A report from kick-off meeting

The second workshop on SOFT COMPUTING took place in Piestany, Slovakia, in November 29 and 30, 2001, as a satellite event of the 28-the conference SOFSEM. In fact, this was already the second meeting of the same group which met for the first time in 2001 during the 27-th SOFSEM.

The scientific agenda of the second meeting on SOFT COMPUTING consisted of one invited talk (that was also a part of the scientific program of SOFSEM 2001), and of 15 papers by workshop participants. The papers for presentation have been chosen from 18 submissions to the workshop; 13 papers were selected for publication in a special issue of the journal Neural Network World (Vol.11, No. 6, 2001, ISBN 1210-0552) that was available at the workshop. The workshop was also visited by regular SOFSEM participants. For the detailed program see http://www.sofsem.sk.

The kick-off meeting of the ERCIM working group took place in November 30, 2001. It was attended by 24 participants from 5 ERCIM countries: Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy, Hungary, and the Netherlands (see the enclosed copy of the list of participants). INRIA showed its interest in joining the group via e-mail. There was also a representative from Spain and an observer from Japan.

Professor Petr Hajek (hajek@cs.cas.cz) from the Institute of Computer Science, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, has been unanimously elected as the working group leader.

The next meeting of the working group will take place in Milovy, Czech Republic, during SOFSEM 2002, in November 2002, see http://www.sofsem.cz.

December 2001 Jiri Wiedermann, CRCIM, Prague