Dear CIEF'2003 Participants,

     Very soon we shall see each other in Cary, North Carolina.  I know that many of you are now waiting for the final schedule of the program to plan your trip.  Very soon we shall announce the program at the conference website. 

      Due to some constraints, we know that not all of you can stay from the beginning to the end, but we do want to convince the rest of you that attending CIEF'2003 from the beginning to the end is definitely rewarding. 

       First, CIEF'2003 itself has 19 sessions plus one tutorial session and a plenary session.  Unlike most conferences, there is no concurrent sessions, which means you will not miss any single talk if you wish.   

       Of course, you may not be interested in all sessions.  But, please do notice that there are other conferences running in parallel with us at the same time, and you can switch among them. Totally, there are 10 conferences in this JCIS event.   Among them, there are conferences on fuzzy logic, neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, adaptive systems,...  Needless to say, these are all relevant to CIEF.  This is another unique feature of CIEF series: you can attend an interdisciplinary conference at a interdisciplinary rich environment.    

      So, please do not just restrict your attention on CIEF only. Go shopping around.  I believe that you will learn something useful for your research from other parallel conferences.

       Last, but not the least, each conference also has its own keynote speech.  Together, we have 25 keynote speeches. In addition to Robert Axtell for CIEF, we have Lotfi A. Zadeh for fuzzy logic, David Goldberg for genetic algorithms,...to name just a few.

       I believe that you would not see anything comparable to this one anywhere in the world.  Therefore, I would highly recommend all of you make a shopping list before your coming, and make sure that you get all of the items.  This is going to be a very fantastic academic trip for all of us.

       We are looking forward to seeing you in Cary!

Best regards,
Paul Wang, Shu-Heng Chen, Xin Yao, and Chia-Hsuan Yeh
CIEF'2003 Conference Chairs