This month, the Robotics Chapter is holding a joint meeting with two other IEEE societies. Please note that, unlike our practice, the main hosting society asks for advance reservations for dinner using the email address provided below. Society on Social Implications of Technology Computational Intelligence Society Robotics and Automation Society Central New England Chapters Tuesday, January 17, 2006 Program: 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. Dinner: 7:15 p.m. Social Implications of Computational Intelligence: Will We Better Understand the Mind, Art, and Religion? Leonid I. Perlovsky Principal Research Physicist and Technical Advisor Air Force Research Laboratory ABSTRACT Will computational intelligence (CI) help us understand the world and ourselves? Good and evil, ugliness and beauty are mixed up on TV screens and in museums of modern art. Courts struggle with reconciling religion and science in the classroom. I'll try to show that CI can help in clarifying some of these issues. CI suggests that the main mind mechanisms include concepts and emotions. They are driven by the knowledge instinct, the need to constantly fit our concepts to the surrounding world. I'll tell how CI models our higher mental functions. How our 'spiritual' abilities for beauty, for religion, for music appear from everyday workings of the mind. SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY Dr. Leonid Perlovsky is Principal Research Physicist and Technical Advisor at the Air Force Research Laboratory Sensors Directorate at Hanscom AFB. Previously, from 1985 to 1999, he served as Chief Scientist at Nichols Research, a $0.5B high-tech organization, leading corporate research in information science, intelligent systems, neural networks, optimization, sensor fusion, and algorithm development. In the past he served as professor at Novosibirsk University and New York University. He participated as a principal in commercial startups developing tools for text understanding, biotechnology, and financial predictions. He has published about 50 papers in refereed scientific journals and about 200 papers in conferences, delivered invited keynote plenary talks and authored the book "Neural Networks and Intellect: Model-based Concepts," Oxford University Press, 2001 (currently in its 3rd printing). Dr. Perlovsky organizes IEEE conferences on Computational Intelligence, serves on several IEEE committees, and as Chair for IEEE Boston Computational Intelligence Chapter. In 2005 he received the Distinguished Member of the IEEE Boston Section Award. He serves as Editor-at-Large for World's Scientific Natural Computations journal and as Editor-in-Chief for an Elsevier journal Physics of Life Reviews. MEETING INFORMATION This meeting is free and open to the public. It is jointly sponsored by the Central New England Chapters of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS), the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT), and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. It will be held 5:30 - 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 17 January 2006, in the Lincoln Laboratory Cafeteria, 244 Wood Street, Lexington, MA. For more information, please contact Jim Ernstmeyer, j.ernstmeyer@worldnet.att.net, 781-929-8114, or visit the IEEE website at http://www.ieeeboston.org/ . DINNER INFORMATION The no-host dinner and discussion will begin at 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday, 17 January, at the Great Wall Restaurant, in the Great Road Shopping Center, Bedford, MA. Please RSVP to Bill Pjura at bpjura@bu.edu by 13 January. DIRECTIONS Meeting: Please enter MIT Lincoln Laboratory parking lot at the 244 Wood Street entrance and park in visitor parking. The entrance to the cafeteria is on the lower level, to the left of the main entrance. From I-95 (Route 128): Take Exit 30B onto Route 2A, and stay in right lane. Turn right on to Mass. Ave. Follow Mass. Ave for ~0.4 miles. Turn left onto Wood Street and drive for 1.0 miles. Turn left at the Wood Street gate. Lincoln Lab is also accessible via public transportation by taking the 62/76 bus from Alewife. More directions are available at http://www.ll.mit.edu/about/directions.html . Dinner: For door-to-door directions please use MapQuest.com with a destination of 309b Great Road, Bedford MA. Or click on: http://tinyurl.com/alc62 From I-95 (Route 128): take exit 31B, and follow Routes 4 and 255 west for 2.4 miles to the Great Road Shopping Center on your left. The Great Wall Restaurant will be towards the far right corner of the mall.