Next
month is our flagship conference, SMC’03, which
will be held in Washington, D.C. at the Crystal City Hyatt
Regency Hotel. I am looking forward to meeting many of
you there.
This
is an exciting time for SMC. Over the past several years,
there has been a significant research explosion in the
area of complex smart “intelligent systems”.
SMC is moving away from publishing papers on non-perceptive
and non-adaptive systems and moving towards publishing
papers on intelligent systems dealing with uncertainty
and vagueness. A typical paper published in 1992 might
have been titled: “Distributed Dynamic Decision
and Planning Systems for Robot Motion”, whereas
a paper published today would more likely be titled: “An
Adaptive Intelligent Control System Application Using
a Fuzzy-Neural Network Algorithm Approach”.
We
now see papers published on new, everyday applications
involving smart, intelligent systems such as intelligent
retrieval from Internet searches, cameras that remove
the jitter that comes from your unsteady hands, Intelligent
transportation systems, Adaptive communications technologies,
Intelligent manufacturing systems, etc.
In
fact, because of this research explosion, submissions
to our journals are predicted, by the end of 2004, to
increase by 163% for Part A, 229% for Part B, and 280%
for Part C, as compared to the number of submissions several
years ago. The SMC journal that has the biggest increase
in the number of submissions is Part B, from 310 submissions
in 1999 to an estimated 1000 submissions for 2004. In
fact, Part B will publish over 2500 pages in 2004, an
increase of 1500 pages over 2003, to meet this demand
(with an acceptance rate of only 20%).
Part
A is the only journal in IEEE that publishes results from
human factors, human-machine systems, cognitive engineering,
and systems engineering, along with their many methodologies
from simulation to optimization and their many applications
in areas such as: manufacturing, finance, transportation,
and medicine. Part A also publishes papers in intelligent
systems but concentrates on the interface of these systems
with human operators, teams, and organizations. During
the past few years Part A has worked to stabilize its
focus and has become the premier journal in the above
areas.
Part
B now publishes mostly systems research papers, typically
with an experimental component from academia and corporate
research labs, e.g. tracking targets by scent, increasing
the stability while reducing the number of rules in fuzzy
control, clustering document databases for retrieval,
etc. Intelligent and smart systems, especially those with
computational intelligence, have taken on much more importance
in the past decade because it is now possible to realize
examples of such systems.
Finally,
due to demand by IEEE and by members of SMC, Part C focuses
on papers of interest to the non-academic practicing systems
engineer such as: Learning in Multimedia Communications,
Information Processing, and Education, Computational Intelligence
in Telecommunications Networks and Internet Services,
and Intelligent Techniques in Flexible Manufacturing
This
month, September, is also when IEEE starts to send out
its renewal notices for 2004 memberships. Thus, I would
like to take this opportunity to invite you to renew your
membership in SMC for next year. If you are not yet a
member, please take this opportunity to join SMC when
you renew your IEEE 2004 membership.
There
are a number of reasons to join SMC:
