ICNSC2004 Conference Brief Report

The 2004 IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control was successfully held in Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan R.O.C., from March 21 to 23, 2004. This is the first time this conference which is full sponsored by IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society was held. This conference brought together researchers and developers in the fields of networking, sensing and control technologies from 25 different countries and areas providing them an ideal opportunity to exchange ideas and to explore possible collaborations. The conference received 339 full paper submissions including 164 invited papers. The papers went through a thorough review process, after which 116 papers were accepted for regular sessions, 129 papers for special invited sessions, and 26 papers for poster sessions.


In addition, we had three extraordinary plenary speeches: “Communication aspects in intelligent transportation systems” by Dr. Adam T. Drobot, who is the corporate vise president for Applied Research, Telcordia Technologies, Inc., “New attraction of automobile by information technology,” given by Prof. Tadao Saito of the Institute of System Science, University of Tokyo, “DRIVE - Dissemination of resource-information in vehicular peer-to-peer networks,” by Prof. Ouri E. Wolfson of Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago. Besides, the conference also hosted one panel discussion and one industry forum. The panel discussion was organized by Prof. Jason Chang and the topics discussed in the panel were regarding advanced public transportation systems. The industry forum that was organized by Prof. Chi-Kuo Mao focused on the issues on potential barriers and critical issues in the ITS development. In Addition, the Best Paper Award of ICNSC’04 was won by Fumio Miyazaki and Ryosuke Mori for their paper entitled “Realization of Ball Catching Task using a Mobile Robot ”. We had also invited several field experts from the industry and academia as the panelists to join the discussions. In a nut-shell, this inaugural conference was an immense success in the following ways:

1. Technically, the quality of the accepted papers is very high. Although we only accepted full paper manuscripts for review, thanks mainly to the promotion efforts of our organizing and program committees, the number of submissions is even higher than expected for an inaugural conference. The papers included present research and applications which cover the breadth of our discipline. Submissions received in the related areas of Intelligent Transportation Systems, this year’s Conference Theme, are rich in depth and width. Session themes mainly encompassed Vehicle Control, Traffic Control, Wireless Mobile Communications, Network-based Computing Systems, Transportation Networks, Environment Perception of Intelligent Vehicles, Pattern Recognition and Intrusion Detection, Transportation System Management, with almost all themes spanning multiple sessions.
   
2. Financially, the conference has gained a surplus higher than that initially set by the Society. We have maintained the policy of the SMC annual conferences that each paper should have at least one author registered. In addition, we have thankfully received generous supports from the National Science Council, Ministry of Education, and corporate sponsors including our banquet speaker.
   
3. Socially, the participants had a good opportunity of getting on with other experts in the fields of Networking, Sensing and Control from various universities and research/industrial institutes around the world. The cultural and social programs are found to have created a perfect environment for the participants to personally get to know of each other.

Special thanks go out to all the committee members, Sponsoring societies and organizations, and industries for the priceless contributions and support. ICNSC’05 will be held in March, 2005, in Tucson, Arizona, with conference theme being “Intelligent Networking and Systems”. For further information, please visit the following web:
http://web.njit.edu/~zhou/nsc.htm