage such new 

initiatives by providing special financial support for interdisciplinary symposia and 

workshops that promote this direction of development. Second, I believe a more flexible 

and open strategy of establishing new technical committees and task forces within our 

society can help identify quickly new trends and tendencies in the methods in the 

research related to machine and human intelligence. (For example, the CIS encourages 

the creation of short term (2-3 yrs) task forces focusing on new research topics.) Third, I 

expect that the SMC can only benefit from fostering better collaborative relations with 

other similar societies and institutions from the cybernetics field that are not necessarily 

part of IEEE, e.g., American Society for Cybernetics, European Meetings on Cybernetics 

and Systems Research (EMCSR), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis 

(IIASA), etc. (An example of such partnership is the collaboration between the IEEE 

Control Society and the International Federation on Automatic Control – IFAC.) This can 

be accomplished through co-sponsored joined meetings and publications. 

I am a strong believer in the cross-disciplinary power of cybernetics. I was one of the first 

graduates in the (then) newly established program in Technical Cybernetics at the 

Czech Technical University in Prague in 1977.The ideas of cybernetics as a general 

methodology for describing the principles of regulation along with the concepts of 

systems theory had very significant influence on my research career which has been 

focused on the application of control and information theory to different domains – 

industrial systems, biochemical processes, decision making systems, manufacturing 

processes, vehicle systems, humanoid robots, etc. 

CANDIDATE FOR VP CYBERNETICS 

Hideyuki Takagi -I worked on the cooperative systems of neural networks (NN), fuzzy 

systems (FS), and evolutionary computation (EC), and made significant contribution to 

the start of neuro-fuzzy systems since 1988. Takagi and Hayashi's very fundamental 

patent of NN+FS covers any FS that use NN in part and any pure FS that are designed 

using NN; it is a proof of our initiative of NN+FS research. 

I have worked on Interactive EC as a tool to combine human capability with 

computational intelligence for about 10 years and am one of the most active researchers 

on this topic. I am serving/served on IEEE SMC Society as: 

(1) Vice President for Technical Activity (2006-2007) 

(2) Board of Governors member in 2001-2003, and 2004-2006, 

(3) Technical Committee Coordinator in 2004-2005, 

(4) Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. on SMC-B since 2001, 

(5) Chair of Technical Committee on Soft Computing in 1998-2004, 

(6) Special Session Chair of SMC2006, SMC2007, and SMC2008,

(7) Lecturer of the SMCS Distinguish Lecturer Program in 2006 and 2007. I gave DL 

talks at Central & South Italy Section Chapter and Japan Hiroshima Section Chapter 

in 2006 and United Kingdom & Republic of Ireland Section Chapter in 2007, and 

(8) A session organizer for SMC2001 - SMC2005. 

I received the below awards from SMCS: 

(a) 2003 SMC Outstanding Service Award, and 

(b) 2005 SMC Best Associate Editor Award. 

I contributed for IEEE Neural Network Council (current Computational Intelligent Society) 

as a super-plenary speaker and a plenary speaker for their flagship conferences, 

WCCI1998 and WCCI2002, respectively. 

My contributions as the TA Coordinator and VP-TA in past three years were increase of 

TC's activities: 

(a) eight TC's were newly established, 

(b) TC's had their introduction web pages at SMCS official site and started to appeal 

their activities to not only all SMCS members but also many non-SMCS members, 

(c) planning and conducting TC Poster Promotion events at SMC2006 and SMC2007 

with VP-Membership, 

(d) planning and conducting Technical Map Project to find SMCS technical trends and 

use them for SMCS management, and 

(e) planning and conducting IT Tool Project and introducing the WebEx web conference 

system for TC's, Chapters, and SMCS conference organizers. 

Candidate Statement: I have served as the Chair of Technical Committee (TC) in the 

Cybernetics field in 1998 -2004, and the Technical Activity Coordinator in 2004-2005, 

and Vice-President for Technical Activities in 2006-2007. I also have long administrative 

experience in SMCS as BoG members in 2001-2006 and the VP-Technical Activities in 

2006-2007. Through these long continuous experiences in SMCS, I have known strong 

points and weak points of our society, especially in technical aspects. My experiences 

and know-how obtained in these 10 years must be assets to the SMCS if I serve as the 

VP of Cybernetics. 

I will continue these activities for mainly Cybernetics and for whole S, M, and C by 

cooperating with other VP's in S and M fields. Especially, I will complete the mentioned 

(d) and (c) projects for whole technical activities of our society.

Candidates for 2008-10 Members-at-Large 

JIAN CHEN (M’95—SM’96) received the B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from 

Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1983, and the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. degree both in 

Systems Engineering from the same University in 1986 and 1989, respectively. 

He is a Professor and Chairman of Management Science and Engineering Department, 

the Director of Research Center for Contemporary Management, Tsinghua University. 

His main research interests include supply chain management, modeling and control for 

complex systems, decision support systems and information systems. Dr. Chen has 

published over 100 papers in refereed journals and has been a principal investigator for 

over 30 grants or research contracts with National Science Foundation of China, 

governmental organizations and companies (e.g., IBM, Motorola, SAP). He was invited 

to lecture in China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, UK and US. 

He has been active in the IEEE SMC Society, served as an associate editor of IEEE 

Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Part A (since 2003) and IEEE 

Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Part C (since 2002), was elected as a 

member of the Administrative Committee of IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics 

Society (1998-2000), the Chairman of the Service Systems and Organizations Technical 

Committee of IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (since 2002) and founding 

chair of IEEE SMC Beijing Chapter. He is the recipient of the Outstanding Contribution 

Award of IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society, 1996. He is the Secretary 

General of the 1996 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 

Co-chair of 2004 International Conference on Service Systems and Service and 

Program Chair of 2005, 2005 and 2007 International Conferences on Service Systems 

and Service, which have been technically cosponsored by the IEEE SMC Society. He 

served on the program committee and as a session chair for many international 

conferences (including SMC conferences). He has also played as a leading role for 

many academic societies in China. 

Candidate Statement: I would be delighted to represent and serve in my capacity 

(especially in organizing technical activities and international conferences) as a member 

of the Board of Governors of the IEEE SMC Society. 

SHYI-MING CHEN (M’88-SM’96) is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE 

Transactions on SMC, Part C: Applications and Reviews, a Co-Chair of the IEEE SMC’s 

Technical Committee on Intelligent Internet Systems, an Associate Editor of the IEEE 

Computational Intelligence Magazine, an Officer of the IEEE Taipei Section, and the 

President of the Taiwanese Association for Artificial Intelligence. He served as Program 

Area Chair of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence 

and Program Co-Chair for SMC’s technically sponsored Seventh International 

Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics. He received the Outstanding 

Contribution Award for the SMC’s technically sponsored Sixth International Conference 

on Machine Learning and Cybernetics for accomplishments in the Invited Sessions 

organization. He is the IEEE Student Branch Counsellor and the IEEE SMC Student 

Branch Chapter Advisor at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology.

Dr. Chen received his PhD in electrical engineering from the National Taiwan University 

of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, in 1991. He is currently a Professor in the 

Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at the same university. 

Dr. Chen’s professional accomplishments include the following: (1) More than 260 

publications related to his research area; (2) IET Fellow (Fellow of IEE); (3) Editorial 

Board member and Associate Editor of 23 referred journals, including the IEEE 

Transactions on SMC, Part C: Applications and Reviews and IEEE Computational 

Intelligence Magazine; (4) General Chair and Program Chair of 8 referred conferences 

(including SMC technical sponsored conferences); (5) Outstanding Electrical 

Engineering Professor Award granted by the Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineering; 

(6) Program Committee Member of 45 referred conferences; (7) Session Chair of 32 

referred conferences (including SMC conferences); (8) 1994 Outstanding Paper Award 

of the Journal of Information and Education; (9) 1995 and 1999 Outstanding Paper 

Awards of the Computer Society, Taiwan; (10) 1997 Outstanding Youth Electrical 

Engineer Award of the Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineering; (11) 1999 Best Paper 

Award of the National Computer Symposium, Taiwan; (12) 2001 Outstanding Talented 

Person Award for the contributions in Information Technology, Taiwan; (13) 2003 

Outstanding Paper Award of the Technological and Vocational Education 

Society, Taiwan; (14) 2006 Outstanding Paper Award of the 11th Conference on Artificial 

Intelligence and Applications, Taiwan; (15) 2007 Best Paper Award of the 20th 

International Conference on Industrial, Engineering and Other Applications of Applied 

Intelligent Systems, Japan. 

Candidate Statement: If elected, I would be honored to serve the needs and interests of 

the SMC members by (1) increasing their participation in the SMC technical committees, 

(2) increasing their benefits in SMC conferences, (3) increasing their opportunities to 

organize SMC technical sponsored conferences, (4) increasing their opportunities to be 

involved in leadership positions within the SMC, and (5) increasing new SMC chapters 

as well as SMC student chapters worldwide. I would use my extensive experience in 

SMC, including my prior experience serving the SMC, to actively participate in the 

governance of the society and to actively encourage new members to join the SMC 

society. 

IRVING ENGELSON (S’55-A’57-SM’73-F’93-LF’96), Ph.D. (EE), is an SMCS Life Fellow 

with over 30 years of membership in the SMC Society. He had been appointed to SMCS 

BoG positions by two SMCS presidents, and chaired the SMCS Strategic Planning Task 

Force. Engelson is the recipient of the 2006 Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society’s 

Outstanding Contribution Award. His research included systems and cybernetics. Irv is 

the past President of the IEEE Engineering Management Society and has substantial 

governance experience. He is an IEEE Director. Previously he held senior leadership 

positions in industry and academe, including Full Professor and Associate Dean of 

Engineering and Technology at the University of Nebraska. He speaks seven languages, 

and served as Representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council; 

Member, New Jersey Higher Education Master Planning Committee; and Member, 

Omaha NE Chamber of Commerce Free Enterprise Task Force. Engelson held elective 

positions in AAAS, ASEE, and Eta Kappa Nu. He is the second foreigner to be named 

an Honorary Member of the Russia Popov Society. He served on ALL IEEE major 

boards and numerous committees. SMCS has implemented many of his 

recommendations.

Candidate Statement: SMCS has most desirable characteristics among IEEE societies: 

• A scholarly, transnational, and capable membership 

• A broad and significant technical field on interest 

• Excellent conference and publication offerings 

• A sound financial base 

Yet we are not well known within IEEE, or by the technical community at large. Many 

qualified professionals are not SMCS members, and SMCS cannot benefit from their 

potential. Within IEEE there is an encroachment on our Field of Interest by the creation 

of competitive entities such as the IEEE Systems Council. To counteract the threats and 

to take advantage of opportunities we must increase our efforts for the benefit of our 

members. I have the management background to assist in this effort, and was 

recognized for it with the 2006 Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, Outstanding 

Contribution Award. 

If elected, I will continue to: 

• Strive to provide greater value to our members 

• Work to make it more attractive to future new members 

• Increase the IEEE internal and External SMCS visibility 

• Listen to our members and their needs and try to meet them 

• Ensure that we provide a welcoming environment for our chapters worldwide 

I have the time, energy, commitment, and skills to make a significant contribution to our 

Society and will appreciate your support and vote. 

MARK LAST is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Information Systems 

Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He holds the MSc (1990) and 

the PhD (2000) degrees in industrial engineering from Tel-Aviv University. Prior to 

starting his position at Ben-Gurion University in 2001, he has been a Visiting Assistant 

Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South 

Florida, USA (1999 – 2001), a senior computing consultant (1994-1998), and the Head 

of Production Control Department at an international semiconductor company (1989- 

1994). His present areas of research are focused on Data Mining, Cross-Lingual Text 

Mining, Soft Computing, and Software Quality Assurance. Dr. Last has been a coauthor 

of two monographs and a co-editor of six edited volumes. He has also published 

more than 120 papers and chapters in scientific journals, books, and refereed 

conferences. 

Dr. Last is a Senior Member of the IEEE. He serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE 

Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part C and Pattern Analysis and 

Applications (PAA) Journal. He has been awarded the Best Associate Editor Award of 

all Transactions of the Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society for 2006 “for being 

recognized as the Best Associate Editor of 2006 for exceptional contributions to 

managing publication reviews and providing decisions on them for the IEEE 

Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics" 

Dr. Last is very active in organizing cooperative international scientific activities. He has 

co-chaired three international conferences on text mining and web intelligence. He has 

also organized a Special Session on Web Intelligence and Web Mining at the IEEE

Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Data Mining (CIDM07). Dr. Last has 

served on the technical committees of several IEEE conferences including FUZZ-IEEE, 

GrC, CIDM, and IRI. He has also served as a reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on 

Fuzzy Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and IEEE 

Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. 

Candidate Statement: One of my objectives as a Member-at-Large of the Board of 

Governors would be establishment of an SMC chapter and a student chapter in Israel 

with a special emphasis on strengthening the ties between the local members of the 

SMC Society and the Society members in other countries of the Middle East. I will be 

also organizing SMC sponsored conferences and workshops with topics of relevance to 

our region. These activities are expected to encourage new members to join our 

Society. 

SEONG-WHAN LEE is a tenured full professor in Information and Communications 

Engineering, Korea University. He is the deputy dean of the Graduate School of 

Information Technology and the director of the Center for Artificial Vision Research, 

Korea University. He is the founding chair of the IEEE SMC Society Korea Chapter. 

He received his B.S. degree in Computer Science and Statistics from Seoul National 

University, Seoul, Korea, in 1984; and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science 

from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 1986 and 1989, 

respectively. He has more than 250 publications on computer vision and pattern 

recognition in international journals and conference proceedings, and authored 10 

books. His present areas of research interests include: biometrics, face recognition, 

gesture recognition, and human-robot interaction. 

He has rich experiences in serving as editor-in-chief and associate-editor of several 

international journals including Pattern Recognition Journal, International Journal of 

Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, International Journal on Document 

Analysis and Recognition, International Journal of Image and Graphics, and so on. He 

also has served as general chair and program chair of more than 20 well-known 

international conferences. He was recently the general chair of the 2nd IAPR/IEEE 

International Conference on Biometrics (ICB2007). He has been a Senior Member of the 

IEEE since 1996 and a fellow of IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition) 

since 1998. Having these experiences, he is competent for playing an important role in 

the SMCS as a Board of Governor with strong responsibility. 

Candidate Statement: As a Board of Governor and a chair of the IEEE SMCS Korea 

Chapter, I would use my experience and network to spread SMCS in Asia which is 

believed to have a large potential capability, especially in East Asia. This would include 

encouraging new Asian regular and student members to join SMCS and establishing 

new journals and conferences which are sponsored by SMCS. 

ALI G. HESSAMI is Chief Engineer and Head of Advanced Technology Group and 

Project Director for Surety (Safety & Security) at Project Development Group, Atkins UK. 

He is an expert in the systems assurance and safety/security analysis and assessment 

methodologies and has a background in design and development of advanced control 

systems for mission critical applications.

Ali has established an International reputation in the field of system safety/security 

assurance and has published many papers and lectured throughout the world from 

Europe to the Far-Middle East and North America 

He founded the IEEE UK&RI Chapters of IAS and Systems, Man and Cybernetics 

(SMC) Society. He currently chairs SMC Chapter in the UK & Republic of Ireland, as well 

as being the Chairman of Systems Safety and Security Group at IEEE/SMC, He head of 

Systems Safety and Security Research Group at London City University and is the 

Principal UK Expert in CENELEC SC9XA on Systems Safety Assurance and Integrity 

matters. 

He currently represents UK on WG8 as team-leader for writing guidance on assessment 

and modelling for CENELEC’s EN50126 standard & WGA2-3 team leader for Crossacceptance 

guidance within EN50129. Ali is appointed by CENELEC as convenor of 

EN50128 Software Safety Standard, a Visiting Professor within London City University’s 

Centre for Systems and Control in the School of Engineering & Mathematics where he 

contributes to the advanced systems research and postgraduate education. He was 

appointed as a Fellow of Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) during late 2004. He was 

appointed as a visiting Professor at Beijing Jiaotong University during November 2006. 

Candidate Statement: I have an industrial and academic interest in understanding, 

characterizing, modelling and predicting the emergent properties of complex systems 

including cybernetics and man-machine interactions and eventually the environmental 

sustainability aspects of such systems. As in the past, I will endeavour to continue with 

promoting and developing the UK&RI Chapter’s very successful annual conferences, 

promote SMC membership and organise workshops and publications for the Technical 

Committee on Systems Safety and Security. I will also support thee SMCS in 

disseminating knowledge of the society’s activities and will contribute to DL programme 

on systems emergence. 

MARK MATTINGLEY-SCOTT is founder and currently Chair of the IEEE SMC German 

Chapter. He received his Ph.D. in communications theory from Durham University in 

1989, worked from 1985 until 1989 for Thorn EMI Central Research Laboratories in the 

UK, and since 1989 works for IBM in Germany, responsible for Sensor and Actuator 

related business. His professional accomplishments include 12 papers and conference 

key note speeches, 6 patents related to his work, and the supervision of 30 students as 

industry partner over the last 18 years. In addition he is an adjunct professor for 

Cognitive Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, and a 

member of the Board of Directors of the German Institute for New Media. 

Candidate Statement: It is my privilege to be nominated for membership to the SMC 

Board of Governors, and I believe my experience in founding the German Chapter of the 

SMC, and my long year ex-patriot status as an Englishman living in Germany equip me 

with unique experience in the challenges and goals of the SMC at the international level. 

If elected I intend to help increase the effectiveness of the SMC by improving the 

coordination between Chapters and Technical Committees, by promoting cross-chapter 

collaboration and cooperation within and between Regions, and by increasing the 

attractiveness of IEEE Membership by promoting cooperation between the IEEE and 

other regional and local affiliate organisations.

FERAT SAHIN (M’96) received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Virginia Polytechnic 

Institute and State University in 1997 and 2000, respectively. In September 2000, he 

joined Rochester Institute of Technology, where he is an Associate Professor. He is 

also the Director of the Multi Agent Bio-Robotics Laboratory. His current research 

interests are System of Systems, Swarm Intelligence, Robotics, MEMS Materials 

Modeling, Distributed Multi-agent Systems, and Structural Bayesian Network Learning. 

He has 70 publications in these areas and he has been a reviewer for leading journals 

and conferences in both the IEEE and other organizations. He is the co-author of a book 

called “Practical and Experimental Robotics” by CRC Press. He has also several book 

chapters in the areas such as Particle Swarm Optimization, System of Systems 

Simulation, and System of Autonomous Rovers. He serves as the Deputy Editor-in-Chief 

for International Journal of Computers and Electrical Engineering and as an Associate 

Editor for IEEE Systems Journal and AutoSoft Journal. 

He has been an active member of the IEEE and the SMC Society. Locally, he has 

served as secretary (2003) and section vice-chair (2004 and 2005) in the IEEE 

Rochester Section. He has also been the Faculty Advisor of the IEEE Student Chapter 

at Rochester Institute of Technology from 2001 to 2003. He has served as the Student 

Activities Chair for the IEEE SMC Society in 2001 – 2003. Dr. Sahin has been the 

Secretary of the SMC Society since 2003. He received the Outstanding Contribution 

Award for his service as the SMC Society Secretary in 2006. He was also a member of 

the Strategic Opportunities and Initiatives Committee and the SMC Technical Committee 

on Robotics and Intelligent Sensing. He is the publications Co-Chair for the IEEE SMC 

International Conference on System of Systems Engineering (SOSE 2007). He is the 

program co-chair of the IEEE SMC International Conference on System of Systems 

Engineering (SOSE 2008). 

Candidate Statement: I would be glad to serve SMC Society as a member of the Board 

of Governors. As SMC Society Student Activities Chair and the SMC Society Secretary, I 

believe I have gained an invaluable experience and, if elected, I believe I can serve best 

in Membership, Publications, and Conferences. I believe the SMC Society membership 

can be grown further by focusing our efforts into communicating well with our GOLD 

members. I can also help improve the membership by introducing new chapters in USA 

by determining the sections where we have a critical mass and reaching out the 

members and encouraging/helping them to establish chapters in their sections. I believe 

we can improve the impact factors of our transactions by increasing the paper download 

rates. I believe there are effective ways of doing that such as encouraging or inviting 

literature survey papers and giving full-access link to a paper in each issue of the SMC 

e-Newsletter as well as providing the tables of contents of the transactions with 

download links from IEEE Xplore. 

HONG YAN (S’88-M’89-SM’93-F’06) received a B.Eng. degree from Nanjing University 

of Posts and Telecommunications, an M.S. degree from the University of Michigan, Ann 

Arbor, and a Ph.D. degree from Yale University. From 1986 to 1989, he was a research 

scientist at General Network Corporation, New Haven, CT, USA, where he worked on 

design and optimization of computer and telecommunications networks. He joined the 

University of Sydney in 1989 and became Professor of Electrical and Information

Engineering in 1997. He is currently Professor of Electronic Engineering at City 

University of Hong Kong. His research interests include image processing, pattern 

recognition and bioinformatics. He has over 300 publications in these areas. Professor 

Yan is a Fellow of the IEEE, the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) 

and the Institution of Engineers, Australia (IEAust). He was the Program Chair of 2001 

IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, and is currently the Web Editor for 

Technical Committees of IEEE SMC Society and a Co-Chair for the Technical 

Committee on Computational Life Science. He has been the leader for many research 

projects funded by Australian, Japanese, Hong Kong and US governments and 

industries. Professor Yan received the best mobile entertainment software award in 

Hong Kong in 2005. 

Candidate Statement: If I’m elected a member of the SMCS Board of Governors, I 

would like to: 

• Promote research activities and provide leadership in emerging areas such as 

bioinformatics and mobile entertainment through organization of conferences, 

workshops and competitions on system design and data analysis. 

• Foster collaborations among researchers, for example, through our TC web 

pages and by exchanging research ideas and sharing information, to improve 

members’ productivities. 

• Encourage student participation of SMCS related activities, such as providing 

them a web based platform for discussions. 

• Help address the members’ needs, make the Society’s activities interesting and 

attract more researchers to join the Society. 

HONG ZHANG is a professor in Department of Computing Science, University of 

Alberta, Canada. He received his BSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from 

Northeastern University, Boston, in 1982 and his PhD from Purdue University, in 1986. 

He has been conducting robotics research for over 20 years, and his current research 

interests include robotics, computer vision, and image processing. Dr. Zhang holds the 

NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Intelligent Sensing Systems. 

Dr. Zhang has been active within IEEE and in the SMC society in particular. He has 

served as the Chair of the SMC Technical Committee on Robotics and Intelligent 

Sensing since 2004, and as an associate editor of the SMC Transactions (Part B) since 

2003. In addition, he has been on the Program Committee of annual SMC conference, 

and regularly organized special sessions in robotics and intelligent sensing areas in this 

annual conference in the past decade. Outside of the SMC society, Dr. Zhang has 

provided consistent active service to IEEE. Examples of such service include the 

General Chair of 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics 

(ROBIO), and the Program Chair of 2005 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent 

Robots and Systems (IROS) and 2003 IEEE International Symposium on Computational 

Intelligence in Robotics and Automation (CIRA). He is a founding chair of IEEE 

International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation (ICMA). As a result of his 

excellent service to IEEE, he has been awarded the IEEE Millennium Medal. 

Candidate Statement: My membership as a Member-at-Large of the Board of 

Governors will allow me to work more effectively for SMC society to improve its research 

activities in robotics, computer vision, and image processing, with respect their roles in

intelligent systems and in system of systems. These traditional areas of strength for the 

SMC society, in my view, have eroded in the recent past to the point where the SMC 

membership is no longer adequately served and their contribution in these areas 

properly recognized. It is time that SMC took initiatives to restore its reputation in these 

areas, not to compete with other IEEE more specialized societies but to work in 

collaboration for the benefits of the IEEE SMC membership and for IEEE. 

My specific initiatives in order to meet the above objectives include 

• Organize a track of multiple sessions on robotics and intelligent sensing at the 

annual SMC conference, 

• Increase technical SMC sponsorship of new and potentially high-impact 

international conferences in robotics and intelligent sensing, and 

• Work with the TSMC editors and edit special issues in emerging areas in robotics 

and intelligent sensing from papers presented at the annual SMC conference and 

SMC-sponsored conferences.

1710 - 1720 Discussion of opportunities for improvements and budget (all) 

176

1720 – 1730 Awards report (Mike Smith and T.T. Lee) 

177

Awards Committee Report 

178 

The activities of the Awards Committee this year included: 

1) Rewrote and updated all the SMC awards. The changes have been submitted to TAB for 

their approval. 

2) Submitted to TAB a proposal to approve 3 new and existing SMC awards. 

3) Rewrote the nomination and selection procedures for the Awards Committee. 

4) Sought nominations and selected the recipients of 14 SMC awards for 2007. The awards will 

be presented at the banquet. 

5) Set up a process whereby the recipients of SMC 2007 awards were nominated and 

selected early enough in the year so that: 

a) Plaques could be ordered in advance of the banquet to be given out at the banquet, 

b) A more formal award presentation for the banquet could be created, and 

c) Recipients were notified early enough so that out of 14 awards, 12 recipients were able 

to make plans to attend the banquet to accept their award in person. 

This process should solve the problem in the past whereby most recipients were no-shows at 

the banquet because they were not notified in advance that they were a winner, or were 

notified too late to make travel plans. 

6) Possible Other New Awards to be considered by the BOG: 

a) Separate Best Paper Awards for each of SMC’s 3 transactions 

b) Early Academic Career Award in Systems, Man and/or Cybernetics 

c) Lotfi A Zadeh Intelligent Systems Award 

d) Outstanding Young Engineer Award 

e) Outstanding Distinguished Lecturer Award 

f) Madan Singh Invention and Entrepreneur Award 

g) Early Government or Industry Career Award in Systems, Man and/or Cybernetics 

h) Pioneer Award 

i) SMC Education Award 

j) Outstanding PhD Dissertation in the fields of Systems, Man and/or Cybernetics Award 

k) IEEE wide field awards in Systems, Human-Machine, and/or Cybernetics 

j) Certificate of Appreciation 

7) Of the above, the Certificate of Appreciation and the Lotfi A. Zadeh Intelligent Systems 

Award seem to be 2 awards that the society needs. The Certificate of Appreciation is 

needed for when the President wants to thank a SMC volunteer for some valued activity 

that is not significant enough to qualify for a SMC Outstanding Award, e.g., a Conference 

General Chair may get an Outstanding Contribution Award, and a Conference Coprogram 

Chair may get a Certificate of Appreciation. The President could give the 

Certificate of Appreciation throughout the year, not just at the banquet. The Lotfi A. Zadeh 

Award would be a technical level award in the area of intelligent systems whereby SMC’s 

Weiner Award is a broader award in systems, man, and/or cybernetics. 

8) The Awards Committee would like the BOG to approve a motion approving the 2 awards in 

concept, with the final language of the award to be approved by the BOG in the future.

179 

9) The Awards Committee feels that there should be 3 Best Transactions Paper awards, one for 

each journal, instead of one award for all 3 journals. The Awards Committee would like 

input from the BOG on this issue.

1730 – 1930 Adjournment 

180

1930 Dinner at Delta Centre-Ville Hotel 

181

Conferences and Meetings Committee Report - IEEE Systems, Man ...

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