Cerebellar Model Neural Networks and their Applications on Control, Signal Processing, and Image Classification
Chih-Min Lin
Yuan Ze University, Taiwan
E-mail: cml@saturn.yzu.edu.tw

 [Abstract]
Based on biological prototype of human brain and improved understanding of the functionality of the neurons and the pattern of their interconnections in the brain, a theoretical model used to explain the information-processing characteristics of the cerebellum was developed independently by Marr (1969) and Albus (1971). Cerebellar model neural network (CMNN) or called as cerebellar model articulation controller (CMAC) was first proposed by Albus in 1974. CMNN is a learning structure that imitates the organization and functionality of the cerebellum of the human brain. That model revealed the structure and functionality of the various cells and fibers in the cerebellum. The core of CMNN is an associative memory which has the ability to approach complex nonlinear functions. CMNN takes advantage of the input-redundancy by using distributed storage and can learn nonlinear functions extremely quickly due to the on-line adjustment of its system parameters. CMNN is classified as a non-fully connected perceptron-like associative memory network with overlapping receptive-fields. It has good generalization capability and fast learning property and is suitable for a lot of applications. This speech will introduce several new CMNN-based adaptive learning systems proposed by me; these systems combine the advantages of CMNN identification, adaptive learning, control technique, signal processing and image classification. In these systems, the on-line parameter training methodologies, using the Lyapunov theorem, are proposed to guarantee the stability and convergence of these systems. Moreover, the applications of these systems in nonlinear systems control, biped robot control, signal processing of communication system, and computer-aided diagnosis of breast nodules are demonstrated.

 [Biography] Prof. Chih-Min Lin is currently a Chair Professor and Dean of Electrical and Communication Engineering College, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan. He also serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B; Asian Journal of Control; International Journal of Fuzzy Systems; Intelligent Automation and Soft Computing; and International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics. He has been the Chair of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Taipei Chapter, the Chair of IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society Taipei Chapter, a Board of Governor of IEEE Taipei Session. He has been awarded as the Distinguished Research Professor from National Science Council in Taiwan, the Distinguished Engineering Professor from China Engineering Society in Taiwan, and the Distinguished Electrical Engineering Professor from Chinese Electrical Engineering Society in Taiwan. He has been invited to give 7 keynote speeches in the international conferences. He is now a Board of Governor of IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society. His research interests include fuzzy systems, neural network, cerebellar model neural network, and intelligent control systems. He is an IEEE Fellow and IET Fellow. Till now he has published 143 journal papers and 154 conference papers.

Self-Organizing Volunteering System Through Swarm Intelligence
Ahmad Zaki Bin Abu Bakar
Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM), Malaysia
E-mail: profzaki@utem.edu.my

 [Abstract]
Volunteering is an altruistic activity where community members contribute time, resources and services to fulfill a need without being paid financially. There are many benefits from volunteering and communities with high volunteering culture achieved higher rankings on the happiness index. Volunteering is a common way of life in many villages but less in cities due to various factors including attitude, work demands, life commitments, time limitations and the hazards of living in a fast pace environment. As a center for commercial, administration, education, entertainment, and urban social activities, cities naturally attract many talents to come and work, learn, live and play. Urban communities comprise of dwellers from various demographic backgrounds, have higher education, better income, purchasing power, superior infrastructure, facilities and more opportunities to make meaningful changes compared to villagers. This unaligned intellectual capital will go to waste if not harnessed for the common good of the community. The issue then is how to get communities to contribute and be involved in volunteering activities? One of the factors identified contributing to active volunteering is activity organization. Communities respond and contribute significantly to volunteering activities when there is a formal or informal group organizing and promoting the activities. An issue here is how to sustain this group after the volunteering project has fulfilled its purpose when each member of the community is busy and there is no economic reward for the effort? The concept of setting-up an administrative organization to manage volunteering activities is not viable since it requires a continuous budget and resources while the volunteering activity is seasonal and the focus is diverse. Many community members are found to be also against autocratic rule that came from such an organization as well as if it is biased towards a certain ideology. A novel and effective solution is to utilize swarm intelligence by getting the crowd decentralized self-organization feature to sustain the volunteering activities and involvement in open innovation. Like swarm of ants and bees, the community does not need a leader to dictate them on what to do. By providing a framework and ecosystem for virtual collaboration, communities are able to organize and run various activities by themselves. A volunteering portal for crowdsourcing, crowd funding and crowd innovation based on swarm intelligence facilitates members of the community to propose, support and be involved in volunteering projects through a self-organization.

 [Biography] Prof. Dr. Ahmad Zaki Bin Abu Bakar is a Senior Professor at the Department of Interactive Media, Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM) since November 2012. Previously he was with Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) since 1977. He was the UTM official representative and Visiting Professor at Qatar University from 2010 to 2011, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 2010 and before that at Universitas Sriwijaya, Palembang, Indonesia.
He serves in many national and international committees such President of the Malaysian National Computer Confederation (MNCC) since June 2012, Exco member and Vice President of the South East Asia Regional Confederation (SEARCC) since 2013, a member of the National Information Technology Council since 2012, Secretary of the ICT Cluster of the Malaysian National Council of Professors since 2012, Chairman of the National E-Commerce Standards Committee since 2003, a senior panel member for the Malaysian Qualification Agency since 2006, a member of the Malaysian National Academic Search Committee since 2007 and as the Honorary Johor Commissioner of Scouts since 2009.
His current research interests include Swarm Intellogence, Community Informatics, Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, Multilingual Information Technology, Information Systems Innovation, Intelligent Systems, Knowledge Management Systems, Complex Systems, e-Business, IT Technopreneurship, IT Project Management, Creativity & Innovation, Science & Technology Fiction and Technology Foresight and Policy.
His management experience include Director of UTeMEX since 2013, Director of UTM Press (2007 – 2008), Dean of International Affairs (2004 – 2007), Dean of Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems (2001 – 2004), Manager of Technopreneur Development at the Bureau of Innovation and Consultancy (1999 – 2001), Manager of Integrated Graduate Development Scheme of the Business Advanced Technology Center (1996 -1997), founding Managing Director of the Malaysian National Institute of Translation (1993 - 1996) and Director of the Malaysian Division of the Joint Research in Multilingual Computer Translation Project between Japan, Malaysia, China, Thailand and Indonesia (1989 -1996).

Soft Computing and its Application to Humans-Robots Interaction
Kaoru Hirota
Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

 [Abstract]
Many interesting robots, e.g., HONDA ASIMO and TOYOTA trumpet playing robot, have been developed and accepted by general people. In most cases, however, the operations/demonstrations are done basically by one robot and one human operator or at most by a few and a few. It is expected in the near future to realize such a society that many robots/machines and many humans communicate with each other by using internet connection or face to face communication. The presenter’s group at Tokyo Institute of Technology has been studying on many robots and many humans communication through internet, where the atmosphere of the communication field/society by many humans/robots plays an important role for the smooth communication. The concept of Fuzzy Atmosfield (FA) is proposed to express the atmosphere in such humans-robots communication field/society, where the atmosphere in the communication field/society is expressed by a point in the 3D fuzzy cubic space, and is varying/moving in the space time by time. To understand easily such movement of the atmosphere, a graphical representation method is also proposed. To illustrate the FA and its visualization method, demonstration scenarios by five eye robots and four humans are demonstrated.

 [Biography] Prof. Dr. Kaoru HIROTAreceived Dr. E. degrees from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1979. After his career at Sagami Institute of Technology and Hosei University, he has been with Tokyo Institute of Technology. His research interests include fuzzy systems, intelligent robot, and image understanding. He experienced president-elect and fellow of IFSA (International Fuzzy Systems Association), and president of SOFT (Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Systems.) He is a chief editor of J. of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics. Banki Donat Medal, Henri Coanda Medal, Grigore MOISIL Award, SOFT best paper award, Acoustical Society of Japan best paper award, honorary professorships from de La Salle University and Changchun Univ. of Science & Technology, and Honoris Causa from Bulacan state university, Budapest Technical University, and Szechenyi Istvan University were awarded to him. He organized more than 10 international conferences/symposiums as a founding/general/program chair. He has been publishing about 250 journal papers, 50 books, and 450 conference papers.

Open Educational Resources: Does Open Imply Findable?
Darina Dicheva
Winston-Salem State University, USA

 [Abstract]
Information and Communication Technologies, as a rapidly expanding and evolving body of knowledge, force a continuous re-evaluation of the ICT topics covered in academic courses. This requires both faculty and students to develop and update their knowledge in order to keep pace with the evolving field. Open Educational Resources (OER) can aid this continuous process by providing infrastructure for sharing knowledge and experience, and reducing the duplication of efforts for creating educational resources. The concept behind OER - that educational resources should be shared and reused - is not foreign to the educational community. Instructors have been often sharing their materials with colleagues. What is new is the way these resources can be produced and the legal framework that allows their reuse, sharing and distribution. As a result of these developments, there is a considerable amount and variation of open content available to the public today. However, a big portion of this open content is significantly underused. As the OER movement emerges into the mainstream, it is evident that the findability of OER is one of the major barriers towards their wider use and reuse. The problem of finding useful open content resources is complex. It involves technical, organizational and institutional aspects. Substantial research has been conducted on this subject and some OER reference repositories have been built. In this talk I will discuss the importance of OER for the fast changing landscape of the Computing and ICT education and will present the current state of the art in this area. The focus will be on the problems of OER search, navigation, and recommendation as a vehicle to improve Open Educational Resources’ findability. At the end, I will outline some approaches for improving findability through enhancing the access mechanisms and methods for capturing and utilizing subject domain vocabularies.

 [Biography] Prof. Darina Dicheva is Paul Fulton/Delta Sigma Theta Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Winston-Salem State University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA. She received a MSc degree and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria in 1974 and 1982, respectively. Previously she has worked as a tenured professor at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Sofia, Bulgaria. Her research interests include semantic web, social networks, digital libraries, intelligent learning environments, adaptive information retrieval and filtering, and user modeling. The focus of her recent research is on using ontologies, semantic technologies and information retrieval techniques for content structuring and improving findability of resources in digital libraries. She has authored over 130 research papers and co-authored/co-edited 13 books. She is currently Associate Editor of the Int’l Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Lifelong Learning, Member of the Advisory Board of the IEEE Educational Technologies and Society Journal, Member of the Editorial Board of the Int’l Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies and of the Int’l Journal on Information Technologies and Knowledge. She has been Program (Co-)Chair of 9 international conferences, and a member of the program committees of more than 60 international conferences and workshops in the recent years. She was also a co-organizer of the International Workshop on Semantic Web for e-Learning (SWEL) series. Her research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, as well as by the European Union INCO Copernicus, Copernicus and Tempus programs.