Summer School on Fuzzy Cognitive Maps 1.89

This five-day Summer School deals with the principles, assumptions, models, learning algorithms, convergence issues, strengths, limitations, applications of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) and new software tools for them.


Organizer

Ass. Prof. Elpiniki Papageorgiou
Dep. of Computer Science, University of Thessaly Lamia, Greece

epapageorgiou@teiste.gr, epapageorg@cs.uth.gr, www.epapageorgiou.com

Fuzzy cognitive maps are fuzzy feedback dynamical systems for modeling causal knowledge. They were introduced by Bart Kosko in 1986 as an extension of cognitive maps. Cognitive maps are a set of nodes linked by directed and signed edges. The nodes represent concepts relevant to a given domain. The causal links between these concepts are represented by the edges which are oriented to show the direction of the influence and are signed to show a promoting or inhibitory effect.

FCMs have emerged as tools for representing and studying the behavior of systems and people. By combining the main aspects of fuzzy logic, neural networks, expert systems, semantic networks, they have gained considerable research interest and are widely used to analyze causal complex systems. From an Artificial Intelligence perspective, FCMs are dynamic networks with learning capabilities, where in more and more data is available to model the problem, the system becomes better at adapting itself and reaching a solution. They gained momentum due to their dynamic characteristics and learning capabilities. These capabilities make them essential for modeling, analysis and decision making tasks as they improve the performance of these tasks.

During the past decade, FCMs played a vital role in the applications of diverse scientific areas, such as social and political sciences, engineering, information technology, robotics, expert systems, medicine, education, prediction, environment etc. The number of published papers (in the last 10 years) was extremely high and in the last three years was exceptionally high showing that there is a strong interest in FCMs by contemporary researchers. Thus, it seems that there is a need for a Summer School in FCMs focusing on fundamentals, construction, learning algorithms, optimization and convergence issues, granularity, extensions and prediction algorithms for FCM.

Summer School Scope

This summer school is dedicated to providing participants with deep insights on fundamentals, modeling methodologies, learning algorithms, optimization and convergence issues for fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs), supplemented with hands on real case studies using the software tool of FCM Wizard. A diverse number of applications of FCMs in applied sciences and engineering will be investigated.

The FCM software tool, called FCM WIZARD, will be fully presented in practice and the computer experiments will be based on it. A full version of FCM WIZARD will be given to the participants for investigating their problems.

Some experienced researchers in FCMs will participate and give lectures in specific application domains, like Engineering and Control, Environmental Modeling, Management, Business Intelligence etc.

Participants will bring their own problems from different applications domains, and through the conducted experiments and software we will try to solve them providing valuable results, which in next will be invited to be published in a Special Issue organized by the Main Organizers.
Details on the Special Issue will be announced soon.

Computer Exercises

The computer practice component of the Summer School has a number of very useful hands on real case studies. Hands on training includes:

· FCM construction from experts and stakeholders, participants
· FCM construction from historical data
· Inference and Scenario analysis
· Learning
· Optimization
· Convergence
· Prediction
· Classification
· Clustering
· Decision Support (medical, environmental, business, management etc)

Target audience

The ideal number of participants is about 50. The summer school will host: a) young researchers who wish to achieve a thesis on the subject or to carry on a personal work which uses FCM or to in-depth their knowledge in this discipline in order to complete their training, and b) academics and scientists from research community that have an interest in using FCMs, either as a theoretical framework or as a methodology and tool for applied research, engineering, industrial applications, environmental management, medical decision support, computer science etc.

The official language of the School is English. Unfortunately, we cannot provide any simultaneous translation.