Keynote Speeches

It took only four and half decades for fuzzy set and logic to be a part of mainstream of some academic disciplines and its evolution process has been truly fascinating and colorful, sometime unpredictable, sometime can be quite frustrated.
One puzzling question to be asked has been, "Why there was much opposition to the growth and the development of this seemingly really needed theory, especially by invoking the philosophy of pragmatism?"
This question, actually, can easily be answered by studying the history of mathematics and the history of philosophy.

To compare with another example, it took the theory of probability and statistics no less than four and half centuries to become a mainstream in education systems and economics of our society [job creations].
The main lesson we learn from this study, however, is very significant, to say the least. By invoking the Principia Mathematica of the Bertrand Russell and the works of several important mathematicians and philosophers, it is perhaps prudent to say that the development of the mathematics of uncertainty as a new identity, of which the probability theory has been the oldest member and together with the theory of possibility are the two most important members.
We also believe there may be more members to be discovered in the future!

In responding to the need of encouraging the further development of the mathematics of uncertainty, a group of more than one hundred researchers got together in 2005 at the Salt Lake City to establish an association SMU, Society for Mathematics of Uncertainty, with a chartered 'mission statement' [ www.math-uncertainty.org ].
In the mean time, some strategic plan for action has been laid out as well.

Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) is a method for optimizing target systems based on human knowledge, experiences, preference, intuition, and/or KANSE in general. There are many systems that it is hard or impossible to design fitness functions for the optimization and therefore we cannot apply conventional optimization methods including conventional evolutionary computation (EC) framework.

We first overview IEC research mainly consisting of two directions: expanding IEC applications in a wide variety of areas and reducing IEC user fatigue. The IEC application areas include artistic areas, engineering areas, and others. The research on reducing IEC user fatigue includes improving IEC user interface, accelerating EC search, predicting IEC user evaluation characteristics, and others.

Next, we turn in to the main part of this talk. An IEC framework consists of three parts: a target system, EC, and an IEC user, and conventional EC algorithms, such as genetic algorithms (GA), genetic programming, evolutionary strategy, and evolutionary programming have been adopted. We show several variations of the IEC frameworks; they are (1) interactive real code GA, (2) interactive Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), (3) tournament IEC, (4) interactive Differential Evolution, and (5) parallel IEC. Each of these IEC frameworks has different characteristics, and we introduce them and compare the performances of some of them with conventional IEC.

He received the degrees of Bachelor, Master, Doctorate Degrees in 1979, 1981, and 1991. He worked for the Central Research Laboratories of Panasonic in 1981-1995, and is an Associate Professor of Kyushu Institute of Design since 1995 and now works for Kyushu University after two universities merged in 2003. He was a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley in 1991-1993.

He is interested in Computational Intelligence (CI), especially cooperation of several CI techniques and human. Currently, his interest focuses on Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) that aims the cooperation of human and EC. He is one of the most active researchers in IEC research community as shown in his publication, organizing sessions at conferences, giving invited talks and lectures, receiving paper awards, and other academic activities. He received eight academic awards.

He is the Vice President of IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (SMCS) in 2006-2007 and 2008-2009, a registered lecturer of the SMCS Distinguish Lecturer Program in 2006-2007 and 2008-2009, the Chair of SMCS Technical Committee on Soft Computing, and an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. on SMC Part B.

See detail at here.

Fragile watermarking is applied to protect the integrity of the digital media. Current fragile watermarking schemes mainly provide the functionality of detecting and locating the tampered regions of an authorized image. The capability to recover the tampered regions has rarely been discussed in the literature.

In fact, the recovery ability is an important issue while proving and maintaining the image integrity. For achieving these purposes, we first utilize the concept of self-reference to preserve the significant information of a protected image.

Then we embed the information into the protected image using the technique of wet paper coding. According to experimental results, the new scheme is highly sensitive to detect and locate the tampered area. In particular, the results show that the quality of recovery image is satisfactory.

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. And since his early years of career development, he consecutively won Outstanding Youth Award of Taiwan., Outstanding Talent in Information Sciences of Taiwan., AceR Dragon Award of the Ten Most Outstanding Talents, Outstanding Scholar Award of Taiwan., Outstanding Engineering Professor Award of Taiwan, Chung-Shan Academic Publication Awards, Distinguished Research Awards of National Science Council of Taiwan, Outstanding Scholarly Contribution Award of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, Top Fifteen Scholars in Systems and Software Engineering of the Journal of Systems and Software, and so on. 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 more than one thousand papers in Information Sciences. In the meantime, he participates actively in international academic organizations and performs advisory work to government agencies and academic organizations.

A large class of physical systems has variable structures subject to random changes, which may result from the abrupt phenomena such as component and interconnection failures, parameters shifting, tracking, and the time required to measure some of the variables at different stages. Systems with this character may be modeled as hybrid ones, that is, to the continuous state variable, a discrete random variable called the mode, or regime, is appended. The mode describes the random jumps of the system parameters and the occurrence of discontinuities. When an important and unpredictable variation causes a discrete change in the plant characterization at isolated points in time, a Markov chain with a finite state space is a natural model for the plant parameter processes. Stochastic Jump systems (SJS) have been a subject of great practical importance which has attracted a lot of interest for last three decades. SJS model is useful particularly since it allows the decision maker to cope adequately with the discrete events that disrupt and/or change significantly the normal operation of a system, by using the knowledge of their occurrence and the statistical information on the rate at which these events take place.

On the other hand, in order to control the behavior of a system, we should capture the system's salient features in a mathematical model. In practice, it is almost always impossible to get an exact mathematical model of a dynamical system due to the complexity of the system, the difficulty of measuring various parameters, environmental noises, uncertain and/or time-varying parameters, etc. Indeed, the model of the system to be controlled almost always contains some type of uncertainty. The control design should take into account the uncertainty inherent to a mathematical model of the system in order to maintain stability and performance specifications in the presence of these uncertainties. In the past decades, the design of control systems that can handle model uncertainties has been one of the most challenging problems and received considerable attention from engineers and scientists.

In this talk, the nature of hybrid dynamical systems will be explored, and filtering design techniques for such systems with uncertainties will be presented. It is hoped that this presentation will help people study hybrid system from control engineering perspective.

Peng Shi received the BSc degree in Mathematics from Harbin Institute of Technology, China in 1982; the ME degree in control theory from Harbin Engineering University, China in 1985; the PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Newcastle, Australia in 1994; and the PhD degree in mathematics from the University of South Australia in 1998. He was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science (higher doctorate) by the University of Glamorgan, UK, in 2006.

Dr Shi worked as a lecturer in Heilongjiang University, China (1985-1989), in the University of South Australia (1997-1999) and a senior scientist in Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Department of Defence, Australia (1999-2005). He joined in the University of Glamorgan, UK, in 2004 as a professor. He is now on leave in Australia, as a professor in the Victoria University. Dr Shi?™s research interests include robust control and filtering on hybrid systems, fault detection techniques, Markov decision processes, and optimization techniques. He has published a number of papers in these areas. In addition, Dr Shi is a co-author of the two research monographs, Fuzzy Control and Filtering Design for Uncertain Fuzzy Systems (Berlin, Springer, 2006), and Methodologies for Control of Jump Time-Delay Systems (Boston, Kluwer, 2003).

Dr Shi currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Int. J. of Innovative Computing, Information and Control. He is also an Associate Editor/Editorial Board Member for a number of other journals, including IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics-Part B, and IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems. Dr Shi is a Fellow of Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (UK), and a Senior Member of IEEE (USA).