Organisers

The International Conference on Man-Machine Interactions ICMMI is organised by the Institute of Informatics, the Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice.

The Institute of Informatics is a part of the Faculty of Automatic Control, Electronics and Computer Science, one of the twelve faculties of the Silesian University of Technology.

Co-organiser

Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Gliwice

Some history of the Institute of Informatics, Silesian University of Technology

The origins of the Institute can be found in the former Chair of Electrical Engineering Fundamentals at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, where in 1956 a Division of Control Theory was created, headed by Dr Stefan Węgrzyn. The Division conducted research in the theory of automatic control and fundamentals of control and system design measurement. On 18 October 1961, the Division was transformed into the Chair of Control Theory and, at the same time, at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering a unit of Automatic Control was formed. That set the basis for the new Faculty of Automatic Control, formally established on 30 December 1963.

Originally, in the Chair, the research addressed automation, control theory and dynamics of electric circuits, but with time it evolved to new areas such as: analogue and digital technologies, digital systems, peripheral devices of digital systems, programming of digital systems, and many others. The worldwide and domestic regional developments in the area of computer science and industrial automation caused the issues of control systems design and programming for digital systems to become the main target of scientific and educational activities of the Chair, which in turn led to renaming the Faculty to the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science on 26 June 1972, and starting a new course programme in computer science.

On 18 September 1975, the Institute of Real-Time Computer Science was founded, which performed its teaching and research activities until 1977, when the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science was reorganised once again through the integration of the Institute (Professor S. Węgrzyn as the Director) with part of the Institute of Industrial Automatic Control and Measurement (Professor Jerzy Siwiński as the Director).

In 1984 the Faculty changed its name into the Faculty of Automatic Control, Electronics and Computer Science, and the Institute of Real-Time Computer Science into the Institute of Informatics, which better corresponded to their research areas.

From 1994 until 2000 Professor Andrzej Grzywak was the Director of the Institute and during this time the scientific research topics widened, including computer networks, databases, multimedia systems, and computer systems security. This was in turn reflected in the changes of teaching programmes, curricula and the introduction of specialisations.

Since the year 2000 the Director of the Institute has been Professor Stanisław Kozielski, who is specialising in databases and computer architecture.