Conference reports. EIS'98. Engineering of Intelligent Systems

Conference reports

EIS'98 ­ Engineering of Intelligent Systems

When this conference was first mooted the title caused some concern. Was it about the "engineering of intelligent systems", that is their design and implementation or was it"intelligent systems for engineers" or indeed, was it concerned about both?Whatever the interpretation, the conference, which was held at the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain in February of last year (1998) was well supported and held in a most attractive setting. The conference did have a more formal title: The International ICSC Symposium on the Engineering of Intelligent Systems and the papers themselves illustrated the "broad church" sought by its organisers.

Some 205 presentations ranged over many diverse aspects of the field of intelligent systems. Research topics considered included:

• Fuzzy Logic;

• Genetic Algorithms;

• Neural Networks;

• Artificial Intelligence.

The diversity of content of presentations is illustrated by the following selection of subjects: Control,speech processing; Image processing; Pattern recognition; Decision making:Expert systems, robotics; Medical systems; Hardware implementations. There were also many other subjects considered in a theoretical fashion as well as a number of different applications. Before the main symposium, Colin Fyfe organised the"International Workshop on Independence and Artificial Neural Networks".

The case for building Intelligent Systems is an obvious one and one that is not the prerogative of engineers. This symposium showed that its participants were enthusiastically engaged in producing such systems. The degree of "intelligence" in a system seems to have been assessed in different ways by the various speakers who used many innovative approaches. One was struck by the enormous variety of projects in hand by engineering groups. Once again it is apparent that only a multidisciplinary approach will bring these systems into being.

It was a measure of the success of the event that EIS 2000 is being planned to be held at the University of Paisley, Scotland, UK, during the first year of the millennium. One cannot but believe that this conference's programme contained many of the presentations that will affect the way in which these studies will proceed in the next century.

Details about the conference should still be available at : http:/www.icsc.ab.ca/eis98.htm

For those who are interested in the ICSC, their Website is : http://www.icsc. ab.ca/ . This Website also contains details of EIS 2000.

C. Mann