Systems, Man & Cybernetics - January 2016 - 36

Conference Reports

by Tak Wu (Sam) Kwong

the 2015 IEEE
International
Conference on
Systems, Man,
and Cybernetics

he 2015 IEEE International
Conference on Systems, Man,
and Cybernetics (SMC) 2015
was held at City University (CityU) of
Hong Kong 9-12 October. Hong Kong,
the "Pearl of the East," is Asia's premier city, and its culture represents a
fusion of East and West. The main
conference venue was the recently
completed Academic 3 building at the
university. With its modern appearance that evokes the image of a ship
sailing smoothly in the air and its spacious interior design, which includes a
600-seat lecture theater with state-ofthe-art facilities, the new academic
building provided an ideal environment for the SMC 2015 attendees to
participate in the various conference
activities and to interact with their
academic peers.
Being the flagship conference of
the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (SMCS), the SMC conference is a premier forum featuring
extraordinarily wide coverage of
many themes. These themes are related to theories and technologies for
integrating human intelligence with
machine intelligence to accomplish
complex information processing
tasks typically present in large and

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSMC.2016.2538498
Date of publication: 6 June 2016

highly automated systems. The theme
chosen for this year's conference, "Big
Data Analytics for Human-Centric
Systems," highlights this focus and
also echoes the increasing interest in
this area in general society. As we
realize the ubiquitous presence of
sensors making large volumes of data
continuously available, we also see
the limitations of known methods to
extract actionable insights from such
data in a manner that is timely and
tolerant to system imperfections. The
conference sought to engage the SMC
community to address these issues
and to craft new discoveries and
applications that will shape how society views and uses big data.
technical Program
The presentations in the conference
were divided into three main technical
tracks focusing on systems science
and engineering, human-machine systems, and cybernetics, respectively.
Within each track, there were also
many special sessions dedicated to
selected topics. The program was
developed from 407 papers selected for
oral presentations and 141 for poster
presentations. In terms of the number
of papers per track, there were 254
from cybernetics, 147 from human-
machine systems, and 147 from systems science and engineering. A total

IEEE SyStEmS, man, & CybErnEtICS magazInE Janu ar y 2016

Sam Kwong, IEEE SmC 2015
general chair, provides welcoming
remarks.

Ljiljana trajkovic, president of
the SmCS, greets conference
attendees.

of 582 participants from 35 countries
attended the conference. The technical program was the result of many
months of dedicated work of 949
program committee members and
772 reviewers together with the program cochairs.
The program also featured four keynote speakers: Jack L. Gallant of University of California (UC), Berkeley;
Piotr Mirowski of Google DeepMind;

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Systems, Man & Cybernetics - January 2016