Communications of the ACM
Selfie With a View on 'cybernetics and Systems Analysis'
When witnessing and being a part of something that requires major public attention, sometimes a measure of ego is necessary, says Dmitry Zaitsev of International Humanitarian University, Ukraine.
Credit: Dmitry Zaitsev (daze.ho.ua)
Selfies are all the rage recently, though many people resent seeing suchlike narcissistic affairs. The topic of most selfies is "me and something remarkable," but many of them even suffer from ignoring any background with the only topic being: "I am surprisingly beautiful with this peculiar grimace."
But when witnessing and being a part of something that requires major public attention, sometimes a measure of ego is necessary. I am attempting to avoid such excessive selfishness in my "selfie" and pay due respect to my contemporary—the best CS journal in Ukraine, which has been published since 1965. Cybernetics and Systems Analysis (CSA) is the only CS Ukrainian journal indexed in Scopus and included in JCR 1997-1999. I like to believe that this is because during those years we published a couple of papers [1,2] in it. In spite of the fact that the journal is republished and translated in English by Springer, it lays aside the citation thoroughfares of the civilized world. Sometimes good results published in CSA remain unheeded for years because very few scientists look inside it.
Ukraine has solid background in Computer Science, established with the first in the continental Europe computer MESM put into operation in 1951 in Kiev Laboratory of Sergey Lebedev. The further maintenance and development of the computer since 1956 was continued by Victor Glushkov, who headed Cybernetics Institute of National Academy of Science of Ukraine, created in 1962. The Institute, which established numerous branches in universities all around Ukraine, has become the center of Computer Science in Ukraine. It is widely known for its scientific achievements and bright scientists such as Zinoviy Rabinovich, Vladimir Skurihin, Igor Velbitsky, Ivan Sergiyenko, and others. It has developed new kinds of computer hardware and software and fulfilled numerous application projects for production control, management, and artificial intelligence. Interested parties can trace the implementation of "paperless management technology" and "state control system" as original concepts of Vladimir Glushkov. In 1965, a journal named Cybernetics was founded and renamed in Cybernetics and Systems Analysis in 1991.
From ICI-Global
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Comments
David Walker
It's good to see that the research by Computer Scientists in Ukraine is becoming more widely recognised now that English translations of some Ukrainian journals are available, and can be found by web search engines.
Nikolay Shilov
An interesting attempt to create a new genre for a scientific magazine! Selfie with a view of makes sense for researchers from countries with active scientific life and process that failed due several reasons to publish papers in well-promoted western journal. Very few western researchers check English-language Japanese, Russian or Brazilian science journals. So an opportunity to give a word for self-positioning for researchers from these countries should be welcome!
At the same time, I believe that short selfies like this one must be written with simpler words or explanations what (from own perspective) is authors contribution to science. In particular, I like in the article the following sentence about paper [1] in the reference list: Recently, widespread papers on the exhaustive use of rule in spiking P neuron systems do not even mention our multichannel transitions which first appeared in my Ph.D., defended in 1991. It says me much more about contribution of the paper [1] than all other explanations and comments on this paper in the article!
Nikolay Shilov
Assistant Professor, Innopolis University, Russia
Oleksandr Lemeshko
Composition of functional subnets (clans), presented by Dmitry Zaitsev in CSA papers, has been successfully applied for verification of a series of networking protocols such as BGP, TCP, IOTP and others. In the Berthelot's model of ECMA protocol a deadlock has been revealed.
Ryohei Nakatsu
I believe that in [2], an algorithm for synthesis a fuzzy logic function given by a choice table
(where all the variants of arguments and their negations ordering are listed) has been introduced for the first time.
Igor Potapov
Indeed Cybernetics and Systems Analysis (also known as "Kibernetika" form 1965 till 1991) is one of the best and the oldest CS journals in Ukraine that was keeping its high standard for several decades. For many researchers in Ukraine, especially in the past, it was the only way for publishing their research results in respectable venue. Unfortunately, many fundamental results published in this journal are unknown, some of them possibly were rediscovered and published elsewhere. Originally all papers were written in Russian http://www.kibernetika.org/aboutEU.html
and later some issues weretranslated to English and could be accessible via Springer Link: http://link.springer.com/journal/10559
According to my experience, sometimes the terminology in English translations could be misleading or non standard as it was not done by authors, so please take it into account when you will do your searching with keywords.
In anyway I would like to encourage other people to look at the papers published in Cybernetics and Systems Analysis. I am sure you can find a lot of interesting and unknown facts and results. Currently the journal is not included into DBLP and adding it to DBLP journal list could improve the visibility of the research results published in Cybernetics and Systems Analysis.
Slavomir Simonak
For me, this selfie is a comprehensive and inspiring walkthrough of research results of one of prominent Ukrainian computer scientists working in the area of Petri nets. It's also great to know, the results of research published in CSA journal are now available in English too.
Peter Haas
I like the idea of increasing the visibility of underappreciated research communities, and second the suggestion of adding CSA to DBLP, which would help very much in focusing attention on this work. Perhaps there could be one or more survey or "best of" CSA special issues that would highlight significant papers from the past, helping to put the body of work in perspective and pointing researchers to results that ought to be better known.
ILKE AKCAY
As a researcher working on Petri Net modeling, it was good to take a look at this 'selfie' of Dr. Zaitsev.
I rather say that infinite Petri nets and universal Petri nets have appeared for the first time in his CSA papers. And, at MCU2015 he accomplished the topic proving universality in infinite conventional Petri nets.
Benedek Nagy
I was happy to read this short selfie by Dmitry Zaitsev. He has nice contributions.
Parametric description of Petri nets, presented for the first time in Cybernetics and Systems Analysis ([6]) for hypercube structures of computing grids, is a powerful tool for specification of systems with a regular structure and obtaining the system properties for any size of the object.
Abstraction and the passage to the limit allowed the introduction of Infinite Petri nets in the book chapter published with IGI-Global and finally led to the proof of universality of infinite conventional Petri nets, which Dmitry presented at the conference MCU2015 where I was a co-chair.
Advait Apte
Dear Zaitsev,
I highly appreciate your efforts to shed light on the hidden Ukrainian world of scientific inquiry in computation. It is a sad truth that many researchers and their ideas are not known to the wider scientific community due to language barriers.
I would also like to thank you for the brief introduction to your past research and I am confident that it will help many in the field of Computer Science. I look forward to more interesting articles from you.
Best wishes.
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