ICAR Program Update

ICAR ′96 Program Finalized

The scientific and short course program has been finalized for ICAR' 96. This year's meeting has been expanded to include 53 oral presentations. The opening session will feature a new award this year, the Beckman Award Lecture from Bart Kosko entitled “A Fuzzy Vision of the Future” (see Personality Highlight). The scientific program will continue the theme of artificial intelligence with a special session immediately following Dr. Kosko's lecture.

For a complete listing of the scientific program and abstracts received, visit the ICAR home page http://icar.esa.lanl.gov.

ICAR ′96 Award Presentations

At the January meeting, the following awards will be presented to leaders in the field of laboratory automation:

the Hewlett Packard Award for outstanding strategic research in automated sample preparation,

the Scitec-TNO Award for the best oral and poster presentations and

the Boehringer Mannheim Award for the most novel use of robotics in the clinical laboratory, with an emphasis on the pre-analytical phase.

A recap of the 1995 ICAR award winners follows on pages 24 and 25.

Personality Highlight: Dr. Bart Kosko to Lead Artificial Intelligence Session at ICAR ′96

Bart Kosko ([e-mail]) is the head of the Signal and Image Processing Institute at the University of Southern California and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, the best selling author of Fuzzy Thinking (Hyperion press), as well as Neural Networks and Fuzzy Systems (Prentice Hall). and has been credited with popularizing Fuzzy Logic.

In addition to his Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Bart holds degrees in philosophy, economics and applied mathematics. He is an elected member of the governing board of the International Neural Network Society.

Bart sees himself as a sort of a prophet for the science of fuzzy logic which has brought him international acclaim as one of the masters of this rapidly expanding field. Don't miss his session at this year's meeting in San Diego.