VIPSI 2011 - End of year conference in Milocer, Montenegro, December 31, 2011 and January 1, 2012#

Short report#

This year’s VIPSI - a yearly by invitation only conference - (organized by Pavle Andjus, University of Belgrade, and Veljko Milutinovic, http://home.etf.rs/~vm, University of Belgrade) was special in that Milutinovic joined Academia Europaea (Informatics) in 2011 and invited a number of members of the Informatics Section of AE as speakers.

The venue was the beautiful Residence Hotel in Milocer, only a stone throw away from famous Sveti Stefan (see VIPSI 2011 impressions). It started with a lunch on Dec. 31, 2011. This was followed by a veritable speaker marathon from 14:00 to 20:00, continuing in the evening of Jan.1, 2012. On both evenings this was followed by a lavish dinner (year’s end and year’s beginning dinner - the people of Montenegro and Serbia know how to celebrate!). For most attendees there was a bit of time to visit beautiful Budva, and other spectacular places in Montenegro (often guided by their hosts) December 31, January 1 and morning of January 2 (see VIPSI 2011 impressions)!

Veljko Milutenovic was a very generous host. He is very well connected in Serbia and Montenegro (after all, it was through him that Serbia has become a paying patron of AE). In addition to the interesting and very interdisciplinary conference the about 25 participants not only got to know each other, but also a very good glimpse of some of the beautiful aspects of Montenegro.

A brief summary of some of the presentations of the conference:

Photo gallery of some of the speakers

• The conference started and ended by a talk of Hiro Fujii on the Japanese Space Elevator Project which at some future stage might make travelling to a geo-stationary space station possible without using rockets. Such a station would be the obvious launching pad for trips to the moon or other parts of the solar system.

• Professor Ljubisha Stankovic, of the University of Montenegro, talked about the development of the University (as a former Rector, he is well acquainted with long-term strategic plans) and then he discussed the most referenced research effort, which is in the field of signal processing, with benefits coming from adequate treatment of time, frequency, and space domains.

• Ulrike Leopold-Wildburger, member of AE, from the Institute for Statistics and Operations Research, Graz, Austria gave an impressive talk that showed how a simple experiment shows the likelihood of persons to be good collaborators.

• Milica Pejanovic, Faculty of Engineering, University of Montenegro, gave a very interesting talk on "Advanced solutions for future wireless networks" showing how “holes” in the network can be overcome by routing via other users. In addition to discussing the obvious andavantages it was also explained how to overcome the technical and commercial problems involved.

• Yoshiko Motoya, Osaka University, showed that early drawings of children can be used to determine the likelihood of a life full of turmoil or not, and gave many interesting picture examples and classifications.

• Hermann Maurer, member of AE, Graz University of Technology, Austria talked about "Information Integration and Going Beyond Wikipedia" arguing that special local servers are required in addition to Wikipedia to go deeper and provide more functionality.

• Rade Mihajlovic, New York Institute of Technology, http://www.nyit.edu/directory, gave a scary talk about "Cyber War and Peace", showing how fragile our computer infrastructure has become to cyber-attacks. He also pointed out the many organisations in e.g. the US to fight cyber-crime.

• Andrzej Janicki, the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin; Military Institute of Aviation Medicine, Poland, http://www.kul.pl, http://www.wiml.pl together with Monika Walczak from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland, http://www.msz.gov.pl, gave a talk on "Adaptive estimation of innovation powers of enlarging EU", using national productivity, human development, size of population and size of area to arrive at an estimate of innovative (and military) power. Following their model Europe is not doing well so adequate measures are needed.

• Genci Berati, University of Shkodra, Albania showed in his presentation "Introducing International Standards in Teaching Informatics in the 7th, 8th, and 9th Grade" how Albania is trying to close the IT gap.

• Ksenija Bilbija, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA talked on "Tortured by Fashion: Making Memory Through Corporate Advertising in Chile and Argentina", showing how some companies explore the tragedies that have happened to people.

• Pavle Andjus, Institute of Biology, University of Belgrade, gave a nice talk about the special issue on advances in biophysics that he guest-edited for IPSI Transactions on Advanced Research.

• Veljko Milutinovic, University of Belgrade, Serbia, as humble last-but-one speaker showed how 10 criteria can be used to make students more creative in their Ph.D. work: the emerging paper may well be THE guideline for future Ph.D. students.

The organisation was excellent - I hope all participants enjoyed the meeting and its environment as much as I did! I hope my report and the pictures give a reasonable impression. I apologize for omissions!

Hermann Maurer, January 2012

P.S.: Professor Milutinovic has informed me that there will be another (by invitation only) VIPSI meeting Dec. 31, 2012. Members of AE are invited to participate without registration fee. All interested please contact Professor Milutinovic under vm@etf.rs.