The Experts Speak on Emergent Technologies

Based on the survey and discussion of the NaBIC2010 Emergent Technologies Committee, we invited three plenary speakers for the best three emergent technologies. As we want to make NaBIC2010 be a trigger conference to spread these emergent technologies through conference attendees, three plenary speakers do not make research presentations for specific researchers but explain these technologies as tutorial talks for all conference attendees who have different backgrounds in the best golden time slot of NaBIC2010 time schedule, whole afternoon on December 16.

	Introduction to Organic Computing        Prof. Christian Müller-Schloer        Leibniz Universitat Hannover, Germany
[Abstract] Organic Computing has emerged as a challenging vision for future information processing systems, based on the insight that already in the near future we will be surrounded by large collections of autonomous systems equipped with sensors and actuators to be aware of their environment, to communicate freely, and to organize themselves. The presence of networks of intelligent systems in our environment opens fascinating application areas but, at the same time, bears the problem of their controllability. Hence, we have to construct these systems - which we increasingly depend on - as robust, safe, flexible, and trustworthy as possible. In particular, a strong orientation of these systems towards human needs as opposed to a pure implementation of the technologically possible seems absolutely central. In order to achieve these goals, our technical systems will have to act more independently, flexibly, and autonomously, i.e. they will have to exhibit life-like properties. We call those systems "organic". Hence, an "Organic Computing System" is a technical system, which adapts dynamically to the current conditions of its environment. It will be self-organizing, self-configuring, self-healing, self-protecting, self-explaining, and context-aware.     First steps towards adaptive and self-organizing computer systems are already being undertaken. Adaptivity, reconfigurability, emergence of new properties, and self-organisation are topics in a variety of research projects. The special priority research program on Organic Computing of the German Science Foundation (DFG) addresses fundamental challenges in the design of organic computing systems; its objective is a deeper understanding of emergent global behaviour in self-organising systems and the design of specific concepts and tools to support the construction of organic computing systems for technical applications.    This presentation will introduce the research ideas of Organic Computing, explain key concepts such as observer/controller architectures and multi-level online learning, and illustrate these concepts with current technical application projects like Organic Traffic Control, Organic Network control or Cooperating Smart Camera Systems. It will conclude with an outlook towards future Social Organic Computing systems.
[Biography] Christian Müller-Schloer studied EE at the Technical University of Munich and received the Diploma degree in 1975, the Ph. D. in semiconductor physics in 1977. In the same year he joined Siemens Corporate Technology where he worked in a variety of research fields, among them CAD for communication systems, cryptography, simulation accelerators and RISC architectures.     From 1980 until 1982 he was a member of the Siemens research labs in Princeton, NJ, U.S.A. In 1991 he was appointed full professor of computer architecture and operating systems at the University of Hannover. His institute, later renamed to Institute of Systems Engineering - System and Computer Architecture, engaged in systems level research such as system design and simulation, embedded systems, virtual prototyping, educational technology and, since 2001, adaptive and self-organizing systems.    He is one of the founders of the German Organic Computing initiative, which was launched in 2003 with support of GI and itg, the two key professional societies for computer science in Germany. In 2005 he co-initiated the Special Priority Programme on Organic Computing of the German Research Foundation (DFG).    He is author of more than 130 papers and several books.    Present projects - predominantly in the area of Organic Computing - deal, among others, with topics like quantitative emergence and self-organization, organic traffic control, organic network control, self-organizing smart camera systems and ontology-based self-organizing embedded systems.

	Introduction to Perception-based Computing        Prof. Andrzej Skowron        University of Warsaw, Poland
[Abstract] We discuss Perception-based Computing (PbC) in the Wisdom Technology (Wistech) framework. The intuitive nature of wisdom in Wistech can be expressed by the so called wisdom equation metaphorically described by wisdom = knowledge + adaptive_ judgment + interactions. Interactive Rough-Granular Computing (IRGC) is used as the basic methodology for PbC. Key issue in Granular Computing (GC) is information granulation (IG). IG is used for modeling of human way of data compression and plays a key role in problem solving by human. Due to limited abilities of human organs, human perception is usually imprecise (e.g., boundary between decision classes are vague, values of attributes are granular). Hence, in IRGC the rough set approach in combination with the other soft computing approaches for dealing with imprecise knowledge are used. Computations in IRGC are performed on different kinds of objects, called information granules (such as sensory granules, decision rules or sets of decision rules, classifiers for vague concepts, agents or coalitions of agents). These computations are progressing through interactions between granules. In the discussed approach, methods for modeling of interactions among granules and interactive computations are of great importance. Some granules (e.g., agents) have ability to perceive objects. Perception by such granules is understood here as a process resulting in activation of some parts (e.g., complex concepts) of these granules. This activation is caused by interactions of sensory parts of the granules with distributed environments and other parts of these granules (e.g., granules stored in knowledge networks representing behavioral patterns of observed objects or different components of activated complex granules). The activated parts are used, e.g., for triggering of actions or plans. We discuss how granules such as complex vague concepts can be approximated using domain ontology approximation. This illustrates how the activation of complex granules can be realized, i.e., how, in the discussed model, the perception results are computed. Some applications of the discussed approach in real-life projects such as medical decision support, identification o complex behavioral patterns on the road or sunspot classification are reported.
[Biography] Andrzej Skowron received the Ph. D. and D. Sci. (habilitation) from the University of Warsaw in Poland. In 1991 he received the Scientific Title of Professor. He is Full Professor in the Faculty of Mathematics, Computer Science and Mechanics at Warsaw University. Andrzej Skowron is the (co)author of more than 350 scientific publications. His areas of expertise include reasoning with incomplete information, approximate reasoning, soft computing methods and applications, rough sets, rough mereology, granular computing, synthesis and analysis of complex objects, intelligent agents, knowledge discovery and data mining, decision support systems, adaptive and autonomous systems. He was the supervisor of more than 20 PhD Thesis. He was also involved in several national and international research and commercial projects related to, e.g., data mining (fraud detection, web mining), control of unmanned vehicles, medical decision support systems and approximate reasoning in distributed environments.    In the period 1995-2009 he was the Editor-in-Chief of Fundamenta Informaticae journal. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the LNCS Transactions on Rough Sets journal published by Springer. He is on Editorial Boards of many others journals including Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Andrzej Skowron was the President of the International Rough Set Society from 1996 to 2000. He served or is currently serving on the program committees of more than 100 international conferences and workshops, as program or steering committee member, program chair or co-chair. He has delivered numerous invited talks at international conferences including a plenary talk at the 16-th IFIP World Computer Congress (Beijing, 2000). Throughout his career Andrzej Skowron received many awards for his achievements.

	Introduction to Morphogenetic Robotics        Prof. Yaochu Jin        University of Surrey, UK
[Abstract] Biological morphogenesis can be seen as a self-organizing process where a large number of cells communicate and interact locally with each other and with the environment to form a complex shape as an emerging global behavior under the control of a gene regulatory network. This self-organization process is decentralized, robust to mild changes in the environment and capable of self-healing.     This talk gives an overview of morphogenetic robotics, an emerging subfield of developmental robotics that is concerned with the physical development of intelligent robotic systems, including the body plan and neural controller, using genetic and cellular mechanisms inspired from biological morphogenesis. Morphogenetic robotics includes three main topics, namely, morphogenetic swarm robotic systems, morphogenetic modular robots and brain-body co-development of intelligent robots. Morphogenetic swarm robotics deals with the decentralized self-organization of multi-robot systems using genetic and cellular mechanisms, where a metaphor between cells and robots play a central role. By morphogenetic modular robots, we mean the study of morphogenetic principles for autonomous self-reconfiguration of modular robots, where a module is mapped onto a number of cells. In both morphogenetic swarm and modular robots, self-adaptation to environmental changes is a paramount importance. Note however that these two systems are not absolutely separated. It can happen that a swarm robotic system consists of modular robots which are composed of a number of robots. Nevertheless, autonomous behavioral changes can undergo under the governance of a unified gene regulation system. Finally, brain-body co-development of robots, often based on an evolutionary approach, is also a major research topic of morphogenetic robotics. Evolutionary developmental approaches to brain-body co-design can offer us the possibility to not only study the coupling between brain and body function, but also the developmental bias on brain-body co-evolution.
[Biography] Yaochu Jin received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees, all in automatic control from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 1988, 1991, and 1996, respectively, and the Dr.-Ing. Degree from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, in 2001.     Dr. Jin is a Professor and Chair in Computational Intelligence, Department of Computing, University of Surrey, UK, from June 1, 2010. Priori to joining Surrey, he was with the Honda Research Institute Europe and Honda R&D Europe, Germany from 1999 to 2010. His research interests include computational approaches to understanding evolution, learning and development in biology, and biological approaches to complex systems design. He has (co)edited three books and three conference proceedings, authored a monograph, and (co)authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers.     Dr. Jin is an Associate Editor of BioSystems, the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine. He is a Program Chair or Co-Chair of a number of international conferences or symposia. Dr. Jin is an invited Keynote / Plenary Speaker on several international conferences and symposia. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.