Bruno Di Stefano

The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) is an 100 year old organization within IEEE, that develops global standards in the range of industries within the IEEE sphere of interest. The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS) is a young society and was born in 2002 and acquired the current name in 2004. The mission of IEEE CIS is: “Advancing nature-inspired computational paradigms in science and engineering” (e.g., Neural Networks, Fuzzy Systems, and Evolutionary Computation, Cognitive and Developmental Systems, Adaptive Dynamic Programming, Reinforcement Learning, Bioinformatics & Bioengineering, etc.). Twelve Technical Activities committees run the conferences, journals, magazines, and related peerreview process of the society. The IEEE CIS Standards Committee supports the technical committees by developing technical standards, i.e., “guidelines, best practices and procedures aimed at optimizing the reliability of the materials, products, design methods, and services that people, scientists and engineers use every day.”

The Standards Committee of the IEEE CIS has brought to completion two standards: IEEE 1855- 2016 (IEEE Standard for Fuzzy Markup Language (FML)) and IEEE 1849-2016 (IEEE Standard for eXtensible Event Stream (XES) for Achieving Interoperability in Event Logs and Event Streams). IEEE 1855-2016 “allows modelling a fuzzy logic system in a human-readable and hardware independent way. FML is based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML).

The designers of fuzzy systems with FML have a unified and high-level methodology for describing interoperable fuzzy systems.” All of this is vendor independent and designers can use for each phase the tool they deem the most appropriate for that phase. This documentation helps also when documenting for legal reasons the design done (i.e. patents, safety certifications, etc).

IEEE 1855-2016 has proven to be very successful with the research community: Google Scholar returns more than 100 scientific, peer-reviewed articles mentioning IEEE 1855-2016 and work conducted in adherence to the standard.

IEEE 1849-2016 provides “a language to transport, store, and exchange (possibly large volumes of) event data (e.g., for process mining)”. “Process mining aims to discover, monitor and improve processes by extracting knowledge from event logs representing actual process executions in a given setting. Process mining depends on the availability of accurate and unambiguous event logs, according to established standards.” IEEE 1849-2016 provides a “format for the interchange of event data between information systems in many application domains on the one hand and analysis tools for such data on the other hand”.

The IEEE CIS Standards Committee also deals with Computational Intelligence Data Sets, that is duly and properly validated reference data to be used to validate and compare algorithms. A well known data set is the MNIST data set of handwritten digits, a “large database of handwritten digits that is commonly used for training various image processing systems”. This allows testing new algorithms and comparing the relative performance of new and existing algorithms. The IEEE CIS Standards Committee also works on such datasets.

About Author

Bruno Di Stefano is a professional engineer (Electronics) (PEO member), LSMIEEE, FEIC, FEC. He is an active member (Standards Committee) of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society(CIS) and also a Member At Large of The IEEE Toronto Section Executive. From 1980 to 2012, he held an active professional engineering license. Since January 1, 2013, he no longer offers engineering services to the public. Bruno Di Stefano conducts research in some of his areas of interest & expertise and manages Nuptek Systems Ltd., the company of which he is president since 1981.