Wlodzislaw Duch Office Department of Computer Methods Nicholas Copernicus University, Torun, Poland E-mail: duch@phys.uni.torun.pl WWW: http://www.phys.uni.torun.pl/~duch Tel: (48-56) 622 1543 or 611-3267 Fax: (48-56) 622 1543

Wlodzislaw Duch's education and degrees include the following: title of a "professor of theoretical physics and applied computational sciences", habilitation (D.Sc.) in many body physics (thesis won the Ministry of Education Award), Ph.D. in quantum chemistry, graduate study in quantum chemistry at the Nicholas Copernicus University, Master of Science diploma (highest honors, "blue diploma"), undergraduate study in physics at the Nicholas Copernicus University.

He has held a number of academic positions at universities and scientific institutions all over the world. These include Full Professor at Nicholas Copernicus University, Visiting Professor at Meiji University, Japan, Louis Pasteur Universite, Strasbourg, France, Visiting Scientist at Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik, Germany (every year since 1984), Senior Research Fellow at Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan, Visiting Scientist, King's College, London, to name only some of them.

He has been an editor of a number of professional journals, a renown expert of the European Union, Ministry of Education, Polish Committee of Scientific Research, a member of many committees both Polish and international. He has published 4 books and over 250 scientific and popular articles in many journals. He has been awarded a number of grants by Polish state agencies, foreign committees as well as European Union institutions.

Full details of can be reached at the following: www.phys.uni.torun.pl/~duch.

Greetings!

The ICIMSS as one of the few truly international initiatives located at the Nicholas Copernicus University. My own interest lies in computational and artificial intelligence methods in application to knowledge-based information management and intelligent search techniques. I am also trying to understand "natural" ways of information organization, natural from the cognitive science point of view. There is a trend towards knowledge-based economics that overlaps with our efforts to structure information. We should see very rapid development of the software tools in these areas, so perhaps this will be at the core of ICIMSS teaching in near future.

With the best wishes for happy meetings and good ideas at ICIMSS,

Wlodek Duch