Conference review: IFIP TC12

I attended the annual meeting of IFIP TC12 on August 6, 2001, during IJCAI in Seattle, as the ACM representative. IFIP is the International Federation for Information Processing. It was established in 1960 under the auspices of UNESCO, and is a society of societies. That is, the members of IFIP are not people, but societies and associations. Mostly, there is one member from each country, serving as the representative of computing activities and people in that country. The United States is an exception. Instead of a single society representing the United States, ACM and IEEE are members of IFIP, even though both of these are international, not national organizations. IFIP technical work is managed by a set of 12 Technical Committees, devoted to various aspects of the field of computing. I am the ACM representative to TC12, Artificial Intelligence. The stated aim of TC12 is, “Research in AI and promotion of interdisciplinary exchange between AI and other fields of information processing,” and its scope is to, “Further develop the foundation for AI on the basis of computer science principles. Contribute techniques from AI to the enrichment of computer science and information processing. Develop AI techniques as part of information processing technologies to enable and advance practical applications.” [www.ifip.or.at/bulletin/bulltcs/tc12_aim.htm] IFIP TCs, in turn, have working groups as part of them. TC12 has two active working groups: WC 12.5, KnowledgeOriented Development of Applications and WG 12.6 Intelligent Information Management. TC12 meets annually during an international AI meeting. As I said above, this year’s meeting was held during IJCAI in Seattle. Nine of the 24 members were present, including the chair, Bernd Neumann, representing Germany’s Gesellschaft für Informatik, and the Secretary, Dan O’Leary, representing IEEE. At the meeting, there was some discussion of what IFIP does. The main message I got from this is that IFIP will cooperate with international conferences, and is especially good at marketing and publications. It usually wants a share of the revenues, but this is negotiable. In fact, it may be possible to get financial support from IFIP. If you are planning a conference, it would be a good idea to discuss it with them. You should start discussions with Prof. Neumann or me, as TC support is important. We specifically discussed support for student attendance, and, especially, given the UNESCO connection, support for attendance from underdeveloped countries. A major part of the meeting was devoted to the upcoming international conference on Intelligent Information Processing (IIP-2002), part of the IFIP World Computer Congress, to be held in Montreal, August 25-30, 2002. The IIP conferences are organized by TC12. IIP-2002 will have two tracks: Knowledge-Based System Architecture, and Intelligent Information Management. It will also have five linkage sessions, which are being organized in cooperation with other TCs. The linkage sessions will be: Autonomous Agents—Control and Security; Innovative Software Architecting with and for Intelligent Information Systems; Semantic Web; Personalized Web Interaction; and Web-based Learning. The next annual meeting of TC12 will be held during IIP-2002 in Montreal.