International conferences and events

Citation

(1998), "International conferences and events", Kybernetes, Vol. 27 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.1998.06727eab.002

International conferences and events

International conferences and events

University of Manchester, UK ­ report

Celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the birth of the first stored program computer were held at the University of Manchester, UK, in June of this year. Under the title Computer 50 the university offered what was described as a Digital Summer 1998. During the week of the anniversary in June there were a number of international conferences and many complementary events.

Rebuilding of the Manchester "Baby". One of the most exciting projects completed for the June 1998 celebration was the re-build of the original "baby" machine. The project is being organized by the British Computer Society Computer Conservation Society with sponsorship from ICL and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.

The project team consists of experienced engineers, many of whom made significant contributions in the early days of computing in Manchester. The team leader is Chris Burton who, in addition to pioneering the re-build effort, finds time to give a most entertaining talk about the trials and tribulations of sorting out exactly what the machine consisted of and then finding the valves, racks and other parts to re-create a working version.

The Manchester Museum of Science and Industry will be the permanent home of the rebuilt machine from June 1998.

International conferences and events. Some of the topics considered at the anniversary events and conferences included:

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  Golden Anniversary Conference ­ a celebration event which focused on the computing achievements of the University of Manchester.

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  Logic programming ­ joint international conference and symposium.

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  Simulation ­ 12th European Simulation Multiconference ranged from simulation algorithmic design through to applications across a a range of diverse domains.

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  Collaborative virtual environments (CVE) ­ actively supports human-human communication in addition to human-machine communication and which uses a Virtual Environment as the user interface.

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  Computers in structural chemistry and molecular biology ­ this was one of the first areas to which the Manchester computers were applied.

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  Numerical analysis and computers ­ 50 years of progress ­ addressed the influence of computing on numerical analysis and the influence anticipated in the future.

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  Celebrating 50 years of information development in higher education ­ addressed the pressing issues of the provision of all classes of information service essential to higher education today.

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  BSHS new directions in the history of British computing ­ focused on the history of computing.

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  Medical informatics ­ grand challenges for research and practice ­ wide-ranging look at the application of computers in medicine.

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  Tools and models for studying the mind ­ a symposium that aimed to reflect past experience and future developments.

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  Informatics: the next 50 years ­ multidisciplinary workshop aimed to identify the challenges and research priorities within Informatics in the coming years.

The proceedings of some of these June 1998 conferences may be available; readers are invited to address their enquiries to the organizers. Details of all events, conferences and complementary activities for this 50th anniversary can be obtained from: 1998 Conference Office, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL. Professor Hilary J. Kahn/Mrs Suzanne Briscoe. Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6269; Fax: +44 (0) 161 275 6280; e-mail: annv98@cs.man.ac.uk URL: http://www.computer50.org/

British Computer Society ­ reports of UK innovation awards

The awards for information technology given by the British Computer Society in 1998 are for projects that will be of considerable interest in systems and cybernetics. Many are truly interdisciplinary and reflect the aims and aspirations of researchers worldwide.

In the UK there are many competitive awards schemes which are run by the major organisations and institutions that are concerned with IT. Foremost among these are the endeavours of the British Computer Society (BCS) which this year celebrates its 25th BCS IT awards competition. The huge variety of UK innovations in information technology and its applications is reflected in the nomination list and, of course, in the list of the finalists. This, the BSC says, is a landmark year and there were 64 nominations which were reduced to 11 final projects by the investigating panel of BCS members. A very elaborate and searching examination of the projects is undertaken and all entries are visited and questioned in draft. Of the final projects, 11 win medals and three have been selected by the panel of judges as award winners.

It has to be noticed that BCS IT awards are designed to recognise both IT excellence and the benefit to industry and to the society at large. Some of the factors used in the judgements include innovation, development speed, cost savings, commercial success or user acceptance. It is important to appreciate the record of past winners many of which have gone on to international fame as world-leading IT products, or have become mainstay applications systems giving competitive advantage to the companies that developed them. Other projects, the BCS believes, have helped to save lives, revolutionise information handling and given disabled people their independence.

This year's finalists and award winners appear to be no exception. The judges believe that CREST has revolutionised securities trading. Cambridge University's iris recognition for security purposes is already being adopted in different systems, BT's system for developing applications based on intelligent agent software could change the way in which companies are structured and negotiate with each other. The winners of this competition will be announced in November 1998 at a celebratory lunch and exhibition in central London. Details of the projects selected as finalists and award winners are as follows.

CREST ­ CREST is a new computerised settlement system for transfers of corporate UK and Irish securities on the Stock Exchange. Before its inauguration in July 1996 it was handed over to an independent organisation, Crestco, to operate and develop the service. Users connect to CREST by secure networks provided by British Telecom's (BT) Synegra subsidiary and SWIFT, the international banking message system. All messages are numbered and use passwords and encrypted authentication codes to guarantee security. Users can input transactions either from a dealer's screen using a GUI provided by Crestco, or by a file transfer from their back-office computer using specially developed software packages. CREST checks all deals to ensure that the stock and the quantity agree. On settlement day further checks ensure that the seller has stock to meet the transfer and the buyers remain within their credit limits. Details are then sent to the registrar for that stock: the transfer must be registered within a two-hour deadline. Each night CREST reconciles its stock records with all the registrars and provides updated information to each member's bank about its cash position.

The CREST system is designed to deal with 1,800 transactions a minute and runs on one of the largest hardware configurations of its type ­ 16 tandam fault -tolerant processors. The software includes Tandam's special Remote Database Facility which ensures that the live and stand-by databases remain synchronised across their 90 mirrored disc pairs. Hardware enhancements are planned for this year to provide additional capacity so that CREST can take on responsibility for gilts (UK government stock) and for unit trust investments. The system receives some 4 million messages a day from its 260 directly connected users. They represent about 120,000 stock transfers with a value of some £18 billion. This in itself is a great achievement particularly when over 3,250 different securities are held on the system and 80-90 percent of these holdings exist solely as electronic entries within CREST. This project surely is an excellent example of it, "automation" of realsystems (further details are available on: Tel: 0171 459 3034; e-mail: bg@crestco.co.uk . and on the site: http://www.crestco.co.uk

Iris recognition ­ from the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, UK, the system, which relies on "peering into someone's eye" has become the basis of one of the latest security systems. The need to provide better and more secure methods to positively identify an individual ­ whether to operate an ATM or to gain access to a home or workplace is now paramount. Many of these efforts have concentrated on physical, biometric attributes of the individual, and this is one such system. The iris of a person's eye is patterned with a complex chaotic texture. This pattern remains unchanged throughout the life of a person. It exists, the developers say, sealed inside the eyeball, protected from tampering, damage ­ or forgery!

The system works in real time. Images are captured from a video camera. They can be taken at distances of up to three feet and do not even need to be precisely focused. A sequence of ten video frames is captured for registration purposes. Ordinary image recognition techniques are applied to the video frames to find the eye, the position of eyelids and the centre of the pupil. Once this has been done the texture in successive concentric iris segments is encoded using 2-D Gabor wavelets through specially developed mathematical transformations. These complex sequences of equations, which have been developed by John Daugman of Cambridge University's Computing Laboratory, reduce the complexities of the iris pattern to a 256-bit IrisCode that uniquely represents that eye.

An exactly similar process is used for recognition with one extra refinement. The variation of the iris size from frame to frame is checked. This normally varies involuntarily by 2-3 percent ­ if it appears to vary by less then identification is aborted. This rules out the use of glass eyes or contact lenses with an iris image on them.

An important feature of recognition systems is the need to steer a midcourse between the Scylla of false acceptance and the Charybdis of false rejection, a report on the project informs us. In many systems false acceptances can only be rejected at the price of increasing the false rejections to an unacceptable level, and vice versa. For the Cambridge system, we are told, this is not so. There is no overlap between acceptance and rejection. The large number of degrees of freedom extracted from the iris image gives a confidence level with astronomical odds against errors of either type occurring when searches compare the observed IrisCode with the stored database of registered users.

The Cambridge system and its complex algorithms have been patented and licensed to a number of companies ­ mostly in the USA and Japan. Other uses that are being investigated include access control, the replacement of identity cards or personal identification numbers, and passport control.

Further details are available on: Tel: 01223 332300; e-mail: john.daugman@cl.cam.ac.uk and on the site: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/jgdl000/irisrecog.ps.gz

ABW ZEUS: ­ from the British Telecom (BT) Laboratories, regarded as one of the foremost world centres for research into the development of "intelligent agents". The work of the Intelligent Systems Research Group has already resulted in ten patents, we are told, and three internal BT awards or prizes.

ZEUS is a toolkit of components which designers can extend and integrate to build specific applications. ZEUS can also provide advanced visualisation, statistical and debugging facilities. This toolkit approach avoids starting from scratch each time when constructing further projects and has speeded up development by 50 percent and 95 percent. With ZEUS users only have to provide code for the problem-specific aspects of the agent-based project they are building. ZEUS produces the code for the rest.

This includes communication, co-operation, visualisation, task execution, error handling. A prime example given of the type of project that ZEUS has enabled is the BT project "Agent-based workflow (ABW)", which is a revolutionary new approach to managing distributed business processes and work activities which provides a vision of how large organisations might be structured and managed in the future.

ABW builds, we are told, on earlier academic and industrial work which was supported by the Department of Trade and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the UK, and seeks to model the business process as a sequence of interacting interdependent steps taking place in a virtual market place. For a demonstration of realistic complexity, the task chosen was a key internal BT problem of providing quotes for services in response to customer requests. This job involves seeking agreements with other sections or departments to undertake specific elements of the process at defined times These negotiations are mediated by autonomous intelligent agents. They carry out different tasks of the process at different phases: sometimes they receive requests and negotiate details of the service they are to provide; at other times they have to allocate and control the resources needed to do this. The development of this project is being actively pursued, and it is confidently believed that this developing applications based system using intelligent agent software could change the way in which companies are structured and negotiate with each other.

Final projects and medallists. Among the chosen are the projects:

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  Mobile data terminal system ­ UK's Cleveland Constabulary have developed special mobile data terminals and a gateway interface to the command and control system, and to the databases beyond it (see e-mail for information: crossley@ram.co.uk ).

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  Dynamic workforce scheduler ­ BT Laboratories project involved the development of a dynamic scheduling capability that can be continuously adjusted to cope with additional unexpected calls (see e-mail for information: azarmin@info.bt.co.uk ).

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  Multimedia TextEase ­ developed by Softease Limited. TextEase is a page layout tool that copes with multimedia as well as text. It is aimed at use in the home and in primary schools and in the early years in secondary schools. It was designed to be as simple to use as a pencil on a page or using glue and scissors ­ the original "cut and paste". It is initially based on Acorn Archimedes and it has now been ported to Windows (further information on e-mail and page: geoff@softease.co.uk and http://www. softease.co.uk ).

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  The Mirror ­ The Mirror is said to be an unusual and quite remarkable project that foresees a world in which the boundaries between television and interactive 3-D real-time computing "blur" ­ resulting in an experience described as "inhabited television". Developed by the BT Laboratories as a pioneering project between themselves and the BBC, Sony and Illuminations ­ the production company for the associated TV programme, "The Net", it provides an example of real innovation (further information from: e-mail: graham.walker@bt-sys.bt.co.uk and on: http://vb.labs.bt.com/SharedSpaces ).

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  Project Camelot ­ developed by ICS Technology in the field of industrial control systems. The project has developed the trusted ICS controller which was one of the first processors to comply with emerging international safety standards. It combines both hardware and software elements. The systems are used to build complete client systems with the safety-critical elements analysed using techniques researched at the UK's York University (further information: e-mail: jont@icstech.co.uk and the page: http://www.icsgroup.co.uk ).

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  CRAMM V3.0 ­ stands for CCTA Risk Analysis and Management Methodology. The current version is owned by the security service and is supported by Cap Gemini, Logica and Insight. It provides a way to assess risks to information systems and to suggest security measures to meet those risks. The developers say that CRAMM ensures that all relevant factors are considered, in a logical, rigorous yet flexible fashion. This it does by providing a framework to lead the management of an organisation through the whole risk assessment process in three phases. The security procedures are said to have been selected from a library of over 2,000 measures contained within the system. It has, currently, some 225 users spread over 11 countries and we are told that it is recommended by over 50 security consultants (further information from: e-mail: john.carr@capgemini.co.uk and steved@insight.co.uk Also on the pages: http://www.insight.co.uk ).

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  EPACT ­ means electronic prescribing analysis and cost and was pioneered by the North West Health Authority. It analyses the basic medical prescription information and helps the work of the UK fraud identification unit. It deals with between 35 million and 45 million items a month and in 1996 the total value of the items exceeded £34.5 billion. Trials have started to enable its use over the Internet (for further information from: e-mail: info@ppa.nhs.uk and on the pages: http://www.ppa.org.uk ).

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  MAPLEX ­ Automatic system to put names on maps developed by the University of Glamorgan, Wales. It has been bought and used by seven of the World's major map makers. It has now been taken over by the major US geographic information systems firm: Environmental Systems Research Institute (further details from: e-mail: ).

United Kingdom Systems Society (UKSS) ­ report of award presentations

The award of the UKSS Gold Medal for outstanding achievement in Systems Thinking and Practice was reported in the Systemist, Vol. 19 No. 4, November 1997, pp. 228-30. The inaugural presentations of this award were made at the UKSS Conference, Milton Keynes, in July 1997. Although details of the awards and the presentations have been known since that time we now have the opportunity of publishing the citation address by the UKSS Chairperson Dr John Mingers. The World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics together with this journal offer their congratulations to the two award winners; Sir Geoffrey Vickers and Professor Peter Checkland.

Citation Address ­ UKSS Chairperson, John Mingers:

As chair of the UK Systems Society I have the great pleasure of being able to present the first of the UKSS Gold Medals for Outstanding Achievement in Systems Thinking and Practice. We have, in fact, decided to make two awards, one unfortunately posthumously, to two people whose complementary contributions have redefined the whole discipline of systems thinking.

This first award of the UKSS medal is to Sir Geoffrey Vickers for his contribution to our understanding of the process of managing, or as he called it, governance.

Sir Geoffrey had a long and very active career, mainly as a lawyer. He served with great distinction in the first world war, where he won the Victoria Cross. During the second world war he was the director of economic intelligence, and after the war he joined the National Coal Board, becoming board member in charge of training, manpower, education and industrial relations. He once confessed that he felt more at home with the executive of the National Union of Mineworkers than with his fellow board members.

Sir Geoffrey's contribution was to think and theorise about the processes of managing that he was involved in. He argued that managing was not an activity that could be quantified or rationalised or put into some algorithm, but always involved a very human ability to make judgements about the nature of situations, judgements about possible actions and their consequences, and judgements about values. And moreover, underpinning such judgements were the frameworks of meaning that different people attributed to their situations and actions. These ideas went very much against the current orthodoxy which was more concerned with determining efficient means of reaching prespecified goals and emphasised the mathematical and quantitative aspects of planning. Sir Geoffrey picked up on ideas of feedback and control, as being developed in cybernetics, but again did not use these in a mechanistic way but rather part of an ongoing organisational and social process of valuing and appreciation.

Although he was never immersed in academia, he published three important books outlining his ideas. The Art of Judgement first published in 1965, Value Systems and Social Process published in 1968 and, perhaps most accessibly, Freedom in a Rocking Boat, published in 1972, that discussed wider problems of society and ecology.

Sir Geoffrey described a process of appreciation in these terms in Freedom in a Rocking Boat:

"to account for the appreciated world which is after all one of the most assured facts of our experience, I postulate that experience, especially the experience of human communication develops in each of us readiness to notice particular aspects of situation to discriminate them in particular ways, and to measure them against particular standards of comparison which have been built up in similar ways".

I would just like to end by saying that many of us here have appreciated, in just the above sense, the enormously insightful work of Sir Geoffrey Vickers, and it is for this reason he is the first recipient of the UKSS medal.

I would like now to move onto the second medal that we are awarding. I would place a fair amount of money on the fact that there is hardly a single person in this room who has not heard of, and more importantly been influenced by, the work of our second medallist. Many of us have been taught by him at one time or anther.

I don't think it significantly overstating the case to claim that he has, almost single-handedly, re-oriented the whole philosophy and practice of both the systems discipline and, more surprisingly perhaps, the operational research world. I refer, of course, to Professor Peter Checkland who, for the last 25 years at Lancaster University has developed with colleagues, as he is always quick to point out, soft systems methodology. Not only has he developed it as a very practical methodology, he has always been concerned to rigorously develop the philosophy underlying it and to rigorously follow the implications of his ideas, no matter how radical they might appear.

Peter Checkland began academic life as a chemist gaining a PhD in the subject, but then moved into the organisational world, as a scientist and manager within ICI. He eventually returned to academia as a professor of systems at Lancaster University in the late 1960s. He returned with a very specific view of what he wanted to do. During his 14 years as a manager, as he has said on many occasions, he found textbook management science quite irrelevant to his real problems. And he went intending to put this right. He actually expressed it slightly less forcefully in his inaugural lecture, when he simply said that:

"management science is characterised today by extreme confusion. There is an enormous gap between what is theoretically possible using all the techniques of management science and what is actually put into practice".

Even so, it was enough to put up the backs of the OR department at Lancaster to such an extent that the two groups were for many years on different sides of the academic equivalent of the Berlin Wall. It is perhaps a measure of the extent to which soft systems has become taken-for-granted that it is now very difficult to realise how radical it was in the 1970s.

Peter actually followed very much on the heels of Sir Geoffrey Vickers, for he too saw that human beings were not reducible to numbers or equations, but had their own unique values, beliefs and meanings that made working in human organisations such a challenge. He too wanted to humanise the hard systems engineering that was available to him at the time. His ideas developed during the 1970s both through the practical efforts of using systems ideas in real world situations and by the intellectual effort of trying to clarify a philosophical and social position that would accommodate the practical results. This resulted in the appropriately titled 1981 book Systems Thinking, Systems Practice. This book can certainly be said to be a seminal work in systems literature, providing both an erudite history of systems thinking, and an exposition of soft-systems methodology as it had by then become called.

The 1980s were characterised on the one hand by development and refinement of SSM itself particularly in its practical use in a variety of areas, including, importantly, information systems. On the other hand, by debate within other disciplines, particularly OR, over the importance of a soft perspective. The former strand of work culminated in a second book called Soft Systems Methodology in Action which gives a rich insight into the mature use of SSM. Having been involved myself with the OR world and the OR society I can say that the battle for what is now called soft OR was certainly won by the late 1980s. The most recent area in which soft systems has had an impact has been information systems where at least in the academic world, it is now a standard part of any information systems course, and is the subject of the third book by Peter Checkland which is currently in press at the moment.

On a personal note I would just like to say that I was at Lancaster on the MA in Systems course during the mid-1970s while SSM was being developed and it provided an enormous impetus for the development of my own interests in the social and philosophical aspects of systems, and I have always had enormous respect for what I think is best described as the integrity of Peter Checkland, rigorously pursuing all aspects of his intellectual and personal endeavours.

I would therefore like to present the second UKSS medal for outstanding achievement to Professor Peter Checkland.