I was in Barcelona recently for the 2010 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence. With little free time, I visited some of Barcelona’s famous architectures.

Gaudi’s Sagrada Família just blow me away!

His idea of a gothic cathedral is like seeing my day dream coming true. The little cherries and berries at the top are just ripe for picking under the sweltering summer heat.

Berries on top of La Sagrada Família

Inside the cathedral, there are big sunflowers which I imagine would be lovely to fall asleep while listening to a boring sermon!

I like to think that Gaudi and Computational Intelligence Scientists have something in common; we are both inspired by nature, and we both try to represent them in our work, either through architecture or computer algorithms.  Judging from the on-going construction, both must feel that it’s a never ending project.

Ugly looking Spanish barnacles

Afterward, we went to the famous Botafumeiro restaurant, and ate some Spanish seafood delicacies – including the strange percebes, which are barnacles highly valued by the Spaniards;  Delicious enough for fishermen to risk their lives to gather them from rocks beaten by strong sea waves.

They look ugly like the toes of a Komodo dragon (a big lizard).  It takes some  skills in twisting and turning the toe-like creature, but once you get it out of the shell, it actually tastes pretty good.

We were lucky to have Michio Sugeno as our dinner companion.  In addition to winning the prestigious 2010 IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award, Michio is clearly the world’s champion of percebes opener!

Gaudi's Familia with big sunflowers

IPMU 2010 conference was hosted in Germany.

The IPMU conference brings together scientists working on methods for the management of uncertainty and aggregation of information in intelligent systems. It provides a medium for the exchange of ideas between theoreticians and practitioners in these and related areas.

Topics and Scope of the Conference

Theory, Methods and Tools: Uncertainty, Bayesian and Probabilistic Methods, Information Theory, Measures of Information and Uncertainty, Evidence and Possibility Theory, Utility Theory, Fuzzy Sets and Fuzzy Logic, Rough Sets, Aggregation Methods, Knowledge Representation, Approximate Reasoning, Non-classical Logics, Default Reasoning, Belief Revision, Argumentation, Ontologies, Uncertainty in Cognition, Graphical Models, Knowledge Acquisition, Machine Learning, Evolutionary Computation, Neural Networks, Data Analysis.

Application Fields: Intelligent Systems and Information Processing, Decision Support, Database and Information Systems, Information Retrieval and Fusion, Image Processing, Multi-Media, Agents, Pattern Recognition, Medicine and Bioinformatics, Finance, Software Engineering, Industrial Engineering.

IPMU Conference in Málaga, Spain: June 22-27, 2008

The IPMU Conference is organized every two years with the focus of bringing together scientists working on methods for the management of uncertainty and aggregation of information in intelligent systems. This conference provides a medium for the exchange of ideas between theoreticians and practitioners in these and related areas.

The 12th edition of IPMU will be organized by the Dept. of Applied Mathematics of the University of Málaga. The conference will be held in Torremolinos, a well-known touristic place very close to Málaga in southern Spain.

I’ll be there.  See you!

NAFIPS conference will take place at The Rockefeller University, New York, NY  on May 19-22, 2008.

I’ll be there.  See you!

Ordered Weighted Averaging Operator — OWA – is explained on  Wikipedia :

operator of dimension is a mapping that has an associated collection of weights lying in the unit interval and summing to one and with

       where bj is the jth largest of the aj