Elektronisk Dansk A.I.Meddelser 105         Feb 07

Dette nummer af EDAIM er foreloebigt sendte til den voksende antal DAIS medlemmer jeg har email adresse paa. Fortsat er der meget faa rettelser til medlemslisten fra jer  .
Medlem-email-adresser er meget velkomne.
Medlems bidrag til EDAIM er meget velkommen. 

Index:

 1) SCIA 2007 
 2) NDRF Sommerkonference 2007 I Varde
 3) AAAI AI ALERT 
 4) AAAI 2007 Sponsored/Affiliated/In Cooperation Conferences
 5) ACAL 2007 
 6) ACII 2007 
 7) AI Communications - New Issue Alert
 8) AIIDE-07 
 9) ArgNMR 2007
  10) Book Chapters on Hybrid-Heuristics for  Scheduling 
11) CIA 2007 - 11th Int Wshp on Cooperative Information Agents
12) Constraints Journal: Special Issue on Bioinformatics
13) CONTEXT'07 Roskilde!!!!!!!!
14) Doctoral Symp. on Stochastic Local Search Algorithms
15) ECCAI bulletin #5 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
16) EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION IN DEFENCE APPLICATIONS, CEC2007
17) Evomusart
18) EvoCOMNET 2007
19) EvoDOP-2007 Workshop at GECCO-2007
  20) ECoMASS-2007
21) Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms
22) ESM'2007
23) EvoCOP 2007 
24) FroCoS'07
25) FUBUTEC 2007, Tu Delft, NL
26) GAMEON ASIA 2007 / ASTEC 2007 
27) IAAI-07 
29) ICGD&BC 2007 
  30) ICNC'07-FSKD'07
32) IEEE Second Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems
33) ICEIS 2007 (Madeira)
34) IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium
35) ISCRAM 2007 
36) ISDA'07 
37) lNIDISC'2007 
38) ICAS 2007 &  ICNS 2007 
39) IJAIT - New Issue Contents Notification
  40) IJPRAI - New Issue Contents Notification
41) ICAIPR-07
42) NLP Robocoach now on line!
43) publishing a review for a new book in DAIS
44) PhD Studentship in Machine Learning at Bristol Uni.
45) CCCT 2007 
46) IWLCS2007
47) ISC'2007
48) RIAO 2007
49) RobocupRescue 2007
  50) SIS 2007
51) Special Issue on Constraint  based methods for Bioinformatics
52) WORLDCOMP'07
53) AISB 07 Convention 
54) AICT 2007 , ICIW 2007 ||      Mauritius
55) artificial mind prototype
56) BCI 2007 
57) Computer Science Newsletter - February 2007
58) GMAI-07
59) IICAI-07 
  60) LATA 2007
61) citsa2007
62) New GEP FAQ and new tutorials
63) RCIS'07 
64) SLS 2007
65) AISB 



 1) SCIA 2007 

For more information on the conference and accepted papers see
http://www.scia2007.dk

We look forward to meeting you in Aalborg, Denmark in June 2007.

Best regards,

Kim Steenstrup Pedersen
Program chair for SCIA2007





2) NDRF Sommerkonference 2007 I Varde

Til: NDRF kontakter ved universiteter i Danmark, Norge og
Sverige.

K¾re venner.

NDRF holder sin Œrlige sommerkonference i dagene 22. til 24.
august 2007. Konferencen afholdes i Varde i Danmark.

I det forl¿bne Œr har vi set en stigning i interessen hos
studerende for problemstillinger knyttet til humanit¾r
minerydning. Derfor besluttede NDRF«s bestyrelse pŒ sit m¿de
den 11. januar 2007 at invitere op til 10 studerende med
interesse for minerydning til gratis at deltage i dette Œrs
sommerkonference. Udv¾lgelsen sker pŒ grundlag af
ans¿gning til NDRF. - Ans¿gningen mŒ ikke v¾re for lang. -
NDRF vil som hj¾lp til transport til og fra konferencen st¿tte
med op til DKK 1.500,- pr. deltager.

Jeg vedl¾gger et kort notat om emnet, og jeg hŒber I vil
videregive informationen til de interesserede.

Med venlig hilsen og pŒ forhŒnd tak for hj¾lpen

Ole


Ole Nymann
NDRF
Nordic Demining Research Forum
Informatik og Matematisk Modellering
Bygning 321
Danmarks Tekniske Universitet
DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Danmark
e-mail: ndrf@ndrf.dk
Web: www.ndrf.dk
Phone: +45 4817 3898






3) AAAI AI ALERT 
 
AI ALERT

8 February 2007

 
 

 Welcome to the <http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/articles&columns/aialerts.html>AI ALERT, a service from <http://www.aaai.org/>The American Association for Artificial Intelligence, showcasing an eclectic subset from the <http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/current.html>AI in the news collection in <http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/welcome.html>AI TOPICS, the AAAI sponsored pathfinder web site. As explained in our <http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/notices.html>notices & disclaimers, the AI ALERT is intended to keep you informed of news articles published by third parties. The mere fact that a particular item is selected for inclusion does NOT imply that AAAI or AI TOPICS has verified the information (articles are offered "<http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/notices.html#alert>as is") or that there is endorsement of any kind. And because the excerpt may not reflect the overall tenor of the article, nor contain all of the relevant information, you are encouraged to access the entire article.

The Headlines:

<#jan25g>Tax Takers Send in the Spiders - Wired News
<#jan29a>Artificial intelligence: Making rapid strides - The Hindu Business Line
<#jan29b>Out of the shadows - The Engineer Online
<#jan30d>A sense of security - The Engineer Online
<#feb00b>Dream Jobs 2007 - IEEE Spectrum Online
<#feb1c>Bears lose to Colts in virtual Super Bowl - InformationWeek (plus two related articles)
<#feb2a>Coast Guard calls off search for missing sailor after four days - The Associated Press
<#feb2b>Rolf Pfeifer - New AI (podcast) - Talking Robots
<#feb4b>A car that parks itself? Now that's truly modern art - The Observer
<#feb5a>Google's Moon Shot - The New Yorker
<#feb5c>Jeff Hawkins hacks the human brain - Business 2.0
<#feb6d>Who watches the watchers in surveillance society - Reuters (plus one related article)
<#feb7d>Found in Translation - Technology Review
<#feb8d>Networking for a brighter future in IT - Telegraph.co.uk (plus one related article)
<#slot>The Expansion Slot - just a few more articles: <#jan26b>A Computer Program Wins Its First Scrabble Tournament | <#jan26d>Computer Program Writes Its Own Fiction | <#jan30b>Robotic Fish Cleared In Computer Glitch | <#jan30c>The global war for talent | <#feb2c>Finding religion with code | <#feb3a>The mind chip | <#feb3b>Bell Labs - Over and out | <#feb4d>Robots, cars, batteries hold key to future growth | <#feb5e>Robo-doggy paddle (video) |  <#feb6a>Q&A: Suranga Chandratillake | <#feb6e>New Bionic Leg Shows Promise for Amputees (television broadcast) | <#feb8x>Man or Machine? Part 1: Human or Robot? | <#feb8a>Robot Asimo learns how to jaywalk | <#feb8e>For R2D2 or T-800 lovers, a new degree awaits

The Articles:

January 25, 2007: <http://www.wired.com/news/technology/security/0,72564-0.html>Tax Takers Send in the Spiders. By Quinn Norton. Wired News.
"Websites around the world are getting a new computerized visitor among the Googlebots and Yahoo web spiders: The taxman. A five-nation tax enforcement cartel has been quietly cracking down on suspected internet tax cheats, using a sophisticated web crawling program to monitor transactions on auction sites, and track operators of online shops, poker and porn sites. The 'Xenon' program.... Xenon, explained Marten den Uyl of Sentient, is in some ways the opposite of something like Google's web crawler, which traverses a tree of links and grabs a copy of everything it sees. Xenon is smart about link selection and context, and uses a 'slow search paradigm,' he said. ... Once the web pages are screen-scraped, Xenon's Identity Information Extraction Module interfaces with national databases containing information like street and city names. ... As illuminating as Xenon is for the tax man, the data-mining effort poses dangers to citizen privacy, said Par Strom, a noted privacy advocate in the world of Swedish IT."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 29, 2007: <http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2007/01/29/stories/2007012901310200.htm>Artificial intelligence: Making rapid strides - AI makes spam filters smarter, search engines more efficient and is even behind speech-to-text software. By J. Preethi. The Hindu Business Line.
"Phraselater - a pencil box shaped device that translates phrases in 15-20 languages and the vacuum-bot called Roomba that automatically finds its way back to its charging point. Examples that indicate that artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to make itself seen and heard. 'What people don't know is that AI has been around for years now,' said the AI expert, Dr Ron Brachman, V-P of Worldwide Research Operations, Yahoo! Research, speaking to Business Line recently. ... Commending the contribution of Indian researchers at Yahoo in the field of AI, he said, 'The talent here is extraordinary.' Work on various AI themes - speech to text, computer vision, Indic language processing and translation, multimodal communication (voice communication) and handwriting recognition is being conducted at various research labs across the country."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 29, 2007: <http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/297976/Out+of+the+shadows.htm>Out of the shadows. The Engineer Online.
"Just a few years ago the idea of a robot combat aircraft was little more than a glint in the eye of the most forward thinking military scientist. While remotely operated drones used for reconnaissance have been around for some time the autonomous, unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) has remained in that shadowy area where military secrecy and the whispered rumours of science-fiction geeks make the truth hard to find. But now the veil of secrecy is beginning to slip and, in both the US and here in the UK, the use of robotic combat aircraft is fast becoming a reality of modern warfare. Under a £124m MoD contract announced late last year, UK engineers have begun work on the development of a prototype unmanned air vehicle (UAV) that could pave the way for a new generation of autonomous, stealthy aircraft and ultimately spell the end for human bomber pilots. Headed by BAE systems, the aim of the portentous-sounding Taranis project (named after the Celtic god of thunder), is to build and fly a technology demonstrator that will autonomously travel long distances deep into enemy territory and sneak past sophisticated air-defence systems. ... One of the biggest keys to Taranis' stealthiness will be its autonomous operation. While most production UAVs now in use are remotely operated Taranis, said [Chris] Clarkson, will operate with an unprecedented degree of autonomy. 'It needs to have intelligence in its mission systems to allow it to route round threats and take evasive action if it needs to do so, without having to have a human involved.'"
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 30, 2007: <http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/297967/A+sense+of+security.htm>A sense of security. The Engineer Online.
"An intelligent sensing system will use wireless technology, GPS and a suite of sensors for real-time monitoring of independent elderly people at home. The Û1.85m (£1.2m) EU-funded Complete Ambient Assisted Living Experiment (CAALYX) project will develop and test a light, mobile device to monitor a number of vital signs and transmit the information to an intelligent data-logging system. ... Limerick University is to develop the fall detection accelerometers, which will also be able to predict falls. Most fall sensors use cameras that must first learn a person's 'normal' movements to be effective. These new sensors will be able to predict falls just before they happen and be adaptable enough for use anywhere so will give the wearer a greater degree of confidence even outside the home, said [Dr Maged] Boulos. ... The device will use algorithms that can pick up on any dangerous change in the person's vital signs or if one of the sensor feeds falls outside of acceptable parameters. If this occurs the system locates his or her position using GPS then triggers an alarm to alert the emergency services."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 2007: <http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb07/4893>Dream Jobs 2007 - The scene of a recent crime, the rim of an active volcano, deep in the woods at the dead of night -- you never know where engineering will lead you. IEEE Spectrum Online.
"There's no rule that dooms engineers to dwell in a Dilbertian cubicle hell. Quite the contrary. As the 10 technologists we found for this year's 'Dream Jobs' report all prove, engineering occurs in some amazing places and offers incredible experiences. It's just a matter of pursuing whatever interests you -- tenaciously. ... Sometimes, the trick is to combine two interests. Vasik Rajlich dreamed of becoming a chess grandmaster but realized he'd never make it. Instead, he's using his talents as a programmer to write the world's best chess software. FrŽdŽric Kaplan's passions are biology and engineering; now, as a researcher in artificial intelligence, he's finding new and provocative ways to meld the two."

<http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb07/4899>Vasik Rajlich: Game Boy. By Phillip E. Ross. IEEE Spectrum Online (February 2007). "[H]e set his sights on a new brass ring: writing the strongest chess-playing program in the world. 'I figured there were about 2000 people in the world stronger than me in chess,' he says, 'but not one chess player that was stronger than me in programming.' He took side jobs to pay the rent, and finally, in late 2005, his brainchild was ready. He called it Rybka, the Czech word for 'little fish,' and later that year entered it in a computer chess championship, held in Paderborn, Germany. It won, then quickly went on to establish an unprecedented superiority. Today the various computer ratings lists place it between 70 and 200 points above its nearest rival."
<http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb07/4902>FrŽdŽric Kaplan: A.I. Auteur. By Marlowe Hood. IEEE Spectrum Online (February 2007). "Working with industrial designers, Kaplan and his team are creating an entire menagerie of such nonintrusive, smart furniture. But their goal isn't to be merely decorative. They also aim to toy with the way people interact with each other and with technology. ... What drew him to A.I. wasn't figuring out how robots could mimic natural intelligence but rather how biology could learn from smart machines. ... In the freewheeling atmosphere at Sony, Kaplan helped design the "brain" of AIBO, the company's eerily endearing canine robot, and he continued to develop it over nearly a decade. One of his biggest achievements was to program AIBO to get 'bored,' an experiment designed to test the limits of open-ended learning -- the holy grail of artificial intel ligence."

-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 1, 2007: <http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197002679>Bears lose to Colts in virtual Super Bowl. By Antone Gonsalves. InformationWeek.
"In the real world, the winner of Sunday's Super Bowl remains a dream of fans and bettors, but in the virtual world, the Indianapolis Colts have won. According to the Madden NFL '07 video game, the Colts beat the Chicago Bears by a score of 38 to 27. To come up with that score, along with a full set of game statistics, game-maker Electronic Arts placed the game on autopilot, and let it use its own artificial intelligence in matching the two teams."

Update: <http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/football/nfl/specials/playoffs/2006/02/04/super.bowl.ap/index.html>Crowning achievement - Manning, Colts storm back on Bears in Super Bowl XLI. The Associated Press / available from SI.com (February 4, 2007). "A wet and wild night of Super Bowl firsts brought Dungy, Manning and the Indianapolis Colts to the top of the NFL with a 29-17 victory over the Chicago Bears on Sunday night."
Also see:  <http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19325891.700-a-sporting-chance-of-beating-the-bookies.html>A sporting chance of beating the bookies - Can a computer really predict sports results well enough to bamboozle the bookmakers? New Scientist decided there was only one way to find out. By Michael Reilly. New Scientist (Issue 2589: pages 36-39; subscription req'd).

-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 2, 2007: <http://www.examiner.com/a-542890%7ECoast_Guard_calls_off_search_for_missing_sailor_after_four_days.html>Coast Guard calls off search for missing sailor after four days. The Associated Press / available from Examiner.com.
"The Coast Guard called off its search Thursday evening for a renowned computer scientist [Jim Gray] lost at sea during solo sailing trip, ending a four-day hunt with no trace of him or his 40-foot yacht. ... Sergey Brin, co-founder and president of Internet search giant Google Inc., and engineers at online retailer Amazon.com sought high-tech ways to find the missing sailor. Gray's work over the past 30 years allowed databases to sort quantities of information once considered too vast to manage, leading to the creation of both online shopping and Web-based mapping programs. ... [E]ngineers at online retailer Amazon.com sought to ascertain whether the artificial intelligence software powering its Web site could be used to sift through aerial photographs of a wide swath of the Pacific."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 2, 2007: <http://lis.epfl.ch/resources/podcast/index.html>Rolf Pfeifer - New AI. Podcast from Talking Robots.
"In this episode of 'Talking Robots' we interview Rolf Pfeifer, about the last 50 years in artificial intelligence, the 'new AI', the central role of embodiment for intelligence, and his new popular science book. Rolf Pfeifer is professor of computer science at the Department of Informatics of the University of Zurich, and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has pioneered a new approach to artificial intelligence ('New AI'), which emphasizes the role of embodiment and argues that thought is not independent of the body, but tightly constrained, and at the same time enabled by it."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 4, 2007: <http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/design/story/0,,2005363,00.html>A car that parks itself? Now that's truly modern art. By Stephen Bayley. The Observer | Guardian Unlimited Arts.
"Even an ordinary car is one of the most sophisticated systems you can buy. And dreams of automation - or artificial intelligence - have always been an element of the Modernist project. The playwright Karel Capek was inspired to create fictional 'robots' (from the Czech for 'slave') because he was 'disgusted by degradation and pain ... revolted by poverty'. Walter Gropius would have said much the same about his social architecture. Capek, and this is 1923, continued that he wanted an 'aristocracy nourished by millions of mechanical slaves'. So now there is the new Lexus LS460, the most automated car you can buy. This car parks itself or, at least, 'assists the driver by automatically controlling the steering when backing up'. These are modest (weasel) words, influenced by Health and Safety: in fact, it's a robot. ... Automation fascinated Enlightenment thinkers who swept idolatry away in a fit of proto-Modernism spring-cleaning. In the Musee d'Art et Histoire in Neuchatel, Switzerland, you can find one of the 18th-century automata of Pierre Jacquet-Droz. ... One of the last visits Mary Shelley made before she settled down to write Frankenstein was to Jacquet-Droz's studio. The experience of automation was enthralling, but the word came much later. Delmar S Harder first used the word in 1948, but it was John Diebold's 1952 book Automation that gave the word currency. Here, Diebold (who invented ATMs) established the useful metaphor of feedback. An intelligent system is one whose behaviour adaptively responds to changing inputs. ... Sixteen years ago Donald Michie, chief scientist of Glasgow's Turing Institute, said: 'If a machine gets very complicated, it becomes pointless to argue whether it's got a mind of its own. It so obviously does that you had better get on good terms with it and shut up about the metaphysics.' ... The robot Lexus is a fine result of the flawed Modernist project which trades dirt and danger for mechanical beau! ty and artificial intelligence. I do not know whether this car is optimistic or pessimistic. It reduces us, its creators, the descendants of Descartes, to near-passive humanoid blobs."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 4, 2007: <http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/design/story/0,,2005363,00.html>A car that parks itself? Now that's truly modern art. By Stephen Bayley. The Observer | Guardian Unlimited Arts.
"Even an ordinary car is one of the most sophisticated systems you can buy. And dreams of automation - or artificial intelligence - have always been an element of the Modernist project. The playwright Karel Capek was inspired to create fictional 'robots' (from the Czech for 'slave') because he was 'disgusted by degradation and pain ... revolted by poverty'. Walter Gropius would have said much the same about his social architecture. Capek, and this is 1923, continued that he wanted an 'aristocracy nourished by millions of mechanical slaves'. So now there is the new Lexus LS460, the most automated car you can buy. This car parks itself or, at least, 'assists the driver by automatically controlling the steering when backing up'. These are modest (weasel) words, influenced by Health and Safety: in fact, it's a robot. ... Automation fascinated Enlightenment thinkers who swept idolatry away in a fit of proto-Modernism spring-cleaning. In the Musee d'Art et Histoire in Neuchatel, Switzerland, you can find one of the 18th-century automata of Pierre Jacquet-Droz. ... One of the last visits Mary Shelley made before she settled down to write Frankenstein was to Jacquet-Droz's studio. The experience of automation was enthralling, but the word came much later. Delmar S Harder first used the word in 1948, but it was John Diebold's 1952 book Automation that gave the word currency. Here, Diebold (who invented ATMs) established the useful metaphor of feedback. An intelligent system is one whose behaviour adaptively responds to changing inputs. ... Sixteen years ago Donald Michie, chief scientist of Glasgow's Turing Institute, said: 'If a machine gets very complicated, it becomes pointless to argue whether it's got a mind of its own. It so obviously does that you had better get on good terms with it and shut up about the metaphysics.' ... The robot Lexus is a fine result of the flawed Modernist project which trades dirt and danger for mechanical beau! ty and artificial intelligence. I do not know whether this car is optimistic or pessimistic. It reduces us, its creators, the descendants of Descartes, to near-passive humanoid blobs."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 5, 2007 [issue date]: <http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070205fa_fact_toobin>Google's Moon Shot - The quest for the universal library. By Jeffrey Toobin. The New Yorker (posted January 29, 2007).
"Google's is not the only book-scanning venture. Amazon has digitized hundreds of thousands of the books it sells, and allows users to search the texts; Carnegie Mellon is hosting a project called the Universal Library, which so far has scanned nearly a million and a half books; the Open Content Alliance, a consortium that includes Microsoft, Yahoo, and several major libraries, is also scanning thousands of books; and there are many smaller projects in various stages of development. Still, only Google has embarked on a project of a scale commensurate with its corporate philosophy: 'to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.' ... The story of how Brin and Google's other co-founder, Larry Page, met as graduate students in computer science at Stanford in the mid-nineties, and devised a series of elegant software algorithms that allowed Web searchers to find relevant information quickly and efficiently, has be come part of Silicon Valley lore. Less well known is that, at the time, Brin and Page were also working on Stanford's Digital Library Technologies Project, an attempt, funded by the federal government, to organize different kinds of stored information, including books, articles, and journals, in digital form. 'There was an attitude in computer science that putting things on dead trees was obsolete and getting it all into a searchable, digital format was a quest that had to be accomplished someday,' Terry Winograd, a Stanford professor who was a mentor to Page and Brin, said. ... The chief engineer of Google's system for scanning books in the library collections is Dan Clancy, who joined the company after eight years at NASA, where he supervised teams of Ph.D.s. working on problems related to artificial intelligence. ... Copying all those pages presents many difficulties, but writing software to make the books useful to searchers is even harder. 'The scanning tech! nology is boring,' Clancy said. 'The real challenge is to get somebody something that they are actually interested in, inside a book.'"
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 5, 2007: <http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/02/01/8398989/index.htm?postversion=2007020512>Jeff Hawkins hacks the human brain - The creator of the PalmPilot and the Treo isn't just making another gadget. He's attempting to fuse silicon and gray matter to produce the ultimate intelligent machine. By Erick Schonfeld. Business 2.0 Magazine / available from CNNMoney.com.
"Now [Jeff] Hawkins is finally ready to open up about what he's been chasing. And what he says makes clear that his quest may well lead to a tremendous technical advance with far-ranging implications. Hawkins believes that his latest startup, called Numenta, is on its way to creating the first truly intelligent computer - a thinking machine that, in essence, learns the same way the human brain does. ... Numenta is developing a new computer memory system that it says can remember the patterns of the world presented to it and use them, the way a human does, to make analogies and draw conclusions. ... 'I know this has to work because this is how the brain does it,' Hawkins says. ... Hawkins is actually interested only in the neocortex, the outer, pink part of the brain where he believes intelligence resides. 'Intelligence is about creating a model of the world and making predictions,' he says. ... The company is developing what Hawkins calls a 'hierarchical temporal memory' [HTM] system. ... Moreover, there are deep moral dilemmas inherent in Hawkins's vision of intelligent machines, starting with the primal fears behind plots for everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Terminator: Man makes machines smart, smart machines whale on man. ... Hawkins thinks such concerns are overblown."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 6, 2007: <http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/02/06/cameras.surveillance.reut/index.html>Who watches the watchers in surveillance society. Reuters / available from CNN.com.
"In some cities in Europe and the United States, a person can be videotaped by surveillance cameras hundreds of times a day, and it's safe to say that most of the time no one is actually watching. But the advent of 'intelligent video' -- software that raises the alarm if something on camera appears amiss -- means Big Brother will soon be able to keep a more constant watch, a prospect that is sure to heighten privacy concerns. Combining motion detection technology with the learning capabilities of video game software, these new systems can detect people loitering, walking in circles or leaving a package. New microphone technology can isolate the sound of a gunshot and direct the attached camera to swivel and zoom in on the source. Sensitivity may reach the point where microphones could pick out the word "explosives" spoken in a crowd. 'There's just not enough personnel to watch every single camera,' said Chicago emergency operations chief Andrew Velasquez. 'We are p iloting analytic software right now ... where you can set that particular camera to watch for erratic behavior, or someone leaving a suitcase on the sidewalk.' ... The encroachment on privacy in what civil libertarians call a 'surveillance society' may be a price willingly paid by citizens who fear terrorism and crime. But ever-alert software capable of maintaining a continuous 'watch' on security cameras multiplies the risks of harassing innocent people, privacy experts say. ... Britain...has 4.2 million government security cameras, 2 million in London alone...."

Also see: <http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72608-0.html>Sowing the Seeds of Surveillance. By Jennifer Granick. Wired News (January 31, 2007). "Technology has an almost irresistible lure. When we build systems for surveillance, experience teaches that we will inevitably use them for purposes other than those for which they were originally designed. Last weekend, the Stanford Technology Law Review held a symposium on the Fourth Amendment, at which participants asked whether traditional conceptions of constitutional privacy are adequate when modern technology tracks personal information in entirely new ways. ... In 1964, Jacques Ellul developed the idea of technological determinism in his book, The Technological Society. Ellul argued that technique, or process, overtakes and dominates human values, and that the logic of technology is such that humans will continually choose to expand its scope, regardless of the effects. Ellul's bleak theory is that once a machine exists, humans will use it, even if that use is not part of the original justification for the machine. In her wonderful book Close to the Machine, author Ellen Ullman tells stories of technological determinism in action."

-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 7, 2007: <http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18149/>Found in Translation - Meadan is offering Arabic-English machine translation to create a virtual town square during troubled times. By Shereen El Feki. Technology Review.
"September 11 affected millions of people in myriad ways. For Ed Bice, an American ex-architect, it sparked a desire to get ordinary Middle Easterners--and Westerners--talking together. Naturally, being based in the Bay Area, he turned to the Web for help. The result, six years later, is Meadan, which means 'town square' in Arabic. The basic idea is simple: it's a website that brings English and Arabic speakers together around daily postings of news articles, broadcasts, and events that are of common interest, and it gives users a platform to communicate through dialogues, blogs, and other exchanges. All the while, it allows users to pinpoint their location so that people can share views across continents. The hard part is creating a system that allows users to express their ideas in their native tongue. Enter IBM, which has committed $1.7 million to this not-for-profit project. The company has one of the most advanced systems for Arabic-English machine translati on. It's 84 percent accurate and can transmute Arabic to English and back again at a blistering 500 words per second. This is no easy task, says Salim Roukos, a senior manager for multilingual natural-language processing technologies at IBM's Watson Research Center."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 8, 2007: <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/02/08/ccbit08.xml>Networking for a brighter future in IT - The British Computer Society is trying to get more people excited about a changing industry. By Wendy Grossman. Telegraph.co.uk.
"The 50-year-old British Computer Society is the leading professional body for those working in IT. About three years ago, the BCS began a push to expand its member base and also to broaden it. Until then, students who joined lost their membership after they'd completed their degrees because they didn't have the necessary experience to be full members. The change of policy has caused the average age of the membership to drop from 37 to 28. The reason for the push to increase numbers, says president Nigel Shadbolt, a professor specialising in artificial intelligence at Southampton University, is part of trying to make the organisation 'more impactful'. There are, he says, 1m to 1.5m people working in IT in the UK. 'We wanted to be representing a lot more of them.' The theme for his year as president is 'public engagement'. ... One frustration for Shadbolt in particular and the BCS in general is the dropping numbers of women entering computer science, a trend that has been studied by both the BCS and its American counterpart, the Association for Computing Machinery."

Also see: <http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/business/story.html?id=ca01b7db-cbfc-4944-9526-61287039d046&k=18267>Robots draw girls to science - UVic course provides a sense of confidence in technical skills. By Carla Wilson. Times Colonist [canada.com] (February 8, 2007). "Girls plus robots equals fun and learning. Six teams of five girls will spend Feb. 17 at UVic assembling and programming robots for a hovercraft rescue mission across a simulated river. Teams choose the type of sensors on their robots needed to save several people, represented by marbles. Robots can be programmed to respond to light, touch and sound commands. The Lego Robotics Festival is aimed at introducing girls in Grades 6 to 12 to computer science and engineering, fields where they are under-represented at UVic and at schools throughout North Amer ica, says Anissa Agah St. Pierre, UVic co-ordinator for women in Engineering and Computer Science. ... Girls have more than a fun day at UVic. 'They get confidence in their technical skills,' she said. 'They will get familiar with programming concepts. They learn that math is both cool and important.' ... Women make up just about 17 per cent of computer science students and 11 per cent of engineering students at UVic and other institutions, she said. With about one-third of the faculty female, UVic's Department of Computer Science has the highest percentage of female faculty in Canada. There's a lack of visible role models for computer science but career possibilities are 'endless,' Agah St. Pierre said."

-> <#listtop>back to headlines

 

The Expansion Slot

January 26, 2007: <http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/1835/a-computer-program-wins-its-first-scrabble-tournament>A Computer Program Wins Its First Scrabble Tournament. By Brock Read. The Chronicle (of Higher Education) Wired Campus Blog. "When Deep Blue first defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, the computer program's victory was hailed as a watershed moment for artificial intelligence, and rightfully so. But in November, another program reached a gaming milestone of its own, and no one seemed to notice. The Wired Campus intends to fix that. At a Scrabble tournament in Toronto, a piece of software called Quackle triumphed in a best-of-five series over David Boys, a computer programmer who won the world Scrabble championship in 1995. ... Mr. Boys seemed to have no trouble keeping a sense of perspective after the loss: 'It's still better to be a human than to be a computer,' he said." -> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 26, 2007: <http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/01/26/automaticbooks_tec.html>Computer Program Writes Its Own Fiction. By Jennifer Viegas. Discovery Channel News. "Could a computer one day be a fiction bestseller? While a computer-written bestseller may be unlikely, a technology expert has created a computer program that writes its own fiction stories with minimal user input. The program, called MEXICA, is the first to generate original stories based on computerized representations of emotions and tensions between characters. Rafael PŽrez y PŽrez [a computer scientist at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in MŽxico City], MEXICA's creator, explains, 'The program keeps a record of the emotional links between characters while developing a story, and employs its knowledge about emotions to retrieve from memory possible logical actions to continue the story.' ... 'Prog rams like MEXICA are computer models that help us to conceive, and therefore to understand, how we write stories,' PŽrez y PŽrez said."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 30, 2007: <http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197001914>Robotic Fish Cleared In Computer Glitch. By K.C. Jones InformationWeek. "The Association of American Medical Colleges' first computerized administration of medical school admissions tests experienced a glitch, but the error appears to be of human origin and not caused by robotic fish. ... No problems have been reported with the software provided by Prometric and or a new artificial intelligence scoring system from Vantage Learning. ... Computerization allowed all scores from the Saturday test to be tallied by 5 a.m. Monday, Jones said. It used to take 30 days to collect all of the exams at a single location and another 30 days to send students their scores." [Also see this <http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/assets/AIalerts/alert.1.25.07.html#jan12d>related article in the previous AI ALERT.]
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 30, 2007: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6293349.stm>The global war for talent. By Steve Schifferes. BBC News. "India's global leadership in the IT services industry, centred on Bangalore, is based on its rich human resources. The country's 400,000 graduates in science and engineering each year - more than any other country in the world - give India a competitive advantage. But with the global outsourcing industry still growing at breakneck speed, the Indian industry is worried about whether there will be enough skilled Indian software engineers in the future. ... India has few PhD programmes in computer sciences, which means that many go abroad to study in the US or Europe - and often stay on. But now, the Bangalore IT boom has persuaded many of them to return home. ... While they make up less than 10% of the IT workforce in the city, these B2B (Back to Bangalore) professionals often as sume key roles in their organisations. ... The best and brightest computer students in India are now flocking to Bangalore's newest university, the International Institute for Information Technology (iiiT-B). ... Its highly ambitious young students are clear that they are competing in a global marketplace and their horizons are the world, not the Infosys campus across the road. Among them is Megha Saini, aged 22. A first-year student at iiiT-B, she has already won a place to study artificial intelligence next term at the University of Padua. She says there is only one lab in the world she wants to work in. 'I plan to work at IBM's artificial intelligence lab in Toronto. I have already collaborated on papers with some of its researchers,' she told the BBC."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 2, 2007: <http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/02/finding-religion-with-code.html>Finding religion with code. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist Technology Blog. "To help the public find similar cases of biblical inspiration, [Noah Vawter of the MIT Media Lab ] has created the 'Religious Speech Sensor' (RSSense), a piece of software that can be used to search speeches and statements using phrases from an electronic transcript of the bible and flags any suspected matches. ... In future, Vawter hopes to extend the system to 'handle additional texts, such as the Quran and the Tao Te Ching' and to automate the program, so that all political speeches could be 'sourced' for its religious content." [A link in the article will take you to the program's code.]
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 3, 2007 [issue date]: <http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/mg19325891.500-the-mind-chip.html>The mind chip. By Douglas Fox. New Scientist (Issue 2589, pages 28-31; subscription req'd). "[W]hat it can do is organise raw optical stimuli into a useful representation of the thing it's 'looking' at, and identify the outlines of different objects in its field of view. Instead of mindlessly number-crunching like an ordinary computer, these chips are physically mimicking the electrical behaviour of the nerve cells found in a lemon-sized wedge of your brain called the primary visual cortex. ... Kwabena Boahen, now at Stanford University in California, and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadephia, from where he recently moved, have built this device to investigate how brains work, and it lets them experiment in ways that neuroscientists working with the real thing can onl y dream of. ... 'I want to figure out how the brain works in a very nuts-and-bolts way,' [Boahen] says. 'I want to figure it out such that I can build it.'"
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 3, 2007 [issue date] : <http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19325895.500>Bell Labs - Over and out. Opinion by Jeff Hecht. New Scientist (Issue 2589, page 18; subscription req'd). "'You don't know what you've got till it's gone,' sang Joni Mitchell a generation ago. That lyric should resonate with many physical scientists who over the past few weeks have been lamenting the fall of Bell Labs in New Jersey, formerly the world's premier industrial research laboratory. ... [photo caption:] Bell Labs' Claude Shannon, creator of modern information theory, developed a mechanical mouse that learned to navigate a changing maze."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 4, 2007: <http://www.kois.go.kr/news/news/newsView.asp?serial_no=20070203002%E2%88%82=107&SearchDay=&page=1>Robots, cars, batteries hold key to future growth. Korea.net News. "Korea is focusing on creating a growth engine in research & development itself and nurturing talented human resources by generating more jobs and increasing exports and the volume of highly value-added products. To this aim, the government plans to inject extended amounts of investment funds in the selected growth engine industries so that it can create production of value-added products amounting to 16.9 trillion won and generate 2.41 million jobs. The selected industries for the next growth engine are artificial intelligence (AI) robotics, environmental-friendly cars and next-generation lithium batteries. Among the selected areas, the AI robot industry receives most attention from experts who predict that th e robot sector can create the next driving force of the Korean economy after the semiconductor sector. ... experts in culture and journalism. In a bid to create a widened market for the robot sector, the government is also considering creating a robot theme park where people can experience the future with robots, a robot stadium and new commercial applications for robots."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 5, 2007: <http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/02/robo-doggy-paddle.html>Robo-doggy paddle. Posted by Tom to New Scientist Technology Blog. "Sony's Aibo robotic dog is no longer in production, but Aibos are still loved by enthusiasts across the world. Some of them are also robotics researchers. The video below shows one of the more inventive Aibo experiments I've heard of - French students took one for a swim."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 6, 2007: <http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/18141/>Q&A: Suranga Chandratillake - A cofounder of Blinkx explains why Internet video matters and how his company can contribute to its growth. By Jason Pontin. Technology Review. "Last week, at Demo07, an annual conference that showcases new technologies and startups, Suranga Chandratillake, a cofounder and co-CTO of Blinkx (pronounced 'blinks'), was voted 'Demo God' by the show's attendees. The crowd was impressed not only by Chandratillake's intelligence, but also by Blinkx's technology, which allows users to search more than seven million hours of Internet video to find exactly the clip they want. ... Chandratillake's technique employs speech recognition, neural networks, and machine learning to create transcripts of the world's videos; then, the words spoken in the videos can be searched. The method creates much more relevant video-search results. ... TR: If video now constitutes 60 percent of Internet traffic (with some estimates saying that figure will rise to 90 percent within the decade), how much of that content is now searchable using Blinkx? Could you compare that with your competitors in video search, please? SC: Blinkx is content and source agnostic, which means that we're working to index all video content, wherever it exists on the Web, which makes us the biggest video-search engine. ..."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 6, 2007: <http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/myfox/pages//ContentDetail?contentId=2298512>New Bionic Leg Shows Promise for Amputees (television broadcast). Fox 5 News | MyFoxAtlanta. "It uses artificial intelligence and the latest technology. For amputees, it may be the biggest breakthrough in decades. A new bionic leg is being called the future of prosthetics. Click video [link in the text] for more information."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 8, 2007: <http://www.wchstv.com/newsroom/healthyforlife/2042.shtml>Man or Machine? Part 1: Human or Robot? - Experts ask are robots the next step in evolution? Find out how intelligent machines will change the world we live in. Transcript of a WCHS8 ABC Eyewitness News television broadcast. "Today, artificial intelligence flies airplanes, makes financial decisions and aids in medical diagnoses. ... BACKGROUND: Today, artificial intelligence helps airplanes fly, makes financial decisions, and helps diagnosis medical conditions. Tom Mitchell, president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, says this about AI: 'Ever since computers were invented, it has been natural to wonder whether they might be able to learn. Imagine computers learning from medical records to discover emerging trends in the spread and treatment of new diseases, houses learni ng from experience to optimize energy costs based on the particular usage patterns of their occupants, or personal software assistants learning the evolving interests of their users to highlight especially relevant stories from the online morning newspaper.' The AAAI describes artificial intelligence as 'the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines.' Experts say AI is going to be increasingly important in our lives and it won't be long before AI allows man to increase his levels of intelligence."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 8, 2007: <http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg19325906.100>Robot Asimo learns how to jaywalk. By Ben Schaub. New Scientist (Issue 2590: page 24; subscription req'd). "At Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, James Kuffner and his team have developed software that can plan a route through a constantly changing environment. It is used to control an Asimo robot on loan from its Japan-based manufacturer, Honda. ... This is 'the world's first demonstration of autonomous footstep planning for walking humanoids in dynamic environments', says Kuffner. ... Kuffner's software can analyse up to 7000 possible steps per second. It constantly updates its plan as new information is received from the camera...."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

February 8, 2007: <http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com/media/storage/paper882/news/2007/02/08/News/For-R2d2.Or.T800.Lovers.A.New.Degree.Awaits-2705932.shtml?sourcedomain=www.dailypennsylvanian.com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com>For R2D2 or T-800 lovers, a new degree awaits - SEAS will be the second school in the country where students can earn master's in robotics. By Helen Yoon. The Daily Pennsylvanian. "From Rosie the Maid to the Terminator, general interest in robots is nothing new. Studying them, however, has been less common - until now. Come fall semester, the School of Engineering and Applied Science will begin offering a master's program in robotics - the study of building, instrumenting and programming robots. ... Penn is the second university in the country to implement this type of program - Carnegie Mellon University already has one in place. ... According to the GRAS P Web site, students will graduate the program with a proficiency in artificial intelligence, computer vision, control systems, dynamics and machine learning. Upon completion of the program, the Web site says, graduate students will be qualified to go into industries that focus on robotics-related skills, like aerospace and defense."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

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AI ALERT

25 January 2007

 
 

 Welcome to the <http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/articles&columns/aialerts.html>AI ALERT, a service from <http://www.aaai.org/>The American Association for Artificial Intelligence, showcasing an eclectic subset from the <http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/current.html>AI in the news collection in <http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/welcome.html>AI TOPICS, the AAAI sponsored pathfinder web site. As explained in our <http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/notices.html>notices & disclaimers, the AI ALERT is intended to keep you informed of news articles published by third parties. The mere fact that a particular item is selected for inclusion does NOT imply that AAAI or AI TOPICS has verified the information (articles are offered "<http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/notices.html#alert>as is") or that there is endorsement of any kind. And because the excerpt may not reflect the overall tenor of the article, nor contain all of the relevant information, you are encouraged to access the entire article.

The Headlines:

<#jan00h>The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky - Discover
<#jan8b>Conference to bring artificial intelligence closer to people - The Hindu
<#jan9a>McGill's research funds for robotic studies drying up - The Gazette (plus one related article
<#jan10b>After Years of Effort, Voice Recognition Is Starting to Work - The Wall Street Journal
<#jan10a>Mother and Two Teenagers Make the Most of Cramped Spaces and Unlimited Goals - The New York Times
<#jan11a>Pursuing a Lifelong Passion - Diverse: Issues In Higher Education
<#jan12b>Machine learning attracting major players - Business Edge
<#jan16b>Ethics dilemma in killer bots - Australian IT (plus one related article)
<#jan17a>Walking like a Bomber - Technology Review
<#jan18d>Shortage of graduates threatens future of UK IT sector, warns BCS - ComputerWeekly.com (plus one related article)
<#jan19a>Keeping more eyes on the planet (commentary) - The Christian Science Monitor
<#jan22a>Q & A: Ronald J. Brachman - The Financial Express
<#jan23c>Of Robots and Men [radio broadcast] - KJZZ
<#jan24c>Street-fighting robot challenge announced - New Scientist & AFP (plus two related articles)
<#jan25b>Future of science debate begins - BBC News (plus one related article)
<#jan25z>Artificial intelligence: Winning ways - The Economist
<#slot>The Expansion Slot - just a few more articles: <#jan4b>How to go to M.I.T. for free | <#jan5d>Robo Cup | <#jan6a>Robot lab to open in Osaka | <#jan8a>Ford-Microsoft software unveiled | <#jan8e>Technology clears a path for putting robots to work (+2) | <#jan11b>The nonhuman touch | <#jan11d>Must-know terms for the 21st Century intellectual - Redux (+1) | <#jan12x>This Day in History: January 12, 1997 | <#jan12c>Robo Crawler Monitors Underground Power Cables | <#jan12d>Artificial Intelligence Used To Grade Medical School Tests | <#jan16a>Robot learns to play dirty Scrabble | <#jan17b>Ring for a robot (+1) | <#jan18a>Fantastic Voyage - Departure 2009 | <#jan19f>Microsoft Predicts The Future With Vista's SuperFetch | <#jan22b>Expert KOs Rocky's artificial intelligence | <#jan23x>You are wasting time. Find out why. The cost of ineffective search | <#jan24b>At Yale, robotics research matures | <#jan25x>Jan. 25, 1921: The Robot Cometh | <#jan25e>Artificially intelligent homes for Alzheimer's patients coming: scientists
<#deck>From the Deck of the AI News Clipper: AI Crossword puzzle

The Articles:

January 2007: <http://www.discover.com/issues/jan-07/departments/interview-minsky/>The Discover Interview - Marvin Minsky: The legendary pioneer of artificial intelligence ponders the brain, bashes neuroscience, and lays out a plan for superhuman robot servants. By Susan Kruglinski. Discover (Volume 28, Number 1).
"[Q] So as you see it, artificial intelligence is the lens through which to look at the mind and unlock the secrets of how it works?  [A] Yes, through the lens of building a simulation. If a theory is very simple, you can use mathematics to predict what it'll do. If it's very complicated, you have to do a simulation. It seems to me that for anything as complicated as the mind or brain, the only way to test a theory is to simulate it and see what it does. ... [Q] Many people feel that the field of AI went bust in the 1980s after failing to deliver on its early promise. Do you agree?  [A] Well, no. What happened is that it ran out of high-level thinkers. ... [Q] Has science fiction influenced your work?[A] It's about the only thing I read. ... [Q] What did you do as consultant on 2001: A Space Odyssey? ... "
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 8, 2007: <http://www.hindu.com/2007/01/08/stories/2007010820420500.htm>Conference to bring artificial intelligence closer to people - The meet titled 'AI and its benefits to society' will be inaugurated by the Chief Minister. The Hindu.
"In an attempt to bring the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) closer to society from the research labs where it has been mostly confined for the last five decades, the 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) will begin here on Monday. ... There would be seven special lectures, with Prof. Raj Reddy, Carnegie Mellon University, US, delivering the keynote address."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 9, 2007: <http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/business/story.html?id=259f8f84-d098-4799-b2da-07b114e6abb6&k=74294>McGill's research funds for robotic studies drying up - Directors warn about brain drain. Centre shows off wizardry while ringing alarm. By Roberto Rocha. The Gazette [canada.com].
"Among the nifty inventions created by McGill University engineers are an amphibious robot, a surveillance camera that can tell an intruder from a janitor, and a touchpad that converts written text into Braille. Almost 20 years since its founding, McGill's Centre for Intelligent Machines, or CIM, is counted among the world's top robotics labs. But federal research money is running dry and the centre risks losing its top brains to wealthier American schools, its directors are warning. ... [Gregory] Dudek was careful not to sound too alarmist, however. A $1.2-billion promise by Quebec to spur research and innovation is encouraging, he said, and an indication of the province's 'forward looking attitude.'"

Also see: <http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=41788>Precarn faces funding crunch. An industry-led consortium that provides money for intelligent systems projects may only last another year or two. We highlight some of the research the organization is supporting. By Briony Smith. ITBusiness.ca (January 8, 2007). "The coffers of Precarn, a non-profit IT development consortium of corporations, research institutes, and government partners may be all out of money in a year or two, according to Precarn vice-president Graham Taylor. Some of Precarn's funding for universities was released through the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS), a Precarn-managed network of institutions and one of the federally-funded Networks of Centres of Excellence, according to Taylor. But a federal policy dictated that funding could only be offered for two seven-year periods. 'Then (the money would be used) to fund new networks,' said Taylor. 'It seems like a rather arbitrary policy.' ... He mourned the potential loss of cutting-edge research -- especially in the arena of robotics and intelligent systems. 'They're a huge part of the future. We need excellence in robotics to be able to compete on the world stage,' Taylor said."

-> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 10, 2007: <http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116839144214572104-6WxRYddk_9n95lxrqvESQgmhfDo_20080110.html>After Years of Effort, Voice Recognition Is Starting to Work. By Lee Gomes. The Wall Street Journal (page B1).
"So maybe you won't be talking to your car anytime soon, the way Microsoft and Ford would like you to be. Odds are, though, that you are already on speaking terms with silicon, probably more than you realize. And you can expect to be chatting it up more and more. Almost since computers were invented, computer scientists have been working to get the machines to understand what people are saying to them. Until the past few years, they hadn't been successful enough to offer anything but lab demos. Now, though, computer speech recognition is sufficiently advanced that it is showing up in a surprising variety of places. Like automobiles. ... While voice-controlled computers are sci-fi staples, in practice most people find a keyboard and a mouse are fine for telling a PC what to do. Bill Meisel, a veteran observer of the speech-recognition market, says the main use of speech recognition at the moment is in specialized applications like law and medicine. Radiologists, f or example, are increasingly dictating their diagnoses and observations into a speech-recognition program rather than into a tape recorder that must later be transcribed. At its core, speech recognition takes advantage of extraordinarily complex statistical methods to match the sounds you say with the right words. ... One of the biggest applications of the technology is in call centers. ... David Nahamoo, who oversees IBM's speech research, says that some other new applications are already at hand. One is a system that produces automatic translations of foreign-language broadcasts, such as those in Arabic, first by performing speech recognition of the spoken words and then by using translation software to render things in English."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 10, 2007: <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/10/nyregion/10neediest.html>Mother and Two Teenagers Make the Most of Cramped Spaces and Unlimited Goals. By Joseph P. Fried. The New York Times [registration req'd].
"Life is tight in the small apartment. Tight physically. Tight financially. But there is still room for large aspirations. 'I want to have combined majors in mechanical and computer engineering and a minor in business,' Dorichel Rodriguez, a high school senior and one of two teenage daughters living in the apartment with their mother, said recently. Sitting at a table in the compact living room, Dorichel, 17, told of having completed applications to 15 colleges, including three in the Ivy League, and of beginning the suspenseful wait to hear from them. 'I want to be a robotics technician,' she said. 'I'm interested in artificial intelligence.'"
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 11, 2007: <http://www.diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_6864.shtml>Pursuing a Lifelong Passion. By David Pluviose. Diverse: Issues In Higher Education (formerly Black Issues In Higher Education).
"M. Brian Blake - Title: Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Georgetown University. ... Driven. That, in a word, best describes Dr. M. Brian Blake. For somebody who fell into teaching by accident, he has taken the academy by storm. At age 33, he was the nation's youngest Black computer science professor awarded tenure. ... Dr. Juan E. Gilbert, an associate professor in Auburn University's computer science department and a 2002 Emerging Scholar, says Blake is an outstandgin scholar as his research in artificial intelligence and software integration is the top in the field. ... Blake says it's his duty to encourage young African-Americans to pursue high-tech careers; that's why he co-founded a program that maps out career pathways for students at a number of Washington, D.C.-area high schools."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 12, 2007:  <http://www.businessedge.ca/article.cfm/newsID/14409.cfm>Machine learning attracting major players - Research applications vary from gaming to cancer identification. By Laura Severs. Business Edge (Vol. 7, No. 1).
"Google is paying attention, so is Yahoo. But the University of Alberta-based Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Machine Learning (AICML) hasn't fully played its hand yet. Established as a centre for pure and applied machine- learning research with financial support in 2006 of $2.3 million from the province's Alberta Ingenuity Fund, AICML's machine-learning operation brings together experts with backgrounds in artificial intelligence, computer science, statistics and mathematics. Combining this knowledge, it finds useful data patterns in databases - but at speeds with which humans would be hard-pressed to compete. It has enjoyed early success with work in the gaming sector - its Poker Academy software, described as a full-feature poker simulator, has generated revenue for Edmonton spinoff firm BioTools - and software that helps with the identification of brain tumours. ... 'Data mining is a technique applied to databases. Machine learning is a step beyond data mining,' a dds [AICML scientific director Russ Greiner, a U of A professor of computing science]. Web search engines such as Google and Yahoo wouldn't exist without machine learning, he notes."
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January 16, 2007: <http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,21064361%5E15309%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html>Ethics dilemma in killer bots. By Philip Argy (National President of the Australian Computer Society). Australian IT.
"When science fiction writer Isaac Asimov developed his Three Laws of Robotics back in 1940, the first law was: 'A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.' Asimov later amended the laws to put the needs of humanity as a whole above those of a single individual, but his intention was unchanged: that robots should be designed to protect human life and should be incapable of endangering it. So reports out of Korea of newly developed guard robots capable of firing autonomously on human targets are raising concerns about their potential uses. ... Ethicists have always questioned the use of technology in weapons development, but the new robots are causing additional disquiet because of their self-directing capabilities. ... It is the responsibility of all technology professionals to ensure that those in our organisation and within our influence are both responsible and ethical in the way they develop and apply technolo gy."

Also see: <http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72543-0.html>Military Builds Robotic Insects. By David Hambling. Wired News (january 23, 2007). "If you feel something crawling on your neck, it might be a wasp or a bee. Or it might be something much more dangerous. Israel is developing a robot the size of a hornet to attack terrorists. And although the prototype will not fly for three years, killer Micro Air Vehicles, or MAVs, are much closer than that. British Special Forces already use 6-inch MAV aircraft called WASPs for reconnaissance in Afghanistan. ... 'After some development time, many countries would produce them,' warns Juergen Altmann, a physicist at Dortmund University, working in assessment of new military technologies. Indiscriminate use would cause many civilian casualties -- and they could end up in the hands of terrorists.... To prevent this danger, Alt mann advocates an international ban on armed MAVs, similar to the ban on landmines."

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January 17, 2007: <http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18072/>Walking like a Bomber - New strides in radar and gait-analysis software show that it's possible to detect when someone is carrying a bomb well before he or she reaches a security checkpoint. By Karen Nitkin. Technology Review.
"A new radar-imaging technology expected to reach market later this year could solve the problem by directing low-power radar beams at people--who can be 50 yards or more away--and analyzing reflected radar returns to reveal concealed objects. And early research indicates that this method could one day be augmented with video-analysis software that spots bombers by discerning subtle differences in gait that occur when people carry heavy objects. ... [T]his technology is helped by novel technology that tracks the subject--thereby enabling the radar to be continuously aimed at the moving person. Software developed by Rama Chellappa, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, uses a form of 'gait recognition' to do this. It notes a person's walking style and physical attributes such as height, then uses those features to follow individuals as they move and locate them again even after they've been obscured by poles or other objects. ... But the next generation of Chellappa's technology could extend the role of gait recognition. In early-stage research, he has shown that he can analyze the joint movements of a walking person and tell whether those movements are anomalous and possibly consistent with carrying heavy objects--and even whether the person has just deposited something on the ground."
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January 18, 2007: <http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/01/18/221254/shortage-of-graduates-threatens-future-of-uk-it-sector-warns.htm>Shortage of graduates threatens future of UK IT sector, warns BCS. By Justin Richards. ComputerWeekly.com.
"The British Computer Society has highlighted an alarming downturn in computer science graduate projections which could imperil long-term success for the nation's expanding IT economy. ... ... BCS president Nigel Shadbolt, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton, said, 'Data collected suggests that the year-on-year reductions affecting the number of students studying computing within higher education will continue until at least 2009.' ... Shadbolt believes that one way for the UK to address its long-term IT skills needs is by getting students interested in IT at an early age. 'We need to introduce children at school to the excitement of computing and information technology in the age of the web. Action is required now to reverse the decline from 2010 onwards,' he said."

Also see: <http://management.silicon.com/itpro/0,39024675,39165286,00.htm>Women abandoning tech jobs - And fewer choosing IT as a career. By Steve Ranger. silicon.com (January 18, 2007). "The number of women choosing careers in IT continues to decline, with many put off by the long-hours culture and lack of flexible working. ... According to Carrie Hartnell, programme manager at industry trade group Intellect, only 16 per cent of tech workers are women, and even that meagre number is a drop from 18 per cent a couple of years ago. ... Intellect is asking members of the IT industry to participate in research examining the culture of their workplace and their career experiences. Using the results of the research Intellect intends to create an 'action plan' to improve diversity in the sector."

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January 19, 2007: <http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0119/p08s01-comv.html>Keeping more eyes on the planet - The US needs more satellites to learn how humanity is changing the Earth -- and fix any mistakes. The Monitor's View (commentary). The Christian Science Monitor.
"How vital is America's armada of Earth-watching satellites? Just ask forest firefighters or water managers tracking the West's winter snowpack. Many know this armada is in serious trouble. Washington needs to put the system on a stable orbit. ... Last year, some 60 countries and dozens of nongovernmental organizations began to implement a 10-year plan to establish a network of space-based, ocean-based, and land-based environmental sensors. And it comes at a time when satellite capabilities are expanding. For example, software engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have developed ways to allow satellites to select their own objects to view, using artificial intelligence to train them in the art of picking the 'interesting' or 'unusual.'"
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January 22, 2007: <http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=152448>Q & A: Ronald J. Brachman, Head, Worldwide Research Operations Yahoo! Research: 'Yahoo research uses artificial intelligence everywhere.' Interviewed by BV Mahalakshmi. The Financial Express.
"[Q] Why is there is so much talk on artificial intelligence (AI) globally? How does this system of learning help in developing intelligent systems? [A] Artificial intelligence is about understanding intelligent behaviour in machines and converting them to natural languages. We want to produce PCs that can perform natural language conversations. Moreover, it helps in planning ahead for the human activities in various applications. ... AI is a form of science having a potential for long-term aspirations like making computers more intelligent. ... [Q] How did the study of AI originate? What is its history ? ... [Q] How do you propose to develop your India R&D centre? What will be its focus area? ... AI is being used in every part of Yahoo's research especially since we collect over 12 terabytes of data everyday. ... [Q] What is the AI's future and how does your company propose to capitalise on this ? ..."
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January 23, 2007: <http://www.kjzz.org/news/arizona/archives/200701/airights>Of Robots and Men - Rights for the Artificially Intelligent [radio broadcast]. <http://cdn.kjzz.org/news/arizona/archives/200701/airights/airights.mp3>Listen to "KJZZ's Dennis Lambert speak[ing] with Scottsdale attorney David Calverley, whose research into bioethics is driving him to artificial intelligence."

Also see David Caverley's paper in <http://www.aaai.org/Library/Symposia/Fall/fs05-06.php>Machine Ethics: Papers from the 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium.

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January 24, 2007: <http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn11021-streetfighting-robot-challenge-announced.html>Street-fighting robot challenge announced. By New Scientist Tech and AFP. NewScientist.com news.
"A contest to build a robot that can operate autonomously in urban warfare conditions, moving in and out of buildings to search and destroy targets like a human soldier, was launched in Singapore on Tuesday. The country's Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) is offering one million Singapore dollars ($652,000) to whoever develops a robot that completes a stipulated set of tasks -- yet to be revealed -- in the fastest time possible. DSTA said individuals, companies, universities and research institutes are all welcome to participate in the contest, dubbed the TechX Challenge, although foreigners must collaborate with local partners."

Also see:
<http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2173458/boffins-compete-build-real>Boffins compete to build real Terminator - Singapore government wants autonomous urban combat robot. By Iain Thomson. vnunet.com (January 25, 2007)
<http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07024/756246-115.stm>Robotic 'Boss' stays the course in road demo. By David Templeton. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (January 24, 2007). "'Boss' -- Carnegie Mellon University's robotic Chevrolet Tahoe -- drives without human assistance in urban settings with surprising skill. ... Boss is being prepared for an October qualifier in the Urban Challenge sponsored by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. The main race will be Nov. 3 in a yet-unnamed Western urban setting with a $2 million prize going to the team whose vehicle best travels 60 miles through cityscape in less than six hours without human assistance. As many as 50 vehicles are expected to compete. ... [General Motors] researchers Hong Bae and Jim Nickolaou said their company joined the team because the technology will make driving safer. The more immediate hope is to help drivers remain in lanes and prevent collisions. 'This is pushing the envelope,' Dr. Bae, a GM senior research engineer, said of Boss. 'It's sensing what's going on, and it makes smart decisions.' Ultimately, Mr. Nickolaou said, GM has big aspirations for the technology."

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January 25, 2007: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6294211.stm>Future of science debate begins - The UK public is being invited to have its say on the future. BBC News.
"Sciencehorizons [<http://www.sciencehorizons.org.uk/>http://www.sciencehorizons.org.uk/], a government funded programme, aims to get people discussing their hopes and fears for future technologies. Their views will then be fed back to the government and could help shape future science policy. ... Science and Innovation Minister Malcolm Wicks said: 'What's important about Sciencehorizons is that we're inviting anyone and everyone to get involved in the discussions, not only the scientists. Over the coming decades, we're going to have some huge ethical debates about science as new discoveries are made and new technologies emerge. We will all need to be part of making informed decisions about how we develop and use scientific and technological advances,' he said."

Also see the related article: '<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6296291.stm>The future of science needs you.' By Professor Martin Earwicker. BBC News (January 25, 2007).

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January 25, 2007: <http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=8585017>Artificial intelligence | Winning ways - Computers have started to outperform humans in games they used to lose. The Economist.
"Researchers in the field of artificial intelligence have long been intrigued by games, and not just as a way of avoiding work. Games provide an ideal setting to explore important elements of the design of cleverer machines, such as pattern recognition, learning and planning. They also hold out the tantalising possibility of fame and fortune should the program ever clobber a human champion. .. Deep Blue and its successors beat Mr Kasparov using the 'brute force' technique. ... In the past two decades researchers have explored several alternative strategies, from neural networks to general rules based on advice from expert players, with indifferent results. Now, however, programmers are making impressive gains with a technique known as the Monte Carlo method. ... MoGo, a [Go] program developed by researchers from the University of Paris, has even beaten a couple of strong human players on the smaller of these boards -- unthinkable a year ago. It is ranked 2,323rd in the world and in Europe's top 300."
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The Expansion Slot

January 4, 2007: <http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0104/p13s02-legn.html>How to go to M.I.T. for free - Online 'intellectual philanthropy' attracts students from every nation on earth. By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor. "By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world's most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted. The cost? It's all free of charge. The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002 and now spread to some 120 other universities worldwide, aims to disperse knowledge far beyond the ivy-clad walls of elite campuses to anyone who has an Internet connection and a desire to learn."
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January 5, 2007: <http://nsf.gov/news/mmg/mmg_disp.cfm?med_id=58643&from=mmg>Robo Cup.  Podcast & audio transcript from The Discovery Files - new advances in science and engineering from the National Science Foundation, hosted by Bob Karson. "Manuella Veloso [head of Carnegie Mellon's CORAL (Cooperate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn) lab] is a very unusual soccer mom. The players she coaches are focused, don't get tired, and always learn from their mistakes. They play with a machine-like precision -- because they're robots. ... Unlike remote-control robotic games, these players are on their own, using principles of artificial intelligence to make decisions, execute plays, and score goals."
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January 6, 2007: <http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070106TDY03002.htm>Robot lab to open in Osaka. Daily Yomiuri Online. "Osaka University is to open a laboratory to develop next-generation robots.... Taking advantage of its city center location, the university aims to create user-friendly robots to assist people with their everyday lives, in cooperation with the Osaka municipal government and private firms in and outside Japan. ... The laboratory's researchers will pursue such aspects of robotics as communication networks, artificial intelligence and control technology. ... The laboratory plans to exhibit prototypes of robots and machines, and will allow the public to test them to determine their usability and potential commercialization problems."
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January 8, 2007: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6240479.stm>Ford-Microsoft software unveiled. BBC News. "Microsoft and Ford have unveiled a system to enable voice-activated music and telephone calls for car drivers. ... Drivers will be able to say contacts' names in English, French or Spanish, or tell the car which song they want to hear from their MP3 player."
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January 8, 2007: <http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/01/08/technology_clears_a_path_for_putting_robots_to_work/>Technology clears a path for putting robots to work - Emphasis shifts at consumer show. By Hiawatha Bray and Carolyn Y. Johnson. The Boston Globe [boston.com]. "Robots have been instrumental in exploring Mars and doing heavy-duty industrial work for years, but robots for consumers have mostly been pricey toys. Now, as the largest consumer technology trade show opens today in Las Vegas, personal robots are striding away from the toy aisle and toward the tool department. ... 'They're ready for prime time,' said Tara Dunion , director of communications for the Consumer Electronics Association. ... That's exactly what Microsoft, iRobot, and other robot-makers hope to do as they release new robots and software that allow people to use their products as a starting point to crea te something of their own. ... That's exactly what Microsoft, iRobot, and other robot-makers hope to do as they release new robots and software that allow people to use their products as a starting point to create something of their own."

Also see/hear:
<http://news.com.com/Build+your+own+bot,+courtesy+of+iRobot/2100-1041_3-6147573.html>Build your own bot, courtesy of iRobot. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com (January 7, 2007). "At the Consumer Electronics Show, iRobot will publicly release its latest product, the iRobot Create, a programmable robot for entertainment and education. ... "This isn't a toy or a plug-and-chug thing," iRobot co-founder Helen Grenier said in an interview. "It is a programmable robot for students and robot enthusiasts." Engineers at the company and students at various universities have been tinkering with the device for a while. ... More than 2 million Roombas have already shipped. Competitor Evolution Robotics, meanwhile, will enter the market with a vacuum it says has a more sophisticated navigation system than is available on the market today."
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6740152>Consumer Electronics Show Abuzz About Mobility (radio broadcast). NPR Morning Edition report by Laura Sydel (January 8, 2007). Hear SpeechGear's machine translation demonstration at the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas.

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January 11, 2007: <http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD/MGArticle/RTD_BasicArticle&%09s=1045855935235&c=MGArticle&cid=1149192587232&path=!health!healthology>The nonhuman touch - Robots are making inroads in health care, are great with stroke patients, autistic kids. By Seth Borenstein. The Associated Press / available from TimesDispatch.com. "'We're able to show consistently better outcome with therapy using robots rather than conventional standard care,' said his MIT colleague, Neville Hogan. In experiments across the country, robots are providing the human caring touch to patients who need more help than there are therapists and nurses: stroke victims, autistic children, and the elderly.... At the University of Southern California, Maja Mataric, who runs the robotics center, is also using robot therapy on stroke patients. Unlike Hogan's robots, Mataric's are more like a coach, using humor and personality, to guide patients through monotonous therapy. ... In Pittsburgh, 'Nursebot' (a robot that took on male and female personalities of Earl and Pearl depending on the voice used at the time) was tried out with elderly patients. Despite the stereotype of older people being technology phobic, the patients accepted the robots."
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January 11, 2007: <http://sentientdevelopments.blogspot.com/2007/01/must-know-terms-for-21st-century_11.html>Must-know terms for the 21st Century intellectual - Redux. George P. Dvorsky's Sentient Developments Blog. "Before I get into the list, however, I'd like to clarify the purpose of this exercise. First, I am trying to come up with a list of the most fundamental and crucial terms that are coming to define and will soon re-define the human condition...." Here are some excerpts > "Artificial General Intelligence: This ain't your daddy's AI. Rather, AGI describes the kind of intelligence that you and I have -- the commonsense knowhow.... Bayesian Rationality: Bayesian rationality is a probabilistic approach to reasoning. ... Friendly AI: If we are going to survive the Singularity and the onset of greater-than-human AI, it had better be friendly. And i f it turns out to be friendly, it won't be by accident. ... Mass Automation: The robotic revolution has only just begun. Robots, AI and automated systems are poised to dramatically reduce the amount of manual labor performed by humans. ..."

Also see: <http://www.caller.com/ccct/business/article/0,2537,CCCT_873_5275100,00.html>Futurist - Technology, education are crucial. By Fanny S. Chirinos. Corpus Christi Caller-Times (January 12, 2007). "Futurist Ed Barlow suggested the following eight literacies to help prepare the work force for today's and tomorrow's global job market. ... Science and Technology: *Learn molecular science: bio- and nanotechnology *Learn information technology: virtual, digital and artificial intelligence *Learn about ethics ..."

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January 12th - <http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/index.php?seldate=1,12,1997>This Day in History: January 12, 1997. From The Computer History Museum. "The Fictional HAL 9000 Computer Becomes Operational: The fictional HAL 9000 computer becomes operational, according to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey."
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January 12, 2007: <http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18060/>Robo Crawler Monitors Underground Power Cables - Researchers have developed a robot that senses damage in cables before they fail. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "Often before a power cable goes, it gives off a few subtle signs of distress. Unfortunately, many critical distribution cables are underground, which makes them difficult for people to access and monitor. But now a new cable-crawling robot, developed by researchers at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, could provide much-needed insight into the health of subterranean power systems. 'Monitoring cable systems is one of the holy grails of the electricity industry,' says Don Von Dollen, program manager for the IntelliGrid Program at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), in Palo Alto, CA. ... The UW researchers approached the challenge by designing a robot tha t can autonomously traverse underground cables buried in pipes and tunnels."
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January 12, 2007: <http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196900647>Artificial Intelligence Used To Grade Medical School Tests. By K.C. Jones. InformationWeek. " The Association of American Medical Colleges will use artificial intelligence to score the writing portion of the Medical College Admission Test. Vantage Learning and Prometric announced this week that they will provide intelligent, computer-based essay scores beginning this year. ... The new format allows AAMC to administer the test 22 times annually, up from two."
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January 16, 2007: <http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg19325864.900>Robot learns to play dirty Scrabble. New Scientist (Issue 2586, page 23; subscription req'd). "Beating people at Scrabble is already no contest for computer programs, which can easily memorise entire dictionaries. Now a Scrabble-playing program has gone one better by playing dirty. Developed by Eyal Amir and Mark Richards at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the program is able to predict which letter tiles other players hold, and use this information to choose moves which block a high-scoring word that an opponent might otherwise have played. ... [Amir] presented the bot at a conference on artificial intelligence in Hyderabad, India this week."
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January 17, 2007: <http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/297750/Ring+for+a+robot.htm>Ring for a robot. The Engineer Online. "Swarms of intelligent robots that can clean, tidy and even attend to patients remotely could revolutionise the provision of healthcare in hospitals. ... The EU-funded project, known as IWARD, will be co-ordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany and involve collaboration between European academic institutions, including the universities of Cardiff, Dublin and Newcastle. Project leader Thomas Schlegel, from Fraunhofer's human-computer interaction division, says the robots could also help hospitals cut MRSA infections on wards by keeping them cleaner. While the hardware and modules will use off-the-shelf technology as much as possible, the swarm-based intelligence will demand ground-breaking work, according to Schlegel. Fraunhofer is working with Warwick University to develo p this innovative software platform to allow the robots to operate semi-autonomously."

Also see: <http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=110202007>Robot nurses could be on the wards in three years, say scientists. By Angus Howarth. Scotsman.com News (January 22, 2007). "Robot nurses could be bustling around hospital wards in as little as three years. The mechanised 'angels' - being developed by EU-funded scientists - will perform basic tasks such as mopping up spillages, taking messages and guiding visitors to hospital beds. ... The robots would also employ face and voice recognition technology to communicate with patients and spot unauthorised visitors."

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January 18, 2007: <http://www.wired.com/news/technology/medtech/0,72448-0.html>Fantastic Voyage - Departure 2009. By Emmet Cole. Wired News. "An international team of scientists is developing what they say will be the world's first microrobot -- as wide as two human hairs -- that can swim through the arteries and digestive system. ... The tiny robot, small enough to pass through the heart and other organs, will be inserted using a syringe. Guided by remote control, it will swim to a site within the body to perform a series of tasks, then return to the point of entry where it can be extracted, again by syringe. ... 'I think the use of this sort of technology is like any other technology in the sense that it is subject to the desires, for better or worse, of the people with the ability to make use of it,' [James Friend of the Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory at Australia's Monash Uni versity, who leads the team] said. 'In light of human history I wouldn't be surprised to see the entire gambit from dystopia to utopia played out in miniature here. Even so, I remain optimistic.'"
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January 19, 2007: <http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196902178>Microsoft Predicts The Future With Vista's SuperFetch - SuperFetch, a feature within Vista, predicts which applications are used when, then pre-loads them so that they're instantly available. By Gregg Keizer. InformationWeek. "Microsoft Research contributed to the SuperFetch effort, a feature within Vista that predicts which applications are used when, then pre-loads them so that they're instantly available. 'As part of a long term set of projects, we want to teach the computer to learn from users to make the machine more proactive,' says Eric Horvitz, a principal researcher with Microsoft's R&D as well as the president-elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. 'We want to use the system's idle time to make things punchier.' Horvitz and his colleagues developed the core algorithms that mak e up the predictive part of SuperFetch, the technology that plays Nostradamus for the operating system. ... Long-range, says Horvitz, he'd like to extend SuperFetch-like predicting to actions within individual applications"
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January 22, 2007: <http://www.electricnews.net/frontpage/news-9873124.html>Expert KOs Rocky's artificial intelligence - The latest Rocky film, which opened in Ireland last weekend, has posed questions about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI). By Emmet Ryan. ElectricNews.net. "'The fact that a computer fight is a central plot point to the movie makes it a work of sci-fi [science fiction],' said Bernard Gorman, a researcher on AI in Dublin City University, speaking with ENN. '[The computer simulation] is significantly ahead of what is possible at present.' ... The idea for a computer-simulated fight in Rocky Balboa was inspired by an actual simulation that measured Muhammad Ali against Rocky Marciano in 1970, in what was known as 'The Superfight'. ... Gorman said the greater focus on AI at present is looking to the future rather than comparing champions of the past. 'There are groups that hop e to have a robot soccer team capable of beating the world champions by 2050," he said. "Like Rocky it's a long shot but the goal is there and people are working towards it all the time.'"
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January 23, 2007: <http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/012307-wasted-searches.html>You are wasting time. Find out why. The cost of ineffective search. By Jon Brodkin. Network World. "A company that employs 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5 million in annual salary costs to go down the drain because of the time wasted looking for information and not finding it, IDC research found last year. ... It turns out, analysts say, that most enterprises are not using the most up-to-date search applications. Not only that, enterprises aren't using the applications they have as effectively as they should. ... Searching based on concepts is 'the generation of search that is just being adopted now.' Most enterprises have not yet upgraded to enterprise search platforms that use this technique, [Susan] Feldman says.... Feldman and some other analysts are optimistic that semantic technology will fuel the next generation of searches. The word semantic 'means meaning,' she says, so an application using semantic technology understands not just keywords but the relationships between subjects, verbs and modifiers. 'This means you can type in a question and it will understand it,' she says. 'More and more applications are able to understand who, what, when, where and why questions, and differentiate among them.' The so-called 'Semantic Web' has been a hot topic of discussion in technology circles for several years. The Semantic Web has been defined as 'an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.' ... The U.S. Army used artificial intelligence to create a virtual officer known as 'SGT STAR,' who is capable of answering a range of questions posed by potential recruits visiting the Army Web site."
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January 24, 2007: <http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/19544>At Yale, robotics research matures. Yale Daily News. "No thanks to Steven Spielberg, robotics research has moved from the realm of science fiction into that of academia in recent years. At Yale this move is manifested in part by the presence of Nico, a short, baseball-capped addition to the Computer Science Department. Nico is a robot that computer science student Kevin Gold GRD '09 uses to run experiments dedicated to topical issues in the field of artificial intelligence. Gold, a member of professor Brian Scassellati's social robotics lab, develops models of language acquisition and self-recognition with the diminutive robot. ... The robot classifies everything it sees into one of three categories -- self, other and inanimate -- which it generates from parameters that Gold has given it and fro m observing its surroundings. ... Nico is not the only project underway at the social robotics lab. Wilma Bainbridge '09, who works at the lab, said that researchers are planning to add new robots and improve old ones. 'The lab is currently working on a project that involves prosody, which refers to the way the pitch, stress and intonation of one's voice varies,' she said. 'The goal is to eventually create robots able to interpret prosody.' ... Scassellati also reflected on the rapid integration of robots in human life that has taken place in the recent past."
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January 25th: <http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72500-0.html?tw=wn_index_7>Jan. 25, 1921: The Robot Cometh. By By Tony Long. Wired News. "A new play premiers at the National Theater in Prague, the capital of what was then Czechoslovakia. R.U.R, (which stands for Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Capek, marks the first use of the word 'robot' to describe an artificial person."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines

January 25, 2007: <http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/01/25/tech-aiassitivehomealzheimers-20070125.html>Artificially intelligent homes for Alzheimer's patients coming: scientists. CBC News. "Scientists in Toronto are developing an artificial intelligence system that would help people with Alzheimer's disease or other cognitive impairments live safely at home.The Toronto Rehabilitation Institute is working with University of Toronto researchers to make home-based computer systems that would assist elderly people with memory loss in living independently. ... [L]ead scientist Alex Mihailidis said in a written statement. 'We are using artificial intelligence to support aging-in-place so that people can remain in their homes for as long as possible.' ... The researchers have also created a home emergency alert system that uses ceiling-mounted cameras linked to computers running image an alysis software to determine whether a person has fallen down. It would then ask whether he or she needs help and use a voice-recognition system to process a response. ... The researchers say they are the first in the world to test home-based artificial intelligence systems in clinical trials."
-> <#listtop>back to headlines


FROM THE DECK OF THE AI NEWS CLIPPER: Did you see the AI Crossword in the latest AI Magazine [<http://www.aaai.org/Library/Magazine/vol27.php#Winter>Winter 2006] on pages 118 - 119? There's a good chance that you have a connection to at least one clue or answer. An interactive version can be accessed from our <http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/xword/>Crossword home page, which is also where you'll find a link to the annotated solution.

 

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PLEASE NOTE: Though we have tried to provide you with links that will be active when you receive this ALERT, be advised that news articles have a tendency to quickly relocate or disappear. The good news, however, is that most articles have several incarnations such that an online search will usually lead to another source. For more information, please see our <http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/springbd.html#newsfaq>News FAQ.

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4) AAAI 2007 Sponsored/Affiliated/In Cooperation Conferences

I am pleased to announce the current roster of AAAI sponsored and affiliated conferences for 2007. For future updates, please consult the AI Magazine Calendar of Events at http://www.aaai.org/Magazine/calendar.php or the individual conference websites.

Regards,

Carol Hamilton
Executive Director, AAAI

***********************************************************************
AAAI Sponsored Conferences
***********************************************************************

AAAI 2007 Spring Symposium Series (SSS-07)
March 26-28, 2007
Stanford University, Stanford, California
http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss07.php

Third Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE-07)
June 6-8, 2007
Stanford, California
http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AIIDE/aiide07.php
http://www.aiide.org

Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07)
July 22-26, 2007
Hyatt Regency Vancouver
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Technical Papers Due: February 6
Senior member papers and Nectar papers Due: February 27
http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/aaai07.php
(Please see the URL above for workshop, tutorial, and student programs, as well as demonstrations and competitions to be held at AAAI-07.)

Nineteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-07)
July 24-26, 2007
Hyatt Regency Vancouver
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/IAAI/iaai07.php

AAAI 2007 Fall Symposium Series (FSS-07)
November 8-11, 2007
Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia (adjacent to Washington, DC)
http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Fall/fss07.php

***********************************************************************
AAAI Affiliates
***********************************************************************

Twentieth International Florida AI Research Society Conference (Flairs-2007)
May 7-9, 2007, Key West, Florida
Conference Program Cochairs: David Wilson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Geoff Sutcliffe, University of Miami
davils@uncc.edu, geoff@cs.miami.edu
http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~ddd/FLAIRS/flairs2007/

23nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2007)
July 19-22, 2007, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Conference Chairs: Rina Dechter and Thomas Richardson
dechter@ics.uci.edu, thomasr@u.washington.edu

The Thirteenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 07)
August 12-15, 2007, San Jose, California
General Chair: Rakesh Agrawal, Microsoft
rakesh.prof@hotmail.com
http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigkdd/kdd/2007/

International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2007)
September 22-26, 2007, Providence, Rhode Island
Conference Cochairs: Mark Boddy, Adventium Labs, USA; Maria Fox, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, UK; Sylvie ThiŽbaux, NICTA & Australian National University, Australia
mark.boddy@adventiumlabs.org, Maria.Fox@cis.strath.ac.uk, Sylvie.Thiebaux@anu.edu.au
http://icaps07.icaps-conference.org/

***********************************************************************
Conferences Held in Cooperation with AAAI
***********************************************************************

2007 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2007)
January 28-31, 2007, Honolulu, Hawaii
General Chairs: David Chin, University of Hawaii and Michelle Zhou, IBM TJ Watson Research
chair2007@iuiconf.org
http://www.iuiconf.org/

The Second ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction Conference (HRI 07)
March 9-11, 2007, Washington DC
General Chair: Alan C. Schultz, Naval Research Laboratory
schultz@aic.nrl.navy.mil
http://hri2007.org/

International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (WSM 2007)
March 26-28, 2007
Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.
Co-chairs:  Natalie Glance, Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Nicolas Nicolov, Umbria Inc.
nglance@intelliseek.com
http://www.icwsm.org/committees.html

Fourth International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO 2007)
May 9-12, 2007, Angers, France
ICINCO Secretariat
secretariat@icinco.org
http://www.icinco.org/

Eleventh International Conference on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and LAW (ICAIL 2007)
June 4 - June 8, 2007, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA
Conference Chair: Anne Gardner (gardner@cs.stanford.edu)
Program Chair: Radboud Winkles (winkels@uva.nl)
http://iaail.org

The Fourth IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC07)
June 11-15, 2007, Jacksonville, Florida
General Chair: Mazin Yousif, Intel Corporation and Omer F. Rana, Cardiff University, UK
Program Chairs: JosŽ Fortes, University of Florida and Kumar Goswami, HP Labs
icac2007@acis.ufl.edu
http://www.autonomic-conference.org/

Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2007)
June 12-16, 2007, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal
Conference Chair: Joaquim Filipe, INSTICC/EST-Setœbal, Portugal (jfilipe@icinco.org)
Program Cochairs: Jorge Cardoso, UMA, Madeira, Portugal; JosŽ Cordeiro, INSTICC/EST-Setœbal, Portugal
secretariat@iceis.org
http://www.iceis.org

Sixth Creativity and Cognition Conference (CC2007)
June 13-15, 2007, Washington, DC USA
General Chair: Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland, USA
Program Chairs: Gerhard Fischer, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA; Elisa Giaccardi, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA; Mike Eisenberg, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
Liaisons: Ted Selker, MIT Media Lab, USA (selker@media.mit.edu)
CC2007-info@cs.umd.edu
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007/

Seventh International Symposium on Smart Graphics
June 25-27, 2007, Kyoto, Japan
Contact: Patrick Olivier, Organizing Committee (p.l.olivier@ncl.ac.uk)
http://www.smartgraphics.org/sg07/index.html

20th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems (IEA/AIE-07)
June 26-29, 2007, Kyoto, Japan
General Chair: Ali, Moonis, Texas State University-San Marcos
cs@txstate.edu
http://winnie.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/IEAAIE-2007/

Robotics Science and Systems (RSS 2007)
June 26-30, 2007, Atlanta, Georgia Tech
Chair: Wolfram Burgard, Univ of Freiburg, Germany
PC-Chair: Oliver Brock, UMASS
rss07org@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
http://www.roboticsconference.org

13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2007)
July 9-13, 2007, Marina del Rey, California
Conference Chair: Jim Greer, University of Saskatchewan
greer@cs.usask.ca

The Seventh Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (SARA 2007)
July 18-21, 2007, Whistler, British Columbia, Canada
Conference Chairs: Ian Miguel, University of St Andrews, UK and Wheeler Ruml, Palo Alto Research Center, USA
ruml@parc.com
http://www-old.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ianm/SARA2007.html

Ninth International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC 2007)
August 19-22, 2007, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Co-Chairs: Maria Gini, University of Minnesota and Rob Kauffman,
University of Minnesota
gini@cs.umn.edu, rkauffman@csom.umn.edu
http://icec07.cs.umn.edu/

Seventh International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA-07)
September 17-19, 2007
Paris, France
iva07@image.ntua.gr
http://iva07.ntua.gr/

The Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2007)
Oct 28-31 , 2007, Whistler, BC
Conference Chair: Derek Sleeman, Univ of Aberdeen
Sponsorship chairs: Yolanda Gil, ISI, and David Leake, Indiana University
David Leake (leake@cs.indiana.edu) will be the contact for the cooperation application
http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/kcap07/index.php

The 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2007)
October 29 - November 2, 2007, San Diego, California
Chair: Edward Grant, North Carolina State University
Co-Chair: Oussama Khatib, Stanford University
egrant@ncsu.edu, khatib@cs.stanford.edu
http://www.crim.ncsu.edu/iros2007/

Sixth International Semantic Web Conference 2007 (ISWC'07)
November 11-15, 2007, BEXCO, Busan, Korea
General Chairs: Riichiro Mizoguchi, Osaka University, Japan
(MIZ@EI.SANKEN.OSAKA-U.AC.JP) and Guus Schreiber, Free University
Amsterdam, Netherlands
http://iswc2007.semanticweb.org/




5) ACAL 2007 

Call For Papers

The Third Australian Conference on Artificial Life (ACAL2007)

Gold Coast, Australia

December 4-6, 2007

http://www.it.bond.edu.au/acal2007/



The Third Australian Conference on Artificial Life, (ACAL07), will be held at the Holiday Inn, 4th - 6th December 2007 in conjunction with the 20th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI07).

The Programme Committee of ACAL07 invites technical papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of Artificial Life and Complex Adaptive Systems. Topics of particular interest to ACAL07 include, but are not limited to:

* Adaptive robotics
* Artificial Chemistry
* Artificial societies and markets
* Ant colony optimisation
* Applications of ALife technologies
* Bioinformatics
* Biological agents
* Cellular automata
* Coevolution of morphology and mind
* Collaborative behaviour
* Complex systems
* Complexity
* Coordination
* Embodied cognition
* Emergence
* Ethics of artificial life
* Evolutionary and adaptive dynamics
* Evolutionary computation
* Fitness landscapes
* Games
* Hierarchical dynamics
* Marriage in Honey-Bees optimisation
* Modularity
* Multi-agent systems
* Neural networks and connectionism
* Neurobiology
* Origin of life
* Philosophy of artificial life
* Percolation
* Self-organisation
* Self-replication
* Simulation and synthesis tools and methodologies
* Social networks
* Swarm Intelligence

All papers will be reviewed by at least two members of the programme committee and proceedings will be published by Springer in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series.  Papers must be submitted in LNCS format and be up to 12 pages in length.   
Formatting instructions may be found at: http://www.springer.com/lncs

The important dates are:

Deadline for paper submissions: 13th July 2007
Notification of acceptance: 31st August 2007
Deadline for camera ready copies: 14th September 2007

Please direct any enquiries to A/Prof Marcus Randall on mrandall@bond.edu.au

-------------------------------
Marcus Randall
Bond University
-------------------------------





6) ACII 2007 

                       FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS


               Second International Conference on

       Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction

                           (ACII 2007)

               September 12-14, 2007, Lisbon, Portugal


                http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/acii2007

                       (or www.acii2007.org)


GOAL AND SCOPE

The second International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent
Interaction (ACII2007) will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, and will be a
meeting point for researchers studying and developing the role of emotion
and other affective phenomena as these relate to human-computer and
human-robot interaction, graphics, AI, robotics, vision, speech, synthetic
characters, games, educational software, and related areas.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

The topics of interest of the conference include, but are not limited to,
the following:

* Generating and Recognizing Affective Body Language:
 - Face/gesture modeling and animation
 - Affect recognition from face/body
 - Motion capture for affect recognition
 - Face/body detection
 - Face/gesture recognition


* Affective Speech and Language Processing:
 - Affective speech analysis
 - Affective speech recognition and synthesis
 - Voice quality of affective speech
 - Prosody of affective speech
 - Affective text processing and annotation
 - Multilingual processing of affective speech

* Affective Biometrics

* Evaluation of Affective Systems

* Affective Databases, Annotation and Tools

* Design of Affective Systems

* Cultural Differences in Affective Design and Interaction

* Psychology and Cognition of Affect in Affective Computing Systems

* Affective Neuroscience and Affective Computing

* Affective Computing Ethics

* Affective Sound and Music Processing

* Affective Interactions:
 - Building the affective loop
 - Affective understanding
 - Affective multimodal systems
 - Affective dialogue systems
 - Affective user interfaces
 - Affective mark-up languages
 - Affective tutoring systems

* Affect in Autonomous and Social Robotics
 - Emotion in cognition and action
 - Embodied emotion
 - Biologically-inspired emotion architectures
 - Developmental and evolutionary models
 - Cultural and relational approaches to affective interaction

* Affective Agent Architectures
 - Computational models of emotion
 - Dynamical systems and emergent models of emotion
 - Personality in agent architectures
 - Emotion and reasoning in agent architectures
 - Embodied emotion architectures
 - Emotion and learning in agent architectures
 - Models of emotional memory

* Systems and Applications of Affective Computing
 - Affective wearables
 - Virtual reality
 - Computer games
 - Ambient intelligence
 - etc


SUBMISSION

Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers (maximum 12
pages in Springer LNCS format), short papers (maximum 8 pages), demos or
posters (maximum 4 pages). All ACII2007 papers will be handled and reviewed
electronically. Detailed submission instructions will be available at the
conference website (http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/acii2007, www.acii2007.org)

The proceedings of the conference will be published by Springer in its LNCS
series.


IMPORTANT DATES

- April 5, 2007: paper submission deadline - April 30, 2007: tutorial
submission deadline (please check the website for details) - May 15, 2007:
notification to authors - June 5, 2007: camera-ready copies due


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

General Chairs:
---------------

Ana Paiva
Rosalind Picard

Program Committee Chairs:
-------------------------

Ruth Aylett
Stefanos Kollias
Andrew Ortony
Jianhua Tao

Publicity Chairs:
-----------------

Nick Campbell
Lola Canamero

Tutorials Chairs:
-----------------

Jonathan Gratch
Kristina Hook

Student and Doctoral Consortium Chairs:
---------------------------------------

Roddy Cowie
Fiorella di Rosis

Demo Chairs:
------------

Carlos Martinho
Paolo Petta

Local Organizing Committee:
---------------------------

Maria Cravo
Joao Dias
Graca Gaspar
Carlos Martinho
Ana Paiva
Rui Prada
Marco Vala


Please visit the conference website for additional details (Program
Committee, venue, submission details, etc).







7) AI Communications - New Issue Alert

Volume 19 Number 4/2006 of AI Communications is now available on the iospress.metapress.com web site at <http://iospress.metapress.com/link.asp?id=7XXB8F3QEQJB> http://iospress.metapress.com.

This issue contains:

<http://iospress.metapress.com/link.asp?id=A0MRTC1RMMMMEVAT>Tools for modeling and solving search problems  p. 301 Deborah East, Mikhail Iakhiaev, Artur Mikitiuk, Miros&lstrok;aw Truszczy&nacute;ski   <http://iospress.metapress.com/link.asp?id=BRHWLH8K19Q1EHGQ>On-line monitoring and diagnosis of a team of service robots: A model-based approach  p. 313 Roberto Micalizio, Pietro Torasso, Gianluca Torta   <http://iospress.metapress.com/link.asp?id=2LR982X4VQVPWFGA>Domain-independent temporal planning in a planning-graph-based approach  p. 341 Antonio Garrido, Eva Onaind’a   <http://iospress.metapress.com/link.asp?id=9751VA2TL83FDU7H>Integrating heterogeneous adaptation techniques to build a flexible and usable mobile tourist guide  p. 369 Federica Cena, Luca Console, Cristina Gena, Anna Goy, Guido Levi, Sonia Modeo, Ilaria Torre   <http://iospress.metapress.com/link.asp?id=44H6H7J4657PPG1F>Fault tolerant knowledge level inter-agent communication in open Multi-Agent Systems  p. 385 Nicola Dragoni   <http://iospress.metapress.com/link.asp?id=C119FHFBW0WACXDY>An inductive logic programming approach to statistical relational learning  p. 389 Kristian Kersting   <http://iospress.metapress.com/link.asp?id=D896VG1YF75RFEQV>Learning user interests for user profiling in personal information agents  p. 391 Daniela Godoy   <http://iospress.metapress.com/link.asp?id=DC7120U2TF728KQ7>On belief change in ontology evolution  p. 395 Giorgos Flouris   <http://iospress.metapress.com/link.asp?id=DTKQQD0VW6UKK1W4>Calendar  p. 399  

If you are not a current subscriber to this publication, you can request a free sample issue <http://iospress.metapress.com/link.asp?id=csi;103140> here.


Thank you,
MetaPress Alerting





8) AIIDE-07 

AAAI invites submissions to the Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment (AIIDE-07), to be held June 6-8, 2007 at Stanford University in Stanford, California. Submissions are being accepted in two distinct paper tracks, the Research Track and the Published Games Track. Papers in the Research Track will focus on results from core AI research areas applicable to interactive digital entertainment, while papers in the Published Games Track will focus on AI approaches developed and fielded in published commercial games.

Submissions are due Monday, January 22, 2007. Prospective authors are required to register at the AIIDE-07 paper submission site at http://aaai07.confmaster.net/pages/login.php?Conf=AIIDE07. The software will assign a password, which will enable authors to log on to submit an abstract and paper. 

AIIDE-07 also invites participation in its Demo program. Researchers and practitioners are encouraged to share insights and cutting-edge results from a wide range of topics with demonstrations of (a) research systems in the context of existing commercial games, (b) new games authored by researchers, (c) contributions demonstrating the adoption and/or extension of AI research results published games, and (d) completely new forms of interactive digital entertainment made possible by AI research. Demonstration authors should submit abstracts and materials at http://www.aaai.org/Forms/aiidedemo-apply-form.php by Friday, February 2, 2007. 

The full Call for Participation, including formatting and submission requirements, is available at http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AIIDE/aiide07.php and http://www.aiide.org/. Please also feel free to contact us at aiide07@aaai.org.

Regards,

Carol Hamilton
Executive Director, AAAI




9) ArgNMR 2007

1st Workshop on Argumentation and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (Arg-NMR)

 in conjunction with the Ninth International Conference on
  Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR-07)
           Tempe, Arizona May 14,  2007

      http://lia.deis.unibo.it/confs/ArgNMR/

============================================================
Important Dates

-> Submission: February 19, 2007 (Extended Deadline)
-> Notification: March 12, 2007
-> Camera-ready: March 29, 2007
-> ArgNMR: May 14, 2007

= Aims and Scope =

Research on Argumentation and Nonmonotonic Reasoning began in full force
in the early eighties. The first attempts showed how argumentation results
in a very natural way of conceptualizing Commonsense Reasoning,
appropriately reflecting its defeasible nature. Further work in the KR&R
community has shown that argumentation provides a useful perspective for
relating different nonmonotonic formalisms. More recently, argumentation
has been revealed as a powerful conceptual tool for exploring the
theoretical foundations of reasoning and interaction in Autonomous Agents
and Multiagent Systems.

This workshop will represent an opportunity for exchanging ideas on the
fundamental theoretical basis and the design and implementation of
argument-based systems including semantics, proof theory, applications to
epistemic and practical reasoning, and the comparison of those systems
with other types of nonmonotonic reasoning.

= Topics =

We solicit unpublished papers that present work on argumentation and
nonmonotonic reasoning. We will privilege articles who emphasize
connections between them. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to,
the following:

-> argumentation theories and logical foundations
-> argumentation and logic programming
-> formal models of argument
-> semantics of argumentation
-> operational semantics and execution models of argumentation systems
-> argumentation and commonsense reasoning
-> argumentation for practical reasoning and deliberation
-> argumentation tools and applications
-> argumentation for reasoning in multiagent systems
-> argumentation dialogues in multiagent systems
-> nonmonotonic reasoning in multiagent systems
-> argumentation for legal reasoning
-> argumentation and nonmonotonic reasoning in the semantic web
-> implementations of argumentation systems

= Submissions =

We welcome and encourage the submission of high quality, original papers,
which have not been accepted for publication nor are currently under
review for another journal or conference. Papers should be written in
English, formatted according to the Springer LNCS style
( http://www.springer.com/comp/lncs/Authors.html ), and they should not
exceed sixteen (16) pages including title page, figures, references, etc.

= Proceedings and post-workshop publications =

A printed volume with the proceedings will be available at the workshop.
The proceedings of ArgNMR are also planned to form the basis for
publishing a post-workshop volume, and/or a special issue of an
international journal, subject to appropriate quality.

= Programme Committee =

Leila Amgoud, IRIT-CNRS Toulouse, France
Grigoris Antoniou, FORTH-ICS, Greece
Pietro Baroni, U Brescia, Italy
Trevor J. Bench-Capon, U Liverpool, United Kingdom
Carlos Iv‡n Ches–evar, U Nacional del Sur, Bahia Blanca, Argentina
JŸrgen Dix, TU Clausthal, Germany
Phan Minh Dung, Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand
Lluis Godo, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
Anthony Hunter, U College London, United Kingdom
Antonis C. Kakas, U Cyprus
Gabriele Kern-Isberner, U Dortmund, Germany
Nicolas Maudet, U Paris-Dauphine, France
Peter McBurney, U Liverpool, United Kingdom
Donald Nute, U. Georgia, Athens, GE, United States
Henry Prakken, U Utrecht, The Netherlands
Iyad Rahwan, British U Dubai, UAE & U Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Tran Cao Son, New Mexico State U, NM, United States
Francesca Toni, Imperial College London, United Kingdom

= Organization =

Guillermo R. Simari, U. Nacional del Sur, Bahia Blanca, Argentina
Paolo Torroni, U. Bologna, Italy






10) Book Chapters on Hybrid-Heuristics for  Scheduling 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Call for Book Chapters



http://www.softcomputing.net/mhs.html


Series in Studies in Computational Intelligence --SPRINGER


Meta-heuristics for Scheduling

               in

Emergent Computational Systems


INTRODUCTION

With the rapid development of Internet and other new technologies,
different kinds of network, distributed computing paradigms and
platforms are emerging as the new
wave in computing of the new millennium. Examples of such emergent
computational systems are Grid
and P2P systems, which are currently being used for solving many
complex problems from science
and engineering.  A broad range of issues are being addressed
nowadays, from theory to
practical development and fast advances are made and reported by
researchers from both
academia and industry.

One such important issue is the scheduling problem, that is, the
efficient allocations of jobs to geographically distributed resources,
which is indispensable for the
development of High Performance Distributed Applications. Despite of
the family of scheduling problems being one of the must
studied  by the optimization research community, the available
approaches do not apply in a
straightforward way to the Job Scheduling in Computational Grids and
P2P systems as it significantly
differs from conventional scheduling on LANs or parallel computers.
Indeed, scheduling in grid
systems adds new features not present in conventional scheduling due
to proper characteristics of
the large-scale distributed environments. Regarding the optimization
criteria, besides typical
optimization criteria such as minimization of makespan and flowtime,
other important criteria are to
be considered such as maximizing resource utilization, resource
owner's benefits, etc. Thus, the problem
is multi-objective in its general formulation. On the other hand,
scheduling must take into
account possible local policies on resources (e.g. access and cost),
the existence of local schedulers,
etc.



Current research efforts are addressing new techniques for dealing in
practice with the complexity of the problem, among them, we
distinguish the meta-heuristic
techniques--the de facto approach for hard combinatorial optimization problems.



THE OVERALL OBJECTIVE OF THE BOOK



To give a comprehensive view of most recent advances from theory and
practice of the job scheduling problem in large-scale distributed
systems. The book aims to provide
relevant theoretical frameworks and latest empirical research findings
in this regard. Readers can
benefit from this book in understanding the basics and current
techniques applied for solving the scheduling
problem in emergent computational systems, as well as its use in
developing large-scale distributed
applications.

RECOMMENDED TOPICS INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO THE FOLLOWING:



 * Single heuristic approaches (Local-search based techniques,
population-based techniques, swarm optimization and ACO techniques)

 * Hybrid heuristic approaches (Hybridization of different heuristics)

 * Parallel implementations of single/hybrid heuristic approaches

 * Ad hoc approaches used in combination with heuristic approaches

 * Economic based approaches used in combination with heuristic
approaches


SUBMISSION PROCEDURE & SCHEDULE



The book will be published in the Springer Verlag, Series -
'Studies in Computational Intelligence'.

Please prepare the manuscript using the author guidelines and format
given in the following link:

http://www.softcomputing.net/cec06/author-kit.zip



 * PROPOSAL: Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on
or before January 15, 2007 a 2-5 page manuscript proposal clearly
explaining the mission and
concerns of the proposed chapter.

   Authors will be notified about the suitability of the chapters
within 2 weeks of the submission date.


 * Full CHAPTER SUBMISSION: March 30, 2007. Chapters have to be no
more than 40 pages length and will be peer-reviewed by at least three referees.



 * NOTIFICATION: Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by
May 30, 2007, about the status of their proposals and sent chapter
organizational guidelines. Full
accepted chapters are expected to be submitted by 31 July, 2007.


The book is scheduled to be published by Springer-Verlag by end of
2007.  Inquiries and Submissions can be forwarded electronically (as a
PDF file) to one of the Volume editors:



Volume Editors:



Fatos Xhafa, Ph.D.

Department of Languages and Informatics Systems
Polytechnic University of Catalonia
Campus Nord, Ed. Omega, C/Jordi Girona 1-3,
08034 Barcelona, SPAIN

Email: fatos@lsi.upc.edu
Tel: +34 93-413-7880
Fax:+34 93-413-7833


Ajith Abraham, Ph.D.

School of Computer Science,
Yonsei University,
134 Shinchon-dong, Sudaemoon-ku,
Seoul 120-749, Republic of Korea

Email: ajith.abraham@ieee.org
WWW: http://www.softcomputing.net

_______________________________________________
Aco-list mailing list
Aco-list@iridia.ulb.ac.be
https://iridia.ulb.ac.be/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aco-list





11) CIA 2007 - 11th Int Wshp on Cooperative Information Agents

            CALL FOR PAPERS

*********************************************

      Eleventh International Workshop on

 Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2007)

         September 19 - 21, 2007
     Delft University of Technology,
          Delft, The Netherlands

*********************************************
    http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/cia2007

Co-sponsored by
  TU Delft ICT Research
  Whitestein Technologies, Switzerland
  IEEE FIPA

-------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT DATES

  Submission of papers:    MARCH 26, 2007

  Notification of authors: May 29, 2007
  Camera-ready papers:     June 15, 2007

-------------------------------------------

AIM & SCOPE
===========

An intelligent information agent is a computational software entity
that is capable of accessing one or multiple, heterogeneous and
distributed information sources, proactively searching for,
mediating, and maintaining relevant information or services on behalf
of its human users, or other agents, at any time and anywhere.
One key challenge of the development of intelligent and cooperative
information system is to balance the autonomy of networked data,
information, and knowledge sources with the potential payoff of
leveraging them by the appropriate use of such agents.
Research on intelligent information agents and systems is inherently
cross disciplinary covering themes from domains such as artificial
intelligence, HCI, Internet and Web technologies, information systems,
information retrieval, P2P and grid computing, pervasive computing,
and multiagent system technologies as well.

The objective of the international workshop series on cooperative
information agents (CIA), since its establishment in 1997, is to
provide a small but distinguished, interdisciplinary forum for
researchers, programmers, and managers to get informed about, present,
and discuss latest high quality results in research and development
of agent-based intelligent and cooperative information systems, and
applications for the Internet and Web.


INVITED SPEAKERS
================

To be announced.


TOPICS
======

Topics of interest are but not exclusive:

Systems and Applications of Information Agents
   Architectures of information agents.
   Prototypes and fielded systems of information agents.
   Recommender systems; collaborative cases.
   Issues of programming information agents.

Information Agents and Grid Computing
  Agent-based grid computing services and infrastructure
  Agent-based grid computing applications

Advanced Means of Collaboration and Coordination
   Social filtering, cooperative search, group forming, negotiation, etc.
   Cooperation in real-time and open environments.
   Self-organising information agent systems.
   Capability-based mediation between information agents.
   Collaboration in peer-to-peer networks.

Agent-Based Knowledge Discovery
   Agent-based distributed data mining.
   Distributed information retrieval, text, and Web mining.

Information Agents, Web Services, and the Semantic Web
   Agent-based information search in the semantic web.
   Agent-based service discovery and composition.
   Agent-based service matchmaking and brokering
   Agent-based distributed ontology mapping and learning.

Mobile Information Agents
   Mobile information agents for distributed information retrieval.
   Engineering of mobile information agents.
   Cooperative mobile information agents.

Information Agents for Pervasive Computing Environments
   Visions, applications, surveys; collaborative cases.

Rational Information Agents for E-Business
   Models of economic rationality.
   Trust and reputation.
   Issues of privacy of communication, data security, and
   jurisdiction for agent-mediated trading.
   Coalition and team formation algorithms.

Intelligent Interfaces for Information Agents
   Human-agent interaction for (systems of) information agents.
   Life-like characters and avatars.
   Information agents for/applied to digital cities.
   Advanced, personalized 3-d visualizations of information spaces.
   Personalization; collaborative cases.

Adaptive Information Agents
   Adaptive information retrieval; collaborative cases.
   Reasoning with imperfect information: collaborative cases.
   Multi-strategy and meta-learning for cooperative information agents.


PROCEEDINGS
===========

The proceedings of the CIA workshop series are regularly published as volume
of the Springer LNCS subseries LNAI (Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence).

Former volumes of the series are
 CIA-1997: LNAI 1202, CIA-1998: LNAI 1435, CIA-1999: LNAI 1652,
 CIA-2000: LNAI 1860, CIA-2001: LNAI 2182, CIA-2002: LNAI 2446,
 CIA-2003: LNAI 2782, CIA 2004: LNAI 3191, CIA 2005 (MATES 2005):
 LNAI 3550, CIA-2006: LNAI 4149

The proceedings of the CIA 2007 workshop will be available to the participants of the workshop at the registration desk.


SUBMISSION
==========

For preparation of (camera-ready) papers to be submitted please follow
the instructions for authors available at the Springer LNCS Web page:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

For those not using the Springer LNCS style files: The paper must be
formatted in A4 size using 10 point Times. (If Times is not available,
please use one of the similar fonts widely used in phototypesetting.)
Printing area should be 12.2 x 19.3 cm, and the interline distance
should be arranged in such a way that some 42 to 45 lines occur on a
full-text page.

The length of each paper should not exceed 15 pages.
All papers must be written in English.

Please submit your paper online at http://www.easychair.org/CIA2007
In case of problems, please contact us immediately for assistance!

Submission of full paper including all figures and references is
either in POSTSCRIPT or PDF format only. In any case, please check
whether the file is really printable on a postscript-level-2 printer
before submitting it.

Double Submission Policy
------------------------

CIA 2007 will not accept papers which have already been published,
or accepted for publication. However, these restrictions apply ONLY
to journals, NOT to conferences, workshops, or symposia.
Though, full copies of papers that are published elsewhere are,
of course, not acceptable; there have to be significant modifications.

Papers not conforming to the above requirements may be rejected
without review. Submissions will be reviewed for quality, correctness,
sufficient originality, and relevance.

STUDENT SUPPORT
===============

There will be limited financial support provided to a limited number
of students as (co-)authors of accepted papers to present their work
at the CIA 2007 workshop.

AWARDS
======

The CIA 2007 workshop issues both a BEST PAPER award, and a
SYSTEM INNOVATION award to acknowledge and honor highly innovative
research and development, respectively, in the area of intelligent
information agents for the Internet and Web. The prize money is 300 euros.

The CIA 2007 SYSTEM INNOVATION AWARD is sponsored by
Whitestein Technologies. The prize money is 500 euros.

Nominations for the CIA 2007 SYSTEM INNOVATION AWARD
are eligible either by means of regular paper submission,
or external explicit request for nomination by submitting
a brief (max. 4 pages, 10pt Times) description of the system in terms
of its core functionalities, main techniques used to implement them,
and (publicly available reference to) experimental results,
as well as a summary of the innovative features in comparison to other
existing systems. After confidential voting by the PC, chairs, and sponsors of the award the top ranked nominees will be requested to
demonstrate a running prototype of their system at the workshop to all
participants and the jury for a final public voting.
The prize money is 500 euros.


ORGANISATION
============

  Matthias Klusch (DFKI, Germany), general chair
  Koen Hindriks (TU Delft, The Netherland)
  Mike P. Papazoglou (U Tilburg, The Netherlands)
  Leon Sterling (U Melbourne, Australia)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
=================

  Wolfgang Benn (TU Chemnitz, Germany)
  Sonia Bergamaschi (U Modena, Italy)
  Abraham Bernstein (U Zurich, Switzerland)
  Monique Calisti (Whitestein Technologies, Switzerland)
  Boi Faltings (EPF Lausanne, Switzerland)
  Rune Gustavsson (TH Blekinge, Sweden)
  Heikki Helin (TeliaSonera, Finland/Sweden)
  Michael Huhns (U South Carolina, USA)
  Catholijn Jonker (TU Delft, The Netherlands)
  Hillol Kargupta (UMBC, USA)
  Uwe Keller (DERI Innsbruck, Austria)
  Ryszard Kowalczyk (Swinburne U, Australia)
  Manolis Koubarakis (TU Crete, Greece)
  Sarit Kraus (Bar-Ilan U, Israel)
  Daniel Kudenko (U York, UK)
  Alain Leger (France Telecom, France)
  Victor Lesser (U Massachusetts, USA)
  Jiming Liu (Hongkong Baptist U, China)
  Stefano Lodi (U Bologna, Italy)
  Werner Nutt (FU Bozen-Bolzano, Italy)
  Sascha Ossowski (U Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)
  Terry Payne (U Southampton, UK)
  Adrian Pearce (U Melbourne, Australia)
  Alun Preece (U Aberdeen, UK)
  Cartic Ramakrishnan (U Georgia, USA)
  Jeffrey Rosenschein (Hebrew U, Israel)
  Amit Sheth (Wright State U, USA)
  Steffen Staab (U Koblenz, Germany)
  Katia Sycara (Carnegie Mellon U, USA)
  Jan Treur (VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
  Rainer Unland (U Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
  Gottfried Vossen (U Muenster, Germany)
  Gerhard Weiss (SCCH, Austria)
  Steve Willmott (UPC Barcelona, Spain)


CONTACT
=======

Please do not hesitate to contact us,
if you have any question on this event.

Matthias Klusch
klusch@dfki.de

Koen Hindriks
koen@wenen.twi.tudelft.nl

Leon Sterling
leon@csse.unimelb.edu.au

Mike Papazoglou
mikep@uvt.nl

------------------------------------------------






12) Constraints Journal: Special Issue on Bioinformatics
                         
CALL FOR PAPERS

                         
CONSTRAINTS Journal

     Special Issue on Constraint based methods for
Bioinformatics

======================================================================

INTRODUCTION

Bioinformatics  is  a  challenging   and 
fast  growing  area  of
research, which is of  utmost importance for our understanding of
life. Major  contributions to this discipline  can provide
significant
benefits in medicine,  agriculture, and  industry. To
pick  out only
a few  examples, Bioinformatics  tackles problems related to:

 * Recognition, analysis, and organization of DNA sequences
 * Biological systems  simulations (for metabolic  or
regulatory
   networks)
 * Prediction of the spatial conformations and interactions of
   biological polymers (e.g., proteins, RNA)

Recently, these problems have been formalized and studied using 
constraints (often over finite domains or intervals of reals). 
Biology is a source of extremely interesting and computationally 
expensive tasks, that can  be encoded  exploiting the 
application 
of  recent and  more general techniques of constraint
programming.

As evidence of this trend, various workshops (Constraints and
Bioinformatics/Biocomputing at CP97, CP98 and Constraint based 
methods for Bioinformatics at ICLP2005 and CP2006) witnessed the 
interest and the importance of research in the topic and moreover 
presented new developments of constraint technology (see, e.g., 
details in

http://www.dimi.uniud.it/dovier/WCB06).

We believe that is valuable to gather papers addressing the 
application of constraints to biological problems. With this special 
issue, we desire to reflect the state of the art of this field, and 
thus we seek for papers that report new ideas, advances and results. 
The submission of papers is opened to anyone who developed ideas 
and/or obtained results in the bioinformatics area making use of 
constraint programming.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
                      
PAPER SUBMISSION
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Researchers are invited to submit original or survey papers to all
the editors (addresses below). The editors would appreciate receiving
a tentative short abstract (may be partial) at the beginning of January.
In the first email, please specify the title, keywords, abstract and
the author's email addresses. Receipt of submissions will be
acknowledged.
All final submissions should be in .pdf format, and must adhere to the
Constraints Journal guidelines

http://ai.uwaterloo.ca/~vanbeek/Constraints/Instructions_for_Authors.html
(Note that the usual on-line submission procedure for the Constraints
Journal
will not be followed initially for the Special Issue)

We expect papers no longer than 25 pages, but this is not a strict
constraint.
Submissions will be reviewed by at least two reviewers.
All accepted papers will meet the usual high-quality standards of the
Constraints Journal

--------------------------------------------------------------------
                      
Important Dates
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Abstract
submission:           
January 10th, 2007
Submission
Deadline:           
January 31th, 2007
Notification of acceptance:     April  
30th, 2007
Final versions of accepted papers: June 30th, 2007

--------------------------------------------------------------------
                      
Guest Editors
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Alessandro Dal Palu', Parma University, Italy.
       Email alessandro.dalpalu AT
unipr.it

Agostino Dovier, Udine University, Italy.
       Email dovier AT dimi.uniud.it

Sebastian Will, Freiburg University, Germany.
       Email will AT
informatik.uni-freiburg.de

See:  http://www.dimi.uniud.it/dovier/WCBSI/

====================================================================



13) CONTEXT'07 Roskilde!!!!!!!!


                  FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
                     CONTEXT'07

The Sixth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on
             Modeling and Using Context

                 August 20-24, 2007
            Roskilde University, Denmark

               Submissions deadlines:
         Full papers:                        March 15, 2007
         Poster and Demonstration abstracts: March 15, 2007

               http://context-07.ruc.dk/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Sixth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and
Using Context (CONTEXT'07) will provide a forum for presenting and
discussing high-quality research and applications on context. The
conference will include paper and poster presentations, system
demonstrations, workshops, and a doctoral consortium. The conference
invites researchers and practitioners to share insights and cutting-edge
results from a wide range of disciplines including:

     Computer Science, especially
          Artificial Intelligence and Ubiquitous Computing

     Cognitive Science           Linguistics

     Organizational Sciences     Philosophy

     Psychology         

     Application areas such as Medicine and Law

Context affects a wide range of activities in humans and animals as well
as in artificial agents and other systems. The importance of context is
widely acknowledged, and "context" has become an area of study in its
own right, as evidenced by numerous workshops, symposia, seminars, and
conferences on this area. CONTEXT, the oldest conference series focusing
on context, is unique in its emphasis on interdisciplinary research.
Previous CONTEXT conferences have been held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
(CONTEXT'97), Trento, Italy (CONTEXT'99, LNCS 1688), Dundee, Scotland
(CONTEXT'01, LNCS 2116), Palo Alto, U.S.A. (CONTEXT'03, LNCS 2680), and
Paris, France (CONTEXT'05, LNCS 3554).
Each of these brought together researchers and practitioners from many
disparate fields to discuss and report on context-related research and
projects.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
------------------

The following list illustrates sample research areas whose perspectives on
context are solicited for the conference. This is not an exhaustive list,
and contributions addressing context from other perspectives are welcome.
The conference scope includes the contextual issues related to areas such
as:

  Analogy and Case-Based Reasoning    Intelligent/Semantic Web Systems 
  Autonomous Agents and Agent-based   Knowledge Engineering and Management
      Systems                         Knowledge Representation 
  Cognitive Modeling                  Language Understanding and Production
  Concepts and Categorization         Learning 
  Context-Aware Applications and      Memory, Representation and Access 
      Systems                         Multiagent Systems and Interagent 
  Databases                               Communication
  Distributed Information Systems     Neuroscience 
  Formal Semantics and Pragmatics
  Formal Theories of Context          Ontology Management 
  Heterogeneous Information           Organizational Theory and Design 
      Integration                     Perception 
  Human Decision-Making and Decision  Philosophical Foundations of Context
  Support Systems                     Problem Solving and Planning
  Human-Centered Computing            Reasoning
  Human-Computer Interaction          Relevance Computation and Relevance
  Information Management                  Theories
  Intelligent Tutoring Systems        Situated and Distributed Cognition
  Intelligent User Interfaces         Ubiquitous Computing


CONFERENCE EVENTS
-----------------

CONTEXT'07 will include paper presentation sessions, a poster and
demonstration session, two days of workshops, and a doctoral
consortium. Workshops and the doctoral consortium will circulate separate
calls for papers and participation, which will also be available at the
conference web site.


ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA AND SUBMISSION CATEGORIES
---------------------------------------------

Because CONTEXT'07 will be an interdisciplinary forum, all submissions will
be evaluated both for their technical merit and for their accessibility to
an interdisciplinary audience. Works that transcend disciplinary boundaries
are especially encouraged.

Submissions may be for full papers, poster abstracts, or demonstration
abstracts. Full papers will be accepted either for oral presentation or for
presentation at a poster session. All accepted full paper submissions will
be published in the proceedings. Accepted posters and demonstrations will be
presented at the poster session, and the associated abstracts will be
published in a brochure distributed to attendees. For additional details
see the conference web site.

For a paper to appear in the proceedings, at least one author must register
for the conference by the deadline for camera-ready copy.


SUBMISSION PROCEDURES
---------------------

Papers must be submitted electronically as PDF files. Submissions cannot
exceed 14 pages in the Springer LNAI format. Detailed formatting and
submissions instructions, as well as LaTeX and Word templates, will be
available in the author instructions section of the conference Web
site.

All accepted authors will have the option of presenting a system
demonstration at the poster session. Authors wishing to present a
demonstration without an accompanying paper must submit a demonstration
abstract. Demonstration abstracts should describe cutting-edge systems not
described in paper submissions. Demonstration abstracts should summarize
the system's behavior and significance, and should include at least one
screen shot. If desired, they may also include the URL of an informal video
on the web. Demonstration abstracts should be at most 2 pages long.


MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS POLICY
---------------------------

CONTEXT'07 will not accept any paper which, at the time of submission, is
under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication
in a journal or another conference. This restriction does not apply to
submissions for workshops and other venues with a limited audience.


IMPORTANT DATES
---------------

Deadline for workshop proposal submissions                   January 31,
2007
Deadline for paper submissions                               March 15, 2007
Deadline for poster and demonstration abstract submissions   March 15, 2007
Notification of acceptance/rejection for paper submissions   May 7, 2007
Suggested deadline for workshop paper submission             May 15, 2007
Deadline for final versions of accepted papers               May 31, 2007
Workshop days                                            August 20-21, 2007
Main conference (including poster and demo sessions)     August 22-24, 2007


CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS
---------------------

CONFERENCE CHAIR
    Boicho Kokinov, New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria

PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS
    Daniel C. Richardson, UCSC, USA
    Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer, DFKI, Germany
    Laure Vieu, IRIT-CNRS, France, and ISTC-CNR, Italy

WORKSHOPS CHAIR
    Stefan Schulz, The e-Spirit Company GmbH, Dortmund, Germany

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
    Henning Christiansen, Roskilde University, Denmark (Chair)
    Troels Andreasen, Roskilde University, Denmark
    John Gallagher, Roskilde University, Denmark
    Mads Rosendahl, Roskilde University, Denmark
    J¿rgen Villadsen, Technical University of Denmark (Publicity Chair)

STEERING COMMITTEE
    Chiara Ghidini, ITC-irst, Italy (Chair)
    Varol Akman, Bilkent University, Turkey
    Massimo Benerecetti, University of Naples, Italy
    Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento, Italy
    Patrick BrŽzillon, University of Paris 6, France
    Anind Dey, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
    Fausto Giunchiglia, ITC-irst, Italy
    Boicho Kokinov, New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria
    David Leake, Indiana University, USA
    Luciano Serafini, Trentino Cultural Institute (ITC), Italy
    Rich Thomason, University of Michigan, USA
    Roy Turner, University of Maine, USA
    Roger A. Young, University of Dundee, UK


FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
---------------------------

Please see http://context-07.ruc.dk/ for additional information on the
conference, complete committee information, and contacts for questions.
From: "Joergen Villadsen" <jv@imm.dtu.dk>
To: <brian@daimi.au.dk>
Subject: CONTEXT'07, call for workshop proposals
Sender: "Joergen Villadsen" <jv@imm.dtu.dk>
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 08:21:12 +0100
X-DAIMI-Spam-Score: 0.136 () BAYES_50,FORGED_RCVD_HELO

------------------------------------------------------------------------
                      CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS

           6th International and Interdisciplinary Conference
                     on Modeling and Using Context

                     Roskilde University - Denmark
                           20-24 August 2007

                       http://context-07.ruc.dk
------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONTEXT 07 Workshops:

CONTEXT 07 invites proposals for the workshop program. Workshops will
be held on August 20-21 immediately prior to the main program of the
conference.


GENERAL INFORMATION

The main goal of the CONTEXT 07 workshops is to stimulate and facilitate
an active exchange on unique and interdisciplinary applications, ideas,
approaches, and methods about specific topics in the general area of
Modeling and Using Context. The Workshops provide a setting that fosters
informal discussion and active engagement among attendees. Researchers
from all disciplines are invited to submit proposals for workshop for
review. Workshops on specific relevant aspects of broader topics and
newly evolving areas of Context are particularly encouraged.

Workshops in general will be one full day in duration, exceptionally
lasting half a day or two days. Format and content of each workshop will
largely be determined by each workshop's organizing committee. Proposals
for "mini-conference" style workshops are discouraged and ample time
should be allotted for general discussion. Workshop organizers and
attendees must register for the main CONTEXT 07 conference!

For presenting workshop summaries to all conference attendees, a time
slot of about 10 minutes each will be provided in coordination with the
main conference's regular sessions. These summaries should be presented
by at least one of the workshop's organizers.


SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS

To propose a workshop for CONTEXT 07, you will submit a full proposal of
at most 5 pages containing the following information:

 * The proposed title of the workshop;
 * A brief description of the technical issues the workshop addresses;
 * A brief discussion on target audience and relevance to CONTEXT 07;
 * A preliminary workshop agenda/schedule, including desired duration;
 * A description of the intended workshop format and style;
 * A description of paper review process and acceptance standards;
 * Potential program committee members, including their affiliations;
 * Number of expected and, if available, a list of interested attendees;
 * Intended means of advertising the workshop;
 * Related workshops recently held, with description and location;
 * Contact information, including the names, postal addresses, phone
   numbers, and email addresses of the proposed workshop organizing
   committee. The committee should consist of three or four people
   knowledgeable about the technical issues to be addressed and,
   ideally, not being from the same institution;
 * Brief notes on each member of the organizing committee and their
   recent work relating to the technical issues addressed.

All proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the CONTEXT 07
workshop chair as PDF file as soon as possible but no later than
January 31, 2007 at:

  context07@workshop.hm

Proposals will be reviewed by the program committee and prospective
organizers will be notified of their decision no later than February 15,
2006.


RESPONSIBILITIES OF CONTEXT 07 AND WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

For all accepted proposals, CONTEXT 07 will be responsible for:

 * Providing a meeting place for the workshop;
 * Determining the workshop date and time;
 * Duplicating working notes.

Workshop organizers will be responsible for the following:

 * Setting up a web site for the workshop;
 * Advertising the workshop and issuing a call for papers/participation;
 * Review and select presentations and papers;
 * Providing the complete workshop's working notes as single PDF file;
 * Ensure registration of workshop organizers and participants to the
   main conference;
 * Arrange for special requirements with the CONTEXT 07 Workshop Chair
   no later than July 18, 2007.

The workshop's call for papers should clarify the process by which the
organizing committee will review and select the papers and presentations
for being accepted. Additionally, the procedure, form, and dates for
submissions should be included. It is recommended to adopt the deadlines
for submissions and notifications from the list of important dates as
given below.

CONTEXT 07 reserves the right to cancel any workshop if the above
responsibilities are not fulfilled, or if too few attendees register
for the workshop. In special cases, the CONTEXT 07 program committee
may suggest the consolidation of workshops, to prevent the need for
cancellation.

The decision on the acceptance of workshops to be included in the final
CONTEXT 07 program will be based upon multiple factors, among others,
scientific and/or technical interest of the topic, the proposal's
quality, distinctness and balance of the workshop's topics, and the
capacity of the conference workshop program.


IMPORTANT DATES (2007)

Jan 31.  Deadline for Workshop Proposal Submission
Feb 15.  Notification of Acceptance for Workshop Proposals
May 15.  Suggested Deadline for Workshop Paper Submission
Jun 07.  Suggested Day of Notifications for Papers
Jun 30.  Suggested Deadline for Camera-ready Copies of Papers
         to be received by the Workshop Organizers
Jul 18.  Deadline for Camera-ready Copy of Workshop Notes
         to be received by the CONTEXT 07 Workshop Chair
Aug 20.-21. Workshop Days


CONTACT

Stefan Schulz
The e-Spirit Company GmbH

Phone: +49 (231) 28661 - 43
Fax:   +49 (231) 28661 - 59

Email: context07@workshop.hm





14) Doctoral Symp. on Stochastic Local Search Algorithms


Doctoral Symposium on
                 Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms 2007
                                 (SLS-DS2007)
               http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/sls2007/doctoral_symposium
                               Brussels, Belgium
                             September 6th-8th, 2007

               part of the International Workshop on
               Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms
                     http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/sls2007/
*******************************************************************************

The Doctoral Symposium on Engineering Stochastic Local Search
Algorithms (SLS-DS) is part of the Workshop on Engineering Stochastic
Local Search Algorithms in Brussels, Belgium, on 6-8 September 2007.
The Doctoral Symposium is a constructive and friendly forum where doctoral
students can:

   1. present their research and obtain constructive feedback from senior
      researchers
   2. establish contact with other students at a similar stage in their
careers
   3. experience an international research event.

The goal of the symposium is to expose students to helpful criticism of
their
current or future research plans and to foster discussions related to their
research and careers.

The format of the symposium is a short single slide oral presentation of
the student's research topic followed by a poster presentation.

Places at the doctoral symposium will be limited. The organisers'
decision on the
acceptance of a student's work for presentation at the symposium will be
based on
an extended abstract describing the student's research. All submissions
will be reviewed for relevance and for quality and clarity of presentation.

Accepted abstracts will appear in the doctoral symposium's proceedings,
will be distributed to all participants of SLS 2007, and will appear as an
IRIDIA Technical Report online (ISSN 1781-3794).


Submission
----------------
Submissions of 5-page extended abstracts are invited from doctoral
students conducting
research on all aspects of engineering stochastic local search algorithms.

Submission formatting instructions are available from the Doctoral Symposium
web page.

By submitting an extended abstract, the author(s) agree that, if their
abstract
is accepted, they will:

   1. Submit a final, revised, camera-ready version by the deadline for
      camera-ready extended abstracts,
   2. Register at least one author for the SLS Workshop
   3. Attend the Doctoral Symposium (at least one author) to present their
      accepted abstract as a poster.


Important Dates
----------------

June 01, 2007         Electronic Extended Abstract Submission Deadline
June 30, 2007         Author Notifications Sent
July 10, 2007         Camera-Ready copy of accepted abstracts due

Committee

   1. Enda Ridge, The Department of Computer Science, The University of
York, U.K.
   2. Edward Curry, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Galway, Ireland
   3. Thomas StŸtzle, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
   4. Mauro Birattari, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
   5. Holger H. Hoos, CS Department, UBC, Vancouver, Canada

***************************************************************************
***************************************************************************


15) ECCAI bulletin #5 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OUTLINE Bulletin #5, November 2006: http://www.eccai.org/bulletin/current.shtml
====================================================
- 2006 Artificial Intelligence Dissertation award
- ECCAI conferences : IJCAI-07 (workshops)
 + few words on ACAI-07 + ECAI-08 + ECAI-10
- ECCAI Journals : IEEE Intelligent Systems + AIComs
====================================================
Bulletin #5, November 2006
==================
Dissertation Award
==================
Nominations are invited for the 2006 Artificial Intelligence Dissertation Award sponsored by ECCAI, the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence.
This Award includes a certificate signed by the ECCAI Chair and 1.500 Euros (which includes the travel grant for the Award ceremony). Eligible doctoral dissertations are those defended after December 1, 2005 in the general area of Artificial Intelligence. The dissertation must have been defended at an European university and the author must be a personal member of an ECCAI member society. Multiple submissions of the same doctoral dissertation to other dissertation award activities of other societies are excluded.

To be considered, a dissertation must be nominated by the thesis supervisor, who must submit the following items:

    * three copies of the dissertation or a link to a WWW version of the thesis,
    * five copies of an extended abstract (3 to 5 pages) in English,
    * if the thesis was not written in English the nomination must include an English paper describing the core ideas of the thesis that has been submitted for publication in an international journal or a prestigious conference. The nominee must be the first author of this paper.
    * nomination letters from two referees selected by the dissertation supervisor, supporting the submission and stating their assessment of why the thesis should win the award.

Submissions will be judged by the Peer Reviewing Procedure, coordinated by a representative of the ECCAI Board.
Submissions and Requests should be sent to:
Ulises CortŽs (Universitat Polit�cnica de Catalunya UPC)
For more details, see http://www.eccai.org/diss-award/current.shtml
The deadline for receipt of submissions is January 31, 2007.
=================
ECCAI conferences
=================
IJCAI-07:
---------
Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
6-12 January, 2007, Hyderabad, India, www.ijcai-07.org
Theme: Artificial Intelligence and Its Benefits to Society...
Conference Chair: Ramon Lopez de Mantaras confchair07@ijcai.org

The IJCAI-07 Workshop Program is already available at http://www.ijcai-07.org. It consists of 28 workshops covering a large number  of topics, including language technologies, agents and multiagent  systems, learning, and several application areas like health, music,  and space. The program is organised in ten parallel sessions along  three days, January 6-8 2007, and tries to avoid, up to which is  possible, the overlapping of related workshops. We aim at setting the  appropriate atmosphere to foster the active exchange of ideas.
For  further information on individual workshops follow the links that you  will find in the workshop table and get in touch whenever necessary  with their contact person.

ACAI-07:
--------
The next ACAI summer shool will be held in August, 20-28, in Leuwen (Belgium) on "Logic for AI".
It will be hosted by the Laboratory for declarative languages and artificial intelligence (DTAI / Katholieke Universiteit Leuven).
More details in the next bulletin.

ECAI-08 in Patras (Greece) / 21-25 July 2008
--------
The University of Patras Conference centre (http://www.confer.upatras.gr) is situated within the University campus.
For more details:  http://www.ece.upatras.gr/ecai2008 website.
More details coming soon.

ECAI-10 in Lisbon (Portugal)
--------
More details later.

==============
ECCAI Journals
==============
- IEEE Intelligent systems
--------------------------
http://www.computer.org/intelligent/
on Intelligent Agents in Healthcarecover image :
Intelligent agents' basic properties (autonomy, proactivity, and social ability) and multiagent systems' main features (management of distributed information, and communication and coordination between autonomous entities) potentially make them a good solution for problems in the healthcare domain. This special issue presents successful applications of agent technology in healthcare-related areas such as diagnosis, monitoring, scheduling, and decision support.
Also in this issue: What's wrong with hit ratio, formal methods in software engineering, and more

- Artificial Intelligence Communications:
------------------------------------------
http://iospress.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=issue&issn=0921-7126&issue=current
Issue: Volume 19, Number 3 / 2006
- Template programs for Disjunctive Logic Programming: An operational semantics pp. 193 - 206 by Francesco Calimeri and Giovambattista Ianni
- A conceptual clustering approach for user profiling in personal information agents pp. 207 - 227 by Daniela Godoy and Anal’a Amandi
- Rewriting queries using views with negation pp. 229 - 237
by Foto Afrati and Vassia Pavlaki
- A Compact Representation for Least Common Subsumers in the description logic ALE pp. 239 - 273 by Chan Le Duc, Nhan Le Thanh, Marie-Christine Rousset
- Fuzzy constraint satisfaction approach for landmark recognition in mobile robotics pp. 275 - 289 by Abraham Otero, Paulo FŽlix, Carlos Regueiro, Miguel Rodr’guez, SenŽn Barro
=======================================
Next ECCAI-Bulletin in December 2006
=====================================

_____________________________________________________________________
Marie-Odile Cordier, Professeur UniversitŽ Rennes1, IRISA, Campus de Beaulieu, F-35042 Rennes Cedex, tel : +33 2 99 84 71 O0, fax : +33 2 99 84 71 71 ou +33 2 99 84 25 33

Dear ECCAI Member Society Representative:

ECCAI has started a membership initiative under the heading "Join us!".

I have collected links to membership pages of the ECCAI member
societies. Please have a look at http://www.eccai.org/join-us.shtml

If you have better link for your society send me this link -
I will do the update.

We will try to advertise this web page to help getting new
members. Please help your society and us to increase
membership. There is a high potential for new members. We
see a large portion of non-member registrations at ECAIs.
We should motivate these (young) researchers to join us.

Thanks for your cooperation.

Werner Horn
ECCAI Chair
www.eccai.org





16) EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION IN DEFENCE APPLICATIONS, CEC2007

EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION IN DEFENCE APPLICATIONS
A Special Session at the 2007 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation
25-28 September 2007, Singapore
 
[CALL FOR PAPERS ]
 
Applying techniques of evolutionary computation to defence and security
domain has recently received considerable attention from the research
community with a tremendous demand for effective and robust solutions to
defence and security problems.
 
This special session on Evolutionary Computation in Defence Applications
(ECDA) seeks to bring together researchers from around the globe for a creative
discussion on recent advances and challenges facing ECDA research. The special
session on ECDA (http://www.itee.adfa.edu.au/~alar/ecda07/) is organized
within CEC'2007 (http://www.cec2007.org).
 
We invite authors to submit their original and unpublished work that
demonstrates current research and novel applications in ECDA. The special
session will focus on evolutionary computation techniques for problems related
to, but not limited to, the following topics:
 
Red teaming
Data farming/mining/fusion.
War-gaming
Network intrusion detection.
Mission planning
Adaptive forces.
Tactical decision making.
Emergence in battlefield simulations.
Path-planning for agents in combat-simulated systems.
Surveillance.
Logistics and supply chain.
Information Operations.
Risk assessments.
Network centric warfare.
Unmanned Vehicles and Swarms
 
 
PAPER SUBMISSION
 
Papers submitted for this session will be peer-reviewed with the same criteria
used for other contributed papers. All accepted papers will be included in the
published conference proceedings. The paper format of the conference is
available on the website: http://www.cec2007.org. After the final decision is
made, authors will receive a notification letter accompanied with the reports of
the reviewers. All accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings of
CEC'2007 and at least one of the authors must register and attend to present
his/her paper at CEC'2007.
 
All papers will be submitted via CEC submission system. Please follow the instructions carefully to upload your papers.
If you experience any difficulty, please feel free to contact us directly.
 
 
IMPORTANT DATES
 
Paper Submission: March 15th, 2007
Notification of acceptance/rejection: May 15th, 2007
Camera-ready submission: June 15th, 2007
 
ORGANIZERS
 
Lam Thu Bui and David Cornforth,
 
The Artificial Life and Adaptive Robotics Laboratory: <http://www.itee.adfa.edu.au/~alar>http://www.itee.adfa.edu.au/~alar  
School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
University of New South Wales,
Australian Defence Force Academy,
Canberra, Australia
Phone: + 61 2 62688324
Fax: +61 2 62688581
Email: {l.bui, d.cornforth}@ adfa.edu.au
Home pages:
<http://www.itee.adfa.edu.au/~z3055293>http://www.itee.adfa.edu.au/~z3055293 and
<http://www.itee.adfa.edu.au/~s3165516>http://www.itee.adfa.edu.au/~s3165516  
 

 

 

17) Evomusart

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

EvoMUSART 2007

5th European Workshop on Evolutionary Music and Art

11-13 April, 2007, Valencia, Spain

EVOSTAR     http://www.evostar.org/
EVOMUSART      http://evonet.lri.fr/TikiWiki/tiki-index.php?page=EvoMUSART

NEW: EVOMUSART EXHIBITION "ArtEscapes"
       http://evonet.lri.fr/TikiWiki/tiki-index.php?page=ArtEscapes
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The use of biological inspired techniques for the development of artistic
systems is a recent, exciting and significant area of research. There is a
growing interest in the application of these techniques in fields such as:
visual art and music generation, analysis, and interpretation; sound
synthesis; architecture; video; and design.

EvoMUSART 2007 is the fifth workshop of the EvoNet working group on
Evolutionary Music and Art. Following the success of previous events
and the growth of interest in the field, the main goal of EvoMUSART
2007 is to bring together researchers who are using biological
inspired techniques for artistic tasks, providing the opportunity to
promote, present and discuss ongoing work in the area.

The workshop will be held from 11-13 April, 2007 in Valencia, Spain,
as part of the Evo* event.

The event includes the exhibition "ArtEscapes: Variations of Life in the
Media Arts", (http://evonet.lri.fr/TikiWiki/tiki-index.php?page=ArtEscapes)
giving an opportunity for the presentation of evolutionary
art and music. The submission of art works for the exhibition session
is independent from the submission of papers.

Accepted papers will be presented orally at the workshop and included
in the EvoWorkshops proceedings, published by Springer Verlag in the
Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOPICS OF INTEREST
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The papers should concern the use of biological inspired techniques -
e.g. Evolutionary Computation, Artificial Life, Swarm Intelligence,
etc. - in the scope of the generation, analysis and interpretation of
art, music, design, architecture and other artistic fields. Topics of
interest include, but are not limited to:

- Generation
   o Biological Inspired Art - Systems that create drawings, images,
   animations, sculptures, poetry, text, etc.;
   o Biological Inspired Music - Systems that create musical pieces,
   sounds, instruments, voices, etc.;
   o Robotic Based Evolutionary Art and Music;
   o Other related generative techniques;
- Theory
   o Computational Aesthetics, Emotional Response, Surprise, Novelty;
   o Representation techniques;
   o Surveys of the current state-of-the-art in the area; identification
     of weaknesses and strengths; comparative analysis and classification;
   o Validation methodologies;
   o Studies on the applicability of these techniques to related areas;
   o New models designed to promote the creative potential of biological
     inspired computation;
- Computer Aided Creativity
   o Systems in which biological inspired computation is used to promote
     the creativity of a human user;
   o New ways of integrating the user in the evolutionary cycle;
   o Analysis and evaluation of: the artistic potential of biological
     inspired art and music; the artistic processes inherent to these
     approaches; the resulting artifacts;
   o Collaborative distributed artificial art environments;
- Automation
   o Techniques for automatic fitness assignment;
   o Systems in which an analysis or interpretation of the artworks is
     used in conjunction with biological inspired techniques to produce
     novel objects;
   o Systems that resort to biological inspired computation to perform
     the analysis of image, music, sound, sculpture, or some other types
     of artistic object;

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND SUBMISSION DETAILS
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Submit your manuscript, at most 10 A4 pages long, in Springer LNCS
format (instructions downloadable from
http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,5-164-2-72376-0,00.html)
no later than November 1, 2006.

The papers will be peer reviewed by at least three members of
the program committee. Authors will be notified via email on the
results of the review by December 15, 2006.

The reviewing process is double blind.
Authors should remove their names from submitted papers, and avoid statements
and references that would identify the authors.

Papers must be submitted using the conference management software.
Please follow the instructions in:
   http://evonet.lri.fr/EvoWorkshops07-Submission/

The authors of accepted papers will have to improve their paper on the
basis of the reviewers' comments and will be asked to send a camera
ready version of their manuscripts, along with text sources and
pictures, by January 8, 2007. The accepted papers will appear in the
workshop proceedings, published in Springer LNCS Series, which will be
available at the workshop.

Further information can be found on the following pages:
   Evo*2007: http://www.evostar.org
   EvoMUSART2007: http://evonet.lri.fr/TikiWiki/tiki-index.php?page=EvoMUSART

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT DATES
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Submission:        1 November 2006
Notification:        15 December 2006
Camera ready:        8 January 2007
Workshop:        11-13 April 2007

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
WORKSHOP CHAIRS
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Penousal Machado
University of Coimbra, Portugal
Machado AT dei DOT uc DOT pt

Juan Romero
University of A Coruna, Spain
jj AT udc DOT es


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alan Dorin, Monash University, Australia
Alejandro Pazos, University of A Coruna, Spain
Amilcar Cardoso, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Andrew Gildfind, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia
Andrew Horner, University of Science & Technology, Hong Kong
Antonino Santos, University of A Coruna, Spain
Artemis Sanchez Moroni, Renato Archer Research Center, Brazil
Bill Manaris, College of Charleston, USA
Brian J. Ross, Brock University, Canada
Carlos Grilo, School of Technology and Management of Leiria, Portugal
Charlie D. Frowd, University of Stirling, UK
Christian Jacob, University of Calgary, Canada
Colin Johnson, University of Kent, UK
Eduardo R. Miranda, University of Plymouth, UK
Eleonora Bilotta, University of Calabria, Italy
Evelyne Lutton, INRIA, France
Francisco Camara Pereira, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Francois-Joseph Lapointe, University of Montreal, Canada
Gary Greenfield, University of Richmond, USA
Gary Lee Nelson, Oberlin College, USA
Gerhard Widmer, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Gianfranco Campolongo, University of Calabria, Italy
James McDermott, University of Limerick, Ireland
Janis Jefferies, Goldsmiths College,  University of London, UK
Jeffrey Ventrella, Independent Artist, US
Joao Martins, University of Plymouth, UK
John Collomosse, University of Bath, UK
Jon McCormack, Monash University, Australia
Jorge Tavares, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Larry Bull, University of the West of England, UK
Luigi Pagliarini, Pescara Electronic Artists Meeting & University of
   Southern Denmark, Italy
Maria Goga, University of Bucharest, Romania
Martin Hemberg, Imperial College London, UK
Matthew Lewis, Ohio State University, USA
Nicolas MonmarchZ, University of Tours, France
Nicolae Goga, University of Groningen, Netherlands
Paul Brown, University of Sussex, UK
Paulo Urbano, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Peter Bentley, University College London, UK
Peter Todd, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany
Pietro Pantano, University of Calabria, Italy
Rafael Ramirez, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
Rodney Waschka II, North Carolina State University, USA
Ruli Manurung, University of Indonesia, Indonesia
Scott Draves, Independent Artist, USA
Stefano Cagnoni, University of Parma, Italy
Stephen Todd, IBM, UK
Tim Blackwell, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
Tony Brooks, Aalborg University, Denmark
William Latham, Art Games Ltd, UK




18) EvoCOMNET 2007


                          ****** EvoComNet2007 ******

    4th European Workshop on the application of Nature-inspired techniques
          to Telecommunication Networks and other Connected Systems

                       Valencia, Spain, April 11-13, 2007

                 ---------------------------------------------
                 Submission deadline:         10 November 2006
                 Notification of acceptance:  15 December 2006
                 Camera ready papers:         08 January 2007
                 ---------------------------------------------

                            http://www.evostar.org/


EvoCOMNET 2007 is the fourth European Workshop on the application of
Nature-inspired techniques to networked systems, with special emphasis to
telecommunication networks. EvoCOMNET 2007 is part of EVO*, that joins the
Europe's premier co-located events in the field of Evolutionary Computing and
Nature-inspired techniques.

The rapid advances in computing and transmission technologies are giving
impetus to the large-scale deployment of interconnected systems for
communication and transport of data, voice, video and resources. The global
Internet, and cellular, satellite, and Wi-Fi networks, as well as power and
logistic networks, just to mention a few remarkable examples, are at the same
time ubiquitous and at the very heart of the functioning and success of modern
societies. On the other hand, all these networks are increasingly
heterogeneous, complex, and dynamic, such as they present a number of
challenging issues concerning their analysis and design, management and
control, robustness and security.

Biological systems show a number of properties, such as self-organization,
adaptivity, scalability, robustness, autonomy, locality of interactions,
distribution, which are highly desirable to deal with the growing complexity of
current and future networks. Therefore, in recent years a growing number of
effective solutions for problems related to networked systems have been
proposed by taking inspiration from the observation of natural systems and
processes such as natural selection, insect societies, immune systems, cultural
systems, collective behaviors of groups of animals/cells, etc.

The aim of the workshop is to provide a forum to present the cutting edge
research on Nature-inspired approaches to network-related problems. The
workshop sought to provide a deep insight into the effective potentialities of
Nature-inspired design to tackle the numerous problems arising in networked
systems, and, in particular, in modern telecommunication networks.



------------------------------------
Areas of Interests and Contributions
------------------------------------

EvoCOMNET 2007 solicits contributions dealing with the application of ideas
from natural processes and systems to the solution of problems of practical
and/or theoretical interests in all domains related to the analysis, design,
control, management, protection, and testing of network systems. All systems
based on a physical network structure and/or on an abstract network model are
of interest for the workshop. The scope of the workshop emphasizes the
following domains:

    * Communication systems: telecommunications; mobile, satellite, optical,
      and voice communications; personal communication systems; switching and
      routing; transmission systems; access systems; communication systems
      simulation; station and antenna design; information and speech
      processing; intrusion detection; error control coding; compression and
      cryptography; propagation and channel modelling; protocol design; etc.


    * Networks: networks and graph problems; unconstrained and constrained
      network design problems; network flows; network and computer security;
      Internet problems; electrical, power, and data networks; computer
      networks; location and link design; reliability and failure; corporate
      network design; location placement; network physical and software
      architecture; network hardware and software technologies; operations,
      maintenance, and management; signalling and control; active networks;
      network services and applications; etc.


    * Wireless networks: mesh networks; mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs); peer
      to peer mobile networks; sensor area networks; GSM/GPRS networks; energy
      efficient and techniques and QoS for MANETs and sensor area networks;
      real world implementations; network services and applications in wireless
      mobile networks; security in wireless networks; hybrid networks;
      intelligent mobile agents for network control and management; RFID based
      systems; robotic networks; etc.


    * Connected systems: network problems in non-technical environments;
      manufacturing, distribution and logistics networks; supply and disposal
      networks; inter-personal communication; communication analysis;
      inter-organisational communication; supply chains; information networks;
      etc.


    * Formal methods and techniques: formal techniques and methods to model the
      behavior and working of above-mentioned systems.



- Particularly welcomed are submissions contributing with:

    * Applications of Nature-inspired techniques (e.g. Evolutionary
      Computation, Ant Algorithms, Swarm Intelligence, Artificial Immune
      Systems, Cultural Algorithms, etc.) to novel network-related problems

    * Definition of novel Nature-inspired techniques and/or general frameworks
      specifically addressing network challenges

    * Detailed comparative studies of Nature-inspired solutions versus more
      classical/established techniques

    * Analytical studies of the behavior and working of the proposed solutions

    * Real-world implementations

    * Studies based on real-world data sets

    * Live demonstrations of algorithm behavior



--------------------
Submission procedure
--------------------


High quality papers are sought on the topics related to the focus of the
workshop, ranging from theoretical work to innovative applications.

Submitted papers must be a maximum of TEN A4 pages long and must conform to
Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science format for multi-author
proceedings. Please download the LNCS package for proceedings directly from the
Springer web site.

The reviewing process is DOUBLE BLIND. Authors should remove their names from
submitted papers, and avoid statements and references that would identify the
authors.

Papers must be submitted using the conference management software. Please
follow the instructions on the web site



-----------
Publication
-----------

All the peer-reviewed papers accepted in the EVO* workshops will be published
in the volume "Applications of Evolutionary Computing" in Springer's LNCS
series.

We will also consider the possibility to arrange a journal special issue with
the best papers submitted.


---------------
Important Dates
---------------

Submission deadline:	              10 November 2006 (deadline extended!)
Notification of acceptance: 	      15 December 2006
Camera ready papers:	               8 January 2007
Events: 	                   11-13 April 2007


----------------
Workshop Chairs
----------------

Muddassar Farooq
Informatik III
44221 Dortmund
Germany
muddassar.farooq@udo.edu


Gianni Di Caro
IDSIA
Galleria 2
6928 Manno-Lugano
Switzerland
gianni@idsia.ch


--------------------------
Workshop Program Committee
--------------------------

Payman ARABSHAHI - University of Washington (USA)
Eric BONABEAU - Icosystem Corp. (USA)
Frederick DUCATELLE - IDSIA, Lugano (Switzerland)
Luca M. GAMBARDELLA - IDSIA, Lugano (Switzerland)
Jin-Kao HAO - University of Angers (France)
Marc HEISSENBUETTEL - Swisscom Mobile Ltd. (Switzerland)
Malcolm I. HEYWOOD - Dalhousie University, Halifax (Canada)
Nur ZINCIR-HEYWOOD - Dalhousie University, Halifax (Canada)
Bryant JULSTROM - St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud (USA)
Vittorio MANIEZZO - University of Bologna (Italy)
Alcherio MARTINOLI - EPFL, Lausanne (Switzerland)
Jose' Luis MARZO - University of Girona (Spain)
Ronaldo MENEZES - Florida Tech., Melbourne (USA)
Roberto MONTEMANNI - IDSIA (Switzerland)
Martin ROTH - Deutsche Telekom Ltd., Berlin (Germany)
Leon ROTHKRANTZ - Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands)
Chien-Chung SHEN - University of Delaware, Newark (USA)
Kwang M. SIM - Hong Kong Baptist University (Hong Kong)
Mark C. SINCLAIR - Royal University of Phnom Penh (Cambodia)
George D. SMITH - University of East Anglia, Norwich (UK)
Christian TSCHUDIN - University of Basel (Switzerland)
Tony WHITE - Carleton University, Ottawa (Canada)
Yong XU - University of Birmingham (UK)
Lidia YAMAMOTO - University of Basel (Switzerland)
Franco ZAMBONELLI - University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia (Italy)



19) EvoDOP-2007 Workshop at GECCO-2007


             Workshop Announcement and Call for Participation

                              Workshop on

                         EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS
                                  FOR
                      DYNAMIC OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS

                             (EvoDOP-2007)

               http://homepages.cwi.nl/~bosman/evodop2007/


                        to be held as part of the

    2007 GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION CONFERENCE (GECCO-2007)

                   July 07-11, 2007 (Saturday-Wednesday)
                        University College London
                             London, England
                        Organized by ACM SIG-EVO
                        www.sigevo.org/gecco-2007

          PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR WORKSHOP: March 10, 2007


TOPIC
=====
Many real-world optimization problems are dynamic. New jobs are to be
added to a schedule, the quality of the raw material may be changing, new
orders have to be included into the routing of a fleet of vehicles, etc.
In such cases, when the problem changes over the course of the optimization,
the purpose of the optimization algorithm changes from finding an optimal
solution to being able to continuously track the movement of the optimum
through time. Since in a sense natural evolution is a process of continuous
adaptation, it seems straightforward to consider evolutionary algorithms as
appropriate candidates for dynamic optimization problems.

And indeed, several attempts have been made to modify evolutionary
algorithms, to tune them for optimization in a changing environment. It was
observed in all these studies, that the dynamic environment requires the
evolutionary algorithm to maintain sufficient diversity for a continuous
adaptation to the changes of the landscape. The following basic strategies
for modifying the evolutionary algorithm can be identified:

- identify the occurrence of a change in the environment and then
  deliberately increase diversity in the population e.g. by means
  of increased mutation
- try to avoid convergence all the time, e.g. by including new random
  individuals in the population in every generation
- supply the EA with a memory, e.g. by using diploidy or an explicit
  memory, so that the EA can recall useful information from past
  generations.

More recent developments in the area include the use of anticipation, the
role of flexibility, and multi-criteria aspects.

The goal of this workshop is to foster interest in the important subject
of evolutionary algorithms for dynamic optimization problems, get together
the researchers working on this topic, and to discuss recent trends in the
area.


SUBMITTING TO EvoDOP-2007
========================
The workshop will feature a series of selected presentations. To submit
your contribution, send your ACM-formatted paper in Postscript or PDF
by e-mail to Peter A.N. Bosman at Peter.Bosman@cwi.nl. Papers should not
exceed the limit of 8 pages and must meet with deadline of the workshop
(see important dates for details). In case you can not submit your paper
electronically, please contact one of the workshop chairs.

Please note that all contributions must abide ACM formatting rules because
all contributions will be on the conference CD as well as in the ACM digital
library. Failing to comply with the ACM formatting rules will result in
exclusion from the proceedings. For formatting details, visit
http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2007/papers.html.


IMPORTANT DATES FOR EvoDOP-2007
==============================
March 10, 2007: Paper submission deadline

April 03, 2007: Notification of acceptance

April 11, 2007: Camera-ready copy deadline


WEBSITE
=======
The workshop program and further information can be found online. Please
check http://homepages.cwi.nl/~bosman/evodop2007/ regularly for the latest
information. In case you have any questions, please contact one of the
workshop organizers.

We are looking forward to meeting you at EvoDOP-2007!


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
===================
Dr. Peter A.N. Bosman
Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science
Theme of Computational Intelligence and Multi-Agent Games
E-mail: Peter.Bosman @ cwi.nl

Dr. JŸrgen Branke
UniversitŠt Karlsruhe
Institute for Applied Computer Science and Formal Descriptiom Methods (AIFB)
E-mail: branke @ aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de





20) ECoMASS-2007

---------------------------------------------------------------
- C A L L  F O R  P A P E R S  -  C A L L  F O R  P A P E R S - 
---------------------------------------------------------------
   
Evolutionary Computation and Multi-Agent Systems and 
Simulation Workshop (ECoMASS-2007)
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~sevan/ecomass07/

at the

Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2007)
http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2007/
7-11 July, 2007, University College London, London, UK

---------------------------------------------------------------
Evolutionary computation (EC) and multi-agent systems and simulation
(MASS) both involve populations of agents. EC is a learning technique
by which a population of individual agents adapt according to the
selection pressures exerted by an environment; MASS seeks to
understand how to coordinate the actions of a population of (possibly
selfish) autonomous agents that share an environment so that some
outcome is achieved. Both EC and MASS have top-down and bottom-up
features. For example, some aspects of multi-agent system engineering
(e.g., mechanism design) are concerned with how top-down structure can
constrain or influence individual decisions. Similarly, most work in
EC is concerned with how to engineer selective pressures to drive the
evolution of individual behavior towards some desired goal. Multi-agent 
simulation (also called agent-based modeling) addresses the bottom-up 
issue of how collective behavior emerges from individual action. 
Likewise, the study of evolutionary dynamics within EC (for example in 
coevolution) often considers how population-level phenomena emerge from 
individual-level interactions. Thus, at a high level, we may view EC and 
MASS as examining and utilizing analogous processes. It is therefore 
natural to consider how knowledge gained within EC may be relevant to 
MASS, and vice versa; indeed, applications and techniques from one field
have often made use of technologies and algorithms from the other field. 
Studying EC and MASS in combination is warranted and has the potential 
to contribute to both fields.

The goal of this workshop is to facilitate the examination and
development of techniques at the intersection of evolutionary
computation and multi-agent systems and simulation.

*List of Example Topics
-Multi-agent systems and agent-based models utilizing evolutionary computation
-Optimization of multi-agent systems and agent-based models using
evolutionary computation
-Evolutionary computation models which rely not on explicit fitness
functions but rather implicit fitness functions defined by the
relationship to other individuals / agents 
-Applications utilizing MASS and EC in combination
-Biological agent-based models (usually called individual-based
models) involving evolution 
-Evolution of cooperation and altruism
-Genotypic representation of the complex phenotypic strategies of MASS
-Evolutionary learning within MASS (including Baldwinian learning and
phenotypic plasticity) 
-Emergence and feedbacks
-Open-ended strategy spaces and evolution
-Adaptive individuals within evolving populations

*Format of the Workshop
The workshop will be a two-hour event held on either the Saturday or
Sunday of GECCO.  The workshop will begin with an overview of the
topic by the coordinators, and then a series of peer-reviewed papers
will be presented on the subject of the workshop.

*Paper Submission
Each accepted paper will be presented orally at the workshop and
distributed in the workshop proceedings to all GECCO attendees. Authors should
follow the format of the GECCO manuscript style; refer to
http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2007/ for details. Manuscripts should not
exceed 6 pages. Papers may be submitted in PostScript or PDF format
to: wrand@northwestern.edu or sevan@eecs.harvard.edu. See
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~sevan/ecomass07/ for details.

*Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: 23 March, 2007
Notification of acceptance: 30 March, 2007
Camera-ready due: 11 April, 2007
Conference registration deadline:  11 April, 2007
Workshop: 7 or 8 July, 2007

*Workshop Chairs:
Dr. William Rand
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Northwestern University
600 Foster St.
Evanston, IL 60208 USA
Phone: 1-847-467-5734
Fax: 1-847-467-1280
Email: wrand@northwestern.edu
http://www.shakyladder.org

Dr. Sevan Ficici
AI Research Group
Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard University
Maxwell-Dworkin 242
33 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
Phone: 1-617-495-9289
Fax: 1-617-496-1066
Email: sevan@eecs.harvard.edu
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~sevan/

*Program Committee
Rick Riolo
Tina Yu
Additional Members TBA






21) Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms



	    Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms
				 ---
      Designing, Implementing and Analyzing Effective Heuristics

			       SLS 2007


		6-8 September, 2007. Brussels, Belgium

	      More details and up-to-date information at
		www.stochastic-local-search.net/sls07


Scope of the Workshop
======================

  Stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms are among the most powerful
  techniques for solving computationally hard problems in many areas
  of computer science, operations research and engineering. SLS
  techniques range from rather simple constructive and iterative
  improvement algorithms to general-purpose methods, also widely known
  as metaheuristics, such as ant colony optimization, evolutionary
  computation, iterated local search, memetic algorithms, simulated
  annealing, tabu search and variable neighbourhood search.

  In recent years, it has become evident that the development of
  effective SLS algorithms is a highly complex engineering process
  that typically combines aspects of algorithm design and
  implementation with empirical analysis and problem-specific
  background knowledge. The difficulty of this process is due in part
  to the complexity of the problems being tackled, and in part to the
  large number of degrees of freedom researchers and practitioners
  face when developing SLS algorithms.

  This development process needs to be assisted by a sound methodology
  that adresses the issues arising in the phases of algorithm design,
  implementation, tuning and experimental evaluation. In addition,
  more research is required to understand which SLS techniques are
  best suited for particular problem types and to better understand
  the relationship between algorithm components, parameter settings,
  problem characteristics and performance.


Relevant Research Areas
========================

  The aim of this workshop is to stress the importance of an
  integration of relevant aspects of SLS research into a more coherent
  engineering methodology and to bring together researchers that work
  in various fields, including computer science, operations research,
  metaheuristics, algorithmics, statistics and application areas.

  SLS 2007 solicits contributions dealing with any aspect of
  engineering stochastic local search algorithms. Typical, but not
  exclusive, topics of interest are:

    + Methodological developments for the implementation of SLS
      algorithms (engineering procedures, integration of tools in the
      SLS engineering process, ...)

    + In-depth experimental studies of SLS algorithms (behavior of SLS
      algorithms, comparison of SLS algorithms, ...), problem
      characteristics (search space analysis, ...) and their impact on
      algorithm performance.

    + Tools for the assistance in the development process of SLS
      algorithms (software libraries, automatic and semi-automatic
      tuning procedures, learning techniques, ...).

    + Case studies in the principled development of well designed SLS
      algorithms for practically relevant problems.

    + Aspects that become relevant when moving from "classical"
      NP-hard problems to those including multiple objectives,
      stochastic information or dynamically changing data.

    + New algorithmic developments (usage of AI/OR techniques, large
      scale neighbourhood searches, new SLS methods, data structures,
      distributed algorithms, ...)

    + Theoretical analysis of SLS behaviour and their impact on
      algorithm design (analysis of operators, dynamic behaviour of
      SLS algorithms, ...)


Publication
============

  The workshop proceedings will be published in Springer's Lecture
  Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.


Important Dates
================

  Submission deadline		  16 March, 2007
  Notification of acceptance      21 May, 2007
  Camera ready copy               4 June, 2007
  Workshop                        6-8 September, 2007


SLS 2007 Workshop Committee
============================

General Chairs

    Thomas Stuetzle, IRIDIA, CoDE, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
    Mauro Birattari, IRIDIA, CoDE, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
    Holger H. Hoos, CS Department, UBC, Vancouver, Canada


Further Information
====================

  Up-to-date information will be published on the web site
  www.stochastic-local-search.net/sls07.  For information about local
  arrangements, registration forms, etc., please refer to the
  above-mentioned web site or contact the local organizers.



--------------------------------------------------------------------

II  RRRR   II  DDDD    II   AAAA      Universite' Libre de Bruxelles
II  RR RR  II  DD DD   II  AA  AA     IRIDIA, CP 194/6
II  RRRR   II  DD  DD  II  AAAAAA     Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50
II  RR RR  II  DD DD   II  AA  AA     1050 Bruxelles
II  RR RR  II  DDDD    II  AA  AA     Belgium

         Dr. Thomas Stuetzle     Tel.: +32 (0)2 650 3167
             room C5.108a        Fax.: +32 (0)2 650 2715

 Email: stuetzle@ulb.ac.be
 WWW: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~stuetzle
      http://www.stochastic-local-search.net/sls07
      http://www.sls-book.net
--------------------------------------------------------------------


22) ESM'2007


------------ESM'2007, OCTOBER 22-24, 2007, WESTIN DRAGONARA HOTEL, ST.JULIAN'S,
MALTA, FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT------------

Dear Colleague

with this email I have the pleasure to send
you the first announcement for ESM2007
(The 21st European Simulation and Modelling
Conference) which will be held at the
Westin Dragonara Hotel, St. Julian's, Malta
(http://www.westinmalta.com) from October
22-24, 2007.

This conference in cooperation with
the University of Malta and chaired by
Jaroslav Sklenar will feature the following
tracks:

SPECIAL HIGHLIGHT TRACKS
- SIMULA- Special 40th anniversary Track
- Complex Systems and Self-Organization Modelling
- Multi-Agent Systems and Simulation

REGULAR TRACKS
- Modelling Methodology
- Modelling Simulation Tools
- Object-Orientation and Re-use
- Simulation and AI
- AI and Expert Systems
- AI and Neural Networks
- AI and Fuzzy Systems
- High Performance/Parallel and Large Scale Computing
- Simulation in Education and Graphics Visualization Simulation
- Simulation in Environmental Ecology, Biology and Medicine
- Analytical and Numerical Modelling Techniques
- Web Based Simulation
- Agent Based Simulation
- Simulation with Petri Nets
- Simulation with Bond Graphs
- DEVS
- Fluid Flow Modelling Simulation

NEW TRACK
- Cosmological Simulation

UNIVERSITY OF MALTA TRACK
- Modelling and Simulation of Electrical Systems

KEYNOTES:
The conference will feature the following keynotes:
Pierre l'Ecuyer, Universite de Montreal, Canada
Renate Sitte, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia

and the following invited speaker:
Eugene Kindler, Ostrava University, Ostrava, Czech Republic

The ESM'2007 website will be posted later this week
on:
http://www.eurosis.org/cms/?q=node/208

Submission deadlines start in June 2007.
A direct room reservation website will come online this
month.

GAMEON NA 2007-GAMEON 2007 and MESM 2007 emails will follow
shortly

Best Regards
Philippe

--
Philippe Geril               Tel: +32.9.264.55.09
EUROSIS -ETI                 Fax: +32.9.264.58.25
Ghent University             E-mail: philippe.geril@eurosis.org
Dept.of Industrial Mgmt.     E-mail: pgeril@yahoo.co.uk
Technologiepark 903          URL: http://www.eurosis.org
Campus Ardoyen
B-9052 Ghent-Zwijnaarde
Belgium
*********************************************************************
*               Your Scientific information site on                 *
* Computer Simulation - Concurrent Engineering - Multimedia- Games  *
*                          WWW.EUROSIS.ORG                          *
*********************************************************************





23) EvoCOP 2007 
                       FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

                            EvoCOP 2007

        Seventh European Conference on Evolutionary Computation
          (and metaheuristics) in Combinatorial Optimization

                 Valencia, Spain, 11-13 April 2007

                      http://www.evostar.org
===================================================================



Topics
------

Metaheuristics have often been shown to be effective for difficult
combinatorial optimization problems appearing in various industrial,
economical, and scientific domains. Prominent examples of
metaheuristics are evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing,
tabu search, scatter search and path relinking, memetic algorithms,
ant colony and particle swarm optimization, variable neighborhood
search, iterated local search, greedy randomized adaptive search
procedures, estimation of distribution algorithms, and
hyperheuristics. Successfully solved problems include scheduling,
timetabling, network design, transportation and distribution
problems, vehicle routing, traveling salesman, graph problems,
satisfiability, packing problems, planning problems, and general
mixed integer programming.

The EvoCOP series, started in 2001 and held annually since then,
was the first event specifically dedicated to the application of
evolutionary computation and related methods to combinatorial
optimization problems. Following the general trend of hybrid
metaheuristics and diminishing boundaries between the different
classes of metaheuristics, EvoCOP broadened its scope in 2006, and
now explicitly invites submissions on any kind of metaheuristic for
combinatorial optimization. All accepted papers will be presented
orally at the conference and printed in the proceedings published
by Springer in the LNCS series (see LNCS volumes 2037, 2279, 2611,
3004, 3448, and 3906 for the previous proceedings). In addition,
negotiations are underway for post-publication of extended versions
of selected papers.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Applications of metaheuristics to combinatorial optimization problems
- Representation techniques
- Neighborhoods and efficient algorithms for searching them
- Variation operators for stochastic search methods
- Constraint-handling techniques
- Hybrid methods and hybridization techniques
- Parallelization
- Theoretical developments
- Search space analyses
- Comparisons between different (also exact) techniques

The conference will be held in conjunction with the 10th European
Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP2007), the Fifth European
Conference on Evolutionary Computation (EvoBIO2007) and EvoWorkshops2007,
a collection of application-oriented workshops in the field of
evolutionary computation.


Submission
----------

Submit your manuscript (PDF or postscript, max. 12 pages, Springer LNCS
style) electronically using the online submission service at

http://evonet.lri.fr/EvoCOP07-Submission/

no later than November 10, 2006. IMPORTANT: The reviewing process will be
double-blind, so please omit information about the authors in the
submitted
paper. The submissions will be peer reviewed by at least three members of
the program committee.

Authors will be notified on the results of the review by December 15,
2006.
The authors of accepted papers will have to improve their paper on the
basis
of the reviewers' comments and will be asked to send a camera ready
version
of their manuscripts by January 8, 2007.


Important Dates
---------------

Submission deadline:         10 November 2006
Notification of acceptance:  15 December 2006
Camera ready papers due:     8 January 2007
Events:                      11-13 April 2007


Program Chairs
--------------

Carlos Cotta (Universidad de Malaga, Spain)
Jano van Hemert (National e-Science Institute, University of Edinburgh,
UK)


More Information
----------------

More detailed information on the event, including venue, committees,
contact
addresses, etc., can be found at the Evo* homepage:

http://www.evostar.org


24) FroCoS'07

First Call for Papers
_________________________________________________________________

FroCoS: International Symposium on Frontiers of Combining Systems 2007
_________________________________________________________________

September 10-12, 2007
Department of Computer Science
University of Liverpool, UK

http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~frocos07/

Topics

Typical topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
-   combinations of logics such as combined predicate, temporal, modal, or
    epistemic logics;
-   combinations and modularity in ontologies;
-   combination of decision procedures, of satisfiability procedures, and of
    constraint solving techniques;
-   combinations and modularity in term rewriting;
-   integration of equational and other theories into deductive systems;
-   combination of deduction systems and computer algebra;
-   integration of data structures into CLP formalisms and deduction
    processes;
-   hybrid methods for deduction, resolution and constraint propagation;
-   hybrid systems in knowledge representation and natural language semantics;
-   combined logics for distributed and multi-agent systems;
-   logical aspects of combining and modularising programs and specifications.

Background

In various areas of computer science, such as logic, computation, program
development and verification, artificial intelligence, and automated
reasoning, there is an obvious need for using specialised formalisms and
inference mechanisms for special tasks. In order to be usable in practice,
these specialised systems must be combined with each other, and they must be
integrated into general purpose systems. The development of general techniques
and methods for the combination and integration of special formally defined
systems, as well as for the analysis and modularisation of complex systems has
been initiated in many areas. The International Symposium on Frontiers of
Combining Systems (FroCoS) traditionally focuses on this type of research
questions and activities and aims at promoting progress in the field. The
previous FroCoS's were held in Munich (1996), Amsterdam (1998), Nancy (2000),
Santa Margherita Ligure (2002), and Vienna (2005). In 2004 and 2006, FroCoS
joined IJCAR, the International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning. Like
its predecessors, FroCoS 2007 wants to offer a common forum for research
activities in the general area of combination, modularisation and integration
of systems (with emphasis on logic-based ones), and of their practical use.

Proceedings 

Proceedings will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes on Artificial
Intelligence (LNAI) series. 
 
Other Events
 
FroCoS will be collocated with FTP (Workshop on First-order Theorem Proving)
 
Important Dates

April 23, 2007:  Abstract submission deadline
April 30, 2007:  Full paper submission deadline
June 5,   2007:  Notification of acceptance
June 20,  2007:  Camera ready copies due

Submission 

The programme committee seeks high-quality submissions that are original and
not submitted for publication elsewhere. There are two categories of
submission:

 (A) Regular papers. Submissions should not exceed 15 pages and should contain
     original research, and sufficient detail to assess the merits and
     relevance of the contribution. Detailed instructions can be found at the
     FroCoS website.

 (B) Tool descriptions. Submissions should not exceed 8 pages, and should
     describe the implemented tool and its novel features. Detailed
     instructions can be found at the FroCoS website.

Programme Chair: Frank Wolter, Liverpool, UK

Conference Chair: Boris Konev, Liverpool, UK

Programme Committee:

Alessandro Armando
Franz Baader 
Jacques Calmet
Silvio Ghilardi
Bernhard Gramlich
Deepak Kapur
Boris Konev
Till Mossakowski
Joachim Niehren
Albert Oliveras
Dirk Pattinson
Silvio Ranise
Mark Reynolds
Christophe Ringeissen
Ulrike Sattler
Amilcar Sernadas
Cesare Tinelli
Luca Vigano
Frank Wolter



25) FUBUTEC 2007, Tu Delft, NL

------------FUBUTEC 2007, TU DELFT, NL, ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS DEADLINE OF
JANUARY 20 COMING UP.------------

Dear Colleague,

just a quick email to remind you that the
abstract submission deadline of January 20
for FUBUTEC 2007, Delft University of
Technology, April 25-27, 2007 is coming up.

The topics are as follows:
[ ] Statistical Analysis and Data Mining of Business Processes
[ ] Discrete Event Simulation and Queueing Systems in Business and
Economics
[ ] Agents in Business Automation and Economics
[ ] Simulation in Business and Economics
[ ] Simulation in Business Games
[ ] Simulation in OR and Knowledge Management
[ ] Emergency Management and Risk Analysis Management
[ ] Simulation in E-Management, E-Government, E-Commerce and E-Trade
[ ] Simulation Tools for Business Management and Business Intelligence
Simulation

And more information about the event can be found
on:http://85.255.195.219/cms/?q=node/98
or on http://www.eurosis.org

Regards
Philippe

--
Philippe Geril               Tel: +32.9.264.55.09
EUROSIS -ETI                 Fax: +32.9.264.58.25
Ghent University             E-mail: philippe.geril@eurosis.org
Dept.of Industrial Mgmt.     E-mail: pgeril@yahoo.co.uk
Technologiepark 903          URL: http://www.eurosis.org
Campus Ardoyen
B-9052 Ghent-Zwijnaarde
Belgium
*********************************************************************
*               Your Scientific information site on                 *
* Computer Simulation - Concurrent Engineering - Multimedia- Games  *
*                          WWW.EUROSIS.ORG                          *
*********************************************************************



26) GAMEON ASIA 2007 / ASTEC 2007 


------------GAMEON ASIA 2007 / ASTEC 2007 SUBMISSION DEADLINE OF DECEMBER 15,
2006 COMING UP------------

Dear Colleague,

just a quick reminder that the GAMEON ASIA 2007 and
ASTEC 2007, at Ritsumeikan University, Shiga, Japan
conferences abstract deadline of December 15 is next week

Conference websites:

ASTEC 2007

http://85.255.195.219/cms/?q=node/74

GAMEON ASIA 2007
http://85.255.195.219/cms/index.php?q=node/71

Best Regards
Philippe

EUROSIS will move its contact address in the
coming weeks. (more info to follow soon)

--
Philippe Geril               Tel: +32.9.264.55.09
EUROSIS -ETI                 Fax: +32.9.264.58.25
Ghent University             E-mail: philippe.geril@eurosis.org
Dept.of Industrial Mgmt.     E-mail: pgeril@yahoo.co.uk
Technologiepark 903          URL: http://www.eurosis.org
Campus Ardoyen
B-9052 Ghent-Zwijnaarde
Belgium
*********************************************************************
*               Your Scientific information site on                 *
* Computer Simulation - Concurrent Engineering - Multimedia- Games  *
*                          WWW.EUROSIS.ORG                          *
*********************************************************************




27) IAAI-07 

January 23: IAAI-07 Paper Submissions Due 

Dear AAAI Members,

The Nineteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-07), to be held July 24-26 in parallel with AAAI-07 in Vancouver, BC, Canada, will focus on successful applications of AI technology. The conference will use technical papers, invited talks, and panel discussions to explore issues, methods, and lessons learned in the development and deployment of AI applications; and to promote an interchange of ideas between basic and applied AI.

Paper submissions are due Tuesday, January 23, 2007. IAAI-07 will consider papers in two tracks: (1) deployed application case studies and (2) emerging applications or methodologies. Submissions should clearly identify which track they are intended for, as the two tracks are judged on different criteria. Case-study papers must describe deployed applications with measurable benefits that include some aspect of AI technology. The goal of the emerging application track is to ãbridge the gapä between basic AI research and deployed AI applications, by discussing efforts to apply AI tools, techniques, or methods to real world problems.

Prospective authors are required to register at the IAAI-07 paper submission site at http://aaai07.confmaster.net/pages/login.php?Conf=IAAI07. The software will assign a password, which will enable authors to log on to submit an abstract and paper. For further information about paper formatting and submission requirements, please review the Call for Papers at http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/IAAI/2007/iaai07call.php.

For more information or inquiries, please feel free to contact us at iaai07@aaai.org.

Happy New Year!

Carol Hamilton
Executive Director, AAAI






29) ICGD&BC 2007 

The First International Conference on Global Defense and Business Continuity

ICGD&BC 2007

Site: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/ICGDBC07.html


Submission: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/SubmitICGDBC07.html

Date: July 1-6, 2007

Place: Silicon Valley, CA, USA

Important deadlines:

Submission deadline             February 20, 2007

Notification of acceptance      March 10, 2007

Registration/camera ready     March 31, 2007
 

also featuring the workshop:

- TRACK 2007: The First International Workshop on Tracking Computing Technologies 

http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/TRACK.html
 
ICGD&BC Tracks (details in the Call for Papers on site)
 
BUSINESS: Business continuity 

RISK: Risk assessment 

DISASTER: Emergency services and disaster recovery 

TRUST: Privacy and trust in pervasive communications    

RIGHT: Digital rights management 

BIOTEC: Biometric techniques 

================================

ICGD&BC Chair

Reda Reda, Siemens, Germany/Austria






30) ICNC'07-FSKD'07

----------------------------------------------------------------------
   The 3rd International Conference on Natural Computation (ICNC'07)
       The 4th International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and  
                      Knowledge Discovery (FSKD'07)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

                 24 - 27 August 2007, Haikou, China

             *** Submission Deadline: 15 March 2007 ***

           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
               <http://www.hainu.edu.cn/htm/icnc-fskd2007>http://www.hainu.edu.cn/htm/icnc-fskd2007
           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

             Call for Papers & Special Session Proposals

The joint ICNC'07-FSKD'07 will be held in Haikou, China. Haikou, the
capital city of Hainan Province, is a pleasant modern city with a number
of historical and cultural sights to see and to hold you for a few days
before heading off to Hainan's beautiful beaches and inland villages.
ICNC'07-FSKD'07 aims to provide an international forum for scientists
and researchers to present the state of the art of intelligent methods
inspired from nature, including biological, linguistic, ecological, and
physical systems, with applications to data mining, manufacturing,
design, reliability, and more. It is an exciting and emerging inter-
disciplinary area in which a wide range of techniques and methods are
being studied for dealing with large, complex, and dynamic problems.

Previously, the joint conferences in 2005 and 2006 each attracted over
3100 submissions from more than 30 countries.

All accepted papers will be indexed by both EI (Compendex) and ISTP.
Furthermore, extended versions of many good papers will be published in
SCI-indexed journals, as well as Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)
and Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) that will be indexed
in SCI-Expanded.  

In addition to regular sessions, participants are encouraged to organize
special sessions on specialized topics. Each special session should have
at least 4 papers. Special session organizers will solicit submissions,
conduct reviews and recommend accept/reject decisions on the submitted
papers.

For more information, visit the conference web page or email the
secretariat at <mailto:nc2007@hainu.edu.cn>nc2007@hainu.edu.cn

Join us at this major event in scenic Hainan !!!



32) IEEE Second Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems



---------------------------------------------------------------------
                            CALL FOR PAPERS
---------------------------------------------------------------------
              SIES'2007 - IEEE Second Symposium on
                  Industrial Embedded Systems
      July 4-6, 2007, Hotel Costa da Caparica, Lisbon, Portugal
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Conference web site:  http://www.uninova.pt/sies2007/
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Sponsored by:
IEEE Industrial Electronics Society
UNINOVA  and Universidade Nova de Lisboa-FCT-DEE
--------------------------------------------------------------------
AIM
The aim of the symposium is to bring together researchers and practitioners
from industry and academia and provide them with a platform to report on
recent developments, deployments, technology trends and research results, as
well as initiatives related to embedded systems and their applications in a
variety of industrial environments.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

TOPICS OF INTEREST
Embedded Systems: Design and Validation of Embedded Systems;
    Real-Time Issues; Models of Embedded Computation and Formal
    Methods; HW/SW Co-Design; Design and Verification Languages;
    Operating Systems and Quasi-Static Scheduling; Timing and
    Performance Analysis; Power Aware Embedded Computing;
    Adaptive Embedded Systems; Security in Embedded Systems System-on-Chip
and Network-on-Chip Design & Testing: Design of
    Application-Specific Instruction-Set Processors; Design and
    Programming of Embedded Multiprocessors; SoC Communication and
    Architectures;  NoC Communication and Architectures; Design of
    SoC/NoC; Platform-Based Design for Embedded Systems;
    Reconfigurable Platforms; Multiprocessor SoC Platforms and Tools;
    Testing of Embedded Core-based Integrated Circuits.
Networked Embedded Systems: Design Issues for Networked Embedded;
    Middleware Design and Implementation for Networked Embedded
    Systems; Self Adaptive Networked Entity Sensor Networks:
    Architectures, Energy-Efficient Medium Access Control, Time
    Synchronization Issues, Distributed Localization Algorithms,
    Routing, Distributed Signal Processing, Security.
Embedded Applications: Industrial Automation and Controls;
    Automotive Applications; Avionics Applications; Building
    Automation and Control; Power (Sub-)Station Automation and
    Control; Intelligent Sensors, etc. ? design, maintenance,
    fault tolerance & dependability, networks, infrastructure,
    safety and security.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
SOLICITED PAPERS :
-  Long Papers - limited to 8 double column pages.
-  Industry Practice ? limited to 8 double column pages.
-  Work-in-Progress ? limited to 4 double column pages.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

AUTHOR'S SCHEDULE:
Long papers
  Deadline for submission of long papers:           February 4, 2007
  Notification of acceptance for long papers:        March 18,  2007
  Final manuscripts due for long papers:              April 22, 2007
Work-in-Progress and Industry Practice
  Deadline for submission of WIP & IP papers:          April 1, 2007
  Notification of acceptance of WIP and IP papers:    April 22, 2007
  Final manuscripts due for WIP & IP papers:             May 6, 2007
--------------------------------------------------------------------

SPECIAL SESSION ORGANIZATION :
To enhance the technical program and focus on specific topics and areas, the
SIES'2007 Symposium will include special sessions, in addition to regular
ones. Special sessions can cover subjects or cross-subjects belonging to the
topics of interest, or novel topics related with the ones identified within
the topics of interest.
Special sessions can also have the drive from specific R&D projects or
clusters of projects, namely EU-sponsored R&D projects.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

COMMITTEES
--------------------------------------------------------------------

SIES?2007 General Co-Chairs:
Luis Gomes, Univ. Nova Lisboa, Portugal
Eric Dekneuvel, I3S/UNSA , France

SIES?2007 Program Co-Chairs:
JosŽ Barata, Univ. Nova Lisboa, Portugal Nicolas Navet, Loria, France
Tei-Wei Kuo, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

SIES?2007 Work in Progress Co-Chairs:
Lucia Lo Bello, University of Catania, Italy Marcian Cirstea, Anglia Ruskin
University, UK

SIES?2007  Industry Liaison Committee
Andrea Andenna, ABB Corporate Research, Switzerland Armando Walter Colombo,
Schneider Electric, Germany Joao Miguel Fernandes (chair), Univ. Minho,
Portugal Vladimir Oplustil, UNIS, Czech Replublic Jianli Xu, Nokia, Finland

SIES?2007  International Advisory Committee Charles Andre, I3S/UNSA, France
Giuseppe Buja, University of Padova, Italy Carlo Cecati, University of
L'Aquila, Italy Carlos Couto, University of Minho, Portugal Paul Drews, APS
- European Centre for Mechatronics, Germany Leopoldo Franquelo, Universidad
de Sevilla, Spain A. Steiger Gar�‹o, Univ. Nova de Lisboa, Portugal J. David
Irwin, Auburn University, USA Karel Jezernik, Uni. Maribor, Slovenia Hermann
Kopetz, Vienna University of Technology, Austria Ian Phillips, ARM, UK Juan
Pimentel, Kettering University, USA Francoise Simonot-Lion, LORIA, France P.
S. Thiagarajan, National University of Singapore, Singapore Bogdan
Wilamosvski, Auburn University, USA Alex Yakovlev, Univ. Newcastle, UK Jing
Bing Zhang, SIMTech, Singapore Richard Zurawski (Chair), ISA Group., USA

SIES?2007  Publicity Committee
Luis Almeida, Univ. Aveiro, Portugal
Ricardo Machado, Univ. Minho, Portugal
JosŽ Carlos Metr™lho, I.P.Castelo Branco, Portugal
Christer Norstrom, MŠlardalen University, Sweden

SIES Series Steering Committee
Eric Dekneuvel, I3S/UNSA , France
Luis Gomes, Univ. Nova Lisboa, Portugal (chair) James C. Hung, Univ. of
Tennessee, USA Richard Zurawski, ISA Group., USA

SIES?2007 Publication Chair
Jo‹o Paulo Barros, ESTIG/UNL/UNINOVA, Portugal

SIES?2007 Local Organizing Committee:
Anik— Costa, UNL/UNINOVA, Portugal
Regina Frei, Univ. Nova Lisboa, Portugal Luis Gomes, UNL/UNINOVA, Portugal
Rodolfo Oliveira, UNL/UNINOVA, Portugal Rui Pais, ESTIG/UNL/UNINOVA,
Portugal Rui Tavares, UNL/UNINOVA, Portugal



-- 

Cumprimentos / Regards

RMAC
_________________________________________________
Ricardo J. Machado
http://www.dsi.uminho.pt/~rmac


-- 

Cumprimentos / Regards

RMAC
_________________________________________________
Ricardo J. Machado
http://www.dsi.uminho.pt/~rmac






33) ICEIS 2007 (Madeira)
International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
http://www.iceis.org

Funchal, Madeira, 12-16 June, 2007

organized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC)
in collaboration with the University of Madeira

in-cooperation with ACM and AAAI
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Conference areas:
 - Databases and Information Systems Integration 
 - Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems 
 - Information Systems Analysis and Specification 
 - Software Agents and Internet Computing 
 - Human-Computer Interaction 

Special Sessions:
To propose a special session see http://www.iceis.org/special_sessions.htm.

ICEIS-2007 Keynote Speakers:
 Dr. Amit Sheth, University of Georgia, USA
 Dr. Wil van der Aalst, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
 Dr. Masao J. Matsumoto, Faculty of Informatics, Kyushu Sangyo University, Japan
 Dr. Kurt Sandkuhl, Jönköping University, Sweden
 Dr. Christoph Bussler, Cisco Systems, Inc., USA
 (list not yet complete)

Workshops:
 7th International Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Information Systems 
 6th International Workshop on Wireless Information Systems 
 5th International Workshop on Modelling, Simulation, Verification and Validation of Enterprise Information Systems 
 5th International Workshop on Security in Information Systems 
 4th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science 
 4th International Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing 
 4th International Workshop on Computer Supported Activity Coordination 
 3rd International Workshop on Model-Driven Enterprise Information Systems 
 2nd International Workshop on Technologies for Collaborative Business Processes 
 1st International Workshop on Management of Enterprise Information Systems 
 1st International Workshop on RFID Technology - Concepts, Applications, Challenges 

Important dates: 
Full Paper Submission: December 11, 2006
Authors Notification: February 12, 2007
Workshops Paper Submission: February 19, 2007
Final Paper Submission and Registration: March 2, 2007

Publications:
The conference has a double-blind review process and all accepted papers will be published in the proceedings under an ISBN and indexed by INSPEC and DBLP.
Furthermore, the best papers of the conference will be published in a Springer book, on the special series "Enterprise Information Systems".
Some papers may be selected for extended version publication in an international journal.

Awards:
There will be 2 awards ("Best Paper Award" and "Best Student Paper Award") announced and given at the conference closing session based on the best combined marks from the Program Committee and Session Chairs.



34) IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium

Dear Colleague,
 
Below you'll find the final call for papers for the 2007 IEEE Symposium on
Intelligent Vehicles (IV 2007) that will be held in the beautiful and exciting
city of Istanbul, connecting two continents through the Bosphorus Strait. We are
also organizing a full social program. Along with the symposium hotel, a variety of hotels
at different price ranges and within walking distance of the symposium hotel
will also be available. The symposium travel agent will also organize pre and post
conference tours in Turkey and an accompanying person program in Istanbul.
 
We look forward to receiving a paper submission from you by January 15 2007.
Please check further details at the conference web site (<http://www.iv2007.itu.edu.tr/>http://www.iv2007.itu.edu.tr).
There you will find detailed information about the symposium topic areas, the day of workshops
before the symposium and the demo day after the symposium.
 
We look forward to hosting you in Istanbul for IV 2007.
 

Sincerely,
 

Prof.Dr. Levent Guvenc
General Chair
IEEE IV 2007 Symposium
 
Let's Meet Where the Continents Meet
 

P.S.: We apologize if you received multiple copies of this message.
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FINAL CALL for PAPERS
 
IV'07: IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium Istanbul, Turkey, June 13-15, 2007
(<http://www.iv2007.itu.edu.tr/>www.iv2007.itu.edu.tr)
 
SCOPE
The 2007 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV'07) which is an annual forum sponsored
by the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society will take place in Istanbul during
June 13-15, 2007. The Intelligent Vehicles Symposium gathers researchers from industry
and universities to discuss research and applications for Intelligent Vehicles and
Intelligent Infrastructures. Three days of the symposium will be allocated for technical
presentations and one additional day (June 16, 2007) will be dedicated to live vehicle
demonstrations. There will be a day of workshops right before the symposium on
June 12, 2007 at Istanbul Technical University. The technical presentations are
characterized by a single session format so that all attendees remain in a single
room for multilateral communication in an informal atmosphere. Papers dealing with
all aspects of vehicle-related intelligent systems and cooperation between vehicles
and infrastructures is being solicited for IV'07.
The motto for IV'07 is: Let's meet where the continents meet. Istanbul connecting the
two continents of Europe and Asia and being a cross-road of civilizations for many
centuries is an ideal location for the Intelligent Vehicles Symposium. The symposium
venue is the Hilton hotel in Istanbul located at the center of the city.
 
TOPICS
 
Original contributions are solicited in all Intelligent Vehicle Technology research and
applications. Contributions for industry and application sessions are also solicited.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
 
* Driver Assistance Systems
* Automated Vehicles
* Active and Passive Safety
* Integrated Safety Systems
* Vehicle Environment Perception
* System Architecture
* Smart Infrastructure
* IVI
* Impact on Traffic Flows
* Cooperative Vehicle-Highway Systems
* Floating Car Data for Safety
* Dedicated Short Range Communications
* AHS
* Collision Avoidance
* Sensors
* Image, Radar, Lidar Signal Processing
* Information Fusion
* Vehicle Control
* Telematics
* Decision and Expert Systems
* Communications and Networks
* Human Factors
* Human Machine Interaction
* Inter-Vehicle Communications
* Driver Attention Monitoring
* Others
 
PAPER SUBMISSION
Prospective authors are requested to submit their paper as a pdf file in IEEE two column
format through The IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Conference Management
System no later than January 15, 2007. A LaTeX style file and a Microsoft Word template are
available at the website (<http://its.papercept.net/conferences/index.html>http://its.papercept.net/conferences/index.html).
 
WORKSHOPS
 
Workshop Organization is encouraged. Prospective organizers should contact the special
session chair at <mailto:iv2007@itu.edu.tr>iv2007@itu.edu.tr. and please visit
<http://www.iv2007.itu.edu.tr/workshop.php>http://www.iv2007.itu.edu.tr/workshop.php
 
* Workshop on Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications is being organized by Onur Altintas (<mailto:onur@jp.toyota-itc.com>onur@jp.toyota-itc.com).
 
* Workshop on Hybrid Electric Vehicle Modeling and Control is being organized by Tankut Acarman (<mailto:acarman@ieee.org>acarman@ieee.org).
More information can be found in Call for Papers - Workshop on HEV Modeling and Control
 
* Special Session on Sensor Data Fusion is being organized by Heiko Cramer (<mailto:cramer@infotech.tu-chemnitz.de>cramer@infotech.tu-chemnitz.de) and
Aris Polychronopoulos (<mailto:arisp@iccs.gr>arisp@iccs.gr).
 

IMPORTANT DATES
 
* Submission deadline       : January 15, 2007 (deadline extended)
 
* Notification of acceptance: Feb. 15,   2007
 
* Final Manuscript due      : Mar. 1, 2007
 
* Workshop proposals due    : March 15, 2007
 
COMMITTEES
 
-----------
 
Program Committee
B. van Arem (Netherlands), N. Bhouri (France), M. BrŸnig (USA), H. Chang (USA), T. Dang (Germany), K. Dietmayer (Germany),
A.Ferrara (Italy),      B. Fidan (Australia), U. Franke (Germany), H.J. Gao (USA/Germany), J. Gayko (Germany),
A. Geistler (Germany), H. Gharavi (USA), K. Gresser (Germany),  K. Grigoriadis (USA), F.Y. Hadaegh (USA),
K. Hedrick (USA), B. Hummel (Germany), A. Iftar (Turkey), H. Jula (USA), N. Kahveci (USA), T. Kakinami (Japan),
S. Kato (Japan), A. Kito  (Japan), E. Kosmatopoulos (Greece), M. Kuipers (USA), K. Leblebicioglu (Turkey),
F. Lewis (USA),  M. Maekawa (Japan), M. Maurer (Germany), V. Mauro (Italy), M.-M. Meinecke (Germany), C. Mertz (USA), 
J. Misener (USA), K. Mizui (Japan), S. Muramatsu (Japan), K. Naab (Germany),  W. Niehsen (Germany),  Y. Ninomiya (Japan),
S. Ogata (Japan), G. Papageorgiou (Cyprius),  M. Parent (France), F. Puente-Leon (Germany), M. Seki (Japan),
M. Schulze (Germany),  B. Schutter (Netherlands),  A. Stathopoulos (Greece),T. Sugimoto (Japan), R. Sutton (UK),
J. Szpytko (Poland),  Y. Takeuchi (Japan), Y. Tamatsu (Japan), M. Tomizuka (USA), M. Trivedi (USA), J.M. Usami (Japan), 
G. Vatchevanos (USA),  G. Vivo (Italy),  L. Vlacic (Australia), P. Venkatesh (USA), H. Winner (Germany), F. Wang (USA), 
Y. Wang (USA), W. Zhang (Japan)
 
 
 
General Chair
Levent Guvenc
Istanbul Technical University
 
Program Chair (US)
Petros Ioannau
Univ. of Southern California
 
Program Co-Chair (Europe)
Christoph Stiller
Karlsruhe University
 
Program Co-Chair (Asia)
Takaaki Hasegawa
Saitama University
 
Advisory Chair
Umit Ozguner
Ohio State University
 
Demos Chair
Ali Goktan
Istanbul Technical University
 
Finance Chair
Tankut Acarman
Galatasaray University
 
Publication Chair
Emre Kose
Bogazici University
 
Publicity Chairs
Bilin Aksun Guvenc
Gokhan Inalhan
Istanbul Technical University
 
Special Sessions Chair
Umit Sonmez
Istanbul Technical University
 
Registration Chair
Erdinc Altug
Istanbul Technical University
 
Workshop Chair
Ahu Ece Hartavi
Istanbul Technical University
 
Founding Chair
Ichiro Masaki
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 
-------------------------------------------
 

 

35) ISCRAM 2007 

ISCRAM 07 Special Session
"Advanced Information Technologies for Crisis and Disaster Management"

ISCRAM 2007
May 13-16, 2007
Delft, The Netherlands

Motivation for this session:
----------------------------
The management of crises and emergencies, resulting from man made or natural disasters, is a very difficult and complicated task. In order to manage a crisis effectively and to minimize the anticipated adverse impacts, imminent decisions must be made on the necessary actions and on the most effective use of the available resources in different managerial levels. In these conditions, decision makers require agile, adaptive and robust Information Management and Decision Support Systems which also take into account the nature of human decision making processes. In this perspective Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science provides the background for the development of intelligent disaster management systems. Today, such Intelligent systems take many forms (for example, intelligent web based crisis management systems - IWBCMS), encompass a variety of approaches (including multi-agent systems) and include many design challenges (such as the development of intelligent user int!
 erfaces).


Topics
------
We seek original and high-quality contributions on the general theme of Intelligent Systems for Disaster Management. The following is a non-exhaustive list with topics of special interest:

- Intelligent agents and multi-agent systems
- Architectures
- Frameworks, formalisms and models
- Adjustable autonomy
- Service Oriented Knowledge Utilities
- Co-ordination, communication and planning
- Grid Technologies
- Adaptive systems
- Self-organizing systems
- Data integration, uncertainty handling and decision making
- Machine Learning
- Semantic web
- Case studies
- Practical applications


Type of Contribution
--------------------
This session is a joint academic, practitioner and demonstration / simulation session. Therefore all submissions should indicate their type of contribution.


Important Deadlines
---------------------
Paper Submissions: January 15, 2007
Review Notifications: February 22, 2007
Final Camera-ready Paper: March 15, 2007


Additional information
----------------------
Additional details for this CFP can be found on the following web page: http://www.gwu.edu/~icdrm/Events/CFP_ISCRAM07.html. If you have questions please contact one of the session organizers.


Session Organizers:
-------------------

- Frank Fiedrich, fiedrich@gwu.edu, Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA

- Julie Dugdale, julie.dugdale@imag.fr, MAGMA, Multi-agent Systems Research Group, Laboratoire Leibniz, Institut IMAG, Grenoble, France

- Ioannis Dokas, idokas@upb.de, Institute of Computer Science, University of Paderborn, Germany

- Yves Demazeau, yves.demazeau@imag.fr, MAGMA, Multi-agent Systems Research Group, Laboratoire Leibniz, Institut IMAG, Grenoble, France

- Chris van Aart, chris@yall.nl, Y'all BV, the Netherlands





36) ISDA'07 

****  ISDA'07 - First Call for Papers ****

7th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA'07)

October 22-24, 2007
Rio de Janeiro, BRAZIL

Conference URL:  http://www.isda07.eng.uerj.br

*******************************************************
ISDA'07 is technically co-sponsored by:

- European Neural Network Society (ENNS)
- European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology (EUSFLAT)
- The World Federation on Soft Computing
- IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (IEEE - SMC)
- Brazilian Society of Computation (SBC)
- Brazilian Society of Automatics (SBA)

Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA'07) is the 7th International conference that brings together international soft computing, artificial intelligence, computational intelligence researchers, developers, practitioners and users. The aim of ISDA'07 is to serve as a forum to present current and future work as well as to exchange research ideas in this field.

*******************************************************
ISDA'07 will focus on the following topics:

A. Intelligent Systems Architectures and Applications
B. Intelligent Image and Signal Processing
C. Intelligent Internet Modeling
D. Intelligent Data mining
E. Intelligent Business Systems
F. Intelligent Control and Automation
G. Intelligent Agents
H. Intelligent Knowledge Management

*******************************************************
Prospective authors are invited to submit a:
- full paper of 8 pages (PDF), for oral presentation. Authors must use the LNCS format (to be confirmed).
- proposal to organize a technical session (see the Call for Events Proposals in the conference Web page for more information).

The submission of a paper implies that the paper is original and has not been submitted under review or copyright protected by the author if accepted. Besides papers in regular sessions, papers in special sessions are also invited to provide forums for focused discussions on new topics and innovative applications of established approaches. A special session consists of at least four related papers. Proposals for special sessions including the session organizers, author names, paper titles, abstracts, and brief statements on the purposes of the sessions must be submitted to by March 1st, 2007.

All papers should be submitted electronically via Online Paper Submission System. The format of the initial submissions can be PDF. The file of the final accepted papers should be in either Word or Latex.
All submitted papers will be refereed by experts in the respective fields according to the criteria of originality, significance, quality, and clarity. The authors of accepted papers will have an opportunity to revise their papers and take into consideration the referees' comments and suggestions, before submitting the final papers.

All accepted papers with paid registration will be included in the Proceedings of ISDA'07, to be published by Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag. After the conference, authors of best papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their papers for possible inclusion in special issues of a selection of international journals.

*******************************************************
Important Dates:
* Special Session Proposal: February 15th, 2007
* Paper Submission: March 16th, 2007
* Notification of Acceptance: June 1st, 2007
* Final Paper Submission: June 15th, 2007

*******************************************************
ISDA'07 Conference Organization:

General Chairs:
Nadia Nedjah, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Ajith Abraham, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea

Program Chairs:
Luiza de Macedo Mourelle, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Janusz Kacprzyk, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland

Steering Commitee Members:
Ajith Abraham, Chung-Ang University, Korea (Chair)
Nadia nedjah, State University of Rio de Janerio (chair)
Janos Abonyi, University of Veszprem, Hungary
Yuehui Chen, Jinan University, Jinan, China
Lakhmi Jain, University of South Australia, Australia
Halina Kwasnicka, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland
Etienne Kerre, Ghent University, Belgium
Janusz Kacprzyk, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Marcin Paprzycki, SWPS, Poland
Jeng-Shyang Pan, National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences, Taiwan
P. Saratchandran, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Publicity Chairs:
Crina Grosan, Babes-Bolyai  University, Romania
Fatos Xhafa, Universitat Polit�cnica de Catalunya, Spain
Keshav Dahal, University of Bradford, UK
Aboul Ella Hassanien, Cairo University, Egypt

Tutorial Chair:
Khalid Saeed, Bialystok Technical University, Poland

Workshop Chair
Dr. Jeng-Shyang Pan, National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences

International Program Committee:
(please, browse the conference webpage for the full list)

*******************************************************
Pleanary Speakers:

* Dr. Risto Miikkulainen, University of Texas, USA
* Dr. Erkki Oja, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
* Dr. Jordan Pollack, Brandeis University, USA


*******************************************************
Mailing Address:
Dr. Nadia Nedjah
Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
Faculdade de Engenharia
Departamento de Engenharia Eletr™nica e Telecomunica�‹o
Rua S‹o Francisco Xavier, 524, Sala 5022-D
Maracan‹, CEP 20550-900
Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
Email Address: nadia@eng.uerj.br or isda07@eng.uerj.br
WWW: http://www.isda07.eng.uerj.br
Tel: +55 21 9839-3142
Fax: +55 21 2587-7374 




37) lNIDISC'2007 

**********************************************************************
                      The 10th International Workshop on
                   Nature Inspired Distributed Computing
                                 (NIDISC'07)

                          held in conjunction with
                    The 21th IEEE/ACM International
  Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium  (IPDPS 2006)
                    26th March - Friday, 30th March 2007
                       Renaissance Long Beach Hotel
                       Long Beach, California, USA
                         http://www.ipdps.org
**********************************************************************

Workshop Theme :
=============

Techniques based on metaheuristics and nature-inspired paradigms can
provide efficient solutions to a wide variety of problems. Moreover,
parallel and distributed metaheuristics can be used to provide more
powerful problem solving environments in a variety of fields, ranging,
for example, from finance to bio- and health-informatics. This
workshop seeks to provide an opportunity for researchers to explore
the connection between metaheuristics and the development of solutions
to problems that arise in operations research, parallel computing,
telecommunications, bioinformativs, and many others.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Nature-inspired methods (e.g. ant colonies, GAs, cellular automata,
DNA and molecular computing, local search, etc) for problem solving
environments.
* Parallel and distributed metaheuristics techniques (algorithms,
technologies and tools).
* Applications combining traditional parallel and distributed
computing and optimization techniques as well as theoretical issues
(convergence, complexity, etc).
* Other algorithms and applications relating the above mentioned
research areas.

Prospective authors of high quality research contributions are invited
to submit an electronic copy of their manuscript not exceeding 8
two-column pages including figures and references in the traditional
IEEE format used in IPDPS. Please, use Postscript or PDF when
possible. In your email, please indicate paper title, author(s), and
the corresponding author.

A selected group of papers from the workshop will be invited to
submit extended versions of their papers to a special issue of an
international scholarly journal. Further announcements will be made
during the workshop.

General Chairs :
============
Albert Y. Zomaya The University of Sydney -Australia-
(zomaya@it.usyd.edu.au)
Fikret Ercal University of Missouri, Rolla - USA (ercal@umr.edu)


Program Co-chairs :
==============
El-ghazali Talbi Lab d'Informatique Fondam. de Lille -France-
(talbi@lifl.fr)
Enrique Alba University of M‡laga -Spain- (eat@lcc.uma.es)


Program Committee (to be completed) :
=====================================
Michael Affenzeller, Univ. of Hagenberg, Austria
Azzedine Boukerche, University of Ottawa, Canada
Pascal Bouvry, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Juergen Branke, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Erick Cantœ-Paz, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA
Beniamino Di Martino, Univ. of Naples, Italia
Tarek El-Ghazawi, George Washington University, USA
Pilar Herrero, UPM, Spain
Andrew Lewis, Griffith University, Australia
Martin Middendorf, University of Leipzig, Germany
Nordine Melab, University of Lille, France
Michelle D. Moore, Texas A & M - Corpus Christi, USA
Antonio J.Nebro, Univ. of M‡laga, Spain
Franciszek Seredynski, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
G. Spezzano, University of Calabria, Italy
Marco Tomassini, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Papers should be submitted to:
==============================

Enrique Alba
Inform‡tica (3-2-12), 29071 M‡laga, Spain
email: eat@lcc.uma.es

El-Ghazali Talbi
LIFL INRIA futurs
email: talbi@lifl.fr

Important Dates:
================
Submission Deadline - November 20, 2006
Notification of Acceptance - December 20, 2006
Final Copy Due - January 5, 2007


Prof. E-G. Talbi






38) ICAS 2007 &  ICNS 2007 

 
ICAS 2007: The Third International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems 

June 19-25, 2007 - Athens, Greece

Site: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/ICAS07.html
 
 
ICNS 2007: The Third International Conference on Networking and Services

June 19-25, 2007 - Athens, Greece

Site: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/ICNS07.html
 
 
 
DETAILS:

=======================================

CALL FOR PAPERS
 
The Third International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems ICAS 2007

Date: June 19-25, 2007

Place: Athens, Greece

Site: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/ICAS07.html

 
Featuring also the workshops: 
 
SELF 2007: The Second International Workshop on Self-adaptability and Self-management of Context-aware Systems,

http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/SELF.html
 

KUI 2007: The First International Workshop on Knowledge-based User Interface,

http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/KUI.html

 
Important deadlines:

Full paper submission, January 31, 2007 

Author notification, February 25, 2007 

Registration and camera ready, March 15, 2007 

 
Published by IEEE Computer Society Press Published in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library

Indexing: http://www.computer.org/portal/pages/cscps/cps/cps_indexing.html

 
Main ICAS 2007 Tracks:

* SYSAT: Advances in system automation 

* AUTSY: Theory and practice of autonomous systems 

* AWARE: Design and deployment of context-awareness networks, services and applications 

* AUTONOMIC: Autonomic computing: design and management of self-behavioural networks and services 

* MCMAC: Monitoring, control, and management of autonomous self-aware and context-aware systems 

* CASES: Automation in specialized mobile environments 

* ALCOC: Algorithms and theory for control and computation 

* MODEL: Modeling, virtualization, any-on-demand, MDA, SOA 

=============================================
 
 
 
 
================================================

CALL FOR PAPERS 
 

ICNS 2007: The Third International Conference on Networking and Services

June 19-25, 2007 - Athens, Greece

Site: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/ICNS07.html

 
Important deadlines:

Full paper submission, January 31, 2007 

Author notification, February 25, 2007 

Registration and camera ready, March 15, 2007 

 
Published by IEEE Computer Society Press Published in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library

Indexing: http://www.computer.org/portal/pages/cscps/cps/cps_indexing.html
 

featuring also the workshops:
 

IPv6DFI 2007: The Second International Workshop on Deploying the Future Infrastructure,

http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/IPV6DFI.html

 
IPDy 2007: The Second International Workshop on Internet Packet Dynamics,

http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/IPDY.html
 

GOBS 2007: The First International Workshop on GRID over Optical Burst Switching Networks,

http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/GOBS.html
 

ICNS 2007 Main Tracks:

* ENCOT: Emerging Network Communications and Technologies 

* COMAN: Network Control and Management 

* SERVI: Multi-technology service deployment and assurance 

* NGNUS: Next Generation Networks and Ubiquitous Services 

* MPQSI: Multi Provider QoS/SLA Internetworking 

* GRIDNS: Grid Networks and Services 

* EDNA: Emergency Services and Disaster Recovery of Networks and Applications 




39) IJAIT - New Issue Contents Notification

 
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS (IJAIT)

<http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S02182130061506.html>Vol. 15, No. 6 (December 2006) is now available online.

Special Issue on FLAIRS 2005: Knowledge Acquisition and Representation
Guest Editors: I. Russell, Z. Markov and L. B. Holder <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003004.html>PREFACE
<http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003016.html>ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND REPRESENTATION
LAWRENCE B. HOLDER, ZDRAVKO MARKOV and INGRID RUSSELL <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003028.html>ON THE LEARNING OF SYSTEM CALL ATTRIBUTES FOR HOST-BASED ANOMALY DETECTION
GAURAV TANDON and PHILIP K. CHAN <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S021821300600303X.html>AN EFFICIENT FEATURE SELECTION ALGORITHM FOR COMPUTER-AIDED POLYP DETECTION
JIANG LI, JIANHUA YAO, RONALD M. SUMMERS, NICHOLAS PETRICK, MICHAEL T. MANRY and AMY K. HARA <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003041.html>STRUCTURE DISCOVERY IN SEQUENTIALLY-CONNECTED DATA STREAMS
JEFFREY COBLE, DIANE J. COOK and LAWRENCE B. HOLDER <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003053.html>MINING TRUST VALUES FROM RECOMMENDATION ERRORS
JOHN O'DONOVAN and BARRY SMYTH <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003065.html>THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL NETWORK HIERARCHY USING CULTURAL ALGORITHMS
ZIAD KOBTI, ROBERT G. REYNOLDS and TIM A. KOHLER <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003077.html>THE DESIGN AND TESTING OF A FIRST-ORDER LOGIC-BASED STOCHASTIC MODELING LANGUAGE
DANIEL J. PLESS, CHAYAN CHAKRABARTI, ROSHAN RAMMOHAN and GEORGE F. LUGER <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003089.html>COORDINATION AND APPLICATIVE CATEGORIAL TYPE LOGIC
ISMAìL BISKRI, JEAN-PIERRE DESCLƒS and BOUCIF AMAR BENSABER <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003090.html>COGNITIVELY INSPIRED NLP-BASED KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATIONS: FURTHER EXPLORATIONS OF LATENT SEMANTIC ANALYSIS
MAX LOUWERSE, ZHIQIANG CAI, XIANGEN HU, MATTHEW VENTURA and PATRICK JEUNIAUX <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003107.html>LOGIC OF DETERMINATION OF OBJECTS: THE MEANING OF VARIABLE IN QUANTIFICATION
JEAN-PIERRE DESCLƒS and ANCA PASCU <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003119.html>SEMANTIC DERIVATION VERIFICATION: TECHNIQUES AND IMPLEMENTATION
GEOFF SUTCLIFFE <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003120.html>TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY MAPPING APPROACH FOR SECURITY MANAGEMENT
ALFRED KA YIU WONG, NANDAN PARAMESH and PRADEEP RAY <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003132.html>RETRIEVING HEART RATE SEQUENCES
MARKUS NILSSON <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003144.html>LIST OF REVIEWERS VOLUME 15 (2006)
<http://www.worldscinet.com/ijait/15/1506/S0218213006003156.pdf>AUTHOR INDEX Volume 15

Recommend This Issue

To share this with your colleagues, feel free to click on the Recommend this Issue icon at the bottom of the table of contents. They will immediately receive an email notification about how to read this issue.

Holiday Greetings

As the holiday season draws near, we at World Scientific would like to share the holiday cheer, with books for you and your loved ones. This joyous season calls for joyous giving. Take this chance to show how much you care, by sharing the precious gift of knowledge.

Now, simply <http://www.worldscibooks.com/>order online using this code: CUST2006, to enjoy a 25% discount off ALL TITLES in our <http://www.worldscibooks.com/>catalogue till 31 December 2006.

* Titles that have been discounted on the web site are not eligible for further discounts.


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40) IJPRAI - New Issue Contents Notification

 
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PATTERN RECOGNITION AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (IJPRAI)
ISSN: 0218-0014

<http://www.worldscinet.com/ijprai/20/2008/S02180014062008.html>Vol. 20, No. 8 (December 2006) is now available online.

PAPERS: Shape Analysis <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijprai/20/2008/S0218001406005174.html>RETRIEVAL FROM SHAPE DATABASES USING CHANCE PROBABILITY FUNCTIONS AND FIXED CORRESPONDENCE
BOAZ J. SUPER PAPERS: Pattern Recognition <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijprai/20/2008/S0218001406005162.html>A HIGH VISUAL QUALITY SPRITE GENERATOR USING INTELLIGENT BLENDING WITHOUT SEGMENTATION MASKS
I-SHENG KUO and LING-HWEI CHEN PAPERS: Biometrics <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijprai/20/2008/S0218001406005198.html>ROBUST REPRESENTATION OF 3D FACES FOR RECOGNITION
A. BELƒN MORENO, çNGEL SçNCHEZ and ENRIQUE FRêAS-MARTêNEZ PAPERS: Medical Image Analysis <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijprai/20/2008/S0218001406005228.html>INTEGRATING GLOBAL AND LOCAL ANALYSIS OF COLOR, TEXTURE AND GEOMETRICAL INFORMATION FOR CATEGORIZING LARYNGEAL IMAGES
ANTANAS VERIKAS, ADAS GELZINIS, MARIJA BACAUSKIENE and VIRGILIJUS ULOZA CORRESPONDENCE: Color Image Processing <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijprai/20/2008/S0218001406005204.html>MORPHOLOGICAL COLOR IMAGE SIMPLIFICATION BY SATURATION-CONTROLLED REGIONAL LEVELINGS
JESòS ANGULO CORRESPONDENCE: Pattern Recognition <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijprai/20/2008/S0218001406005216.html>RUNWAY DETECTING AND TRACKING OF AN UNMANNED AERIAL LANDING VEHICLE BASED ON VISION
HONGQUN WANG, JIAXIONG PENG and LINGLING LI <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijprai/20/2008/S0218001406005186.html>NEAREST NEIGHBOR DISCRIMINANT ANALYSIS
XIPENG QIU and LIDE WU <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijprai/20/2008/S021800140600523X.html>LONG RANGE TIME SERIES FORECASTING BY UPSAMPLING AND USING CROSS-CORRELATION BASED SELECTION OF NEAREST NEIGHBOR
SYED RAHAT ABBAS and MUHAMMAD ARIF <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijprai/20/2008/S0218001406005253.html>LIST OF REVIEWERS VOLUME 20 (2006)
<http://www.worldscinet.com/ijprai/20/2008/S0218001406005241.pdf>AUTHOR INDEX Volume 20 (2006)



41) ICAIPR-07
 
The 2007 International Multi-Conference in Computer Science, Engineering, and Information Science will be held during 9-12 of July 2007 in Orlando, FL, USA. The multi-conference consists of four major events namely
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition (AIPR-07)
International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems and Web Technologies (EISWT-07)
International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking and Communication Systems (HPCNCS-07)
International Conference on Software Engineering Theory and Practice (SETP-07)
 
All these events will be held simultaneously at the same place. Click on <http://www.promoteresearch.org/>www.PromoteResearch.org for more information.
 
 
Sincerely
 
Samuel B. Pyne
Publicity committee co-chair
Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Florida A&M University
Tallahassee, FL 32307, USA
Email: <mailto:spyne@cis.famu.edu>spyne@cis.famu.edu
 

 
42) NLP Robocoach now on line!

MindMentor
your NLP Robocoach

Dear NLP- colleague,

Last month the IEP in Holland launched MindMentor, an internet coaching robot. MindMentor guides the user through a basic NLP process, activating a resource through a contrast frame. Depth is added by using a projection procedure (somewhat similar tot a Rorschach test). His office is located at <http://tr.anp.se/track?t=c&mid=23815&uid=18077378&&&http://www.mentorhall.com>http://www.mentorhall.com.

In his first month on line, MindMentor did 582 coaching sessions with people from Holland, Russia, Sweden, Portugal and the USA. He achieved a solution percentage of 55%. That is: people who finished their session with him solved their problem for 55% on average. You can imagine we (his creators, Dutch psychologists Jaap Hollander and Jeffrey Wijnberg) are somewhat euphoric about this result.

Right now, we see MindMentor as an intern; a beginning electronic coach/therapist who is showing great promise but who still needs to learn a lot. In order to help him learn, we would like him to do as many coaching sessions as possible. Therefore we have decided to offer his services to the international NLP community, free of charge. You are invited to work with him as often as you like and to refer any colleagues, friends and students to him. This offer lasts for the month of December.

So go ahead, meet MindMentor at <http://tr.anp.se/track?t=c&mid=23815&uid=18077378&&&http://www.mentorhall.com>http://www.mentorhall.com and solve a problem the NLP way!

Best Regards,

Jaap Hollander
e-mail: <mailto:jh@iepdoc.nl>jh@iepdoc.nl



43) publishing a review for a new book in DAIS

I got your e-mail address from the web site of the Danish Artificial
Intelligence Society (DAIS).

I was wondering if DAIS has the practice of publishing reviews and/or
adverts for new relevant books in 
its newsletters and/or conference proceedings. If that is the case, then
I would like to ask you to consider my new book entitled 
'Complexity Management in Fuzzy Systems' to be published in January 2007
in the Springer Series in
Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing. 

For your information, this new book is already being advertised on the
Springer web site at the following location:
http://www.springer.com/west/home/default?SGWID=4-40356-22-173676527-0

I am also sending you attached an advert of this new book prepared by
the Springer Marketing Department.

Please, let me know if you would be interested to publish in any of the
DAIS forthcoming newletter issues and/or conference proceedings a review
on this new book and/or the attached advert without any charge for me
and Springer. If necessary, I could arrange a free copy of the book to
be sent to you for review purposes or invite an internationally
recognised academic in a relevant subject area to write a review on the
book and send it directly for you.

Finally, I would like to let you know that I have been authorised by the
Springer Editorial Office to send you this e-mail.

Kind regards,

Alexander Gegov

Attachment converted: BrianMayoh:book_flyer.pdf (PDF /ÇICÈ) (001687E2)


44) PhD Studentship in Machine Learning at Bristol Uni.


PhD Studentship in Machine Learning at University of Bristol

Applications are invited for a 3-year PhD research studentship in the
Machine Learning and Biological Computation Group at the University of
Bristol. The studentship forms part of an EPSRC-funded project aimed at
learning the rules for morphological analysis of synthetic (morphologically
complex) languages, including Russian, Turkish and isiZulu. The PhD student
will develop a Machine Learning approach in order to efficiently induce
morphological rules (or grammars) both for regular and context-free
languages, with a particular emphasis on isiZulu, a tonal Bantu language
with 10 million speakers in Southern Africa. During the course of the
project, the student  will have the opportunity to conduct part of the
research with our project partners in Pretoria, South Africa. More
information about the project is available at
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/Research/MachineLearning/morph/index.html.

This position is available from April 2007. The funding will cover EU
tuition fees and an annual stipend, currently GBP 12,300. (The funding
will not cover non-EU tuition fees, so candidates from outside the EU must
find alternative means to fund the difference between EU and non-EU tuition
fees.) The successful candidate has a strong background in artificial
intelligence and machine learning and excellent analytical skills. Previous
experience with computational linguistics is preferred but not essential.
Due to the international context of the project, excellent communication
skills in English are required, as well as the ability to work in a team.

Applicants should send a full CV, with accompanying letter and name and
email address of two referees, to Professor Peter Flach
(Peter.Flach@bristol.ac.uk) or Dr. Ksenia Shalonova (ksenia@cs.bris.ac.uk).
Further details regarding the studentship are available on request. The
closing date for applications is Friday 9th March 2007.


45) CCCT 2007 


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
CCCT 2007 will be held in Orlando, Florida on July 12-15, 2007

March 8th, 2007 is the deadline for paper/abstract submissions and invited session proposals. http://www.info-cyber.org/ccct2007
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The registration fee of effective invited session organizers will be waived and they will receive at the registration desk, for free, a package of 4 DVDs and one CD containing the 6-hour tutorial "Fundamentals and History of Cybernetics: Development of the Theory of Complex Adaptive Systems". The market price of this package is US $ 295. Twelve more benefits for invited session organizers are listed at CCCT 2007 web page.

The best 10%-20% of the papers will be published in Volume 6 of JSCI Journal (http://www.iiisci.org/Journal/SCI). 24 issues (volumes 1, 2, 3 and 4) of the Journal have been sent to approximately 200 universities and research libraries, Promotional, free subscriptions, for 2 years, are being provided to the organizations of the Journal's authors.

Submitted papers will go through three reviewing processes: double-blind, non-blind (open) and participative reviewing. All submissions will be sent to at least three reviewers, selected by the Organizing Committee, for their respective double-blinded review. Submitted papers or extended abstracts will also be sent to 1-3 reviewers suggested by the author(s) for their open, non-blind, review. All papers will be included in a participative reviewing where other authors, who also made submissions to the same area can access the papers submitted to this area, in order to read them and provide constructive feedback.

The three kinds of reviewing will support the acceptance process for the selection of the papers to be presented at the conference, as well as the selection of the best 10%-20% of the papers that will be included in the JSCI journal. All papers accepted for presentation in the conference will also be included in the conference proceedings.

The papers selected, after their presentation, as the best ones of their regular or invited session, will also be considered for their inclusion in the Journal. The authors of the best 30%-40% of these papers will be invited to modify or extend their papers for its respective publication in the Journal.

For those who are interested in organizing an invited session, please, fill the respective form provided in the conference web page, and we will send you a password (if it is pre-approved) so you can include and modify papers in your invited session.

Invited session organizers with the best performance will be co-editors of the proceedings volume where their sessions' papers were included, and of the CD electronic proceedings. They will also be candidates for invited editors, or co-editors, of a possible JSCI Journal issue related to their invited session papers. Information on the suggested steps to organize an invited session has been included in the conference web site.

Submissions from both academia and industry are encouraged. Research papers, case studies, lessons learned, status reports, and discussions of practical problems faced by industry and user domains are all welcomed submissions.

If you need a detailed Call for Papers and Participation, don't hesitate in asking us for it. You can also get it from the conference's web site.

If the deadlines are tight and you need more time, let us know about a suitable time for you and we will inform you if it is feasible for us.


Dr. C.Dale Zinn
CCCT 2007 Program Chair

If you wish to be removed from this mailing list, please send an e-mail to ccct.remove@info-cybernetics.org with REMOVE MLCCCT in the subject line.

Address: Torre Profesional La California, Av. Francisco de Miranda, Caracas, Venezuela.


46) IWLCS2007

========================================================================
Tenth International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems (IWLCS 2007)
                    London, UK, July 8, 2007.

                   to be held as part of the
   2007 GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION CONFERENCE (GECCO-2007)

               July 7-11, 2007 (Saturday-Wednesday)
                    University College London
                    Gower Street
                    London WC 1E 6BT, UK
                    Organized by ACM SIGEVO
                    www.sigevo.org/GECCO-2007

    PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR WORKSHOP: Friday, March 16, 2007

                           Workshop Website:
   http://www.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/i3pages/butz/IWLCS2007/
========================================================================


CALL FOR PAPERS


Since Learning Classifier Systems (LCSs) were introduced by John H. Holland as a way of applying evolutionary computation to machine learning problems, the LCS paradigm has broadened greatly into a framework encompassing many representations, rule discovery mechanisms, and credit assignment schemes. Current LCS applications range from data mining, to automated innovation, and to the on-line control of cognitive systems. LCS is a very active area of research that encompasses various system approaches. Wilson's accuracy-based XCS system has received the highest attention and gained the highest reputation.

LCSs are benefiting from recent advances in machine learning, and reinforcement learning in particular, as well asin evolutionary computation. Novel insights in these two areas are continuously integrated into the LCS framework.We invite submissions which discuss recent developments in all areas of research on, and applications of, LearningClassifier Systems. IWLCS is the event that brings together most of the core researchers in classifier systems. Moreover, a free introductory tutorial on LCSs is presented at GECCO 2007. The IWLCS workshop gives the opportunity also to researchers interested in LCS to get an impression of the current research directions in the field.


SUBMISSIONS AND PUBLICATION

There are two ways to submit papers (deadline March 16, 2007): i) short papers (up to 4 pages in ACM format) or ii) full papers (up to 20 pages in Springer format).

All accepted papers may be presented orally at IWLCS.

Accepted short papers will appear in the GECCO workshop volume. Proceedings of the workshop will be published on CD-ROM, and distributed at the conference. Authors of short papers will be invited after the workshop to submit revised (full) papers for publication in the post-workshop proceedings, in Springer LNCS/LNAI book series.

Accepted full papers will be published in the post-workshop proceedings. Authors of accepted full papers will be asked to provide a shorter 4-pages version for publication in the GECCO 2007 workshop proceedings.

The normal route is for authors to submit short papers and produce full papers after IWLCS for the post-workshop proceedings, incorporating feedback from reviewers and delegates. All submissions will be peer reviewed. Reviews of short papers will be mainly to provide feedback to enable the production of an improved full paper.

All papers should be submitted in PDF format and e-mailed to: esterb@salle.url.edu.


IMPORTANT DATES

* Paper submission deadline: Friday, March 16, 2007
* Notification to authors: Friday, March 30, 2007
* GECCO camera-ready material: Wednesday, April 11, 2007
* Conference registration: Wednesday, April 11, 2007
* Workshop date: 7th or 8th July
* Extended paper submissions for LNCS/LNAI post-workshop proceedings: early fall 2007
* Notification of acceptance: late fall 2007
* LNCS/LNAI camera ready material: winter 2007/08


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

* Jaume Bacardit, University of Nottingham (UK). E-mail: jqb@cs.nott.ac.uk
* Ester Bernad-Mansilla, Universitat Ramon Llull (Spain). E-mail: esterb@salle.url.edu
* Martin Butz, Universitat Wurzburg (Germany). E-mail: mbutz@psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de


ADVISORY COMMITTEE

* Tim Kovacs, University of Bristol (UK)
* Xavier Llor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)
* Pier Luca Lanzi, Politechnico de Milano (Italy)
* Wolfgang Stolzmann, Daimler Chrysler AG (Germany)
* Keiki Takadama, Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan)
* Stewart Wilson, Prediction Dynamics (USA)


FURTHER INFORMATION

For more details, please visit the workshop website at:
http://www.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/i3pages/butz/IWLCS2007/


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47) ISC'2007


------------ISC'2007, JUNE 11-13, 2007, TU DELFT, DELFT, THE NETHERLANDS,
SUBMISSION DEADLINES COMING UP------------

Dear Colleague,

Just a small reminder that the ISC (Industrial
Simulation Conference) 2007 normal submission
deadline of February 25th is coming up.

Some updates about the event:
1) The keynote will be by: dr.ir. Bert D.A. van Beek, Eindhoven
  University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands on
  Simulation and Verification of Timed and Hybrid Dynamical
  Systems

2) The first tutorial will be posted shortly
  on the use of the Supply Chain Simulator (scMod/Sim.exe)
  by Feliz Manuel Teixeira, University of Porto

3) The first ISC 2007 exhibitor has signed up.
  http://www.esi-group.com/, who will
  also give a presentation about their products
  during an industrial session.

As a reminder the conference covers:
[ ] Modelling Methodology
[ ] Analysis Methodology
[ ] Discrete Simulation Languages and Tools
[ ] Simulation in Manufacturing
[ ] Simulation in Steel Manufacturing
[ ] Simulation in Automotive Systems
[ ] Simulation in Robotics
[ ] Simulation in Electronics, Computers and Telecommunications
[ ] Simulation in Electronics Manufacturing
[ ] Simulation in Logistics, Traffic and Transport Simulation
[ ] Complex Systems Modelling
[ ] Simulation in Aerospace
[ ] Marine Simulation
[ ] Simulation in Industrial and Product Design
[ ] Simulation in Engineering Processes
[ ] Simulation in Energy and Power Systems
[ ] Simulation in Multibody Systems
[ ] Simulation in Chemical and Petroleum Engineering
[ ] Simulation in Military and Defense
[ ] Verification, Validation and Accreditation
[ ] Simulation and Training
[ ] Virtual Reality and Graphical Simulations in Industrial Applications
[ ] The Future of Simulation Roudtable
[ ] Workshop on Modelling and Simulation in the textile Industry
[ ] Workshop on Intelligent Transport Systems
[ ] Workshop NANOSIM
[ ] Augmented reality and Pervasive Systems in Factories
[ ] Lean Manufacturing Simulation
[ ] Tutorials
[ ] Exhibition
[ ] Poster session
[ ] Student Session

Workshops
+ Modelling and Simulation in the Textile Industry
+ Intelligent Transport Systems
+ Nanosim
+ Multi-agent Systems and Simulation
+ Augmented Reality and Pervasive Systems in Factories
+ Lean Manufacturing Simulation

Tutorials
Student Papers, Poster Sessions
Partners for Projects Sessions
Software Product Presentation Sessions
Exhibition

Information about the event can be found on:
http://www.eurosis.org/cms/?q=node/176

Best Regards
Philippe

--
Philippe Geril               Tel: +32.9.264.55.09
EUROSIS -ETI                 Fax: +32.9.264.58.25
Ghent University             E-mail: philippe.geril@eurosis.org
Dept.of Industrial Mgmt.     E-mail: pgeril@yahoo.co.uk
Technologiepark 903          URL: http://www.eurosis.org
Campus Ardoyen
B-9052 Ghent-Zwijnaarde
Belgium
*********************************************************************
*               Your Scientific information site on                 *
* Computer Simulation - Concurrent Engineering - Multimedia- Games  *
*                          WWW.EUROSIS.ORG                          *
*********************************************************************


48) RIAO 2007

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO DEC 15, 2006
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

RIAO 2007 - 8th Conference on Information Retrieval
Large-Scale Semantic Access to Content (Text, Image, Video and Sound)
www.riao.org
May 30 to June 1, 2007
Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
The conferences are composed of peer-reviewed scientific sessions and
demonstrations of innovative industrial applications and advanced research
prototypes.

Deadline for paper submissions December 15, 2006
Acceptance Letters sent February 15, 2007
Program Published February 27, 2007
Camera-Ready Copies Due April 1, 2007
Conference Dates May 30, May 31, June 1, 2007

Scope of the Conference
Papers are invited on recent, substantial, original and unpublished research
that has been validated to the level of the creation of a functioning
prototype. We are interested in large-scale solutions to the problem of
accessing the semantic content found in unstructured text, images, video and
audio.
Among other topics concerning the theme of the conference, the submissions 
might
concern one or more of the following subjects:
* Automatic indexing of video, images, and speech
* Improved indexing of text, image, video and sound
* Ontologies and unstructured data
* Semantic Web and Ontologies for Full-Scale Information Retrieval
* Automatically producing textual descriptions of images
* Automatically adding metadata to video and sound
* Indexing and retrieval of mixed-media documents
* Indexing interactive documents
* Natural interface dialogue
* Multimedia question answering systems
* Competitive Intelligence
* Intelligent Search Agents
* Multimodal search
* Architectures for semantic treatment of very large databases
* Algorithms for semantic treatment of very large databases
* Comprehension-based question answering and summarization
* Cooperative indexing between media
* Semantics for less studied languages
* Semantic representations and standards
* Collaborative construction of semantic resources
* Indexing multilingual collections
* Automatic extraction of ontologies from unstructured data
* Aligning multilingual ontologies
* Language resources for multimedia indexing
* Extracting semantic resources from raw data
* Semantic annotation of blogs and videoblogs
* Exploiting large-scale resources for e-learning
* Structuring cultural heritage
* Technological, commercial, industrial watch systems
* Semantic access to large and open archives

Paper Submission
We welcome submissions both from the research community and industry 
concerning
the main conference theme of treating the semantic content of large
quantities
of text, images, videos, and sound.
Submitted papers should describe original work, emphasizing completed or
well
advanced, rather than intended, research. The state of completion of the
reported work must be clearly indicated. Where appropriate, results should
be
rigorously evaluated; the assessment of statistical significance for
quantitative results is encouraged.
Submissions should contain original material that has not been previously
presented to the scientific community. A parallel submission for other
publication or a significant overlap in contents with previously published 
work
should be clearly indicated to the program committee.
All submissions will be reviewed by at least three program committee
members.
The submissions will be judged on originality, relevance, technical quality,
and presentation. Extended versions of selected best papers will be invited 
for
publication in the Information Processing & Management (IPM) International
Journal.
Papers must be submitted on the conference's web site:
http://www.riao.org/cyberchair/cyberPapers/
<http://www.riao.org/cyberchair/cyberPapers/>
Papers can be submitted in two categories: long papers or short papers. Full
papers are appropriate for describing substantial research with
well-evaluated
results and short papers will typically describe ongoing research and
preliminary results. All accepted papers in both categories will be
published
in the conference proceedings. At the conference, full papers will be 
presented
as a talk and short papers will be presented as a poster.
Long papers must not be more than 20 pages (on one column, single-spaced, 
using
Times font 12 points), starting with an abstract. Short papers must not be 
more
than 6 pages (on one column, single-spaced, using Times font 12 points),
starting with an abstract. Submissions should be in Microsoft Word format 
or in
PDF.

Program Committee
Program Committee Presidents
Americas EVANS David, CEO & Chief Scientist, Clairvoyance Corporation, USA
Asia, Oceania FURUI Sadaoki, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Europe, Africa SOULƒ-DUPUY Chantal, IRIT, UniversitŽ Toulouse I, France
Program Committee Members
BELLOT Patrice, UniversitŽ d'Avignon, France
BERRUT Catherine, IMAG, France
BOUGHANEM Mohand, IRIT, UniversitŽ Paul Sabatier, France
BOUJEMAA Nozha, INRIA, France
BRAJNIK Giorgio, University of Udine, Italy
CALLAN Jamie, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
CHEN Hsin-Hsi, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
CHEN Yixin, University of Mississippi, USA
CHEVALIER Max, IRIT, UniversitŽ Paul Sabatier, France
CHRISTMAS William, University of Surrey, UK
CRESTANI Fabio, University of Strathclyde, UK
DAELEMANS Walter, Anvers University, Belgium
de JONG Franciska, University of Twente, The Netherlands
DOWNIE Stephen J., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
DUYGULU Pinar, Bilkent University, Turkey
ELLIS Daniel, Columbia University, USA
ENSER Peter, University of Brighton, UK
FEDERICO Marcello, ITC-IRST, Trente, Italy
FLUHR Christian, CEA/LIST, France
FUHR Norbert, University of Duisberg, Deutchland
FUNG Pascale, University of Science and Technology of Hong Kong, China
GALLINARI Patrick, LIP6 Paris, France
GAROFOLO John S., NIST, USA
GAUSSIER Eric, University of Grenoble, France
GAUVAIN Jean-Luc, LIMSI, France
GEOFFROIS Edouard, DGA, France
GONZALO Julio, UNED, Spain
GRAU Brigitte, LIMSI - CHM - LIR, France
GREFENSTETTE Gregory, CEA/LIST, France
GROSKY William, Michigan Dearborn University, USA
HAINDL Michal, IITA, Czech Republic
HALIN Gilles, LORIA, France
HANSEN John H. L., University of Dallas, USA
HARMAN Donna, NIST, USA
HIRTLE Stephen C., University of Pittsburgh, USA
KANDO Noriko, National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan
KOTROPOULOS Constantine, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
KURIMO Mikko, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
LAGUS Krista, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
LALMAS Mounia, Queen Mary University of London, UK
LAM Wai, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
LEUNG Howard, City Hong Kong University, Hong Kong, China
LIDDY Elizabeth, Syracuse University, USA
LIU Hugo, MIT Media Laboratory, USA
LU Hanging, Chinese Academy of Sciences - Institute of Automation, China
MARCOTEGUI Beatriz, ƒcole des Mines, France
McCOWAN Iain, CSIRO, Australia
MENG Helen, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
NIE Jian-Yun, UniversitŽ de MontrŽal, Canada
OARD Douglas, University of Maryland, USA
OUNIS Iadh, University of Glasgow, UK
PACHET Francois, SONY, France
PARDAS Montse, Universitat Polytecnica de Catalunya, Spain
PASI Gabriella, CNR - ITM Milan, Italy
PAUWELS Eric, CWI Amsterdam, The Netherlands
PETEK Bojan, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
PETERS Carol, CNR, Italia
PINON Jean-Marie, LIRIS - INSA Lyon, France
POPAT Ashok, Google, USA
PUN Thierry, CUI - UniversitŽ de Gen�ve, Switzerland
QU Yan, Clairvoyance Corporation, USA
RAUBER Andreas, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
RENALS Steve, University of Edinburgh, UK
SAKAI Tetsuya, Knowledge Media Lab., Toshiba Corp. R&D Center, Japan
SASAKI Yutaka, ATR, Japon
SARACEVIC Tefko, Rutgers - State University of New Jersey, USA
SAVOY Jacques, UniversitŽ de Neuchatel, Switzerland
SMEATON Alan, Dublin City University, Ireland
TAKENOBU Tokunaga, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
TZANETAKIS George, University of Victoria, Canada
van RIJSBERGEN Keith, University of Glasgow, UK
WILKINSON Ross, CSIRO, Australia
XU Guangyou, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
ZHANG Zhengyou, Microsoft Research, USA
ZHAO Rong, State university of New York, USA
ZHOU Ming, Microsoft Research, Hong Kong, China
ZREIK Khaldoun, UniversitŽ de Caen, France


49) RobocupRescue 2007


==================================================================
        CFP: RobocupRescue Simulation Competition 2007
              
                  -----
             
      To be held in conjunction with Robocup 2007 in Atlanta, July 2007

        (http://www.robocup-us.org/)
         
       
       URL: http://www.robocuprescue.org/robocup2007/cfp.html
==================================================================

Please submit your intention to participate by the **17th of December** 
(only affiliation information required)
(see instructions at: 
http://www.robocuprescue.org/robocup2007/instructions.html)

Invite
------

The RobocupRescue Simulation Competition is divided two main strands: 
the Agent competition and the Infrastructure competition.

*Agent Competition:
The Agent competition involves scoring competing agent coordination 
algorithms on different maps of the RobocupRescue simulation platform. 
The challenge in this case involves developing coordination algorithms 
that will enable teams of Ambulances, Police forces, and Fire Brigades 
to save as many civilians as possible and extinguish fires in a city 
where an earthquake has just happened. The following general issues have 
to be dealt with:

1. Path planning under uncertainty (given that roads may be blocked).
2. Communication with constrained bandwidth and uncertainty
3. Reasoning under uncertainty
4. Scheduling
5. Data fusion

This year's competition will see the implementation of a improved 
simulators, noisy/corrupted communication and sensing abilities, and  an 
improved scoring system.


*Infrastructure Competition:
The Infrastructure competition involves evaluating tools and simulators 
developed for the simulation platform and for simulating disaster 
management problems in general. Here, the intent is, (but not limited 
to), to build up realistic simulators and tools that could be used to 
enhance the basic RobocupRescue simulator and expand upon it.


Goal:
-----
While the general goal of the competition is to develop tools for 
disaster management, it also provides a playground to try out tools and 
techniques developed by Multi-Agent Systems and Artificial Intelligence 
research communities and allow them to showcase the applicability of 
their techniques to significant real-world problems.

For more information please consult: http://www.robocuprescue.org


Procedure to enter the competitions:
-----------------------------------

We require that groups intent on participating in the competitions 
should follow the instructions given on 
http://www.robocuprescue.org/robocup2007/instructions.html to 
pre-register so that they can be directly informed about the settings to 
be used in the competitions. The deadline for pre-registration is the 
***17th of December***. This does not require submitting any code or 
detailed explanation of your strategy/simulator. Once you have 
pre-registered you will be notified when to submit your team description 
papers and code for the competition.


Special Note for new-comers
---------------------------

We understand that not all groups are familiar with the RobocupRescue 
platform. However, new teams can either choose to code their own 
algorithms for the Agent competition or use algorithms developed by 
other teams in previous years. While the basic robocuprescue package 
comes with dummy agents pre-intalled, there are a number of JAVA-based 
and C++-based code that are open source and available for downlaod at 
http://www.robocuprescue.org/robocup/ (see the compressed files in the 
different folders which denote different days of the 2006 competition). 
Last years top 3 teams' codes are directly downloadable from  
http://www.robocuprescue.org/competitions.html.

To download the simulator and basic agent code, follow the instructions 
on http://www.robocuprescue.org/tools.html

There is also a wiki which is under development and where we aim to 
store all instructions on how to install and run the simulator and 
agents: http://www.robocuprescue.org/wiki

Finally, please register with the RobocupRescue simulation mailing list 
to receive regular updates about the simulator changes and to ask 
questions anything to do with the simulator(s). See instructions on how 
to do this: https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/mailman/listinfo/robocup-rescue-s

Important note:
---------------
We adhere to an open-source policy on all code submitted to the 
competition. This means that teams need to make sure that they will not 
violate any software licences by providing their code for free download 
after the competition.


Important Dates:
---------------

December 17, 2006: Deadline for pre-registration.
February 2007  (Exact date to be decided): Teams submit team description 
papers
March 2007  (Exact date to be decided):   Acceptance notification to 
participating teams.
July  2007: Competition takes place in conjunction with Robocup 2007.


Organising Committee
--------------------

Cameron Skinner (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
Arash Rahimi (Iran)
Dr. Nobuhiro Ito (Aichi Institute of Technology, Japan)

Technical committee:
--------------------
Mohammad Mehdi Sabourian (Iran)
Dr. Sarvapali D. Ramchurn (University of Southampton, UK)
Yasovardhan Reddy (Indian Institute of Information Technology, India)

Execs:
-------------------
Prof. H. Levent Akin (Bogazi�i University, Turkey)
Alexander Kleiner (University of Freiburg, Germany)
Prof. Dr. Stefano Carpin (International University Bremen, Germany)

-- 
Dr. Sarvapali Ramchurn
Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group    t: +44 (0) 23 8059 3270
Electronics and Computer Science          f: +44 (0) 23 8059 2865
University of Southampton                 e: sdr@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~sdr


50) SIS 2007

IEEE SIS 2007, Special Session on Swarm Intelligence and Computational
Biology
IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu,
Hawaii, April 1-5, 2007
http://www.computelligence.org/sis/2007/

We would like to inform you that, although the official deadline has
already passed, you can still submit papers to the special session

*Swarm Intelligence and Computational Biology*

Late paper submission will be accepted as long as the time permits.
Accepted papers will be included in the proceedings of the conference.

Organizer chairs:

Dr. Daniel Merkle University of Leipzig, Germany
Dr. Christian Blum Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain

Abstract: Swarm intelligence methods are inspired by the collective
behavior of individuals in decentralized, self-organized systems. They
often provide state-of-the-art solutions for hard optimization
problems. In the field of bioinformatics and computational biology
such problems often occur. Successful optimization methods play a
crucial role for finding optimal or near optimal solutions for such
problems. Furthermore, swarm intelligence can be successfully applied
for making predictions of real biological processes and
structures. The goal of this special session is to present recent
research results with the focus on combinations of swarm intelligence
methods and computational biology. Contributions should address the
combination of swarm intelligence inspired methods (for example
particle swarm optimization or ant colony optimization, but also
related optimization methods) and a research topic from computational
biology. These topics include, but are not limited to:

-Proteomics
-Protein-ligand docking and inter-protein interaction
-Sequence alignment and sequence search
-Phylogeny and cophylogeny
-Drug discovery and drug design
-Fitness landscapes for biological systems
-Genomics
-Identification and classification of genes
-Gene expression
-Metabolic networks
-Bioinformatic databases
-Biomedical imagery




51) SLS 2007



	    Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms
				 ---
      Designing, Implementing and Analyzing Effective Heuristics

			       SLS 2007


		6-8 September, 2007. Brussels, Belgium

	      More details and up-to-date information at
                      iridia.ulb.ac.be/sls2007


Scope of the Workshop
======================

  Stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms are among the most powerful
  techniques for solving computationally hard problems in many areas
  of computer science, operations research and engineering. SLS
  techniques range from rather simple constructive and iterative
  improvement algorithms to general-purpose methods, also widely known
  as metaheuristics, such as ant colony optimization, evolutionary
  computation, iterated local search, memetic algorithms, simulated
  annealing, tabu search and variable neighbourhood search.

  In recent years, it has become evident that the development of
  effective SLS algorithms is a highly complex engineering process
  that typically combines aspects of algorithm design and
  implementation with empirical analysis and problem-specific
  background knowledge. The difficulty of this process is due in part
  to the complexity of the problems being tackled, and in part to the
  large number of degrees of freedom researchers and practitioners
  face when developing SLS algorithms.

  This development process needs to be assisted by a sound methodology
  that adresses the issues arising in the phases of algorithm design,
  implementation, tuning and experimental evaluation. In addition,
  more research is required to understand which SLS techniques are
  best suited for particular problem types and to better understand
  the relationship between algorithm components, parameter settings,
  problem characteristics and performance.


Relevant Research Areas
========================

  The aim of this workshop is to stress the importance of an
  integration of relevant aspects of SLS research into a more coherent
  engineering methodology and to bring together researchers that work
  in various fields, including computer science, operations research,
  metaheuristics, algorithmics, statistics and application areas.

  SLS 2007 solicits contributions dealing with any aspect of
  engineering stochastic local search algorithms. Typical, but not
  exclusive, topics of interest are:

    + Methodological developments
    + In-depth experimental studies
    + Tools for the assistance in the development process of SLS algorithms
    + Case studies on the development of well designed SLS algorithms
    + SLS algorithms for problems including multiple objectives,
      stochastic information or dynamically changing data.
    + New algorithmic developments
    + Theoretical analysis of SLS behaviour


Publication
============

  The workshop proceedings will be published in Springer's Lecture
  Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. Submitted papers must be
  max. 15 pages.

Important Dates
================

  Submission deadline		  16 March, 2007
  Notification of acceptance      21 May, 2007
  Camera ready copy               4 June, 2007
  Workshop                        6-8 September, 2007

General Chairs
==========

    Thomas Stuetzle, IRIDIA, CoDE, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
    Mauro Birattari, IRIDIA, CoDE, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
    Holger H. Hoos, CS Department, UBC, Vancouver, Canada


--------------------------------------------------------------------

II  RRRR   II  DDDD    II   AAAA      Universite' Libre de Bruxelles
II  RR RR  II  DD DD   II  AA  AA     IRIDIA, CP 194/6
II  RRRR   II  DD  DD  II  AAAAAA     Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50
II  RR RR  II  DD DD   II  AA  AA     1050 Bruxelles
II  RR RR  II  DDDD    II  AA  AA     Belgium

         Dr. Thomas Stuetzle     Tel.: +32 (0)2 650 3167
             room C5.108a        Fax.: +32 (0)2 650 2715

 Email: stuetzle@ulb.ac.be
 WWW: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~stuetzle
      http://www.stochastic-local-search.net/sls07
      http://www.sls-book.net
--------------------------------------------------------------------
====================================================================
     SLS 2007 -- Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms
     Designing, Implementing and Analyzing Effective Heuristics
                Brussels, Belgium, 6-8 September 2007
                 http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/sls2007/
====================================================================





52) Special Issue on Evolutionary Algorithms & Probabilistic Models

Special Issue on Evolutionary Algorithms based on, Probabilistic Models,
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation,

AIM & SCOPE,

Evolutionary algorithms based on probabilistic models, (EAPM) have been recognized as a new computing paradigm, in evolutionary computation. There is no traditional crossover, or mutation in EAPMs. Instead, they explicitly extract global, statistical information from their previous searches and build, a probability distribution model of promising solutions, based, on the extracted information. New solutions are then sampled, from the model thus built. Instances of EAPMs include estimation, of distribution algorithms, probabilistic model building, genetic algorithms, ant colony optimization, and the cross, entropy method, to name just a few. Recent years have seen a, growing interest in the research and application of EAPMs., As an interdisciplinary research area, the development of, EAPMs needs joint effort from researchers and practitioners, in evolutionary computation, machine learning, statistics and, simulation. The aim of this special issue is to be a milestone, event in the development of EAPMs, which will highlight the, recent development of EAPMs, clarify outstanding issues for, future progress, and disseminate EAPMs to a wider audience, to attract more researchers to EAPMs.,

TOPICS COVERED,

Suggested topics include (but are not limited to) the following:,
Theory of EAPMs,
New EAPMs,
Combination of machine learning techniques, and EAPMs,
Combination of statistics techniques and EAPMs,
Combination of other heuristics and EAPMs,
EAPMs for multiobjective optimization problems,
EAPMs in dynamic and noisy environments,
Parallel implementation of EAPMs,
Real-world/novel applications

SUBMISSIONS,

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the instructions, of the "Information for Authors" section of the, journal founded at (<http://ieee-cis.org/pubs/tec/authors/>http://ieee-cis.org/pubs/tec/authors/ ) and, submission should be done through the journal website:, <http://tevcieee.manuscriptcentral.com/>http://tevcieee.manuscriptcentral.com/ and clearly mark "Special, Issue on EAPM" as comments to the editor-in-chief., Submission of a manuscript implies that it is the authors', original unpublished work and is not being submitted for, possible publication elsewhere., The review process will be driven by the Guest Editors of, this Special Issue and the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Xin Yao. For, any clarification please contact Jose A. Lozano, Qingfu Zhang, or Pedro Larra÷naga at the addresses below.,

IMPORTANT DATES,
July 31, 2007, Submission deadline,
November 30, 2007, Notification of the first review,
January 31, 2008, Revised versions due,
March 30, 2008, Final notice of acceptance/reject,
April 30, 2008, Final manuscript.,
The expected publication year of the special issue will be 2008.,

GUEST EDITORS,
Prof. Jose A. Lozano,
Department of Computer Science and AI,
University of the Basque Country,
Spain.,
Tel.:+34 943 018029,
e-mail: <mailto:ja.lozano@ehu.es>ja.lozano@ehu.es,
url: <http://www.sc.ehu.es/isg>http://www.sc.ehu.es/isg

Dr. Qingfu Zhang,
Department of Computer Science,
University of Essex, UK.,
Tel.: +441206 872336,
e-mail: <mailto:qzhang@essex.ac.uk>qzhang@essex.ac.uk,
url: <http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/qzhang>http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/qzhang


Prof. Pedro Larra÷naga,
Department of Computer Science and AI,
University of the Basque Country,
Spain., Tel.:+34 943 018045,
e-mail: <mailto:pedro.larranaga@ehu.es>pedro.larranaga@ehu.es
url: <http://www.sc.ehu.es/isg>http://www.sc.ehu.es/isg



Flyer URL: <http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/qzhang/IEEETECcfp.pdf>http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/qzhang/IEEETECcfp.pdf


for,
Dr. Qingfu Zhang
Department of Computer, University of Essex,
Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK
<http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/zhang>http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/zhang
Email: <https://wwwdev.ulb.ac.be/webmail3/webmail.php?PHPSESSID=6bec011d0f26d753eebbe53f0943f926&form-type=readmail&TO=qzhang@essex.ac.uk>qzhang@essex.ac.uk
Tel: (0044) 1206 872336


51) Special Issue on Constraint  based methods for Bioinformatics



                        FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

                         CONSTRAINTS Journal

    Special Issue on Constraint based methods for Bioinformatics

=====================================================================

INTRODUCTION

Bioinformatics   is   a   challenging   and   fast  growing  area  of
research,  which  is  of  utmost  importance  for  our  understanding
of   life.   Major  contributions  to  this  discipline  can  provide
significant  benefits  in  medicine,  agriculture,  and  industry. To
pick  out  only  a  few  examples,  Bioinformatics  tackles  problems
related to:

 * Recognition,   analysis,   and  organization   of   DNA  sequences
 * Biological  systems  simulations  (for  metabolic   or  regulatory
   networks)
 * Prediction  of  the  spatial  conformations  and  interactions  of
   biological polymers (e.g., proteins, RNA)

Recently,  these  problems  have  been  formalized  and studied using
constraints  (often  over  finite  domains  or  intervals  of reals).
Biology  is  a  source  of  extremely interesting and computationally
expensive  tasks,  that  can  be  encoded  exploiting the application
of  recent  and  more  general  techniques of constraint programming.

As  evidence  of  this  trend,  various  workshops  (Constraints  and
Bioinformatics/Biocomputing   at  CP97,  CP98  and  Constraint  based
methods  for  Bioinformatics  at  ICLP2005  and CP2006) witnessed the
interest  and  the  importance  of research in the topic and moreover
presented  new  developments  of  constraint  technology  (see, e.g.,
details in http://www.dimi.uniud.it/dovier/WCB06).

We   believe  that  is  valuable  to  gather  papers  addressing  the
application  of constraints to biological problems. With this special
issue,  we  desire to reflect the state of the art of this field, and
thus  we seek for papers that report new ideas, advances and results.
The  submission  of  papers  is  opened to anyone who developed ideas
and/or  obtained  results  in  the  bioinformatics area making use of
constraint programming.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
                          PAPER SUBMISSION
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Researchers  are  invited  to submit original or survey papers to all
the   editors   (addresses   below).  The  editors  would  appreciate
receiving  a  tentative  short  abstract  (may  be  partial)  at  the
beginning  of  January. In the first email, please specify the title,
keywords,  abstract  and  the  author's  email  addresses. Receipt of
submissions  will be acknowledged. All final submissions should be in
.pdf  format,  and  must adhere to the Constraints Journal guidelines
http://ai.uwaterloo.ca/~vanbeek/Constraints/Instructions_for_Authors.html
(Note   that   the   usual   on-line  submission  procedure  for  the
Constraints  Journal  will  not be followed initially for the Special
Issue)

We  expect  papers  no longer than 25 pages, but this is not a strict
constraint.  Submissions  will be reviewed by at least two reviewers.
All  accepted  papers  will  meet the usual high-quality standards of
the Constraints Journal.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
                           Important Dates
---------------------------------------------------------------------

 Abstract submission:               January  10th, 2007
 Submission Deadline:               February 14th, 2007
 Notification of acceptance:        May      14th, 2007
 Final versions of accepted papers: July     14th, 2007

 --------------------------------------------------------------------
                            Guest Editors
 --------------------------------------------------------------------

 Alessandro Dal Palu', Parma University, Italy.
        Email alessandro.dalpalu AT unipr.it

 Agostino Dovier, Udine University, Italy.
        Email dovier AT dimi.uniud.it

 Sebastian Will, Freiburg University, Germany.
        Email will AT informatik.uni-freiburg.de


 See: http://www.dimi.uniud.it/dovier/WCBSI/

=====================================================================

-- 
Sebastian Will, Dr. rer. nat.
Bioinformatics - Inst. of Computer Science
Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg
Tel: +49 (0761) 203 8246
http://www.bioinf.uni-freiburg.de/~will




52) WORLDCOMP'07

                  Call  For  Papers

     The 2007 World Congress in Computer Science,
     Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing
                    WORLDCOMP'07
 Date and Location: June 25-28, 2007, Las Vegas, USA

        Academic Sponsors: Research Labs at
  MIT, Harvard, Purdue, Univ. of Texas at Austin, ...

    Paper Submission Deadline: February 20, 2007

Dear Colleagues:

You are invited to submit a draft/full paper for consideration.
All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings.

The 2007 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering,
and Applied Computing (WORLDCOMP'07) is composed of the following
25 conferences (all will be held simultaneously, same location
and dates: June 25-28, 2007, USA).

o The 2007 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed
  Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Grid Computing and
  Applications (GCA'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Computer Design (CDES'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Scientific Computing (CSC'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence
  (ICAI'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary
  Methods (GEM'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Machine Learning; Models,
  Technologies and Applications (MLMTA'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Bioinformatics and
  Computational Biology (BIOCOMP'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Software Engineering Research
  and Practice (SERP'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Wireless Networks (ICWN'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Image Processing, Computer
  Vision, and Pattern Recognition (IPCV'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Modeling, Simulation and
  Visualization Methods (MSV'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Computer Graphics and Virtual
  Reality (CGVR'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Multimedia Systems and
  Applications (MSA'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Internet Computing (ICOMP'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Semantic Web and Web Services
  (SWWS'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Security and Management (SAM'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Data Mining (DMIN'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Information and Knowledge
  Engineering (IKE'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on e-Learning, e-Business,
  Enterprise Information Systems, and e-Government (EEE'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Embedded Systems and
  Applications (ESA'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Frontiers in Education: Computer
  Science and Computer Engineering (FECS'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Foundations of Computer
  Science (FCS'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Engineering of Reconfigurable
  Systems and Algorithms (ERSA'07)

o The 2007 International Conference on Communications in Computing
  (CIC'7)

(a link to each conference's URL can be found at
http://www.worldacademyofscience.org/worldcomp07)

Coordinator/General Chair:

   H. R. Arabnia, PhD
   Professor, Computer Science
   Editor-in-Chief, The Journal of Supercomputing (Springer)
   The University of Georgia
   Department of Computer Science
   415 Graduate Studies Research Center
   Athens, Georgia 30602-7404, USA
   email: hra@cs.uga.edu

Submission of Papers:

   Prospective authors are invited to submit their draft/full paper
   (about 5 to 8 pages - single space, font size of 10 to 12) to
   H. R. Arabnia by Feb. 20, 2007 (hra@cs.uga.edu). E-mail submissions
   in MS Doc or PDF formats are preferable (postal mail submissions
   are also fine.) All reasonable typesetting formats are acceptable
   (later, the authors of accepted papers will be asked to follow a
   particular typesetting format to prepare their papers for publication.)

   The length of the Camera-Ready papers (if accepted) will be limited to
   7 (IEEE style) pages.  Papers must not have been previously published
   or currently submitted for publication elsewhere.  The first page of
   the draft paper should include: title of the paper, name, affiliation,
   postal address, email address, and telephone number for each author.
   The first page should also identify the name of the author who will
   be presenting the paper (if accepted) and a maximum of 5 topical
   keywords that would best represent the content of the paper.  Finally,
   the name of the conference that the paper is being submitted to must be
   stated on the first page.

   Papers will be evaluated for originality, significance, clarity, impact,
   and soundness.  Each paper will be refereed by two experts in the field
   who are independent of the conference program committee.  The referees'
   evaluations will then be reviewed by two members of the program
   committee who will recommend a decision to the chair of the track that
   the paper has been submitted to.  The track chair will make the final
   decision.  Lastly, the Camera-Ready papers will be reviewed by one
   member of the program committee.

Members of Program and Organizing Committees:

   The Program Committee includes members of chapters of World Academy
   of Science (chapters: supercomputing; scientific computing; artificial
   intelligence; imaging science; databases; simulation; software
   engineering; embedded systems; internet and web technologies;
   communications; computer security; and bioinformatics.) Many members
   of the program committee for individual conferences include renowned
   leaders, scholars, researchers, scientists and practitioners of the
   highest ranks; many are directors of large research laboratories,
   IEEE Fellows, heads/chairs of departments, deans and provosts.
   Each committee also includes two Student Members (in their final stages
   of their PhD programs) who are identified as such.  Refer to the
   conference web sites for the list of members of program committee.

Co-Sponsors (a partial list):

   Academic Co-Sponsors of WORLDCOMP'07 include:
     - Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory,
       MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
     - Statistical Genomics and Computational Biology Laboratory,
       Department of Statistics, Harvard University (Cambridge,
       Massachusetts)
     - Texas Advanced Computing Center, The University of Texas at
       Austin (Austin, Texas)
     - Statistical and Computational Intelligence Laboratory of
       Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana)
     - University of Iowa's Medical Imaging HPC Lab (Iowa City, Iowa)
     - Institute for Informatics Problems of the Russian Academy of
       Sciences, Moscow, Russia);
   Other Co-sponsors include:
     - HPCwire
     - GRIDtoday
     - STEM Education Society
     - HPCSoft, HPC Software Inc.
     - International Technology Institute (ITI)
     - H2cM - Hodges' Health, UK

Location of Conferences:

   The conferences will be held in the Monte Carlo Resort hotel, Las Vegas,
   Nevada, USA.  This is a mega hotel with excellent conference facilities
   and over 3,000 rooms.  The hotel is minutes from the airport with
   24-hour shuttle service to and from the airport.  This hotel has many
   recreational attractions, including: waterfalls, spa, pools, sunning
   decks, Easy River water ride, wave pool, lighted tennis courts,
   health spa (with workout equipment, whirlpool, sauna, ...),
   nightly shows, snack bars, many restaurants, shopping area, bars, ...
   Many of these attractions are open 24 hours a day and most are suitable
   for families and children.  The negotiated room rate for conference
   attendees is very reasonable.  The hotel is within walking distance
   from most other attractions (major shopping areas, night clubs, free
   street shows, Golf courses, ...).

Purpose / History:

   This set of joint conferences is the largest annual gathering of
   researchers in computer science, computer engineering and applied
   computing.  Many of the 25 joint conferences in WORLDCOMP are the
   premier conferences for presentation of advances in their respective
   fields.  Most of these conferences have been evaluated and determined
   to be top tier research conferences
   (see http://www.cs-conference-ranking.org/index.html for an example).
   We anticipate to have 2000 or more attendees from over 75 countries
   participating in the 2007 joint conferences.

   The motivation is to assemble a spectrum of affiliated research
   conferences into a coordinated research meeting held in a common
   place at a common time.  The main goal is to provide a forum for
   exchange of ideas in a number of research areas that interact.  The
   model used to form these annual conferences facilitates communication
   among researchers from all over the world in different fields of
   computer science, computer engineering and applied computing.  Both
   inward research (core areas of computer science and engineering) and
   outward research (multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, and
   applications) will be covered during the conferences.

Important Dates:

   Feb.  20, 2007:    Submission of full/draft papers (about 5 to 8 pages)
   March 20, 2007:    Notification of acceptance
   April 20, 2007:    Camera-Ready papers and Registration due
   June 25-28, 2007:  The 2007 World Congress in Computer Science,
                      Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing
                      (WORLDCOMP'07 - 25 joint conferences)




53) AISB 07 Convention 

AISB'07 Artificial and Ambient Intelligence
April 2nd-4th 2007 (early registration 6th March)
Culture Lab -- Newcastle
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of
Behaviour (AISB) is pleased to announce its forthcoming convention to be
held at Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2-5 April 2007. The AISB
convention is an annual event organised as a number of collocated symposia
interspersed with invited plenary talks. In addition to symposia related to
the theme of the convention (artificial and ambient intelligence) a number
of other symposia will be collocated:

1. Affective Smart Environments
   http://www.di.uniba.it/intint/ase07.html

2. Artificial Societies for Ambient Intelligence (ASAMI)
   http://asami07.cs.rhul.ac.uk/

3. Mindful Environments
  http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/conference/ME

4. Language, Speech and Gesture for Expressive Characters
   http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/p.l.olivier/expressivecharacters/

5. Imitation in Animals and Artifacts
   http://vislab.isr.ist.utl.pt/aisb07_imitation/

6. Narrative AI and Intelligent Serious Games for Education
   http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~daniela/AISB_07.html

7. Spatial Reasoning and Communication
   http://www.sfbtr8.uni-bremen.de/aisb/

8. The Reign of Catz and Dogz? Virtual Creatures in a Computerized Society
   http://hemswell.lincoln.ac.uk/virtualcreatures/index.html





54) AICT 2007 , ICIW 2007 ||      Mauritius

Invitation
 
Please note the extended deadline for submissions.

Please consider to contribute and forward the Call for Papers to the appropriate groups.  
 
For awards, photos, and other info on previous editions (AICT 2006 // ICIW 2006), please see 

http://www.iaria.org/conferences/AICT06.html

http://www.iaria.org/conferences/ICIW06.html
 
Cheers,

Petre Dini, pdini@cisco.com 
 
 
==========================================
 
CALL FOR PAPERS 
 

Important deadlines:

Full paper submission: December 12, 2006

Author notification: January 15, 2007

Registration and Camera ready: February 5, 2007

 
Date/Place: May 13-19, 2007 - Mauritius
 

Conferences:

The Third Advanced International Conference on Telecommunications

AICT 2007 

http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/AICT07.html

 
The Second International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services

ICIW 2007  

http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/ICIW07.html   

 
Featuring the workshops:
 
- ENSYS 2007: The Second Worksop on Entertainment Systems 

  http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/ENSYS.html
 
- P2PSA 2007: The Second International Workshop on P2P Systems and Applications 

  http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/P2PSA.html
 
- ONLINE 2007: The Second International Workshop on Online Communications, Collaborative Systems, and Social Networks

  http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/ONLINE.html
 
- SAPIR 2007: The Fourth International Workshop on Partial and Intermittent Resources 

  http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/SAPIR.html
 
- ELETE 2007: The Third International Workshop on E-learning and Mobile Learning on Telecommunications 

  http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/ELETE.html
 
- TELET 2007: The Second International Workshop on Teletraffic Modeling and Management

  http://www.iaria.org/conferences2007/TELET.html
 

55) artificial mind prototype

I would like to notify you once again about further developments, this time
concerning an adaptation of the original artificial mind prototype driving
a virtual worm to find its 'food'. This should make it feasible to address
the issue of building a humanoid robot.

A summary can be found on the same website www.otoom.net under > about the
computer program OWorm, although the details have been submitted in a paper
to a journal.

Maybe your members find it interesting.

Best regards,

Martin Wurzinger


=======================
Martin Wurzinger
tel +61 (0)7 3844 0742
mob 0432 398 362
martinw[AT]otoom.net
On the origin of Mind website:
http://www.otoom.net



56) BCI 2007 

********************************************************************************* 
                               FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL ON BIOLOGY,                            
                                COMPUTATION AND INFORMATION (BCI 2007)                                
********************************************************************************* 
                                                  July 2-6, 2007, Trieste, Italy                                                   
********************************************************************************* 
                                                                    
                                                                  
                                                   CALL FOR PARTICIPATION                                            
                                                                    
                                                                  
********************************************************************************* 


The fourth edition of the School of Biology, Computation and Information (BCI) aims at bringing
together teachers and Students of Biology, Mathematics and Computer Science.
The main goal of the School is to give an updated overview of interdisciplinary techniques
and problems cross-bordering the three fields.

During the school, on Wednesday 4th July, a one-day workshop will be held.
It will be titled "Patterns in strings: from biology to linguistics and back".
Excellence lecturers will be invited. The participants to the School may submit an abstract leading
to a twenty-minutes presentation during the workshop.
Abstracts will be sent to and selected/judged by the Scientific Committee.


********************************************************************************* 

COURSES - Main topic: Pattern discovery in genomics



Area: Mathematics
Lecturer: Prof. Nello Cristianini,
University of Bristol, UK


Area: Computer Science
Lecturer: Prof. Michael Brudno,
Toronto University, Canada


Area: Biology
Lecturer: Dr. Elia Stupka
CBM (Consortium for Biomolecular Medicine),
Area Science Park, Trieste, Italy


********************************************************************************* 


WORKSHOP


Title: "Patterns in strings: from biology to linguistics and back"

Strings express a pervasive notion. The workshop aims at exchanging ideas which may be useful
for building bridges between different and seemingly unrelated fields, e.g. computational biology
and computational linguistics.


********************************************************************************* 

REGISTRATION

Early registration deadline: 15 May 2007.
Late registration deadline: 10 June 2007.

Number of participants: 35.

Acceptance of more participants will be evaluated by the School organizers.

We can provide accommodation in Hotels located in the city center for 35 participants
at a discounted rate, please visit the School website for booking details.
For persons accompanying the School participants, please, contact the organizing committee.


Early registration fee: EUR 150.
Late registration fee: EUR 200.


The registration fee covers participation to all lectures and to the workshop,
course texts and general course suppliance, coffee breaks, mid-day lunches,
and transport to the conference venue.

********************************************************************************* 

LOCATION


This school will be held at CBM, company appointed for the coordination of the
Friuli Venezia Giulia Technology District of Molecular Biomedicine.
CBM operates around Area Science Park in Basovizza,
within a picturesque woody landscape just a few miles from Trieste city centre.


********************************************************************************* 

WEBSITE AND CONTACT


For all additional information, please visit the website:
http://bci2007.cbm.fvg.it

You can also contact the school organizers.

********************************************************************************* 

SPONSORS


- CBM (Cluster in Biomedicine) - Area Science Park, Trieste.
- Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Trieste.
- Department of Mathematics andComputer Science, University of Udine.
- National Insitute of High Mathematics. National Group of Scientific Computation

********************************************************************************* 

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE


- Andrea Sgarro, University of Trieste (school director)
- Alberto Policriti, University of Udine (school co-director)
- Elia Stupka, CBM, Trieste
- Luca Bortolussi, University of Trieste
- Eugenio Omodeo, University of Trieste

********************************************************************************* 

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE


- Michael Brudno, University of Toronto
- Nello Cristianini, University of Bristol
- Elia Stupka, CBM, Trieste
- Luca Bortolussi, University of Trieste
- Agostino Dovier, University of Udine
- Francesco Fabris, University of Trieste
- Carla Piazza, University of Udine
- Alberto Policriti, University of Udine
- Andrea Sgarro, University of Trieste

********************************************************************************* 



-- 



***************************************************
***************************************************
**                                               **
**  Luca Bortolussi                              **
**  Assistant Professor of Computer Science      **
**  Department of Maths and Computer Science     ** **  University of Trieste                        **
**  Via A. Valerio 12/A, 34100 Trieste, Italia.  **
**                                               **
**  office: room 320, 3rd floor                  **
**  email: luca@dmi.units.it                     ** **  web: http://www.dmi.units.it/~bortolu/       **
**  phone: +39 040 558 2630                      **
**                                               **
***************************************************
***************************************************



57) Computer Science Newsletter - February 2007

Computer Science Newsletter 	 		 .textbar {font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;} 			 .textbody {font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;}
 
February 2007

Highlight

<http://www.worldscibooks.com/compsci/6268.html>Life Science Data Mining 
Stephen Wong (Harvard Medical School, USA) & Chung-Sheng Li (IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center)

Key Feature:

The first book dedicated to data mining algorithms and techniques for a broad range of life science applications and problems, including public health, drug discovery, biomarker development, systems biology, genetic analysis, biosurveillance and environmental monitoring

About the Editors:

Stephen Wong is the founding Director of the Center for Bioinformatics, Harvard Center of Neurodegeneration and Repair (HCNR) the Executive Director of Functional and Molecular Imaging Center, and an Associate Professor of Radiology, Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His research interests include biomedical informatics and imaging and the interplay between the two in solving pragmatic problems. Dr Wong is a hybrid scientist and has over 20 years of R&D experience with leading institutions in academia and industry. He has published over 170 peer-reviewed papers and holds seven patents in biomedical informatics.

Chung-Sheng Li is a Fellow of IEEE and a Department Head of IBM Watson Research Center, New York, USA. He is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Computer Vision and Image Understanding. His research interests include environmental and public health activity monitoring, digital libraries, security, databases, network communications, and content based retrieval of images and video.

New and Forthcoming Publications

<http://www.worldscibooks.com/compsci/4526.html>Real-Time Systems
Modeling, Design, and Applications
Dan Ionescu (University of Ottawa, Canada) & Aurel Cornell (Brigham Young University, USA)
<http://www.worldscibooks.com/business/6239.html>Enterprise Architectures And Digital Administration 
Planning, Design and Assessment
Ambrose Goikoetxea (Mondragon University, Euskadi)
<http://www.worldscibooks.com/compsci/p457.html>Design And Analysis Of Reliable And Fault-Tolerant Computer Systems 
Mostafa Abd-El-Barr (Kuwait University, Kuwait)
<http://www.worldscibooks.com/business/5932.html>Handbook Of Information Technology In Organizations And Electronic Markets
Angel J Salazar (Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, UK) & Steve Sawyer (Pennsylvania State University, USA)
<http://www.worldscibooks.com/business/6053.html>The Business And Information Technologies (BIT) Project
A Global Study of Business Practice
Uday Karmarkar & Vandana Mangal (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

Highlights from Now Publishers Published by Now Publishers and marketed by World Scientific

<http://www.worldscibooks.com/compsci/n051.html>Algorithmic Results In List Decoding
Venkatesan Guruswami (University of Washington, USA)

Abstract
Introduction
Definitions and Terminology
Combinatorics of List Decoding
Decoding Reed-Solomon Codes
Graph-Based List-Decodable Codes
Folded Reed-Solomon Codes
Achieving Capacity Over Bounded Alphabets
Concluding Thoughts
References

<http://www.worldscibooks.com/compsci/n041.html>A Framework For Web Science
Tim Berners-Lee, Daniel J Weitzner (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA), Wendy Hall, Kieron O'Hara, Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton, UK) & James A Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic University, USA)

A Framework for Web Science sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements.

Journal Highlights

<http://www.worldscinet.com/ijfcs/>International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science
ISSN: 0129-0541

New Special Issue: Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis (ATVA 2005) - <http://www.worldscinet.com/ijfcs/18/1801/S01290541071801.html>Vol. 18, No. 1 (February 2007)

Paper Highlights:

<http://www.worldscinet.com/ijfcs/18/1801/S0129054107004553.html>Modular Ranking Abstraction
Ittai Balaban (New York University) et al.
<http://www.worldscinet.com/ijfcs/18/1801/S0129054107004565.html>Verifying Very Large Industrial Circuits Using 100 Processes And Beyond
Limor Fix (Intel Corporation, Israel) et al.
<http://www.worldscinet.com/ijfcs/18/1801/S0129054107004577.html>Guaranteed Termination In The Verification Of LTL Properties Of Non-Linear Robust Discrete Time Hybrid Systems
Werner Damm (Carl v. Ossietzky UniversitŠt Oldenburg, Germany) et al.


<http://www.worldscinet.com/ppl/>Parallel Processing Letters
ISSN: 0129-6264

New Sample Issue - Vol. 16, No. 3 (September 2006)

<http://www.worldscinet.com/cgi-bin/jform.cgi?/ppl/16/1603/S0129626406002654.html>Quasi Monte Carlo Integration In Grid Environments: Further Leaping Effects
Heinz Hofbauer
<http://www.worldscinet.com/cgi-bin/jform.cgi?/ppl/16/1603/S0129626406002666.html>Communication Complexity And Speed-Up In The Explicit Difference Method
Pavol Purcz
<http://www.worldscinet.com/cgi-bin/jform.cgi?/ppl/16/1603/S0129626406002678.html>Communication Performance Of LAM/MPI And MPICH On A Linux Cluster
Igor Rozman et al.
<http://www.worldscinet.com/cgi-bin/jform.cgi?/ppl/16/1603/S012962640600268X.html>Parallelization Of Wavelet Filters Using SIMD Extensions
Rade Kutil And Peter Eder
<http://www.worldscinet.com/cgi-bin/jform.cgi?/ppl/16/1603/S0129626406002691.html>Parallel Cooperative Savings Based Ant Colony Optimization - Multiple Search And Decomposition Approaches
Karl F. Doerner et al.
<http://www.worldscinet.com/cgi-bin/jform.cgi?/ppl/16/1603/S0129626406002708.html>Preconditioned Parallel Block-Jacobi SVD Algorithm
Gabriel Oksa And Mari‡n Vajtersic
<http://www.worldscinet.com/cgi-bin/jform.cgi?/ppl/16/1603/S012962640600271X.html>Three Counterexamples To Dispel The Myth Of The Universal Computer
Selim G. Akl

Useful Tips for Scientists
Looking for literature on building and using a reputation in Science? Point yourself in the right direction through this <http://www.worldscibooks.com/survival/survival_chap04.shtml>feature article on how budding scientists can get known in their field, whether through publications, speaking at conferences or seminars etc. There are also some useful tips on getting funded.

How to Unsubscribe
At any time you decide to withdraw from this service, you can do so by replying "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line, together with the CONTENTS of this email.

Copyright (c) 2007 <http://www.worldscientific.com>World Scientific Publishing Co.
All rights reserved.
 
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58) GMAI-07

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON Graphical Models and Imaging
 (GMAI'2007)
Sender: sarfraz@kfupm.edu.sa
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>

? Apologies for cross posting

 

==========================

CALL FOR PAPERS

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON Graphical Models and Imaging (GMAI'2007)

04-06 July 2007, ETH, Zurich - Switzerland

<http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/GMAI07/>http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/GMAI07/

==========================

 
PDF file for the CFP is attached.
 
Regards

Prof. Dr. Muhammad Sarfraz
Department of Information and Computer Science
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
KFUPM # 1510, Dhahran 31261
Saudi Arabia.
 
Tel: +966-3-860-2763
Fax: +966-3-860-2763
Email: <>sarfraz@kfupm.edu.sa
WWW: <>http://www.ccse.kfupm.edu.sa/~sarfraz/



59) IICAI-07 

 

The 3rd Indian International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IICAI-07) (website: <http://www.iiconference.org/>http://www.iiconference.org ) will be held in Pune, INDIA during December 17-19 2007. IICAI-07 is one of the major AI events in the world. This conference focuses on all areas of AI and related fields.   We invite paper submissions. Please visit on the conference website for more details.

 

Bhanu Prasad

IICAI-07 Chair

Department of Computer and Information Sciences

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, FL 32307, USA

Email: <mailto:bhanupvsr@gmail.com>bhanupvsr@gmail.com

Phone: 850-412-7350





51) Special Issue on Constraint  based methods for Bioinformatics
52) WORLDCOMP'07
53) AISB 07 Convention 
54) AICT 2007 , ICIW 2007 ||      Mauritius
55) artificial mind prototype
56) BCI 2007 
57) Computer Science Newsletter - February 2007
58) GMAI-07
59) IICAI-07 
60) LATA 2007

1st INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS

LATA 2007

Tarragona, Spain, March 29 - April 4, 2007

http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2007/index.html


PROGRAMME

Thursday, March 29

8:00 - 9:00
Registration		

9:00 - 9:15
Opening		

9:15 - 10:45

	Tomas Masopust and Alexander Meduna - Descriptional Complexity of Grammars Regulated by Context Conditions
	Guangwu Liu, Carlos Martin-Vide, Arto Salomaa and Sheng Yu - State Complexity of Basic Operations Combined with Reversal
	Henning Fernau and Juergen Dassow - Comparison of Some Descriptional Complexities of 0L Systems Obtained by a Unifying Approach

10:45 - 11:15
Coffee Break 		

11:15 - 12:15

	Vinay Choudhary, Anand Kumar Sinha and Somenath Biswas - Universality for Nondeterministic Logspace
	Hermann Gruber and Markus Holzer - Computational Complexity of NFA Minimization for Finite and Unary Languages

12:15 - 12:30
Break 		

12:30 - 14:00

Tutorial	Volker Diekert - Equations: From Words to Graph Products (I)

14:00 - 16:00
Lunch		

16:00 - 17:30
	
	Grigoriy Povarov - Descriptive Complexity of the Hamming Neighborhood of a Regular Language
	Baptiste Blanpain, Jean-Marc Champarnaud and Jean-Philippe Dubernard - Geometrical Languages
	Olivier Bodini, Thomas Fernique and Eric Remila - A Characterization of Flip-accessibility for Rhombus Tilings of the Whole Plane

17:30 - 18:00
Coffee Break
 		
18:00 - 19:30	

	Bernd Borchert and Klaus Reinhardt - Deterministically and Sudoku-deterministically Recognizable Picture Languages
	Ralf Stiebe - Slender Siromoney Matrix Languages
	Kazuya Ogasawara and Satoshi Kobayashi - Stochastically Approximating Tree Grammars by Regular Grammars and Its Application to Faster ncRNA Family Annotation

Friday, March 30

8:45 - 10:15	

	Andreas Maletti - Compositions of Extended Top-down Tree Transducers
	Ekaterina Komendantskaya - First-order Deduction in Neural Networks
	Pal Domosi - Automata Networks without any Letichevsky Criteria

10:15 - 10:45
Coffee Break

10:45 - 12:15

	Henning Bordihn and Gyorgy Vaszil - On Leftmost Derivations in CD Grammar Systems
	Suna Bensch - An Approach to Parallel Mildly Context-sensitive Grammar Formalisms
	Yurii Rogozhin, Carlos Martin-Vide and Artiom Alhazov - Networks of Evolutionary Processors with Two Nodes Are Unpredictable

12:15 - 12:30
Break

12:30 - 14:00

Tutorial	Volker Diekert - Equations: From Words to Graph Products (II)

14:00 - 16:00
Lunch

16:00 - 17:30	

	Victor Selivanov - Classifying Omega-regular Partitions
	Paolo Boldi, Violetta Lonati, Roberto Radicioni and Massimo Santini - The Number of Convex Permutominoes
	Pawel Baturo and Wojciech Rytter - Occurrence and Lexicographic Properties of Standard Sturmian Words

17:30 - 18:00
Coffee Break

18:00 - 19:00

Invited Talk	Neil Immerman - Nested Words

19:30
Visit to the old city
	
Monday, April 2

9:00 - 10:30

	Francine Blanchet-Sadri, Kevin Corcoran and Jenell Nyberg - Fine and Wilf's Periodicity Result on Partial Words and Consequences
	Costas Iliopoulos, Borivoj Melichar, Jan Supol and Inuka Jayasekera - Weighted Degenerated Approximate Pattern Matching
	Krystyna Stawikowska and Edward Ochmanski - On Star-free Trace Languages and their Lexicographic Representations

10:30 - 11:00
Coffee Break

11:00 - 12:30

 	Zoltan L. Nemeth - On the Regularity of Binoid Languages: A Comparative Approach
	Markus Lohrey and Benjamin Steinberg - The Submonoid and Rational Subset Membership Problems for Graph Groups
	Camilo Thorne - Categorial Module Grammars of Bounded Size Have Finite Bounded Density

12:30 - 12:45
Break

12:45 - 13:45

Tutorial	Erich Graedel - Infinite Games (I)

13:45 - 15:45
Lunch

15:45 - 17:15

	Mathieu Poudret, Jean-Paul Comet, Pascale Le Gall, Agn�s Arnould and Philippe Meseure - Topology-based Geometric Modelling for Biological Cellular Processes
	Farid Ablayev and Aida Gainutdinova - Classical Simulation Complexity of Quantum Branching Programs
	Martin Kochol, Nada Krivonakova, Silvia Smejova and Katarina Srankova - Reductions of Matrices Associated with Nowhere-zero Flows

17:15 - 17:45
Coffee Break

17:45 - 18:45

	Juntae Yoon and Seonho Kim - Rule-based Word Spacing in Korean Based on Lexical Information Extracted from a Corpus
	Julien Bourdaillet and Jean-Gabriel Ganascia - Practical Block Sequence Alignment with Moves

18:45 - 19:00
Break

19:00 - 20:00

Invited Talk	Helmut Juergensen - Synchronization

Tuesday, April 3

9:00 - 10:30

	Pavlos Antoniou, Maxime Crochemore, Costas Iliopoulos and Pierre Peterlongo - Application of Suffix Trees for the Acquisition of Common Motifs with Gaps in a Set of Strings
	Frantisek Mraz, Friedrich Otto and Martin Platek - Free Word-order and Restarting Automata
	Martin Kutrib and Jens Reimann - Succinct Description of Regular Languages by Weak Restarting Automata

10:30 - 11:00
Coffee Break

11:00 - 12:30	

	Hartmut Messerschmidt and Friedrich Otto - On Determinism Versus Non-determinism for Restarting Automata
	Martin Kutrib and Andreas Malcher - Fast Reversible Language Recognition Using Cellular Automata
	Pietro Di Lena and Luciano Margara - Computational Complexity of Dynamical Systems: the Case of Cellular Automata

12:30 - 12:45
Break

12:45 - 13:45

Tutorial	Erich Graedel - Infinite Games (II)

13:45 - 15:45
Lunch

15:45 - 17:15	

	Christos Nomikos and Panos Rondogiannis - Locally Stratified Boolean Grammars
	Alexander Okhotin - Unambiguous Boolean Grammars
	Yo-Sub Han and Derick Wood - Generalizations of One-deterministic Regular Languages

17:15 - 17:45
Coffee Break

17:45 - 18:45

	Franz Baader, Jan Hladik and Rafael Penaloza - SI! Automata Can Show PSPACE Results for Description Logics
	Liviu P. Dinu, Radu Gramatovici and Florin Manea - On the Syllabification of Words via Go-through Automata

18:45 - 19:00
Break

19:00 - 20:00

Invited Talk	Nissim Francez and Michael Kaminski - Extensions of Pregroup Grammars and Their Correlated Automata

20:30
Visit to the City Hall
	
Wednesday, April 4

9:15 - 10:45	

	Deian Tabakov and Moshe Vardi - Model Checking Buechi Specifications
	Benedikt Bollig and Dietrich Kuske - Muller Message-passing Automata and Logics
	Pavel Martjugin - A Series of Slowly Synchronizable Automata with a Zero State Over a Small Alphabet

10:45 - 11:15
Coffee Break

11:15 - 12:15

	Gennaro Parlato, Salvatore La Torre, Margherita Napoli and Mimmo Parente - Verification of Succinct Hierarchical State Machines
	Miklos Kresz - Nondeterministic Soliton Automata with a Single External Vertex

12:15 - 12:30
Break

12:30 - 13:30

Tutorial	Erich Graedel - Infinite Games (III)

13:30
Closing


61) citsa2007


Announcement
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 8th is the new deadline for papers/abstracts submissions and Invited Sessions Proposals for CITSA 2007 (Orlando, Florida, USA. July 12-15, 2007) http://www.info-cyber.org/citsa2007

Authors Notification: April 25, 2007
Camera ready, full papers: May 31, 2007
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The registration fee of effective invited session organizers will be waived and they will receive at the registration desk, for free, a package of 4 DVDs and one CD containing the 6-hour tutorial "Fundamentals and History of Cybernetics: Development of the Theory of Complex Adaptive Systems". The market price of this package is US $ 295. Twelve more benefits for invited session organizers are listed at CITSA 2007 web page.

For submissions or Invited Sessions Proposals, please go to the web site: http://www.info-cyber.org/citsa2007

All Submitted papers will be reviewed by a double-blind (at least three reviewers), non-blind, and participative peer review. These three kinds of review will support the selection process of those that will be accepted for their presentation at the conference, as well as those to be selected for their publication in JSCI Journal. Details are given in the conference web site.

Authors of the best 10%-20% of the papers presented at the conference will be invited to adapt their papers for their publication in the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics.


Best regards,


CITSA 2007 Secretariat





62) New GEP FAQ and new tutorials


Greetings from GEP-list!

The new GeneXproTools FAQ ( http://www.gepsoft.com/faq.htm ) was compiled
from support requests received over the years, and covers Installation
Issues and Demo Functionality, Classification and General Issues, plus
Algorithms and Evolution Issues. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Three new tutorials ( http://www.gepsoft.com/tutorials.htm ):

1. DNA Microarrays: A Case Study
2. What is GEP?
3. Karva Notation: The Native Language of GeneXproTools

These new tutorials are the first three of what I hope will grow into an
interesting forum not only to discuss practical and theoretical matters but
also for talking about different uses of GeneXproTools. There are people
around the world using GeneXproTools to study amazing things (from top quark
and Higgs analysis to new drugs and analog circuits) and it would be great
to have them using this forum to talk about their work and what they are
achieving with GeneXproTools (I encourage and invite you to submit your
contributions to me personally).

My best wishes,
Candida Ferreira

---
Candida Ferreira, Ph.D.
Founder and Director, Gepsoft
http://www.gene-expression-programming.com/author.asp

GEP: Mathematical Modeling by an Artificial Intelligence
2nd Edition, Springer-Verlag, 2006
http://www.gene-expression-programming.com/Books/index.asp

Modeling Software:
http://www.gepsoft.com/


                                *******
If this e-mail was forwarded to you and you would like to be added to our
list for the latest news on GEP, please visit our website at
<http://www.gene-expression-programming.com/> to subscribe to the GEP
mailing list.



63) RCIS'07 

The First International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS) aims at providing an international forum for scientists, researchers, engineers and developers from a wide range of information science areas to exchange ideas and approaches in this evolving field.


General Chair:	Colette Rolland (University of Paris 1 La Sorbonne)
PC Chair:		Oscar Pastor (Technical University of Valencia)
PC Co-Chair:	AndrŽ Flory (INSA de Lyon)
Organizing Chair:	Jean Louis Cavarero (University of Nice)


31 long papers, 17 short papers, 5 doctoral papers and 11 posters have been selected for publication among 120 submitted papers.


We are very pleased to announce the following keynote speakers for RCIS'07 :

Klaus Dittrich ( University of Zurich)
Kalle Lyytinen ( Case Western Reserve University)
Barbara Pernici ( Politecnico di Milano)
Arne Solvberg ( The Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Peri Loucopoulos ( University of Manchester )



Please visit http://www.farcampus.com/ for on line registration to the conference.
Early bid deadline is March 15th, 2007 !!

The Conference registration fees include Proceedings, Lunches and Coffee Breaks.


The program of the conference is available at http://www.farcampus.com/rcis/program.php


Do not hesitate to forward this message to your colleagues...


I hope to meet you in Ouarzazate.
Best regards,

Selmin Nurcan
RCIS'07 Publicity Chair







----------------------------------------------------------------
Selmin NURCAN
Ma”tre de ConfŽrences / Associate Professor
----------------------------------------------------------------
UniversitŽ Paris 1 - PanthŽon - Sorbonne
Centre de Recherche en Informatique
90, rue de Tolbiac 75634 Paris cedex 13 FRANCE			
http://crinfo.univ-paris1.fr/users/nurcan	
Tel : 33 - 1 44 07 86 34	
Fax : 33 - 1 44 07 89 54					 
mailto:nurcan@univ-paris1.fr			
----------------------------------------------------------------
Next spring, the First International Conference on
Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS'07)
will be organised at Ouarzazate, Morocco    
Registration is now open.
Visit our web site at http://www.farcampus.com/rcis/
----------------------------------------------------------------
IAE de Paris
UniversitŽ Paris 1 - PanthŽon - Sorbonne
21, rue Broca 75240 Paris cedex 05 FRANCE	
Tel : 33 - 1 53 55 27 13 (rŽpondeur)	
Fax : 33 - 1 53 55 27 01					 	 
----------------------------------------------------------------
To handle yourself, use your head.
To handle others, use your heart.
----------------------------------------------------------------



64) SLS 2007


	    Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms
				 ---
      Designing, Implementing and Analyzing Effective Heuristics

			       SLS 2007
				
		6-8 September, 2007. Brussels, Belgium
		www.stochastic-local-search.net/sls07
				
News
=====
  The submission system for the SLS 2007 Workshop is now open. It can be accessed at
  http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/sls2007/conftool/

Publication
============
  The workshop proceedings will be published in Springer's Lecture
  Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

Scope of the Workshop
======================
  Stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms are among the most powerful
  techniques for solving computationally hard problems in many areas
  of computer science, operations research and engineering. SLS
  techniques range from rather simple constructive and iterative
  improvement algorithms to general-purpose methods, also widely known
  as metaheuristics, such as ant colony optimization, evolutionary
  computation, iterated local search, memetic algorithms, simulated
  annealing, tabu search and variable neighbourhood search.

  In recent years, it has become evident that the development of
  effective SLS algorithms is a highly complex engineering process
  that typically combines aspects of algorithm design and
  implementation with empirical analysis and problem-specific
  background knowledge. The difficulty of this process is due in part
  to the complexity of the problems being tackled, and in part to the
  large number of degrees of freedom researchers and practitioners
  face when developing SLS algorithms.

  This development process needs to be assisted by a sound methodology
  that adresses the issues arising in the phases of algorithm design,
  implementation, tuning and experimental evaluation. In addition,
  more research is required to understand which SLS techniques are
  best suited for particular problem types and to better understand
  the relationship between algorithm components, parameter settings,
  problem characteristics and performance.

Important Dates
================
  Submission deadline		  16 March, 2007
  Notification of acceptance      21 May, 2007
  Camera ready copy               4 June, 2007
  Workshop                        6-8 September, 2007

General Chairs
==========
    Thomas Stuetzle, IRIDIA, CoDE, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
    Mauro Birattari, IRIDIA, CoDE, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
    Holger H. Hoos, CS Department, UBC, Vancouver, Canada



65) AISB 

This is the AISB opportunities bulletin for 23/2/2007
-----------------------------

1. Postdoc Opportunities in Image Analysis at CEREMADE, Paris, France (DEADLINE: 12:03:2007)


-----------------------------

1. Postdoc Opportunities in Image Analysis at CEREMADE, Paris, France

http://www.ceremade.dauphine.fr/~cohen/MVA/postdoc.html
(DEADLINE: 12:03:2007)
Postdoc Opportunities in Image Analysis at CEREMADE, Paris, France
http://www.ceremade.dauphine.fr/~cohen/MVA/postdoc.html

A 12 month postdoc position is available. The candidate must have a
PhD in applied maths, computer vision or a closely related field.
The position starts as soon as possible, with possible renewal
for a second year. The postdoc takes place in the
Applied Math and Image Analysis group of CEREMADE,  under the
guidance of Laurent Cohen. The main topic is on deformable surfaces, but
it is open for discussion in a subject of common interest
in all areas of the group's research. For example, have a look
at the list of publications:

http://www.ceremade.dauphine.fr/~cohen/publithematic.html


For more information, please send a CV and references to
cohen@ceremade.dauphine.fr

DEADLINE for application: March 12, 2007

Laurent Cohen

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Laurent Cohen
Directeur de Recherche
CEREMADE, UMR CNRS 7534, Universite  Paris Dauphine
Place du Marechal de Lattre de Tassigny
75775 Paris cedex 16, France
Tel. (33-1) 44 05 46 78 Fax (33-1) 44 05 45 99
mailto:Cohen@ceremade.dauphine.fr
Home Page: http://www.ceremade.dauphine.fr/~cohen

********************************************************


More Information about the AISB can be found at www.aisb.org.uk

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