Business Systems and Knowledge Modelling Lab

Media Release

Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems

From crime prediction to genetic engineering - Global researchers highlight the latest in Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems

One of the largest information technology conferences ever in Melbourne – the International Conference on Knowledge-based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems (KES 2005) – will be held from 14 to 16 September.

Organised and hosted by the School of Business at La Trobe University, the conference has already registered around 700 delegates from more than 40 countries. A large number are from the Asia-Pacific region.

Intelligent Information and Engineering systems cover applications in an enormous range of endeavour, from finance, banking, tourism, manufacturing and automation to health care, bioinformatics, medical and general diagnosis – as well as security and defence.

News about the latest developments will be delivered by researchers from 400 universities (20 Australian universities) and from industry bodies world-wide, such as the Australia’s CSIRO and DSTO; Daewoo from South Korea; Hitachi and NTT, Japan; and Vimtech, Spain.

Conference General Chair, Dr Rajiv Khosla, Associate Professor in the School of Business at La Trobe University’s main Melbourne campus at Bundoora, says around 100 technical sessions have been scheduled.

‘These will demonstrate how far intelligent systems have come in translating research into commercial applications in practically all areas of business, commerce and engineering.’

Dr Khosla says KES conferences are among the largest and most widely attended in the area of intelligent systems worldwide. Their goal is to advance the knowledge and use of intelligent systems and related areas among researchers and practitioners in academia and industry.

‘New and emerging areas,’ says Dr Khosla, ‘include “agent-based” workflow and experience management, emotional intelligence and smart systems, customisation of business knowledge, remote sensing and sensor networks, communicative intelligence, knowledge discovery in data streams, medical text mining and natural language processing – and crime prediction to name just a few.’

The main conference venue is Hilton on the Park in Melbourne. Prominent researchers from Harvard University, Tokyo University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and other institutions will present seminars at La Trobe University’s Business Systems and Knowledge Modelling (BSKM) Research Laboratory, headed by Dr Khosla.

The La Trobe University laboratory engages in applied research and develops IT products and prototypes for commercial applications. Its projects emphasise ‘humanisation’ and ‘emotional intelligence’ in engineered systems.
Among them are face recognition software that could eventually be used to sweep crowds for security purposes – for example in subways, airports or at sporting events.

Other projects range from data mining; customer relationship management in banking and finance; resource planning; ‘smart’ recruitment systems; environmental benchmarking in manufacturing to emergency and critical events; health care and medical diagnostics, biometrics and bioinformatics. (See further details, below.)

International plenary speakers at the conference include:

• Professsor Jun Liu from Harvard University who uses statistical and computer techniques to study repetitive patterns in DNA between genes. This DNA contains instructions for regulating the expression of genes – for example, whether the proteins produced by genes will become part of your brain or your foot.
• Professor Ron Sun from New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who specialises in hybrid systems, mostly those used in cognitive modelling. Professor Sun is the founding co-editor-in-chief of the journal Cognitive Systems Research (Elsevier).
• Professor Jiming Liu from Hong Kong Baptist University who will discuss computational systems with autonomous components, capable of displaying aspects of behavioral self-organisation, amorphous intelligence – or the ability to ‘engineer’ themselves.
• Professor Toyoaki Nishida from Kyoto and Tokyo universities who is an expert in conversational informatics and social intelligence systems that can approximate the flow of real conversation. His work is based on a collection of vast amounts of ‘conversational quanta’ obtained from studies of normal conversations.

The conference will be opened by the Chair of the State Parliamentary Sub-committee on Information Technology and e-democracy, Mr Michael Leighton. The Victorian Minister for Information and Communications Technology, Ms Marsha Thomson, will also speak at the conference.

La Trobe University Business Systems and Knowledge Modelling Laboratory

La Trobe University’s Business Systems and Knowledge Modelling Laboratory (BSKM) is an externally funded research laboratory headed by Dr Rajiv Khosla. It comprises six postgraduate researchers, research assistants and 15 external research affiliates and collaborators from industry and from institutions in Japan, USA, and Europe. The laboratory engages in applied research and develops IT products and prototypes for commercial applications. Some examples are:

• Emotionally Intelligent Smart Recruitment Systems:
  Emotions form an important component of human behaviour and decision making. The aim of this research is to design and develop a smart sales recruitment and benchmarking tool which will provide HR managers and recruitment agencies with psychological profiles of selling behaviour and the emotional state of sales candidates. The technique involves analysis of video images of the candidates. The work also has implications for ‘web personalisation’ – e-shopping, e-tourism and internet based decision support systems in general. An earlier version of this system was commercialised seven years ago.
• On-line Environmental Benchmarking System for Consumer Manufacturing:
  The aim of this project is to help consumers make choices that might encourage them to buy more environmentally-friendly products. Such systems can also be useful for policy makers and regulators in determining industry and product benchmarking, and might lead to cleaner manufacturing processes. Besides Dr Khosla, other key figures in this research project include Dr Clare D’Souza from La Trobe University and Dr Mehdi Taghian, now at Deakin University.
• Face Detection and Annotation in Natural and Complex Settings:
  Finding faces in crowds and analysing facial expressions – such as in recent video footage from London underground train stations – is an important problem to be solved for large-scale security screening world-wide. Dr Khosla’s team is developing a system which uses co-operating image processing agents to hone in on certain critical parts of faces.
• Automated Diagnostic System for Analysis of Serious Pathological Conditions:
  Demand for rapid analysis of specimens for diagnostic medicine is increasing dramatically. Dr Khosla says most automated diagnostic systems are used with stained specimens, a process that can interfere with cell characteristics. ‘We have developed an accurate method of identifying unstained human cell images for serious pathological conditions such as breast cancer, where a pathologist looks at the grade or the appearance of potential cancer cells under a microscope, and in Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia, where the morphology of the white blood cells changes dramatically.’

For further information:

Further information, contact;

Dr Rajiv Khosla
Tel: +61 3 9479 3064
Email: r.khosla@latrobe.edu.au
Web: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/kes