Goto http://iske2008.xmu.edu.cn/ for conference information.

1 COCA-COLA
2 IBM
3 MICROSOFT
4 GE
5 NOKIA
6 TOYOTA
7 INTEL
8 McDONALD’S
9 DISNEY
10 GOOGLE

BusinessWeek and Interbrand follow an interesting 3-step approach in measuring the “economic value” of a brand, as quoted below:

STEP ONE is calculating how much of a company’s total sales falls under a particular brand. In some cases the brand encompasses nearly all sales, as with McDonald’s. In others it is tied to only one set of products: Louis Vuitton within LVMH Group. Using reports from analysts at JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanly, Interbrand projects five years of sales and earnings tied to each brand’s products and services.

STEP TWO is ca1culating how much of those earnings results from the power of the brand. Interbrand strips out operating costs, taxes, and charges for the capital employed to arrive at the earnings attributable to intangible assets. Inlerbrand then estimates the brand’s effect on earnings relative to other intangible assets such as patents and management strength.

FINALLY, those future earnings are discounted to arrive at a net present value. lnterbrand discounts against current interest rates and also against the brand’s overall risk profile to factor in brand strength. Factors include market leadership, stability, and global reach-or the ability to cross both geographic and cultural borders.

The final result values the brand as a financial asset. BusinessWeek and Interbrand believe this figure comes closest to representing a brand’s true economic worth.

But I never told you the amazing effort of our city’s recovery.

On August 26th 2004, just 2 weeks shy of the annual anniversary, NYPD called me. An officer told me that they have recovered my wallet lost on 9/11/2001. I was shocked to see my wallet two days later, all twisted and dirt-covered, neatly tugged in a plastic cover.

On the cover, there are 5 barcode stickers lined up carefully, and a business card of the Forensic Investigator. It just demonstrates the extensive investigations that our country undertook.

Today, I like to think that these digital barcodes will forever be part of my digital existence. In the past 7 years,  digital technology and data intelligence innovations have evolved rapidly. RFID technology and other man-machine interactions are made possible and more important each day.

I’m proud to be an American and thankful for the effort to recover us from the darkest day in our nation.

In a recent article - State-media story fuels questions on gymnast’s age - about He Kexin, a Chinese gymnast, this funny line appeared:

He herself told reporters after Wednesday’s final that “my real age is 16. I don’t pay any attention to what everyone says.”

Can any NLP technology ever crack this one? “He” is actually a “She” !!!

The full article written by JOHN LEICESTER, an Associated Press Writer is quoted below:

BEIJING - Just nine months before the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government’s news agency, Xinhua, reported that gymnast He Kexin was 13, which would have made her ineligible to be on the team that won a gold medal this week.

In its report Nov. 3, Xinhua identified He as one of “10 big new stars” who made a splash at China’s Cities Games. It gave her age as 13 and reported that she beat Yang Yilin on the uneven bars at those games. In the final, “this little girl” pulled off a difficult release move on the bars known as the Li Na, named for another Chinese gymnast, Xinhua said in the report, which appeared on one of its Web sites, http://www.hb.xinhuanet.com

The Associated Press found the Xinhua report on the site Thursday morning and saved a copy of the page. Later that afternoon, the Web site was still working but the page was no longer accessible. Sports editors at the state-run news agency would not comment for publication.

If the age reported by Xinhua was correct, that would have meant He was too young to be on the Chinese team that beat the United States on Wednesday and clinched China’s first women’s team Olympic gold in gymnastics. He is also a favorite for gold in Monday’s uneven bars final.

Yang was also on Wednesday’s winning team. Questions have also been raised about her age and that of a third team member, Jiang Yuyuan.

Gymnasts have to be 16 during the Olympic year to be eligible for the games. He’s birthday is listed as Jan. 1, 1992.

Chinese authorities insist that all three are old enough to compete. He herself told reporters after Wednesday’s final that “my real age is 16. I don’t pay any attention to what everyone says.”

Zhang Hongliang, an official with China’s gymnastics delegation at the games, said Thursday the differing ages which have appeared in Chinese media reports had not been checked in advance with the gymnastics federation.

“It’s definitely a mistake,” Zhang said of the Xinhua report, speaking in a telephone interview. “Never has any media outlet called me to check the athletes’ ages.”

Asked whether the federation had changed their ages to make them eligible, Zhang said: “We are a sports department. How would we have the ability to do that?”

“We already explained this very clearly. There’s no need to discuss this thing again.”

The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) has said repeatedly that a passport is the “accepted proof of a gymnast’s eligibility,” and that He and China’s other gymnasts have presented ones that show they are age eligible. The IOC also checked the girls’ passports and deemed them valid.

A May 23 story in the China Daily newspaper, the official English-language paper of the Chinese government, said He was 14. The story was later corrected to list her as 16.

“This is not a USAG issue,” said Steve Penny, president of USA Gymnastics. “The FIG and the IOC are the proper bodies to handle this.”

On my site, I only talk about people and scientists whom I know. But Randy Pausch first caught my attention while I was reading Wall Street Journal.

I like his thinking and admire his courage.

He was an articulate Lecturer and focused. One line I particularly like is when he talked about framing his illness as an engineering problem — engineering is not about optimal solution but it’s doing the best with what you have.

The lecture was videotaped and footage began spreading across thousands of Web sites. (The full talk can now be seen at thelastlecture.com.) His last lecture is shown below:

The Award was presented to him at the 2008 World Congress on Computational Intelligence hosted in Hong Kong. I was at the banquet with Dr. Kohonen when he received the award, and I shot a video clip of the ceremony. The video will be uploaded shortly (please visit this post again soon).

Dr. Tuevo Kohonen has made pivotal contributions int he fiedl of artificial neural networks, having developed the self-organizing map (SOM), a data-analysis method that helps with the problem of clustering and data exploration. SOM is regularly used in finance, trade, natural sciences and linguistics. This method and its derivatives are also used in speech recognition and robotics. The SOM method, considered by experts to be one of the most significant inventions in computational science, has been the subject of some 8000 scientific papers, a dozen books and six international workshops that haven been organized using the method. Dr. Kohonen is currently a professor and Academician at Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland. An IEEE Fellow, he has received several awards including the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award, the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Technical Achievement Award and the International Neural Network Society Lifetime Achievement Award. Dr. Kohonen holds a master’s and doctorate in engineering from Helsinki University of Technology and holds three honorary doctorates form Universitat Dortmund in Germany, Abo Akademi in Finland and University of York in England.

My first guest is Professor Lotfi Zadeh.

Lotfi is the inventor of Fuzzy Logic. With every click of your camera, with every turn of your washing machine cycle, you got to give thanks to him. His thoughts and his invention have impacted the world. He changes the way we see numbers and how we analyze information.

The video below is about his sources of inspiration when he invented fuzzy logic.

From Wikipedia, I quote a number of his awards (see below).

Awards
In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1995 “For pioneering development of fuzzy logic and its many diverse applications.”

Zadeh has a long list of achievements, but since 2003, Zadeh has received the following awards.

Awards

In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1995 “For pioneering development of fuzzy logic and its many diverse applications.”

Zadeh has a long list of achievements, but since 2003, Zadeh has received the following awards.

• In 1993 Azerbaijan bestowed him an honorary Professorship from the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy.
• Outstanding Contribution Award, Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), Halifax, Canada, 2003.
• Wall of Fame, Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (HNF), Paderborn, Germany, 2004.
• Civitate Honoris Causa, Budapest Tech Polytechnical Institution, Budapest, Hungary; Sept. 4, 2004.
• Doctor Honoris Causa, Muroran Institute of Technology, Muroran, Japan; Oct. 29, 2004.
• Doctor Honoris Causa, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China; Nov. 9, 2004.
• V. Kaufmann Prize and Gold Medal, International Association for Fuzzy-Set Management and Economy (SIGEF), Barcelona, Spain, Nov. 15, 2004.
• Foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2005.
• Nicolaus Copernicus Medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2005.
• J. Keith Brimacombe IPMM Award in recognition of his development of fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic, 2005.
• Doctor Honoris Causa, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain; Jan. 29, 2007.
• Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award

I suggest that they should start thinking about the human motivation and behavior factor.

After the dotcom bubble burst in early 2000, many companies took advantage of the lessons learned in consumer space experimentation. The frequent key words I heard when we were speaking among managers about ROI are:

“Trust”, “Authoritative Content”, “Employee & Customer Self service” “Sticky Solution”

We are in a period of rapidly changing our computing paradigm from application model to social model. Computers and mobile devices are now the social machinery allowing us to collaborate with large group of people in a distributed network.

We believe in amazon book review ratings and buy a book if it’s 5 stars. We believe in Google search result and will take the first page search results as the de facto best documents out there in the WWW. These are examples of social computing models long before facebook and myspace come along. The science behind it is an equation of connectivity and social behavior.

One big challenge that I believe management faces is in building the TRUST factor in corporate social network services. Take care of this first and you will reap better content or business intelligence. Two emerging areas particularly important to support the trust model are:

• Behavioral modeling that allows management for experimenting, scenario planning, and deep understanding of behavior, patterns, and potential outcomes.
• Cognitive modeling that allows management to understand the human factors and address the challenges of increased growth, productivity, and innovation.

See the Google map I created below (click on it to see the details).

View Larger Map

1. Apple Store at Fifth Avenue (HIGHLY recommended)
   It’s not a museum, but this is a heavenly place that you just can’t miss!
   Hint: You can admire the famous Plaza Hotel just across Fifth Ave.
2. American Museum of Natural History (HIGHLY recommended)
3. American Museum of the Moving Image (HIGHLY recommended)
   The American Museum of the Moving Image focuses on film, television and digital media, and its impact on culture and society.
4. Hayden Planetarium (HIGHLY recommended)
5. Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum (HIGHLY recommended)
   Sea, air and space exhibits aboard the U.S. Intrepid, an aircraft carrier with a successful battle history.
6. The Skyscraper Museum
7. The Museum of Television and Radio
8. Sony Wonder Technology Lab
9. Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology
10. New York Hall of Science
11. Goudreau Museum of Mathematics in Art and Science
12. Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences

Sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, co-sponsored by the International Neural Network Society, Evolutionary Programming Society and the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and composed of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE) and IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), WCCI 2008 will be the largest technical event on computational intelligence in the world with the biggest impact. WCCI 2008 will provide a stimulating forum for thousands of scientists, engineers, educators and students from all over the world to disseminate their new research findings and exchange information on emerging areas of research in the fields.

The 2008 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2008) will be held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre during June 1-6, 2008 (Sunday - Friday). WCCI 2008 is composed of the 2008 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2008), the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE 2008) and the 2008 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2008). The congress will feature world-renowned plenary speakers, regular technical sessions, state-of-the-art special sessions, interactive poster sessions, moderated panel discussions, informative pre-congress tutorials, complementary post-congress workshops, and entertaining social functions.

Final Program (PDF file) is available. Please see http://www.wcci2008.org for detail information.