Infobright Blog

Hello,

Last week I attended the FGIT 2011 multi-conference organized by the SERSC society. (FGIT and SERSC stand for Future Generation Information Technology and Science & Engineering Research Support soCiety, respectively.) As usual, it was a good opportunity to interact with experts in different areas of foundations and applications of computer science. I enjoyed a couple of interesting database presentations. (See for example the paper on recursive extensions of SQL-based analytics.) This time I contributed with an article on a new type of rough-set-based framework for classifier ensembles, which are now quite trendy in machine learning. I could also see several inspiring papers that were not directly related to my research interests. (See for instance the paper on blended nurture.) I do like such a variety of topics!

Of course everyone paid special attention to the keynote and plenary talks. There were nine of them. See the conference homepage for their brief descriptions. Let me start with Dr. Hamid Arabnia who perfectly adjusted his lecture on parallel multiprocessor systems to the varied background of the audience including myself. Honestly speaking, I did not realize that it is possible to think about adaptively reconfigurable (during runtime!!!) topologies of processor connections. I found the analogy between human neurons and processing units truly inspiring – indeed, it's not only about their number but also the ability to learn how to communicate optimally. I also liked the way of using the resulting multiprocessor system model to image analysis, specifically to breast cancer detection. Medical applications also dominated a few other invited talks including the one on capturing the behavior of medical staff by Dr. Shusaku Tsumoto (very impressive usage of temporal data mining methods within hospital information systems and warehouses) and the one on privacy issues in public health informatics by Dr. Sabah Mohammed (I can see here some interesting opportunities for analytic databases, at the edge of bio-surveillance and knowledge discovery).

Besides the interesting presentations there were of course also discussions about the future of the FGIT conference series. Let me recall that so far SERSC applied the following strategy: one big annual multi-conference and a few smaller events scattered in time and space, all published in the form of proceedings in a way that is standard for the majority of international academic events. However, for 2012 they have planned something new and pretty ambitious. They intend to organize events of roughly equal size (almost) every month, in different parts of the world. They also made an agreement with an American journal publisher and they will do their best to put accepted conference articles directly into scientific journal issues, without publishing regular proceedings any longer. Take a look from time to time at the SERSC conference calendar. I hope it will get updated soon. I will try to attend at least one of events (especially those exposing science-industry connections). Let's hope that the above-described fast journal publication strategy turns out to be successful. It may encourage other scientific conference organizers to follow the same path in the near future.

Dominik