2011-10-02: Task Force "Education"

Today is the launch of the new task force "Education" of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, Emergent Technology Technical Committee (IEEE CIS ETTC). I have the great honor to chair this task force, together with my vice chairs Raymond Chiong and Mateen Rizki. The website of the task force is www.emergentCItechs.org.

The application of evolutionary optimization techniques in practice and the industry still meets with skepticism and prejudices. Especially emerging CI technologies face this problem, even in the academic sector. The reasons are that only few people are trained and educated in CI and its emergent fields. It thus is the goal of our task force to provide a wider audience with a clearly organized, sorted, comprehensive, up-to-date, and free collection of education and teaching material on emergent Computational Intelligence-based technologies. We will collect, review, and present a set of high-quality education, teaching, and training material in a central repository. As such material becomes available and easier to find, more students and practitioners will acquire knowledge in the area and it also becomes easier for university teachers to include corresponding topics into their curriculum.

The main goal of this task force is to build a central website and repository (at http://www.emergentCItechs.org) for tutorials, teaching material, how-tos, examples, sources, manuals, and references on Emergent Technologies in Computational Intelligence as listed in section "Scope" below. We will therefore collect and compile videos of tutorials, invited talks, and plenary talks at major CIS conferences, review the online education materials that are related to the interests of the Emergent Technology Technical Committee (ETTC) for their relevance and accuracy, and assist in other CIS educational activities within the fields of ETTC. We will also provide a catalogue on courses, syllabuses, teaching material, literature, software and sources, as well as real-world applications concerning the related fields.

This mission statement sounds really fancy. I hope we can live up it. This is the first time that I am leading a task force or similar activity. I am a bit afraid of whether I will be a good leader. I have to try hard.