Conferences, workshop & seminars, 1999

Conferences, workshop & seminars, 1999

Workshops
Seminars
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1999 Conferences

ASIAN'99, Asian Computing Science Conference, Phuket, Thailand, December 10-12, 1999.
The series of annual Asian Computing Science Conferences (ASIAN) was initiated in 1995 by AIT, INRIA and UNU/IIST to provide a forum for researchers in computer science from the Asian region and to promote interaction with researchers from other regions. The first four conferences have been held, respectively, in Bangkok, Singapore, Katmandu and Manila. In addition to support from the host countries, they have also been sponsored by INRIA, France, UNU/IIST, Macau and NUS, Singapore. The proceedings have been published as Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag.
The scope of the conferences has been a broad coverage of Computer Science, but with a focus on a few chosen specific themes concerning the formal aspects of algorithms, programming, concurrency and parallelism, networking and security. The 1999 conference will continue to emphasize the conceptual areas of Computer Science, though papers in all areas will be considered. The following themes represent the areas of focus for this year:
- Embedded and Real-Time Systems
- Formal Reasoning and Verification
- Distributed and Mobile Computing
, AIT, Bangkok, Thailand, 22-26 November 1999.
SmartNet'99, the 5th IFIP Conference on Intelligence in Networks, aims at providing an international forum for academics, researchers, practitioners and service providers. The discussion areas will include the research and development in the area of telecommunication service architectures, service creation, distribution and intelligence in networks, applications to multimedia and mobility, market issues of new services, and performance and QoS issues.
Nowadays a simultaneous and mutual profound development takes place regarding:
- the dependency of society and business on telecommunication services
- the telecommunication marketplace
- considerations of quality and price of telecommunication services
- telecommunications and Internet service architectures
- network complexity and competence related to the operation of teleservices and telecommunication equipment
FM'99, World Congress on Formal Methods in the Development of Computing Systems, September 20th-24th, Toulouse, France.

1999 Workshops

11th Asian School on Computer Science, Phuket, Thailand, 13-15 December, 1999 (post ASIAN'99).
Arithmetic Circuit Design, by Jean Vuillemin, Ecole Normale Superieure
Explicit and Inplicit Automata, by Gerard Berry, Ecole des Mines de Paris and INRIA
Verification by Model-Checking, by Nicolas Halbwachs, Verimag/CNRS

1999 Seminars

The Fluent Calculus - A Theoretical Foundation for Cognitive Robotics, by Prof. Michael Thielscher, University of Dresden.
CS 209, Friday, November 26, 1999, 13:30.
Cognitive Robotics aims at creating robots -or any kind of largely autonomous agents- which are endowed with high-level cognitive functions. These functions involve reasoning about perceptions, about the robot's own actions and their effects, and about its goals and desires. The provision of high-level cognitive functions liberate robots from being confined to strictly algorithmic solutions, and so enable them to truly autonomously pursue high-level goals.
The talk is intended to give an overview of the Fluent Calculus as a standard formal foundation for Cognitive Robotic. Based on a logical representation of elementary actions, we will present recent research results in modeling uncertainty, concurrent actions, actions with indirect effects, and continuous processes along with exogenous events.
From Logic Programming to Multiagents Systems, by Prof R. Kowalski, Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK.
ET2, Tuesday, November 9, 1999, 10:00.
Modeling and Use of Context in Computer Systems, by Prof Patrick Brézillon, University Paris VI, France.
CS 209, Tuesday, October 26, 1999, 14:00.
It is generally accepted that 'knowledge' has a contextual component. However, even if its importance is acknowledged, this contextual component is rarely represented explicitly in available knowledge representation systems and not used in subsequent processing of knowledge. Thus, there is a gap between what is known and what is done. For example, in Artificial Intelligence (AI), acquisition, representation and exploitation of knowledge in context would have a major contribution in knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition, explanation, maintenance, documentation, learning, human-computer communication and validation or verification. A computational capability to understand, represent and reason about context will be very valuable for, and of immense benefit to, many AI problems. However, the gap is not specific to AI and is found in practically all the domains where context plays a crucial role.
The paramount importance of context is point out in an application for the subway for managing incidents.
Towards Intelligent Assistant Systems, by Prof Patrick Brézillon, University Paris VI, France.
CS 209, Thursday, October 28, 1999, 14:00.
Expert systems have rose many hopes for helping in domains where human experts are rare. However, it was a failure for different reasons, mainly because it is not possible to know what the expert system needs before its use. In parallel, decision support systems have shown many interests for helping the decision making process. However, the knowledge dimension in decision support systems is missing and limits seriously the potentialities of these systems. We present in this talk the new generation of knowledge-based systems, namely the intelligent assistant systems. These systems associate the strong features of expert systems and decision support systems--avoiding their weknesses--and have a contextual dimension that put them above previous systems.
Data Analysis with Conceptual Information Systems, by Dr. Gerd Stumme, Fachbereich Mathematik, Darmstadt University of Technology Schlossgartenstr.
CS 209, Monday, October 4th, 1999, 11:00.
Conceptual Information Systems are tools for data analysis, information retrieval, and knowledge discovery. They provide a multi-dimensional conceptually structured view on data stored in relational databases. Conceptual Information Systems are similar to On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools, but focus on qualitative (i.e. non-numerical) data. Conceptual Information Systems have proven their value in more than 30 scientific and commercial implementations.
From Expert Systems to Agent Based Systems, by Prof. P.C.P Bhatt, Information Systems Engineering, Kochi University of Technology, Kochi-Ken, JAPAN.
CS 209, Wednesday, September 1st, 1999, 14:00.
The influence of variability on the evolvability of conceptual models of information systems, by Mr. Jan Verelst, Business Information Systems, Operations and Logistics Management, University of Antwerp (RUCA) Antwrep, Belgium.
CS 209, Thursday, June 3rd, 1999, 14:00.
Many methodologies for information system (IS) development advocate the use of conceptual models during the analysis phase of IS-development. A conceptual model (CM) is defined as a model of the part of the real world that is relevant to the IS (also called the Universe of Discourse - UoD). Well-known modeling techniques for CM are Entity-Relationship (ER)-modeling and object-oriented (OO)-modeling.
We are interested in factors that affect the evolvability or maintainability of CM.These terms refer to the ease with which CM can be changed to reflect the changes in the UoD.
Therefore, we investigate the following two research questions:
1. is it possible to build in a certain modeling technique (such as ER or OO), different but correct CM for a UoD ? More specifically, we are interested in how these differences can be described. We will refer to the existence of these differences using the term variability.
2. do these different but correct CM have different evolvability ?
Visual Verification, by Prof Zohar Manna, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University.
RCC Auditorium, Wednesday May 19, 1999, 10:00.
The deductive approach to verifying temporal properties of reactive systems is based on verification rules, which reduce the system validity of a temporal property to the general validity of first-order verification conditions. This methodology is complete relative to the underlying first-order reasoning. However, the proofs can be difficult to construct and understand, particularly as the complexity of the system increases.
We present diagram-based formalisms for the verification of general temporal properties of reactive, real-time and hybrid systems. A diagram is a visual abstraction of the system to be verified; it captures the aspects of the system relevant to the property to be proved. The diagram represents a schematic overview of a deductive proof, and therefore it is more intuitive and easier to construct and understand.