Keynote Speaker I

Dr. Liu Jiren
Chairman& CEO, Neusoft Group Ltd.

Dr. Liu Jiren is chairman and CEO at Neusoft Group Ltd., the leading software and solution provider in China.
As the principal founder of the company, Dr. Liu started his entrepreneur career in 1988 when he, together with the other two young university teachers set up the Computer Software and Network Engineering Research Lab under NEU Computer Department with merely 3 PCs and RMB 30,000 Yuan as their total asset. Through 13 years’ development, the lab, predecessor of Neusoft, has now grown into a large software enterprise with 6000 employees and annual sales revenue of more than RMB 2 billion Yuan.
Dr. Liu has conducted innovative explorations in the areas of software application research and software industry development. He advanced the point of “bridging software research and software application” which represents a new mode of transferring software research achievement then.
For his outstanding contributions to the development of China software industry, Dr. Liu has been awarded “May 1st Labor Medal” by the state. He was also elected as one of China Top Ten IT Fortune People, and one of China Top Ten Leaders of Software Enterprises.
Dr. Liu also serves on Neusoft Co., Ltd. as chairman, on Northeastern University as vice president and on Software Center of Northeastern University as director.
Dr. Liu is active with many social and industry organizations. He is vice director-general of China Software Association, vice director-general of Internet Society of China, member of Business Advisory Council of APEC.
After obtaining bachelor’s degree in computer application from Northeastern Institute of Engineering (the present Northeastern University), Dr. Liu went to NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) of the United States in 1986 to further his study where he finished his doctoral dissertation. In 1988, he returned to China and got his doctoral degree, becoming the first doctor in computer application in China. At the age of 33, he was promoted to professor, becoming one of the youngest professors in China. He began to tutor doctoral students in 1995.

Keynote Speaker II

Prof. Chin-Chen Chang
Feng Chia University

Professor C.C. Chang was born in Taichung, Taiwan on Nov. 12th, 1954. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from National Chiao Tung University. He's first degree is Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics and master degree is Master of Science in computer and decision sciences. Both were awarded in National Tsing Hua University. Dr. Chang served in National Chung Cheng University from 1989 to 2005. His current title is Chair Professor in Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, from Feb. 2005.

Prior to joining Feng Chia University, Professor Chang was an associate professor in Chiao Tung University, professor in National Chung Hsing University, chair professor in National Chung Cheng University. He had also been Visiting Researcher and Visiting Scientist to Tokyo University and Kyoto University, Japan. During his service in Chung Cheng, Professor Chang served as Chairman of the Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Dean of College of Engineering, Provost and then Acting President of Chung Cheng University and Director of Advisory Office in Ministry of Education, Taiwan.

Professor Chang's specialties include, but not limited to, data engineering, database systems, computer cryptography and information security. A researcher of acclaimed and distinguished services and contributions to his country and advancing human knowledge in the field of information science, Professor Chang has won many research awards and honorary positions by and in prestigious organizations both nationally and internationally. He is currently a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of IEE, UK. On numerous occasions, he was invited to serve as Visiting Professor, Chair Professor, Honorary Professor, Honorary Director, Honorary Chairman, Distinguished Alumnus, Distinguished Researcher, Research Fellow by universities and research institutes. He also published over 1,100 papers in Information Sciences. In the meantime, he participates actively in international academic organizations and performs advisory work to government agencies and academic organizations.

Keynote Speaker III

Prof. Xin Yao, FIEEE
Natural Computation Group
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, U.K.

Biosketch of the Speaker:

Xin Yao is a Professor (Chair) of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, UK, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, China. He obtained his BSc from USTC in 1982, MSc from the North China Institute of Computing Technology in Beijing, China, in 1985, and PhD from USTC in Hefei, China, in 1990.

He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra in 1990-91 and at CSIRO Division of Building, Construction and Engineering in Melbourne in 1991-92. He was a lecturer, senior lecturer and associate professor at the University College, the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra in 1992-99. Attracted by the English weather, he moved to Birmingham on the April's Fool day in 1999 to take up a Chair of Computer Science.

Currently he is the Director of CERCIA (the Centre of Excellence for Research in Computational Intelligence and Applications, http://www.cercia.ac.uk) at the University of Birmingham, UK, which is specialised in applied research and
knowledge transfer. He is an IEEE Fellow and a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He won the 2001 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award and several other best paper awards. He was a Cheung Kong Scholar
(Changjian Chair Professor) of the Ministry of Education of China and a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Yuan Ze University, Taiwan. In his spare time, he did the voluntary work as the Editor-in-Chief (2003-08) of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and is an associate editor or editorial board member of 12 international journals, and the editor of the World Scientific book series on "Advances in Natural Computation". He currently serves as the Vice President for Publications of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He has been invited to give more than 55 keynote/plenary speeches at international conferences in many countries.

His major research interests include evolutionary computation and neural network ensembles. He has more than 300 refereed publications in international journals and conferences. His work has been supported by AWM, EPSRC, EU, Royal
Society, Chinese Academy of Sciences, NSFC, Honda, Marconi, BT, Thales and Severn Trent Water.

Evolving, Training and Designing Neural Network Ensembles

Xin Yao (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~xin)
CERCIA, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK

Abstract:

Previous work on evolving neural networks has focused on single neural networks. However, monolithic neural networks are too complex to train and evolve for large and complex problems. It is often better to design a collection of simpler neural networks that work cooperatively to solve a large and complex problem. The key issue here is how to design such a collection automatically so that it has the best generalisation.
This talk introduces work on evolving neural network ensembles, negative correlation learning, and multi-objective approaches to ensemble learning. The links among different learning algorithms are discussed. Online/incremental learning using ensembles will also be presented briefly.

Selected References:

[1] On negative correlation: Y. Liu and X. Yao, ``Simultaneous training of negatively correlated neural networks in an ensemble,'' IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics, 29(6):716-725, December 1999.
[2] On negative correlation and evolution: Y. Liu, X. Yao and T. Higuchi, ``Evolutionary Ensembles with Negative Correlation Learning,'' IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 4(4):380-387, November 2000.
[3] On constructive ensemble learning: Md. Monirul Islam, X. Yao and K. Murase, ``A constructive algorithm for training cooperative neural network ensembles,'' IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 14(4):820-834, July 2003.
[4] On multi-objective approaches to ensemble learning: A Chandra and X. Yao, ``Ensemble learning using multi-objective evolutionary algorithms,'' Journal of Mathematical Modelling and Algorithms, 5(4):417-445, December 2006.
[5] On incremental learning using ensembles: F. L. Minku, H. Inoue and X. Yao, ``Negative correlation in incremental learning,'' Natural Computing, 8(2):289-320, June 2009.
[6] On ensemble pruning: H. Chen, P. Tino and X. Yao, ``Predictive Ensemble Pruning by Expectation Propagation,'' IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 21(7):999-1013, July 2009.
[7] On evolving ensembles: X. Yao and Md. M. Islam, ``Evolving artificial neural network ensembles,'' IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, 3(1):31-42,February 2008.
 

Keynote Speaker IV

Prof. Nikola Kasabov, Fellow IEEE, Fellow RSNZ
Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute, KEDRI
Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand
nkasabov@aut.ac.nz, http://www.kedri.info

Biodata:
Professor Nikola Kasabov is the Director of the Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute (KEDRI), Auckland. He holds a Chair of Knowledge Engineering at the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Auckland University of Technology. He is a Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and Fellow of the New Zealand Computer Society. He is the President of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) and a Past President of the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). He is a member of several technical committees of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society and IFIP. Kasabov has served as Associate Editor of Neural Networks, IEEE TrNN, IEEE TrFS, Information Science, J. Theoretical and Computational Nanosciences, Applied Soft Computing and other journals. Kasabov holds MSc and PhD from the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria. His main research interests are in the areas of intelligent information systems, soft computing, neuro-computing, bioinformatics, brain study, novel methods for data mining and knowledge discovery. He has published more than 400 publications that include 15 books, 120 journal papers, 60 book chapters, 32 patents and numerous conference papers. He has extensive academic experience as an academic or a visiting scholar at the University of Otago, New Zealand; University of Essex, UK; University of Trento, Italy; Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria; University of California at Berkeley; RIKEN and KIT, Japan; TUniversity Kaiserslautern, Germany, and others. At present he is also a Guest Professor at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Prof. Kasabov has received the Bayer Science Innovation Award, the RSNZ Science and Technology Silver Medal, the APNNA Excellent Service Award and other awards. More information of Prof. Kasabov can be found on the KEDRI web site: http://www.kedri.info.

Keynote Speaker V

Dr. Stanley H. Smith, Professor, Life Senior Member of IEEE
Stevens Institute of Technology
Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

Dr. Stanley H. Smith is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He was previously Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stevens. He has been engaged in consulting on modeling and simulation for network architectures and in the development of embedded computer systems for applications which include medical, control, instrumentation and data acquisition, signal and image processing and communications.

Professor Smith has been in involved in embedded systems design, having designed and produced more than thirty systems. All of these involved both hardware and software development. He was one of the first (if not the first) to offer courses and programs in microprocessor systems design in the United States. He has given courses on this for the IEEE, industrial corporations and the U.S. government. He has been involved in embedded systems design for industry, medical and pharmaceutical companies and government agencies such as the NIH and U.S. Army.

Dr. Smith has taught courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level. He has given special courses and invited lectures for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Weston Instruments Corporation, ITT-DCD and the Department of Defense. While on a sabbatical leave of absence from Stevens, he was a Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York - now Polytechnic Institute of NYU. There, he taught courses in radar systems, data acquisition and signal processing, and high-speed digital signal and image processing with VLSI. In 1986, in Hefei, China he presented a course on High Speed Computer Architectures in Hefei, China.

Dr. Smith is the author of more than one hundred technical reports and papers. He has served as a consultant in the writing of nine books for consumers and was a contributing author in books on product defects for the legal profession and on digital signal processing. He was also an editorial consultant for the IEEE Spectrum. He is a Life Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Communications Society and the Society for Photographic and Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). He has appeared in Marquis’ Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who on the Web.

Embedded Computing

Dr. Stanley H. Smith
Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, USA

Abstract

This talk deals with the development of the digital computer from the middle of the last century until today. Needless there have been very significant innovations that have increased the capability while at the same time resulted in major (and that may be an under emphasis) increases in capacity and speed, but even more significant reductions in size, power consumption and, particularly, cost.

We have gone from the mainframe in the 1940’s with it hundreds of square feet in cabinets containing power-consuming, heat-generating vacuum tubes (and punched card input) to solid-state mainframes and minicomputers (with less computing power than mainframes) in the 1950s through 1960’s. The late 1960s and the 1970’s saw the development of microprocessors virtually replace the minicomputer and eventually the mainframe. We saw microcomputers (based on microprocessors) operated with batteries! We started to see automobile ignition systems controlled by microprocessors. Eventually, in the 1980s (or even the late 1970s) we saw whole computers placed on a single chip – called microcontrollers. The applications for these in automobiles, communications, instrumentation, medical equipment, etc. was virtually unlimited and it became almost impossible not to consider these and virtually all digital system applications. The systems employing these became known as “embedded computers” or “embedded systems.” In some cases, the speed (throughput) of microcomputers was not adequate and LSI, VLSI and XVLSI “chips” were developed. To some extent, they were replaced by custom and semi-custom logic and gate arrays.

The 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of Digital Signal Processors (DSP) complete with onboard analog-to-digital converters (ADC). These provided some new architectures to increase throughput. The 2000s also saw the rise of “motor controllers” with other specialized features on board for phase control. These also happen to be very good general purpose microcontrollers.

Also, in the 2000s, the application of gate arrays; particularly, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) came into prominence. These offer virtually complete, specific-application architecture development, including performing operations in parallel. We have also seen the emergence of multiple-cores or multiple-processors in microcomputers.

This talk will concentrate on the history and the development of embedded computers to cover a wide range of applications. These also require a wide variety of development tools which will be described. Needless to say, it will be almost impossible not to inject my own experience and opinions which I hope will be useful to all.