Seminars, Workshops and Conferences
January 12, 2004, 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.: Seminar on ‘Introduction to the Manufacturing Engineering Centre, Cardiff University, Wales, UK’. The seminar will be conducted by Dr. Le Chi Hieu, Project Manager, Manufacturing Engineering Centre, School of Engineering, Cardiff University, Wales, UK. Venue will be at Room S115, Chalerm Prakiat Building
and interested persons are invited.
Abstract
The award-winning Manufacturing Engineering Centre (MEC) forms part of Cardiff University, which dates back to 1883 and is one of Britain’s major civic universities. The MEC is a designated Centre of Excellence in Manufacturing Engineering under two different programs, the Centre of Excellence for Industrial Collaboration Program managed by the WDA and the Regional Centres for Manufacturing Excellence Program funded by the DTI and the Welsh Assembly Government. Within the past five years, the Centre has secured over 20M in Grants and contracts and has developed close working relations with some 25 major organizations and over 200 SMEs. Its track record of successful collaboration with industry has culminated in a number of major prizes and awards, including the DTI Secretary of State’s first prize and the Queen’s Anniversary prize.
In this presentation, key-advanced design and manufacturing technologies, which have been applied at the MEC, will be introduced and outlined, including Rapid Prototyping and Tooling, Reverse Engineering and Metrology, Laser Milling and Micro-engineering; and Biomedical Modelling and its Applications.
For further information contact: Assoc. Prof. Erik L.J. Bohez, DME/SAT, Tel. 02 524-5687. For further information please email: [email protected]
January 14-16, 2004: International Conference on ‘Electric Supply Industry in Transition: Issues and Prospect for Asia’ will be held at the AIT Conference Center.
The conference is co-organized by the Power Systems Engineering Research Center (PSERC, comprising of more than a dozen leading universities in the USA, including U.C. Berkeley), University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and Asian Institute of Technology. The conference is coordinated by Professor Surapong Chirarattananon, SERD, AIT
The conference focus will be on ‘Electricity Supply Industry in Transition’: pertinent issues and prospects for Asia. The topic is timely as most of the utilities around the world, including developing nations, are changing the way they do businesses in electricity supply. A variety of people, power utilities, private power producers and academic institution, are expected to benefit from this conference.
For further information please email: [email protected]
January 29, 2004, 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.: Seminar on ‘Social Agents in Digital Cities’ will be held at 2:00-3:00 p.m. in Computer Science Room 209. Dr. Toru Ishida
Professor of Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University and Research Professor of NTT Communication Science Laboratory will conduct the seminar.
CONTENTS:
The research community tackling agents and multi-agent systems has studied
and developed various agents. Typically, personal agents belong to humans
and help their users to operate complex computer/communication systems. In
the area of multi-agent systems, though computational agents are designed to
interact (both collaborate and compete) with each other, interaction among
humans and computational agents has not been studied intensively. In this
talk, however, I focus on social agents that can be members of a human
community: social agents support human-human interactions, while personal
agents support human-computer interactions. To understand the nature of
social agents, we need a research platform to play with them. This talk
proposes a scenario description language called Q for designing interactions
among a large number of agents, and its application to digital cities and
crisis management simulations. We started a five years project to develop
social agents for supporting social interactions in digital cities.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Professor Ishida received his B.E., M.Eng. and D.Eng. from Kyoto
University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1976, 1978 and 1989, respectively. I am an
IEEE fellow from Jan. 2002.
He is currently a professor of Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto
University, Kyoto, Japan. From 1978 to 1993, Ishida was a research scientist of
NTT Laboratories.
He has been working on parallel, distributed and multi-agent production systems from 1983. He proposed parallel rule firing, and extended it to distributed rule firing. Organizational self-design was then introduced into distributed production systems for increasing adaptiveness. From 1990, he started working on real-time search for learning autonomous agents. Again, organizational adaptation becomes a central issue in controlling multiple problem solving agents. He started working on community computing in 1995. Currently, he is leading digital cities and intercultural collaboration projects in Kyoto.
