December 4, 2005

Dear MVL researchers,

My term as a chair of MVL Technical Committee comes to a close on December 31, 2005. It was a real pleasure for me to serve our committee, the symposium, and the Computer Society of IEEE in the last two years.

As a chair I had one main concern that directed my efforts.
This concern ! was the membership in our TC and attendance at our symposia, International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic. We need more researchers, especially new researchers that will replace with time those of us that are or will be retiring. To this aim in year 2005 we established for the first time two awards: "for Outstanding Contribution by Young Researcher" and "for best paper in the area of soft-computing and widely understood robotics". It is my pleasure to announce that the committee selected Phil Serchuk as the winner of both these awards.

Phil was awarded 200 Canadian dollars and a commemorative plaque "For Achievement in Multiple-Valued Logic". More importantly, he obtained also a realistic humanoid robot head build at Portland State University, especially by Martin Lukac, to be used in Phil's awarded project on modeling language and face gesture behaviors related to human emotions. The results of this research will be demonstrat! ed at the next ISMVL 2006 in Singapore. This "challenge award" in the form of a robot head Jan Emil Muval will go every year (for one year only) to the author of the best paper in soft-computing and robotics applications. I cordially invite more young researchers to compete with Phil in development of new theories and application programming that will be used in conjunction with this robot head.

We need more young researchers who will choose Multiple-Valued Logic as the main research area or as one of their research areas. Therefore, during the May 2005 meeting the MVL Executive Committee decided to additionally organize a new student robot competion that will be held during ISMVL and ULSI conferences each year. In contrast to the above mentioned award in form of a talking robot head, the student robot competition does not impose any constraints on the form, size, or behavior of the robot or software used in conjunction with it, but it is! expected that that there will be some link to multiple-valued logic and soft computing. Simulated robot or other software is also allowed. All interested parties are welcome to contact me, Marek Perkowski, at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, USA about the robots to be used in this competition. I will send you robots of various kinds or/and robot kits using which the student will have to write operational software and/or modify/extend both hardware and software. All these robots and software will be demonstrated during the conferences of our TC and the best team will be awarded by a commemorative plaque. All above mentioned robots, including the robot head Muval, will remain the property of the MVL Technical Committee.

To make research in MVL more attractive and widely dispersed, we created also a CDROM with recorded all previous ISMVL Symposium procee! ding materials until year 2005. I am very grateful to Laura Fujino and Ali Sheikholeslami for their leadership and hard work with respect to this endeavor.

Last year conference, thanks to efforts of Svetlana Yanuskevich and her team was again very successful. New areas of research have been introduced and I was especially excited about the invited presentations by Professors Mike Frank and Barry Sanders that introduced topics of Physical Limits of Computing, Reversible Logic and Quantum Computing and the presentation by Professor Lucien Haddad that explained in easy way what are clones. Hopefully more young researchers enthusiastic about this innovative research areas will join our Technical Committe and attend our symposia and workshops as the places to meet specialists with deep knowledge and new ideas.

In our continuing effort to reach new groups of researchers we extended the set of conferences sponsored by o! ur Technical Committee to the workshop "Boolean Problems" organized in Freiberg, Sachsen, in Germany. This bi-annual workshop, chaired by Prof. Bernd Steinbach, will take place in Fall of 2006 and I would like to invite cordially all participants of ISMVL and ULSI conferences to submitt their papers to the workshop as well. This workshop has been traditionally well-attended by the researchers from Central and Eastern Europe and will give a new opportunity for all of us to present new results and exchange scientific opinions.

I would like also to remind that the ULSI worksop will be organized in 2006 by professor Yasushi Yuminaka from Gunma University on May 17, just before ISMVL.
You can contact Prof. Yuminaka by email, yuminaka{at}el.gunma-u.ac.jp.

Although since January I will be no longer a chair of our Technical Committee, I will keep wo! rking on awards and robot competitions and on collaboration with other IEEE Committees that work in adjacent research areas. There is a new task of developing a computer art group in IEEE which I find particularly interesting since fuzzy and multiple-valued logic has been already linked to creative art by computers. This resonates well also with our emotional humanoid robots. Another effort in IEEE is to extend research and bring together researchers in quantum computing. There is also still a need to organize a webpage of multiple-valued logic that will have more information about the research in this area as well as in soft-computing, and that would give links to webpages of more researchers and research groups in the world.

I hope to meet all of you in Singapore and/or Freiberg, Germany in 2006 and I wish everybody a Merry Christmas or whatever you celebrate this time of the year, and a Happy New Year.

! Marek Perkowski