Yaakov Bar-Shalom, 2000
As I begin my Y2K term as ISIF President, I would like to express my thanks to the membership who elected me to the Board of Directors and the Board for entrusting me with the helm of our Society for this year. As a recently formed organization, with a membership of over 250 and two successful Information Fusion Conferences behind us, a modest measure of our success to date is the fact that requests keep coming in for the Proceedings of the most recent one – FUSION ’99 – and we will have to go for a second printing. We have also built up a reserve from selling Proceedings and other conference income from FUSION ’99, which had an attendance of 200.
For the current year, our plans include the following:
- Hold FUSION 2000 in Paris, at the Cité des Sciences, during July 10-13 (every registered participant becomes a member of ISIF for one year);
- Request proposals for organizing FUSION 2001;
- Provide benefits to the members, like discounts on books and, in the future, web-based conference Proceedings;
- Develop a system for administration and member services;
- Improve web site to include more information on fusion;
- Develop an online database of information fusion publications;
- Investigate publication of an online journal;
- Constitution of the Society – a draft is in the works and will be submitted to the membership for vote soon;
- Build up a cadre of volunteers for help in the operation of ISIF and future leadership positions;
- A volunteer is needed (ASAP) to help set up an online version of the Proceedings of FUSION ’99 (to be used later for subsequent conferences) with selective downloading capability for a fee to be credited to ISIF.
As a future measure of success, I envision annual conferences with attendance consisting of not only authors, but also a significant number of attendees who come to listen to presentations and talk to the authors because of these presentations’ relevance to their job.
We will listen to members (and their non-member colleagues who might be interested in joining) with suggestions on what they want and need to make ISIF more relevant for their job. I am looking forward to working with the Board as well as the membership to build a Society all of us will be proud of. Please feel free to contact me with suggestions and/or to volunteer your time and skills for developing ISIF.
Au revoir à Paris.
Yaakov Bar-Shalom