World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC)
World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC)
WOSC Website
The organisation has a WOSC Website which can be accessed at: http:// ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Alex Andrew/wosc.htm The site has been set up by Dr A.M. Andrew, the Internet Editor of this official publication of WOSC. The pages will be updated at frequent intervals and comments from WOSC member bodies, their representatives and Institute members will be most welcome. The appropriate e-mail addresses are included on the site pages.
WOSC sponsored and supported conferences and congresses
The congresses, conferences and other meetings sponsored or supported by WOSC are included in the announcements,special announcements and the news, conferences and technical reports sections of this journal in all its nine issues with the exception of the two Special Issues planned for this 1998 volume.
Conferences supported by WOSC in 1998
Among the many conferences,congresses and meetings and other major events in which WOSC is involved the following will be of current interest.
WOSC Triennial Congress
The Director-General of WOSC,Professor Robert Valleé is engaged in arranging the next Congress in this series. The last was at Bucharest, Romania, and was held in 1996. Members of the organisation are invited to contact him or any of the WOSC Directors about sponsorship or participation matters. The venue for this congress has not been finalised at present.
SCI '98 The World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics and The International Conference on Information Systems, Analysts and Synthesis, Orlando, Florida USA, 12-16 July 1998
Professor Stafford Beer, the WOSC President joins Professors Bela H. Banathy and George Klir as Honorary Presidents of these World and International Conferences. (Other information:http://www.iiis.org)
The conferences hope to bring together participants from all over the world to discuss the conference themes and to offer original ideas or innovations, knowledge or experience, theories or methodologies in the areas of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (SCI). These are becoming increasingly related to each other and to almost every scientific discipline and human activity. Their common transdisciplinarity characterises them, generating strong relations among themselves and with other disciplines. They interpret each other integrating a whole that is permeating human thinking and practice. SCI '98 is a multiconference where participants may focus on an area, or a discipline and also, have the opportunity of attending presentations in other areas or disciplines. This systemic approach stimulates cross-fertilisation among different disciplines, inspiring scholars, generating analogies and provoking innovations which is one of the very basic principles of systems and a fundamental aim of cybernetics.
WOSC Supported Conference Seventh International Conference: Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-based Systems (IPMU), Paris, France, 6-10 July 1998
Details of the conference have been given in Kybernetes, Vol. 26 No. 9, 1997, p. 1074. The Director-General of WOSC, Professor Robert Valleé, is a member of the conference's International Program Committee.
The following important information about the conference outlines its scope and relevance to today's studies in systems and cybernetics.
Its purpose: The aim of this conference was to bring together researchers working on various methodologies for the management of uncertain information. It is hoped that this conference will lead to future useful exchanges between theoreticians and practitioners using these different methods.
The topics presented:
Bayesian and probabilistic methods,fuzzy methods, theory of evidence, belief networks, possibility theory, chaos theory, measures of information and uncertainty, rough sets.
Non-standard logics, non-monotonic logics, default reasoning, approximate reasoning, multivalued logics, temporal reasoning, belief updating.
Knowledge acquisition and representation, machine learning, inductive methods, neural networks, databases,information retrieval, data mining, uncertainty in cognition.
Intelligent systems, fuzzy control,genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation, hybrid systems, uncertainty in expert systems, decision support systems, multicriteria and group decision making, pattern recognition, clustering, classification, data analysis, image processing, multimedia management, financial engineering, intelligent agents,diagnostic systems.
In honour of Claude François Picard:
In honour of Claude François Picard who, based on the use of weighted trees, initiated questionnaire theory in the early 1960s. A special track on the applications of tree structures in information processing and management of uncertainty in knowledge-based systems was organised. Papers on this topic were much appreciated and they ranged from theory to practice, from coding theory to decision making, processing of natural language or arborescent causal networks.
Plenary lectures and lecturers:The following plenary lectures were programmed (details of the others will be given in the full report of the conference which will appear in later issues of this journal:
Kenneth Arrow (Stanford University,USA), Nobel Prize, Kampe de Feriet Award.
Dieter Denneberg (Universität Bremen, Germany), Modelling Uncertainty with the Choquet Integral.
Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro (Genève Consulting Group, USA), Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery: The Next Generation.
Lotfi A. Zadeh (University of California at Berkeley, USA), Information Granulation and its Centrality in Human and Machine Intelligence.
Full list of supporting organisations:
Association française pour l'Intelligence Artificielle (AFIA).
Association française des sciences et technologies de l'information et des systèmes (AFCET).
International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA).
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC).
The Honorary President of the Conference was: Lotfi A. Zadeh of the University of California at Berkeley, USA and the Chairpersons were: Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier (CNRS-UPMC) and Ronald R. Yager (Iona College, NY, USA).
IPMU Homepage and enquiries about published proceedings: contact Secretariat, IPMU '98, LIP6, UPMC, Case 169, 4 place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cédex 05, France. Fax: (33) 1 45 75 08 90;E-mail: ipmu@laforia.ibp.fr; IPMU Homepage: http://www-laforia.ibp.fr/~baslofti/ipmu.html
