Intelligent Systems and Applications

Citation

Kinshuk, D. (2001), "Intelligent Systems and Applications", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 18 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2001.23918bac.009

Intelligent Systems and Applications

Dr Kinshuk

The International ICSC Congress on Intelligent Systems and Applications, organised by International Computer Science Conventions, Canada/ Switzerland took place at the University of Wollongong, Australia, 11-15 December, 2000. It comprised five symposia on computational intelligence (CI), interactive and collaborative computing (ICC), industrial systems (IS), biologically inspired systems (BIS), and multi-agents and mobile agents in virtual organisation and e-commerce (MAMA). About 320 participants attended the congress.

The symposium on multi-agents and mobile agents in virtual organisation and e-commerce started on 11 December, whereas the rest of the symposia started on 12 December. For the symposia other than MAMA, 12 December was solely workshop and tutorials day. The rest of the days started with a keynote speech and then dispersed into parallel technical sessions.

This review will mainly focus on the events which started on 12 December.

Opening ceremony

The congress was officially opened on 13 December by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wollongong who stressed the role of Wollongong in technological research and pointed out the "University of the Year" title which the university has earned for last four years among all Australian universities. He welcomed all participants and hoped that the discussions during the event would significantly contribute to the advancement of technological research.

This was followed by the keynote speech of Hans-Jürgen Zimmermann from Germany. In his very interesting overview of the three-decade long evolution of computational intelligence, he discussed how fuzzy logic and associated techniques have contributed significantly and how their role and features have changed shape in different phases. He differentiated fuzzy systems from those based on other probabilistic techniques and explained the fuctional differences in very simple terms.

Other plenary speeches during the conference included Hans H. Bothe's "Pulsed Neural Networks for Artificial Perception", Boris Stilman's "From Control to Play, from Play to Construction", Kim Marriott's "Understanding Diagramm", and Gerd Heinz's "Abstraction Levels in Neurocomputation: From Pattern Processing to Wave Interference".

Highlights from tutorials and technical sessions

Other than keynote speeches, all other activities of the conference were run in multiple parallel sessions, so it was not possible to attend each and every activity. What follows is an overview of some of the activities.

A number of presentations at the conference focused on intelligent educational applications. For example, Lorna Uden from the United Kingdom presented a half-day tutorial on "Problem Based Learning for Software Engineers". She demonstrated that problem-based learning is an instructional method to teach students how to "learn-to-learn", particularly in collaborative situations, and how to find solutions to real-world problems. Kinshuk from New Zealand presented another tutorial on "Cognitive Skills Based Adaptive Educational Environments" where he discussed the need, design, architecture and functionality of educational environments that facilitate individualised acquisition of cognitive skills for those students who do not have direct interaction with human experts. Both of these tutorials were of half-day duration.

Web-based learning was a prominent topic in the ICC symposium and a number of presenters focused on this topic. Fazel Naghdy, the Chair of ISA2000, presented a Web-based system simulating laboratory experiments and providing individual and intelligent feedback to learners. Anton Nijholt talked about the Web-based agents his group has developed for instruction purposes. Hiroaki Ogata, Chair of ICC Symposium, presented his work on the open ended and collaborative learning environment on the Web and presented the system SharlockII. It provides a knowledge awareness map to visualize the relationship between shared knowledge and the current and past interactions of learners.

Continuing the focus on Web-based environments, another interesting session was on the theme "reusability in Web-based educational systems". Gerrit Hiddink started the session with discussion on achieving reusability by separating the layout of learning objects from their content. He demonstrated his work on a prototype learning environment using XML and XSL. Kinshuk focused on a more social aspect of reusability and stressed that it is not possible to achieve reusability until the implementing teacher does not feel ownership of the learning material. He discussed a framework of contexts for educational systems and pointed out the significant implementing role a teacher plays in the environmental context by providing direction and a power-relationship in the learning process. Roy Rada shared his experiences of administration responsibilities in the development and implementation of educational systems and focused on providing the reusability in those tasks. Chris DiGiano talked about the reusability and interoperability of design tools for mathematics learning and shared his experiences from the ESCOT project. Finally, Dan Fleming discussed a conceptual model for understanding the various "front" and "back" regions involved in Web-based educational systems.

Other significant technologies discussed during the conference included multimedia and hypermedia, intelligent agents, artificial intelligence, knowledge-based systems, auditory computations, signal processing, pattern recognition, neural networks, tele-working environments, intelligent scheduling and planning, adaptive systems, computer-supported collaborative work, distributed systems, human computer interaction and virtual reality.

Synopsis

The Intelligent Systems and Applications Conference was a rather large event with much to learn and discuss about state-of-the-art technologies currently in the research and development phase. Not all sessions could be of interest to everyone, and participants picked sessions of their interest. But one thing was clear: such a combined event (comprising five symposia) not only gives an overall picture of how particular technologies are being used in different scenarios, it also provides the opportunity for networking among experts and researchers of different disciplines and creates collaboration possibilities.

Dr Kinshuk is Senior Lecturer at Massey University, New Zealand. E-mail: kinshuk@massey.ac.nz