The Speech of Prof. Dr. Ali M. Abbasov, Minister of Communications and Information Technologies of the Republic of Azerbaijan at the Conference on “Control, Optimization and Industrial Applications - COIA-2011”

Dear Scientists,

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Today, the world-respected scholars and experts, as well as representatives of public and private sectors have come together at Bilkent University, the prominent center of science and education, to participate at the opening ceremony of a very important conference on Control, Optimization and Industrial Applications - COIA-2011. In the light of this meeting, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies of the Republic of Azerbaijan is honored to be in the list of organizers of the conference. Taking this opportunity, I would like to convey greetings and congratulations of your friends in Azerbaijan, our government, scholars and specialists to you all.
As you may know, the birthplace of the conference is Baku and the two previous conferences held in Baku made it possible be transformed into a traditional event, which attracts a big attention in the world scientific community. Well-known scientists in the field of optimization and control such as Rockefeller, Tamer Basar, Floudas, Chernouska, Larin, Konstantinov, Aliyev and many others enjoyed their participation at the COIA-2005 and 2008 events. Indeed, I need to express my deepest appreciation to all of them.
I would like to emphasize that one of the outcomes from those two conferences in Baku was to popularize the Journal of Applied and Computational Mathematics supported by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies listed by the Thomas Reuters Journal Citation Reports with 0,857 impact factor in 2010. There are many colleagues of ours who made it possible and I thank them all.
The particular importance of the conference is its multi-stake-holder nature. The government, academia and business come together to hold the conference and it is not a coincidence that the conference brings together scientific theories and their application in practice. We have a platform, as Lincoln said, to add the fuel of interest to the fire of genius. Today, optimization and optimal control is in the foreground when it comes to decision-making, solving economic problems, designing complex technical systems and many other fields. It should be noted that control theory and optimization and its practical development is rapidly growing. We are very grateful to all the scientists and engineers, who are here in this hall for their achieved results and ongoing developments and to those, who for some reasons were unable to attend the conference.
However, as we are all aware problems of optimization and control are also getting rapidly complicated. The scale of practical tasks rapidly increases whereas the “cursed dimension” is sufficiently far from its solution. Along with dimensions, uncertainties of tasks are deepening and requirements for precession of the solution of many problems are growing.
In such situation, it is obvious that a gap between efficiency of researches and a complexity of tasks are expanding. Perhaps, because of it, several unconventional and alternative approaches such as fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, psychological and behavioral modeling, artificial intelligence methods and some others have been popular. In order to clarify what I mean here I would like to bring to your attention an example regarding my research interest.
Nowadays the digital world is growing very rapidly with annual rate of more than 60%. But digitalized information constitutes a very small part of globally generated. For instance, Large Hadron Collider in Geneva generates 40 terabyte of information every second. It can also be noted, jokingly, that today even an every cow generates 200 megabyte of information every year. In other words, I want to say that in the present stage of development we are losing, unintentionally, information, facts and knowledge, which probably could be very important for our future generations. Now let us verify if we could properly manage digital information that has been already digitalized!
Talking about information management we mean gathering, storing, structuring, processing, transforming, searching and extracting knowledge and other operations. In the light of current information boom, effectiveness of information management seems to be very low. And everyone is aware of importance of only optimal decision-making. But, of course, we should not indulge in pessimism. Because, there is also one field which is always helps researchers engaged in optimization and control, namely computing and computers. Recent development of nanotechnology and alternative computing, for instance “soft” computing can lead to a revolution in nanoelectronics, molecular and quantum computers, and thus, can make considerable impact on control and optimization.
Of course, today, interdisciplinary researches are paid big attention and control and optimization in this area is a very friendly neighbor that benefits other areas and can also get benefit from other fields too. However, in my opinion, in the modern times decisive support to scientific researchers must be given by governments. There is a principle of development so called the “triple helix” accepted by most societies; this is the integration of university, government and business. I especially emphasize the role of the government because there are many countries where the government administration has not been fully complied with market economy and economic potential of the country that often lags behind the level of developed countries. In this case, scientific research and education should be under the care of government. Insofar the country is poor; so much money must be spent on education and science to escape from the poverty.
There is also another important factor and that is the borderless of science. I believe that we are all and the governments of countries we represent accept this principle and that is why we gathered here. Azerbaijan is a country which respects civil and international norms and laws and my country supports international cooperation and friendship. Though Azerbaijan is an oil country, it has announced development of science, education and technology to be the priority field and truly keeps to this policy. Therefore, Azerbaijan is one of the countries providing official support to this conference. It would be appropriate to express our deepest gratitude to the Government of Turkey and Turkish science and education community, and to the staff members of Bilkent University, personally to Prof. Abdullah Atalar, Rector of University and to all conference organizers for holding such a high-level event. I think that organization of this high-level conference is an indication of a deep respect and honor to the memory of great personality of Ihsan Dogramaci, the founder of Bilkent University.
And finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to scientists gathered here who has given a special value to this event and to wish the conference every success.
Thank you for your attention.