From ronnyk@starry.engr.sgi.com Mon Apr 22 03:52:40 1996 Received: from lucy.cs.wisc.edu (lucy.cs.wisc.edu [128.105.2.11]) by sea.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id DAA01131 for ; Mon, 22 Apr 1996 03:52:31 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU (TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU [128.2.254.108]) by lucy.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id DAA25522 for ; Mon, 22 Apr 1996 03:52:29 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU by telnet-1.srv.cs.CMU.EDU id aa02013; 22 Apr 96 3:33:37 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU id aa02011; 22 Apr 96 3:05:37 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU id aa03609; 22 Apr 96 3:04:47 EDT Received: from RI.CMU.EDU by B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU id aa07028; 21 Apr 96 2:23:38 EDT Received: from SGI.COM by RI.CMU.EDU id aa20954; 21 Apr 96 2:22:55 EDT Received: from starry.engr.sgi.com by sgi.sgi.com via ESMTP (950405.SGI.8.6.12/910110.SGI) for <@sgi.engr.sgi.com:Connectionists@cs.cmu.edu> id XAA11832; Sat, 20 Apr 1996 23:22:51 -0700 Received: by starry.engr.sgi.com (940816.SGI.8.6.9/940406.SGI.AUTO) id XAA18334; Sat, 20 Apr 1996 23:22:50 -0700 Date: Sat, 20 Apr 1996 23:22:50 -0700 From: Ronny Kohavi Message-Id: <199604210622.XAA18334@starry.engr.sgi.com> To: Connectionists@cs.cmu.edu Subject: Bias + variance for classification Reply-to: ronnyk@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com The following paper will appear in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Machine Learning, 1996. It is available at: http://reality.sgi.com/ronnyk under publications (with some slides containing more results) or by anon ftp to ftp://starry.stanford.edu/pub/ronnyk/biasVar.ps There have been some recent announcements of tech-reports for bias-variance decompositions in classification domains (0-1 loss). In our paper we address the desiderata for good bias-variance decompositions and show some problems with other decompositions. We also address an important issue related to the naive estimation of these quantities using frequency counts and offer a correction. Bias Plus Variance Decomposition for Zero-One Loss Functions Ron Kohavi David H. Wolpert Data Mining and Visualization Silicon Graphics, Inc. The Santa Fe Institute ronnyk@sgi.com dhw@santafe.edu We present a bias-variance decomposition of expected misclassification rate, the most commonly used loss function in supervised classification learning. The bias-variance decomposition for quadratic loss functions is well known and serves as an important tool for analyzing learning algorithms, yet no decomposition was offered for the more commonly used zero-one (misclassification) loss functions until the recent work of Kong & Dietterich [1995] and Breiman [1996]. Their decomposition suffers from some major shortcomings though (.e.g, potentially negative variance), which our decomposition avoids. We show that, in practice, the naive frequency-based estimation of the decomposition terms is by itself biased and show how to correct for this bias. We illustrate the decomposition on various algorithms and datasets from the UCI repository. -- Ronny Kohavi (ronnyk@sgi.com) From Jean-Pierre.Nadal@tournesol.ens.fr Mon Apr 22 18:25:34 1996 Received: from lucy.cs.wisc.edu (lucy.cs.wisc.edu [128.105.2.11]) by sea.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id SAA16508 for ; Mon, 22 Apr 1996 18:25:28 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU (TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU [128.2.254.108]) by lucy.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id SAA10648 for ; Mon, 22 Apr 1996 18:25:26 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU by telnet-1.srv.cs.CMU.EDU id aa03715; 22 Apr 96 18:27:29 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU id aa03713; 22 Apr 96 18:11:18 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU id aa05093; 22 Apr 96 18:11:08 EDT Received: from RI.CMU.EDU by B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU id aa14619; 22 Apr 96 4:26:16 EDT Received: from tournesol.ens.fr by RI.CMU.EDU id aa23955; 22 Apr 96 4:26:00 EDT Received: (from nadal@localhost) by tournesol.ens.fr (8.7.5/8.7.1) id KAA11933 for connectionists@cs.cmu.edu; Mon, 22 Apr 1996 10:25:04 +0200 (MET DST) Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 10:25:04 +0200 (MET DST) From: NADAL Jean-Pierre Message-Id: <199604220825.KAA11933@tournesol.ens.fr> To: connectionists@cs.cmu.edu DYNAMICAL MODELING IN BIOTECHNOLOGY Commission of the European Communities, Directorate General for Science, Research and Development. Biotechnology Programme Advanced workshops in Biotechnology May 27 to June 8 1996 Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Villa Gualino, Torino, Italy Description: An intensive course for biologists at end-graduate and postgraduate level on concepts and methods of biological modeling. The course will include a 3 days computing alphabetization prelude, a series of lectures and 6 modeling projects carried out under the supervision of specialized tutors. Topics: Discrete models for simulating biological systems (P. Seiden, IBM New York), Qualitative theory and simulation of dynamical systems (A. Pikovsky, MPI, Potsdam), Monte-Carlo simulation of ageing (D. Stauffer,Koeln), Non linear excitations and energy localisation (M. Peyrard, ENS, Lyon), Neural Networks (J.-P. Nadal, ENS, Paris), Self organization and pattern formation in biochemical systems (R. Kapral, Toronto). Projects: Gene expression, DNA/RNA sequence analysis and design, Cellular automata and immune system, Non linear time-series analysis, Bacterial evolution, Models of ecosystems. Application: Although mainly aimed at biologists (both from industrial and academic research) the course is also open to physicists, chemists, applied mathematicians and computer scientists from EU countries with interdisciplinary interests. Housing is provided at Villa Gualino. Submit your CV, a one page description of your interests and how you think the course will facilitate long term research/work goals and a recommendation letter. Use e-mail if you can. No fees. Participants will be selected by the services of the Commission and the organisers. Some budget is reserved to support living expenses for students, expecially from unfavoured European countries. Send applications to Stefano Ruffo, Workshop Organizer, Dipartimento di Energetica, Universita' di Firenze, Via s. Marta 3, 50139 Firenze, Italy,tel +39-55-4796344, fax +39-55-4796342, e-mail ruffo@ingfi1.ing.unifi.it (http://www.isi.it/dynamical) From STECK@ie.twsu.edu Tue Apr 23 00:40:41 1996 Received: from lucy.cs.wisc.edu (lucy.cs.wisc.edu [128.105.2.11]) by sea.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id AAA22906 for ; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 00:40:28 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU (TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU [128.2.254.108]) by lucy.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id AAA16549 for ; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 00:40:26 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU by telnet-1.srv.cs.CMU.EDU id aa03746; 22 Apr 96 18:37:16 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU id aa03717; 22 Apr 96 18:13:43 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU id aa05103; 22 Apr 96 18:13:15 EDT Received: from CS.CMU.EDU by B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU id aa25110; 22 Apr 96 17:21:04 EDT Received: from TITAN.ee.twsu.edu by CS.CMU.EDU id aa29216; 22 Apr 96 17:16:52 EDT Received: from ie.twsu.edu (ebdec.ie.twsu.edu) by titan (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA26792; Mon, 22 Apr 96 16:19:51 CDT Received: from EBDEC/SpoolDir by ie.twsu.edu (Mercury 1.21); 22 Apr 96 16:15:14 GMT-5 Received: from SpoolDir by EBDEC (Mercury 1.21); 22 Apr 96 16:15:04 GMT-5 From: JIM STECK Organization: Wichita State Univ. (Engineering) To: connectionists@cs.cmu.edu, neuron@CATTELL.psych.upenn.edu Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 16:14:55 CDT (GMT-6) Subject: (Fwd) Student Assistantship in Optical Neural Networks X-Confirm-Reading-To: "JIM STECK" X-Pmrqc: 1 Priority: normal X-Mailer: Pegasus Mail for Windows (v2.01) Message-Id: <1DD0983499@ie.twsu.edu> The Neural Network Processing Group at Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas, is currently seeking qualified Ph.D. candidates in the area of optical neural network implementations. Research Assistantships are available from $10,000 to $14,000 per year depending on qualifications. Candidates should presently have a M.S. degree from an accredited program and will be expected to enroll as a full time Ph.D. student in the College of Engineering. The appointment will also be contingent on meeting Graduate School requirements. We are especially interested in individuals who have experience with: photorefractive materials, nonlinear optics and artificial neural networks. Wichita State University is an equal opportunity affirmative action employer. Interested candidates should send a resume to: Dr. Steven R. Skinner Dept. of Electrical Engineering, #44 Wichita State University Wichita, KS 67260-0044 The College of Engineering at Wichita State University is organized into four degree-granting departments: aerospace, electrical, industrial & manufacturing, and mechanical engineering. A Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) is offered by each of the four departments of engineering. The National Institute for Aviation Research is also located on the campus of Wichita State. Wichita State is located in the City of Wichita - Kansas' largest business and industrial center - and is situated within 50 miles of 40 percent of Kansas industry. Wichita, one of the world's largest producers of aircraft through Boeing, Raytheon, Cessna and Learjet, is known as the "Air Capital of the World." For more information on Wichita State University College of Engineering see: http://www.ee.twsu.edu/coe/ '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' James E. Steck Assistant Professor (316)-689-3402 ----- End Included Message ----- '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' James E. Steck Assistant Professor (316)-689-3402 From pazzani@super-pan.ICS.UCI.EDU Tue Apr 23 08:34:26 1996 Received: from lucy.cs.wisc.edu (lucy.cs.wisc.edu [128.105.2.11]) by sea.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id IAA28168 for ; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 08:34:21 -0500 Received: from paris.ics.uci.edu (paris.ics.uci.edu [128.195.1.50]) by lucy.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id IAA20332; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 08:33:44 -0500 Received: from super-pan.ics.uci.edu by paris.ics.uci.edu id aa24924; 22 Apr 96 20:54 PDT To: ML-LIST:; Subject: Machine Learning List: Vol. 8, No. 7 Reply-to: ml@ics.uci.edu Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 20:22:01 -0700 From: Michael Pazzani Message-ID: <9604222054.aa24924@paris.ics.uci.edu> Machine Learning List: Vol. 8, No. 7 Monday, April 22, 1996 Contents: An essay on machine learning applications papers Final CFP: NNs in the Capital Markets, Deadline May 1 CFP: EWLR-5 & MLnet WS on Learning Robots Final CFP for Sixth AI and Statistics Workshop Final CFP: Society for Math Psych conference, Chapel Hill, NC AIME'97 CFP COLT '96 call for participation Announcing a tutorial on Machine Learning and Data Mining The Machine Learning List is moderated. Contributions should be relevant to the scientific study of machine learning. Mail contributions to ml@ics.uci.edu. Mail requests to be added or deleted to ml-request@ics.uci.edu. Back issues may be obtained from http://www.ics.uci.edu/AI/ML/Machine-Learning.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: foster@nynexst.com Date: Mon, 22 Apr 96 11:07:41 EDT Subject: An essay on machine learning applications papers On the Value of Applied Research in Machine Learning This is an essay on the topic of applications papers at the International Machine Learning Conference (IMLC) from the point of view of folks working on both academic and applied research in machine learning. We hope to minimize the "sour grapes" tone (some of us had papers rejected); if some has slipped in, please try to ignore it. Our goal, given the continued dearth of applications-oriented papers at IMLC, is to stimulate a discussion on the value of applied research to the machine learning community and on why/if IMLC should even be interested in including "applications" papers. As background, at IMLC-95 in Tahoe we were involved in a large-scale discussion on the ML literature's relative lack of direction from real applications. The consensus among the applications-oriented folks was that there was a perceived bias against applications papers in the community. The response from many members of the MLJ editorial board was that they would welcome applications papers with general lessons to be learned. We were delighted when the call for papers for IMLC-96 included a specific call for applications papers. We were disappointed when our papers were rejected, although we concede that the rejections may have been for reasons other than their applications nature. The rejections were particularly disturbing because the individual reviews were moderately to strongly positive, yet the papers were rejected. While this is not an uncommon occurrence when there is a large number of high quality submissions, it is somewhat strange given that the call for papers explicity requested applications papers. If the accepted paper titles are any indication, applications work remains poorly represented. Our purpose here is to initiate a discussion on what the purpose of applications papers should be in the machine learning community, so that in the future we can do a better job (or not waste our time). This essay was stimulated by a comment from a review that was heartening to us regarding one of our papers, but indicates at best a misunderstanding on our part as to what is expected of an applications paper, and at worst a sad state of affairs in the community. In a nutshell, the paper reported on a high-impact, real-world problem for which the literature provided no applicable solution (and little related work), so we made up an ad hoc combination of three existing ML techniques that performed well. The reviewer wrote: I really wish I could wholeheartedly recommend acceptance for this paper, because it would easily get into any KDD conference and I don't want to lose such papers, but I can't see the average ML researcher getting more out of it than a sating of curiosity about applications. This is a troubling problem that I hope the program committee and ML as a whole will address; I can't blame the authors for it. The reviews of a second applications paper caused similar concern. We decided to submit it this year mainly because of the indicated desire for applications papers. We believe that through this work we have learned a great deal about the difference between academic machine learning and real-world machine learning. The reviewers seemed to agree strongly.* However, the paper was not accepted, presumably because the other submissions were stronger. We fear that if applications papers are evaluated as if they were academic papers, they will almost always fall short, because it is difficult to bundle up all the complexity of a real-world application into a nice, neat, conference-length result. (*The reader can draw his/her own conclusions; the submitted paper is available at http://www.cs.umass.edu/~fawcett/Provost-Danyluk-96.ps.) Thus, we would like to initiate a discussion as to the value of applications papers in our field. We will offer two related areas of value, at either end of the spectrum of significance. First, an applications paper can sate the researcher's curiosity about applications: What types of problems are actually being addressed with our technology? Do the real-world results provide support for the results we see in our academic work? In addition, academic grant proposals often make the point that machine learning research can have an impact on real problems. Applications papers provide references for such claims. One might argue that the community's yearly meeting is the appropriate place to present such information (rather than waiting for it to be published in CACM). At the other end of the spectrum are applications that indicate interesting new directions for the field. Those of us who work in applied machine learning research grumble amongst ourselves about how most academic work seems to ignore important complexities and concentrates on relatively less important problems. As an example, a favorite topic is "classification accuracy." There is a consensus among many folks who try to apply machine learning to real-world tasks that very seldom is classification accuracy of primary importance. Yet for the past ten years, the community has produced reams of studies on how to increase classification accuracy. On the other hand, real-world tasks indicate that minimizing cost is often very important. However, the literature contains only a handful of relatively inconclusive studies on cost-sensitivity. When in our work we have wanted to produce classifiers with sensitivity to error costs, the research community has had little to say. In our opinion, real-world work is begging for thorough studies of cost-sensitive learning; showing that one system can beat another in classification accuracy is nearly useless. One reason for the lack of direction from applications may be the UCI database repository. While we laud the tremendous efforts of the contributors and custodians, we must point out that there is a danger in the assumption that operating on the UCI databases is doing "real-world" machine learning. Often the assumption is tacit--a paper will claim to have used machine learning on "real-world problems," and the reader finds that the author did cross-validation over a set of UCI databases. For academic researchers, the repository is a wonderful resource for benchmarking. It is important that the repository not become a narrow window through which academic researchers view the world. In conclusion, we view the academic/applied research dichotomy as comprising an important cycle, in which the applied world supplies significant problems and initial (probably ad hoc) solutions, which feed the academic work. The academic work supplies more elegant and well-tested approaches, which feed back to the applied community for use and reality checking. We fear that this cycle may be broken in the machine learning community (although it may be functioning well within individual research programs). Applied researchers feel that the academic world only pays lip service to real problems. The academic world seems to view applied work as interesting only if it looks like good academic work. We, as a community, should strive to define the roles of applied research in machine learning, recognize the differences from academic work, and provide forums for the two to communicate. To that end, we thought it would be valuable to initiate a discussion on the value to the community of applied machine learning research. At the very least, we hope such a discussion will help applied researchers to present their work in a way that the community will find interesting and valuable. So, what is the value (if any) of applied research papers to the Machine Learning community? Should there be recognized differences in presentation or evaluation between papers reporting on academic versus applied research? We are interested in hearing opinions from the rest of the community. - Foster Provost, NYNEX Science and Technology - Tom Fawcett, NYNEX Science and Technology - Andrea Danyluk, Williams College - Pat Riddle, Boeing Research and Technology ------------------------------ From: John Moody Date: Mon, 15 Apr 96 19:44:11 -0700 Subject: Final CFP: NNs in the Capital Markets, Deadline May 1 -- Final Call for Papers -- NNCM-96 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE NEURAL NETWORKS in the CAPITAL MARKETS Wednesday-Friday, November 20-22, 1996 The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Pasadena, California, U.S.A. Sponsored by Caltech and London Business School Mailing List: If you wish to be added to the mailing list of NNCM-96, please send your postal address, e-mail address, and fax number to Dr. Y. Abu-Mostafa, Caltech 136-93, Pasadena, CA 91125, U.S.A. e-mail: yaser@caltech.edu , fax (818) 795-0326 Home Page: http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~learn/nncm.html ------------------------------ From: Volker Klingspor Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 08:37:02 +0200 Subject: CFP: EWLR-5 & MLnet WS on Learning Robots EWLR-5 MLnet Familiarization Workshop and 5th European Workshop on Learning Robots Bari, Italy --- July 2nd, 1996 Announcement & Call for papers Further information: http://www-ai.informatik.uni-dortmund.de/ewlr/ewlr5.html Scope of the workshop: Robot learning is one of the currently small but growing fields in machine learning in Europe. Four European Workshops on Learning Robots have been held during the last three years, starting with participants from the Esprit-project BLearn-II and then expanding to scientists from outside BLearn. The fifth workshop aims to familiarize researcher with European work on learning robots. Robotics offers numerous opportunities to learn. Learning is applied at lower level to learn controller for skill acquisition or to learn how to control special sensors like vision systems. Higher-level learning concerns learning to classify the robot's perception, learning to plan, learning for monitoring and supervision. In all cases of learning the representation of the robot's perception and action, or, in other terms, the organization of the robot's knowledge and the processes, that deal with this knowledge, determines the applicability of learning algorithms and the applicability of the learned knowledge. Furthermore, for higher level learning, it has been shown, that the signal-to-symbol-preprocessing step is crucial for learning. A lot of the work for applying real world robots in real world domains comes from finding the right algorithm for this preprocessing step. The workshop's emphasis is on the application of Machine Learning in real world Robotic applications, including, but not limited to: Human-Robot Interaction * Mobile Robot Perception, Navigation, and Mission Planning * Architectures for Intelligent Robots * Knowledge Representation for Robot Learning * Robot Supervision, Fault Detection and Recovery * Learning and Adaptivity in Robot Control Submission of papers: The goal of familiarization workshops is to make European research more visible and acknowledged. The workshop is intended to offer an overview of European research in the area of Learning Robots. Scientists from European institutions are invited to present their work to an international audience which, of course, is not restricted to Europeans. The size of papers is limited to 8 pages. The title page should include the paper title, the author's name, physical address, email address, phone number, affiliation. In cases of multiple authors, all correspondence will be sent to the first author unless otherwise requested. Submissions must be received by the workshop chair by May, 15th. Alternatively, electronical submission of papers in Postscript format via email to volker@ls8.informatik.uni-dortmund.de is encouraged. The papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, papers submitted by email will additionally be published electronically. A style description and a LaTeX style file is available via anonymous ftp at ftp-ai.informatik.uni-dortmund.de/pub/EWLR-5/ewlr5.tar.Z Import Dates: Submission deadline: May, 15th, 1996 Notification of acceptance: June, 1st, 1996 Camera ready copy: June, 15th, 1996 Workshop: July, 2nd, 1996 Program Committee: L. Basanez (Spain) L. Camarinha-Matos (Portugal) R. Dillmann (Germany) A. Giordana (Italy) K. Morik (Germany) C. Torras (Spain) H. Van Brussel (Belgium) G. Vernazza (Italy) Workshop chair: Volker Klingspor Universitaet Dortmund Lehrstuhl Informatik VIII D-44221 Dortmund, Germany Phone: + 49 231 755 2499 Fax: + 49 231 755 5105 Email: volker@ls8.informatik.uni-dortmund.de ------------------------------ From: Padhraic Smyth Date: Tue, 16 Apr 1996 11:02:06 -0700 Subject: Final CFP for Sixth AI and Statistics Workshop Final Call For Papers SIXTH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND STATISTICS January 4-7, 1997 Ft. Lauderdale, Florida http://www.stat.washington.edu/aistats97/ PURPOSE: This is the sixth in a series of workshops which has brought together researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in Statistics to discuss problems of mutual interest. The exchange has broadened research in both fields and has strongly encouraged interdisciplinary work. Papers on all aspects of the interface between AI & Statistics are encouraged. FORMAT: To encourage interaction and a broad exchange of ideas, the presentations will be limited to about 20 discussion papers in single session meetings over three days (Jan. 5-7). Focussed poster sessions will provide the means for presenting and discussing the remaining research papers. Papers for poster sessions will be treated equally with papers for presentation in publications. Attendance at the workshop will *not* be limited. The three days of research presentations will be preceded by a day of tutorials (Jan. 4). These are intended to expose researchers in each field to the methodology used in the other field. The tutorial speakers are A. P. Dawid (University College London), Michael Jordan (MIT), Tom Mitchell (Carnegie Mellon), and Mike West (Duke University). TOPICS OF INTEREST: - automated data analysis and knowledge representation for statistics - statistical strategy - metadata and design of statistical data bases - multivariate graphical models, belief networks - causality - cluster analysis and unsupervised learning - predictive modeling: classification and regression - interpretability in modeling - model uncertainty, multiple models - probability and search - knowledge discovery in databases - integrated man-machine modeling methods - statistical methods in AI approaches to vision, robotics, pattern recognition, software agents, planning, information retrieval, natural language processing, etc. - AI methods applied to problems in statistics such as statistical advisory systems, experimental design, exploratory data analysis, causal modeling, etc. This list is not intended to define an exclusive list of topics of interest. Authors are encouraged to submit papers on any topic which falls within the intersection of AI and Statistics. SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: Three copies of an extended abstract (up to 4 pages) should be sent to David Madigan, Program Chair 6th International Workshop on AI and Statistics Department of Statistics, Box 354322 University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 or electronically (postscript or latex preferred) to aistats@stat.washington.edu Submissions for will be considered if *postmarked* by June 30, 1996. If the submission is electronic (e-mail), then it must be *received* by midnight July 1, 1996. Please indicate which topic(s) your abstract addresses and include an electronic mail address for correspondence. Receipt of all submissions will be confirmed via electronic mail. Acceptance notices will be mailed by September 1, 1996. Preliminary papers (up to 20 pages) must be returned by November 1, 1996. These preliminary papers will be copied and distributed at the workshop. PROGRAM COMMITTEE: General Chair: P. Smyth UC Irvine and JPL Program Chair: D. Madigan U. Washington Members: Russell Almond, ETS, Princeton Wray Buntine, Thinkbank, Inc. Peter Cheeseman, NASA Ames Paul Cohen, University of Massachusetts Greg Cooper, University of Pittsburgh Bill DuMouchel, Columbia University Doug Fisher, Vanderbilt University Dan Geiger, Technion Clark Glymour, Carnegie-Mellon University David Hand, Open University, UK Steve Hanks, University of Washington Trevor Hastie, Stanford University David Haussler, UC Santa Cruz David Heckerman, Microsoft Paula Hietala, University of Tampere, Finland Geoff Hinton, University of Toronto Mike Jordan, MIT Hans Lenz, Free University of Berlin, Germany David Lewis, AT&T Bell Labs Andrew Moore, Carnegie-Mellon University Radford Neal, University of Toronto Jonathan Oliver, Monash University, Australia Steve Omohundro, NEC Research, Princeton Judea Pearl, UCLA Daryl Pregibon, AT&T Bell Labs Ross Shachter, Stanford University Glenn Shafer, Rutgers University Prakash Shenoy, University of Kansas David Spiegelhalter, MRC, Cambridge, UK Peter Spirtes, Carnegie-Mellon University MORE INFORMATION: For more information see the workshop's Web page: http://www.stat.washington.edu/aistats97/ or write David Madigan at aistats@stat.washington.edu for inquiries concerning the technical program or Padhraic Smyth at aistats@jpl.nasa.gov for other inquiries about the workshop. Write to ai-stats-request@watstat.uwaterloo.ca to subscribe to the AI and Statistics mailing list. ------------------------------ From: foster@nynexst.com Date: Mon, 22 Apr 96 11:07:41 EDT Subject: An essay on machine learning applications papers On the Value of Applied Research in Machine Learning This is an essay on the topic of applications papers at the International Machine Learning Conference (IMLC) from the point of view of folks working on both academic and applied research in machine learning. We hope to minimize the "sour grapes" tone (some of us had papers rejected); if some has slipped in, please try to ignore it. Our goal, given the continued dearth of applications-oriented papers at IMLC, is to stimulate a discussion on the value of applied research to the machine learning community and on why/if IMLC should even be interested in including "applications" papers. As background, at IMLC-95 in Tahoe we were involved in a large-scale discussion on the ML literature's relative lack of direction from real applications. The consensus among the applications-oriented folks was that there was a perceived bias against applications papers in the community. The response from many members of the MLJ editorial board was that they would welcome applications papers with general lessons to be learned. We were delighted when the call for papers for IMLC-96 included a specific call for applications papers. We were disappointed when our papers were rejected, although we concede that the rejections may have been for reasons other than their applications nature. The rejections were particularly disturbing because the individual reviews were moderately to strongly positive, yet the papers were rejected. While this is not an uncommon occurrence when there is a large number of high quality submissions, it is somewhat strange given that the call for papers explicity requested applications papers. If the accepted paper titles are any indication, applications work remains poorly represented. Our purpose here is to initiate a discussion on what the purpose of applications papers should be in the machine learning community, so that in the future we can do a better job (or not waste our time). This essay was stimulated by a comment from a review that was heartening to us regarding one of our papers, but indicates at best a misunderstanding on our part as to what is expected of an applications paper, and at worst a sad state of affairs in the community. In a nutshell, the paper reported on a high-impact, real-world problem for which the literature provided no applicable solution (and little related work), so we made up an ad hoc combination of three existing ML techniques that performed well. The reviewer wrote: I really wish I could wholeheartedly recommend acceptance for this paper, because it would easily get into any KDD conference and I don't want to lose such papers, but I can't see the average ML researcher getting more out of it than a sating of curiosity about applications. This is a troubling problem that I hope the program committee and ML as a whole will address; I can't blame the authors for it. The reviews of a second applications paper caused similar concern. We decided to submit it this year mainly because of the indicated desire for applications papers. We believe that through this work we have learned a great deal about the difference between academic machine learning and real-world machine learning. The reviewers seemed to agree strongly.* However, the paper was not accepted, presumably because the other submissions were stronger. We fear that if applications papers are evaluated as if they were academic papers, they will almost always fall short, because it is difficult to bundle up all the complexity of a real-world application into a nice, neat, conference-length result. (*The reader can draw his/her own conclusions; the submitted paper is available at http://www.cs.umass.edu/~fawcett/Provost-Danyluk-96.ps.) Thus, we would like to initiate a discussion as to the value of applications papers in our field. We will offer two related areas of value, at either end of the spectrum of significance. First, an applications paper can sate the researcher's curiosity about applications: What types of problems are actually being addressed with our technology? Do the real-world results provide support for the results we see in our academic work? In addition, academic grant proposals often make the point that machine learning research can have an impact on real problems. Applications papers provide references for such claims. One might argue that the community's yearly meeting is the appropriate place to present such information (rather than waiting for it to be published in CACM). At the other end of the spectrum are applications that indicate interesting new directions for the field. Those of us who work in applied machine learning research grumble amongst ourselves about how most academic work seems to ignore important complexities and concentrates on relatively less important problems. As an example, a favorite topic is "classification accuracy." There is a consensus among many folks who try to apply machine learning to real-world tasks that very seldom is classification accuracy of primary importance. Yet for the past ten years, the community has produced reams of studies on how to increase classification accuracy. On the other hand, real-world tasks indicate that minimizing cost is often very important. However, the literature contains only a handful of relatively inconclusive studies on cost-sensitivity. When in our work we have wanted to produce classifiers with sensitivity to error costs, the research community has had little to say. In our opinion, real-world work is begging for thorough studies of cost-sensitive learning; showing that one system can beat another in classification accuracy is nearly useless. One reason for the lack of direction from applications may be the UCI database repository. While we laud the tremendous efforts of the contributors and custodians, we must point out that there is a danger in the assumption that operating on the UCI databases is doing "real-world" machine learning. Often the assumption is tacit--a paper will claim to have used machine learning on "real-world problems," and the reader finds that the author did cross-validation over a set of UCI databases. For academic researchers, the repository is a wonderful resource for benchmarking. It is important that the repository not become a narrow window through which academic researchers view the world. In conclusion, we view the academic/applied research dichotomy as comprising an important cycle, in which the applied world supplies significant problems and initial (probably ad hoc) solutions, which feed the academic work. The academic work supplies more elegant and well-tested approaches, which feed back to the applied community for use and reality checking. We fear that this cycle may be broken in the machine learning community (although it may be functioning well within individual research programs). Applied researchers feel that the academic world only pays lip service to real problems. The academic world seems to view applied work as interesting only if it looks like good academic work. We, as a community, should strive to define the roles of applied research in machine learning, recognize the differences from academic work, and provide forums for the two to communicate. To that end, we thought it would be valuable to initiate a discussion on the value to the community of applied machine learning research. At the very least, we hope such a discussion will help applied researchers to present their work in a way that the community will find interesting and valuable. So, what is the value (if any) of applied research papers to the Machine Learning community? Should there be recognized differences in presentation or evaluation between papers reporting on academic versus applied research? We are interested in hearing opinions from the rest of the community. - Foster Provost, NYNEX Science and Technology - Tom Fawcett, NYNEX Science and Technology - Andrea Danyluk, Williams College - Pat Riddle, Boeing Research and Technology ------------------------------ From: Jonathan Marshall Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 12:08:37 -0400 Subject: Final CFP: Society for Math Psych conference, Chapel Hill, NC FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS 29th Annual MATHEMATICAL PSYCHOLOGY Meeting 1-4 August 1996 Sponsored by the Society for Mathematical Psychology and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The 29th Annual Mathematical Psychology Meeting will be held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The meetings will follow the usual format with paper sessions over two and a half days (2-4 August) with a banquet after the first day of papers. The Organizing Committee consists of Christina A. Burbeck, Elliot Hirshman, Jonathan A. Marshall (Co-Chair), Nestor Schmajuk, Thomas S. Wallsten (Co-Chair), and Yiu-Fai Yung. Keynote speakers: Amnon Rapoport, Stephen Grossberg. Programs of past meetings appear in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology and may be consulted for ideas concerning symposia as well as for ideas about areas that have not recently been covered. All members of the Society for Mathematical Psychology are welcome to make suggestions for symposia and invited speakers to the Program Committee as soon as possible. Possible special symposia at the meeting include: - Games and Human Behavior, in honor of Amnon Rapoport - Models of Binding Mechanisms in Vision Papers for the Mathematical Psychology Meeting may be submitted by regular members, student members, and nonmembers. Any one person may present only one paper but may be a coauthor of other papers, or may be an invited speaker or symposium participant. Papers will be limited to those in which mathematical, statistical, and simulation methods play a significant role in the development of psychological ideas or in the interpretation of results. Purely theoretical developments should clearly relate to some psychological issue or contribute to methodologies of obvious use in psychology. Experimental results should bear directly on some mathematical or simulation model. Abstracts of papers must be received by 30 April 1996. Papers are accepted on the basis of their quality and suitability and not according to the author's affiliation with the Society. For oral papers, presentation time will be limited to 25 minutes including five minutes for discussion. Sessions will be strictly timed. This year, we are considering adding a poster session. If there are sufficient submissions, we will do so. Poster presentations have the advantage of longer discussion time, less formality, and closer audience contact. The "status" associated with poster presentations will be equal to that associated with oral presentations. Submissions must include the following information: 1. For all authors and co-authors: - Names - Institutional affiliations - Mailing addresses - E-mail addresses - Telephone and fax numbers - Membership status in the Society for Mathematical Psychology (member, student member, or nonmember) 2. A specification of which co-author will present the paper at the meeting 3. Your preference for spoken/poster presentation: (a) Only wish to present a spoken paper (b) Prefer spoken paper, willing to give a poster (c) No preference; either spoken or poster is fine (d) Prefer poster, willing to give a spoken paper (e) Only willing to present a poster 4. Title of paper 5. Category of the paper. Choose the most appropriate category: (a) categorization (b) cognition and language (c) judgment, decision, and choice (d) information processing and performance (e) learning and memory (f) measurement and scaling (g) methodology and statistics (h) neural/neurophysiological modeling (i) physiology (j) psychophysics (k) sensation and perception (l) social psychology (m) other (please specify) 6. An abstract of 150-250 words E-mail submission of abstracts (and all other information) is greatly preferred, since this will facilitate compiling (without retyping) of an abstract book to be distributed at the meeting. The abstracts will also be published in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology after the meeting. Please e-mail your abstract in plain (ASCII) text format if possible, without MIME encoding, uuencoding, TeX formatting, or other modifications. Send abstracts to: Professor Jonathan A. Marshall Math Psych '96 Program Committee Department of Computer Science CB 3175, Sitterson Hall University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175, U.S.A. E-mail marshall@cs.unc.edu Tel +1-919-962-1887, fax +1-919-962-1799 Address symposium outlines, and invited speaker suggestions to: Professor Thomas S. Wallsten Math Psych '96 Program Committee Department of Psychology CB 3270, Davie Hall University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270, U.S.A. E-mail tom.wallsten@unc.edu Tel +1-919-962-2538, fax +1-919-962-2537 Send all other questions concerning the Mathematical Psychology Meeting to: Ms. Colleen R. Schwoerke Division of Continuing Education CB 1020, Friday Center University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1020, U.S.A. E-mail smp96@cs.unc.edu Tel +1-919-962-6298, fax +1-919-962-2061 Expenses: We anticipate that the registration fee will be $90 ($45 for students). The fee includes the banquet dinner and all conference materials. A late fee of $15 will apply to registrations after July 12. Low-cost dorm accommodations will be available, as will standard hotel rooms. Travel: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is approximately 20-25 minutes from the Raleigh-Durham International Airport (RDU). Information about accommodations and transportation will be sent in May or early June to members of the Society for Mathematical Psychology; others should contact Colleen Schwoerke at the above address. Information about the Society for Mathematical Psychology is available via the World Wide Web at http://www.socsci.uci.edu/smp/. This announcement is available at http://www.cs.unc.edu/~marshall/math.html. Sponsors: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology, Department of Computer Science Society for Mathematical Psychology ------------------------------ From: Catherine.Garbay@imag.fr Date: Tue, 16 Apr 1996 14:40:05 +0000 Subject: AIME'97 CFP AIME'97 6th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Europe 23rd - 26th March 1997 Grenoble, France Call for papers 1 INTRODUCTION _________________ The European Society for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Europe (AIME) was established in 1986 after a highly successful workshop held in Pavia the year before. The aims of AIME are the following: * to foster fundamental and applied research in the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to medical care and medical research, and * to provide a forum for reporting significant results achieved at biennial conferences. AIME also assists industry to identify high quality medical products which exploit these techniques. 2 SCOPE _________ We seek to publish original contributions to the development of theory, techniques, and applications of AI in Medicine. Contributions to theory may include a presentation or an analysis of the properties of novel AI methodologies potentially useful to solve relevant medical problems. Papers on techniques should describe the development or the extension of AI methods and their implementation. They should also discuss the assumptions and limitations which characterize the proposed methods. Application papers should describe the implementation of AI systems to solve significant medical problems, and should present sufficient information to allow evaluation of the practical benefits of using the system. AIME'97 will provide: * invited papers * contributed papers * contributed posters * system demonstrations * round table discussions and panel sessions * tutorials to introduce newcomers and discuss advanced topics * workshops The scope includes the following methodological areas: * knowledge representation, acquisition & validation ; machine learning * uncertain, temporal, case-based reasoning * natural language understanding * KBS for image and signal interpretation * monitoring and control * AI and telemedicine * integration of KBS and patient medical record * resource allocation, planning and scheduling * other areas relevant to AI in Medicine 3 CONTRIBUTIONS ___________________ Full papers should be submitted on or before 15th September 1996 (send three copies to the Programme Chair). Papers should not exceed 5000 (posters 500) words. Authors are requested to classify their submitted paper using the categories given in the Scope. Papers must be original and must not have been published before. All papers will be carefully reviewed by at least two independent and highly respected referees. All accepted papers will be published in the Conference Proceedings (the Proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag, under their Lecture Notes in AI Series). We also invite submission of tutorial proposals or panel discussions on the topics relevant to this Conference. A one-page abstract of the tutorial, as well as further relevant data concerning the topic and the presenter (one page curriculum vitae of the lecturer, previous presentations of the tutorial, target audience, etc) should be sent to the Tutorials Chair. 4 SCHEDULE _____________ * Receipt of full papers and tutorial proposals for consideration: 15th September 1996 * Notification of acceptance: 15th November 1996 * Receipt of camera-ready manuscript: 15th December 1996 5 CONFERENCE DETAILS ________________________ The Conference will be held at Grenoble World Trade Center, in France, on 23rd-26th March 1997. The Conference programme and registration form will be available from the Secretariat of the Conference and will be sent to those who return the attached reply form. Tutorials will be held on 23rd March 1997. The working language is English and will be used for all printed material, presentations and discussions. The Conference will be held immediately after the first joint conference of CVRMED & MRCAS (Computer Vision, Virtual Reality and Robotics in Medicine, Application to Computer Assisted Surgery) which will be held at Grenoble World Trade Center, on 20th-22nd March, 1997. This conference will provide a unique opportunity to gain an insight into advanced research in computer-based technologies applied to surgery and therapy (http://curie.imag.fr/cvrmed-mrcas.html). 6 REGISTRATION _________________ Registration fees include participation in the technical programme, a copy of the proceedings, all lunches and refreshments during the Conference, and the Welcome Party on the evening of Monday 24th March. Fees are in French Francs (FFr). * Early registration (before February 15th, 1997): 2 300 FFr * Late registration (after February 15th, 1997): 2 850 FFr * Early student registration (before February 15th, 1997): 1 300 FFr * Late student registration (after February 15th, 1997): 1 650 FFr Students should attach a letter of support from their supervisor or institution confirming student status. 7 EXIBITION _____________ A Technical Exhibition will be held in association with the Conference. Those requiring further details of layout and charges should indicate this on the attached reply form. 8 PROGRAMME COMMITTEE ___________________________ Elpida Keravnou (Chair) (Nicosia, Cyprus) Steen Andreassen (Aalborg, Denmark) Pedro Barahona (Lisboa, Portugal) Robert Baud (Geneva, Switzerland) Jan van Bemmel (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) Enrico Coiera (Bristol, United Kingdom) Carlo Combi (Milano, Italy) Luca Console (Torino, Italy) Michel Dojat (Crteil, France) Rolf Engelbrecht (Munich, Germany) John Fox (London, United Kingdom) Catherine Garbay (Grenoble, France) Werner Horn (Vienna, Austria) Jim Hunter (Aberdeen, United Kingdom) Nada Lavrac (Ljubljana, Slovenia) Stelios Orphanoudakis (Heraklion, Greece) Alan Rector (Manchester, United Kingdom) Costas Spyropoulos (Athens, Greece) Mario Stefanelli (Pavia, Italy) Mario Veloso (Lisboa, Portugal) John Washbrook (London, United Kingdom) Jeremy Wyatt (London, United Kingdom) 9 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE ___________________________ Catherine Garbay (Chair, TIMC, Grenoble) Robert Baud (co-Chair, Univ. Geneva) Jean-Dominique Monet (TIMC, Grenoble) Georges Weil (TIMC, Grenoble) Nicole Brochier (TIMC, Grenoble) Paulette Souillard (TIMC, Grenoble) Catherine Plottier (Destination-Congrs, Grenoble) Jacques Chevallier (Grenoble Isre Promotion) Pierre Kermen (UJF, Grenoble) 10 CONFERENCE ADDRESSES ____________________________ Programme Committee Chair Elpida Keravnou Department of Computer Science University of Cyprus 75 Kallipoleos Street, P.O. Box 537 CY-1678 Nicosia - Cyprus Tel: + 357 2 338705 Fax: + 357 2 339062 Email: elpida@turing.cs.ucy.ac.cy Organizing Committee Chair Catherine Garbay Lab. TIMC - IMAG Institut Bonniot - Domaine de la Merci 38706 La Tronche - France Tl : + 33 76 54 94 85 Fax : + 33 76 54 95 49 Email: Catherine.Garbay@imag.fr WWW: http://www-timc.imag.fr/aime97 Organizing Committee Co-Chair Robert Baud Centre d'Informatique Hospitalire Hopital Cantonal Universitaire de Genve CH-1214 Genve - Suisse Fax : + 41 22 372 62 55 Tutorials Chair Jeremy Wyatt Biomedical Informatics Unit Imperial Cancer Research Fund Lincoln's Inn Fields, PO Box 123 London WC2A 3PX - United Kingdom Tel: + 44 - 71 - 269 3637 Fax: + 44 - 71 - 269 3186 Email: j.wyatt@icrf.icnet.uk Secretariat DESTINATION-CONGRES 73 bis Grande Rue, F-38700 LA TRONCHE, FRANCE Tel: + 33 76 01 00 54 Fax: + 33 76 63 16 36 Email: dcongres@imaginet.fr PRELIMINARY REGISTRATION FORM ___________________________________ To be sent to the Conference Secretariat * I am interested in attending AIME 97 in Grenoble * I intend to submit a paper * I intend to present a poster * I intend to present a demonstration * Please send me further details about the technical exhibition Family Name: First Name: Title: Organization: Address: Post Code: Country: Telephone: Fax: Email: ____________________________________________________________ ----------------------------------------------------------------- Catherine GARBAY Lab. TIMC - IMAG Institut Bonniot Facult de Mdecine - Domaine de la Merci 38706 La Tronche - France Tl : 33 76 54 94 85 Fax : 33 76 54 95 49 URL: http://www-timc.imag.fr/sic ----------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ From: Nicolo` Cesa-Bianchi Posted-Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 13:51:47 +0200 Subject: COLT '96 call for participation NINTH CONFERENCE ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING THEORY - COLT '96 Desenzano del Garda, Italy June 28 - July 1, 1996 In cooperation with ACM/SIGACT/SIGART Sponsored by: Municipality of Desenzano del Garda University of Milan AT&T Research International Computer Science Institute NEC IGI, Technische Universitaet Graz EATCS Italian Chapter For more information please check: http://www.dsi.unimi.it/~colt96 or http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~avrim/colt96.html The registration form with hotel information is also available at: ftp://ftp.dsi.unimi.it/DSI/cesabian/colt96-regist.ps (gunzipped version available) ============================================================================= GENERAL INFORMATION GETTING THERE. By plane: the easiest way is to land in one of Milano airports (Linate or Malpensa) and take a shuttle to Stazione Centrale (Milano's main railway station). The shuttle ride to Stazione Centrale takes about half an hour from Linate and about an hour from Malpensa airport. Trains to Desenzano del Garda leave approximately every hour from Milano Stazione Centrale and are bound to Verona or Venezia. The train ride (120Km) takes an hour and fifteen minutes. Be sure to timestamp your ticket before getting on the trains (use the yellow machines located at the gates between the departure hall and the tracks.) By car: take the Desenzano exit on the Milano-Venezia (A4) highway. If you come from the north, you can enter Italy through Brennero pass and then drive until Verona to reach the A4. Make your flight reservations as early as possible! If you plan to go to Bari after COLT to attend the ICML conference, be aware that the trip takes more than 10 hours by train. If you would rather catch a plane, then book your flight soon. THINGS TO DO. Desenzano is a climatic resort located on the southern coast of the Garda lake between Milan and Venice. Weather at the end of June is usually nice and warm. Garda is the biggest Italian lake and, beyond the many cultural attractives, its northern coast is an excellent spot for windsurfing! To find a lot of information on the Garda area, check the website http://www.gardanet.it/garda.html. You can visit the lake by catching the shuttle boat connecting Desenzano to several other coastal towns. In Sirmione, 4Km east of Desenzano, there is a XIII century Rocca (castle) and the Roman ruins of Catullo's Villa. Mantua, 50Km south of Desenzano, is a splendid town: don't miss the Duomo and Palazzo Te, with frescos by Giulio Romano and Mantegna. Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet, is quickly reachable by train from Desenzano. On the way to Venezia, pay a visit to Padua to see the Giotto frescos in the famous Scrovegni's chapel. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx cut here xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx CONFERENCE REGISTRATION FORM Please fill in the information needed for registration. Make your payment by check or international money order, in Italian lira (Lit.) and payable through an Italian bank, to "Capitolo Italiano dell'EATCS" (for bank transfers use ABI-CAB code 1025-54460, account number 17504/2/401). Mail or fax this form together with proof of payment (by June 1, 1996 to avoid late fee) to: Attn. Miss Gianfranca Comune di Desenzano, Ufficio Turismo Via Porto Vecchio 36 25015 Desenzano Del Garda, Italy Fax: +39 (30) 991-4217 Questions to coltinfo@dsi.unimi.it (confirmations will be sent by email.) Anyone needing special arrangements to accommodate a disability should enclose a note with their registration. REGISTRATION FEES ACM/SIG or EATCS members (before June 1):______________Lit. 270,000 Non-members (before June 1):___________________________Lit. 300,000 Members (after June 1):________________________________Lit. 350,000 Non-members (after June 1):____________________________Lit. 390,000 Full time students (no banquet):_______________________Lit. 135,000 The registration fee includes a copy of the proceedings. Name:________________________________________________________________________ Affiliation:_________________________________________________________________ Address:_____________________________________________________________________ City:____________________________________________Zip:________________________ Country:_____________________________________________________________________ Telephone:___________________________________________________________________ Email:_______________________________________________________________________ Extra banquet tickets:_____________(quantity) x Lit. 60,000 How many in your party have dietary restrictions?__________ Vegetarian:___________ Other:____________ Shirt size. Please circle one: medium large X-large AMOUNT ENCLOSED Registration Lit. Extra banquet tickets Lit._____________________ Discount (see below) Lit._____________________ TOTAL Lit._____________________ There is a Lit. 50,000 discount for registering for both COLT '96 and ICML '96. (For student registrations the discount is Lit. 20,000.) Proof of registration to ICML '96 is required for discount to be taken. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx cut here xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ACCOMMODATIONS The following hotels are offering special rates for COLT '96 participants. Deadline for reservation at quoted rates is May 31. Please, make reservations directly with them. Include your credit card number (total refund guaranteed until dates specified in the list below, check with hotels for details on refund policies) and mention you are a participant of the COLT conference. All rates below are per night, per person. The rate for a "single" refers to a room with two beds. Most hotels in the list have a limited number of one-bed rooms at a cheaper price. Three-bed and four-bed rooms are also available on request. Albergo Sole e Fiori (****) Via Gramsci, 40 VISA/MC. Total refund until June 20. Double Lit. 62,000. Single Lit. 102,000. Phone +39 (30) 912-1021. Fax +39 (30) 991-2530 Hotel Vittorio (***) Via Porto Vecchio, 4 All major cards. Total refund until June 13. Double Lit. 50,000. Single Lit. 85,000. Phone +39 (30) 991-2245. Fax +39 (30) 991-2270 Hotel City (***) Via N. Sauro, 29 All major cards. Total refund until June 13. Double Lit. 60,000. Single Lit. 80,000. Phone +39 (30) 991-1704. Fax +39 (30) 991-2837 Hotel Plaza (***) Via Anelli, 24 VISA/MC. Total refund until June 1. Double Lit. 60,000. Single Lit. 110,000. Phone +39 (30) 991-2920. Fax +39 (30) 991-4675 Hotel Primavera (**) Via Cavour, 36 VISA/MC. Total refund until June 1. Double Lit. 45,000. Single Lit. 80,000. Phone +39 (30) 914-1404. Fax +39 (30) 991-4241 ================================================================== CONFERENCE SCHEDULE ================================================================== Thursday Evening, 6:00 - 8:00 Reception and registration ================================================================== Friday Morning, 9:00 - 9:10 Opening of the conference ================================================================== Friday Morning, June 28, 9:10 - 10:30 Session Chair: Avrim Blum Analysis of a Simple Learning Algorithm: Learning Foraging Thresholds for Lizards Leslie Ann Goldberg, William E. Hart, David Wilson VC Dimension of an Integrate and Fire Neuron Model Anthony M. Zador, Barak A. Pearlmutter Graph Learning with a Nearest Neighbor Approach Sven Koenig, Yury Smirnov The Dual DFA Problem: Hardness Results for Programming by Demonstration and Learning First-Order Representations William W. Cohen ================================================================== Friday Morning, 10:30 - 11:10 Break ================================================================== Friday Morning, 11:10 - 12:30 Session Chair: Michael Kearns PAC-Like Upper Bounds for the Sample Complexity of Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation Sean B. Holden A Data-Dependent Skeleton Estimate for Learning Gabor Lugosi, Marta Pinter Towards Robust Model Selection using Estimation and Approximation Error Bounds Joel Ratsaby, R. Meir, V. Maiorov A Framework for Structural Risk Minimisation John Shawe-Taylor, Peter Bartlett, Robert Williamson, Martin Anthony ================================================================== Friday Afternoon, 12:30 - 2:00 Lunch ================================================================== Friday Afternoon, 2:00 - 3:00. Invited speaker Thomas G. Dietterich: Title to be Announced ================================================================== Friday Afternoon, 3:00 - 3:30 Break ================================================================== Friday Afternoon, 3:30 - 4:50 Session Chair: Yishay Mansour A Bayesian/Information Theoretic Model of Bias Learning Jonathan Baxter Predicting Bits Almost as Well as the Optimal Biased Coin Yoav Freund A Randomized Approximation of the MDL for Stochastic Models with Hidden Variables Kenji Yamanishi Learning an Optimal Decision Strategy in an Influence Diagram with Latent Variables V.G.Vovk ================================================================== Friday Evening, 7:00 Business Meeting ================================================================== Saturday Morning, June 29, 9:00 - 10:20 Session Chair: Dana Ron On the Complexity of Learning from Drifting Distributions Rakesh D. Barve, Philip M. Long Learning Changing Concepts by Exploiting the Structure of Change Peter Bartlett, Shai Ben-David, Sanjeev Kulkarni The Importance of Convexity in Learning with Squared Loss Wee SunLee, Peter L. Bartlett, Robert C. Williamson Learning Curve Bounds for Markov Decision Processes with Undiscounted Rewards Lawrence K. Saul, Satinder P. Singh ================================================================== Saturday Morning, 10:20 - 11:00 Break ================================================================== Saturday Morning, 11:00 - 12:20 Session Chair: Sanjay Jain Probabilistic PFIN-Type Learning: General Properties Andris Ambainis Synthesizing Enumeration Techniques For Language Learning Ganesh Baliga, John Case, Sanjay Jain Elementary Formal Systems, Intrinsic Complexity, and Procrastination Sanjay Jain, Arun Sharma Angluin's theorem for indexed families of r.e. sets and applications Dick de Jongh, Makoto Kanazawa ================================================================== Sunday Morning, June 30, 9:00 - 10:20 Session Chair: Lisa Hellerstein On Restricted-Focus-of-Attention Learnability of Boolean Functions Andreas Birkendorf, Eli Dichterman, Jeffrey Jackson, Norbert Klasner, Hans Ulrich Simon Analysis of Greedy Expert Hiring and an Application to Memory-Based Learning Igal Galperin On Learning Width-Two Branching Programs Nader H. Bshouty, Christino Tamon, David K. Wilson PAC Learning Axis-Aligned Rectangles with Respect to Product Distributions from Multiple-Instance Examples Philip M. Long, Lei Tan ================================================================== Sunday Morning, 10:20 - 11:00 Break ================================================================== Sunday Morning, 11:00 - 12:20 Session Chair: Rob Holte Attribute-Efficient Learning in Query and Mistake-Bound Models Nader Bshouty, Lisa Hellerstein PAC Learning Intersections of Halfspaces with Membership Queries Stephen Kwek, Leonard Pitt Learning Conjunctions of Two Unate DNF Formulas: Computational and Informational Results Aaron Feigelson, Lisa Hellerstein A Simple Algorithm for Learning O(log n)-Term DNF Eyal Kushilevitz ================================================================== Sunday Afternoon, 12:20 - 2:00 Lunch ================================================================== Sunday Afternoon, 2:00 - 3:00. Invited speaker David D. Lewis: "Challenges in Machine Learning for Text Classification" ================================================================== Sunday Afternoon, 3:00 - 3:30 Break ================================================================== Sunday Afternoon, 3:30 - 5:00 Impromptu Sesssion I ================================================================== Sunday Afternoon, 5:00 - 7:00 Meet the Authors/Posters (refreshments) ================================================================== Sunday Evening: Banquet ================================================================== Monday Morning, July 1, 9:00 - 10:20 Session Chair: Martin Anthony Trees and Learning Wolfgang Merkle, Frank Stephan Learning Branches and Learning to Win Closed Games Martin Kummer, Matthias Ott A Competitive Approach to Game Learning Christopher D. Rosin, Richard K. Belew Strong Minimax Lower Bounds for Learning Andras Antos, Gabor Lugosi ================================================================== Monday Morning, 10:20 - 10:50 Break ================================================================== Monday Morning, 10:50 - 12:10 Session Chair: Nick Littlestone On-Line Portfolio Selection Erik Ordentlich, Thomas M. Cover On Bayes Methods for On-Line Boolean Prediction Nicolo` Cesa-Bianchi, David Helmbold, Sandra Panizza Game Theory, On-Line Prediction and Boosting Yoav Freund, Robert E. Schapire Learning of Depth-Two Neural Nets with Constant Fan-in at the Hidden Nodes Peter Auer, Stephen Kwek, Wolfgang Maass, Manfred Warmuth ================================================================== Monday Afternoon, 12:10 - 2:00 Lunch ================================================================== Monday Afternoon, 2:00 onwards: Impromptu Session II ================================================================== END OF CONFERENCE ================================================================== ------------------------------ From: Michele King Date: Wed, 17 Apr 1996 14:03:32 -0700 Subject: Announcing a tutorial on Machine Learning and Data Mining CSLI Interface Lab Workshop Tutorials: featuring lectures by World Authorities Location: Cordura Hall, Stanford University Date: May 13 through 16, 1996 ______________________________________________________________________ Four Days of Tutorials on Machine Learning, the Internet, Human Interfaces to Communication Technology, and Automatic Speech Recognition. May 16, Thursday: Machine Learning and Data Mining The collection and warehousing of data in large quantities presents an unprecedented opportunity for discovering useful knowledge. The fourth day tutorial reviews computational techniques -- known as machine learning or data mining -- designed to support this activity, then examines the main stages of the knowledge discovery process, drawing on illustrative examples from successful industrial efforts. Applications to be discussed include mechanical diagnosis, control problems, and financial prediction. Speaker: Pat Langley, Lars Asker, George John, and George M. White 08:30-08:45 Introduction: George White 08:45-09:30 Overview of Machine Learning: Pat Langley 09:30-10:15 Decision-Tree and Rule Induction: Pat Langley 10:15-10:30 Break 10:30-11:10 Case-based Learning: Pat Langley 11:10-11:50 Learning with Neural Networks: George John 12:30-01:30 *Lunch 01:30-02:00 Stages of Knowledge Discovery: Pat Langley 02:00-02:30 Formulating Problems: Lars Asker 02:30-03:00 Constructing and Selecting Features: Lars Asker 03:00-03:30 Collecting and Preparing Data: Lars Asker 03:30-03:45 Break 03:45-04:30 Noise,Overfitting, and Pruning: Lars Asker 04:30-05:10 Visualization and Understandability: Lars Asker 05:10-05:30 Social and Marketing Issues: Pat Langley *Lunch will be provided Monday, May 13 The Internet New Developments in Education, Business, Medicine, Engineering and Understanding Social Impact. The first day's tutorial covers a range of topics centered on the design and development of effective internet technologies. Speakers: Barbara Hayes-Roth, Marko Balabanovic, Colleen Crangle, Terry Winograd, William M. Detmer, Larry Leifer, George M. White Tuesday, May 14 Human Interface Design Social Responses to Communication Technology. The second day's tutorial covers "Social Responses to Communication Technology" and Human Interface design. Speakers: Clifford Nass, Byron Reeves, George White Wednesday, May 15 Automatic Speech Recognition New Development in Spoken Language Interfaces to PCs on the Desktop and on the Web. The third day covers theoretical and practical aspects of Automatic Speech Recognition. After nearly 30 years of gradual progress, ASR is now showing up everywhere, over the phone, on PCs, and soon on the internet. The history, theory, current practice, and future of the ASR field is treated in this tutorial by several acknowledged authorities in the area who have both industrial and academic experience. Speakers: Wayne Lea, Elizabeth Macken, Neil Scott, George White, Brian Scott. ------------------------------------------------------------------ *Note* If you would like more information about the other tutorials please check out the CSLI Web site at: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Workshop/tutorials.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Method of Registration By mail, complete the card and return with payment to the Interface Lab Tutorials, CSLI, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4115. By phone, please call 1-415-723-1224. By email, contact gwhite@csli.stanford.edu or mking@csli.stanford.edu. By fax, complete card and fax to 1-415-723-0758. Cancellation Policy All refund requests must be in writing and postmarked no later than May 1. Cancellations after this date will result in a 50% cancellation fee. Requests should be addressed to CSLI. Entrance Fee $500 per day; $900 for two days; $1200 for three days; $1500 for four days. 10% price reduction if received by April 30, 1996; 50% price reduction for students. Free for CSLI Industrial Affiliates. Please enroll me in this Seminar Series: Name ______________________________________________________________ Title ______________________________________________________________ Company ___________________________________________________________ Mailing address _____________________________________________________ City _________________________ State ____ Country ______ Zip ________ Phone/Fax Number __________________ Email ___________________________ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ***Method of Payment*** VISA/MC# ________________________________________________________ Expiration Date ____________________________________________________ Cardholder Name ___________________________________________________ Authorized Signature _______________________________________________ Check Enclosed (Payable to Stanford University) ____ Money Order ____ Day 1 ____ Day 2 ____ Day 3 ____ Day 4 ____ Total Amt Enclosed $_______ ------------------------------ End of ML-LIST (Digest format) **************************************** From robtag@dia.unisa.it Tue Apr 23 12:13:40 1996 Received: from lucy.cs.wisc.edu (lucy.cs.wisc.edu [128.105.2.11]) by sea.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id MAA01943 for ; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 12:13:22 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU (TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU [128.2.254.108]) by lucy.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id MAA24449 for ; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 12:13:20 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU by telnet-1.srv.cs.CMU.EDU id aa06228; 23 Apr 96 11:10:19 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU id aa06225; 23 Apr 96 10:42:32 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU id aa07013; 23 Apr 96 10:41:14 EDT Received: from EDRC.CMU.EDU by B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU id aa05762; 23 Apr 96 7:06:09 EDT Received: from [193.205.160.1] by EDRC.CMU.EDU id aa11839; 23 Apr 96 7:05:14 EDT Received: by udsab; (5.65v3.2/1.1.8.2/19Apr96-0403PM) id AA05791; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 13:04:27 +0200 Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 13:04:27 +0200 From: Tagliaferri Roberto Message-Id: <9604231104.AA05791@udsab> To: Connectionists@cs.cmu.edu Subject: Teaching Assistant positions available at IIASS The International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies "E.R. Caianiello" is holding a Master Course on "Advanced Information and Communication Technology". There are two Teaching Assistant positions available, starting from October-December 1996, for one year, on the following subjects: - Pattern analysis and recognition - Communication networks - Parallel and distributed processing - Advanced operating systems - Robotics It includes research activity in the area of neural nets and related fields. It is required a Ph.d or 3 years experience in related areas. The salary is of $1,300 per month. It is not a permanent position but it can be renewed for some years. Please send information and cvs to Prof. Maria Marinaro c/o IIASS via Pellegrino, 19 84019 Vietri s/m (SA) Italy fax no. +39 89 761189 or to Dr. Roberto Tagliaferri e-mail robtag@dia.unisa.it From itb2@psy.ox.ac.uk Tue Apr 23 22:14:22 1996 Received: from lucy.cs.wisc.edu (lucy.cs.wisc.edu [128.105.2.11]) by sea.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id WAA12320 for ; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 22:14:17 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU (TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU [128.2.254.108]) by lucy.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id WAA05812 for ; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 22:14:15 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU by telnet-1.srv.cs.CMU.EDU id aa07001; 23 Apr 96 20:37:46 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU id aa06999; 23 Apr 96 20:25:43 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU id aa07256; 23 Apr 96 20:24:59 EDT Received: from EDRC.CMU.EDU by B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU id aa07317; 23 Apr 96 10:21:40 EDT Received: from [163.1.29.191] by EDRC.CMU.EDU id aa12654; 23 Apr 96 10:20:46 EDT Received: from axp02.mrc-bbc.ox.ac.uk (axp02.mrc-bbc.ox.ac.uk [163.1.29.192]) by axp01.mrc-bbc.ox.ac.uk (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id PAA16966; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 15:10:54 +0100 (BST) Received: (from itb2@localhost) by axp02.mrc-bbc.ox.ac.uk (8.7.5/8.7.3) id PAA02284; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 15:10:52 +0100 (BST) Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 15:10:52 +0100 (BST) Message-Id: <199604231410.PAA02284@axp02.mrc-bbc.ox.ac.uk> From: Information Theory and the Brain II To: Connectionists@cs.cmu.edu CC: itb2@psy.ox.ac.uk, nnss@klab.caltech.edu Subject: Call for papers: Information theory and the Brain II. First call for papers: Information Theory and the Brain II To be held on the 20-21st of September, Headland Hotel, Newquay, Cornwall, England. http://www.mrc-bbc.ox.ac.uk/~itb2/conference.html This is the sequal to the conference held in Stirling, Scotland last year. Presentations on any topic relating ideas from either information theory or statistics, to the operation on the brain are welcomed. It is hoped that an informal atmosphere can be maintained in the plesant surroundings that Newquay provides. This year the conference will be held in the Cornish town of Newquay. Apart from being one of the best areas for surfing in Europe, the surrounding countryside is amongst the most beautiful in Britain. The conference will be held in the spectacular Headland Hotel right next to the famous Fistral Beach and in mid September the water is at its warmest, the surf is starting to get larger, and the summer holiday crowds have headed home. Organsing Commitee: Roland Baddeley (Chair) Nick Chater Peter Foldiak Peter Hancock Bruno Olshausen Dan Ruderman Simon Schultz Guy Wallis Send short (less than one page) abstacts, and any requests for further information either electronically to itb2@psy.ox.ac.uk, or by surface mail to: IBT2 c/o Roland Baddeley, Dept of Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, England OX1 3UD Registration will be 40 pounds (about $60 U.S.) with the participants expected to find their own accommodation. This varies in price from as low as 5 pounds for the most basic upwards. Accommodation in the summer can be hard to find but by the 20th, most summer holidays have finished and the situation is much better. More information on accommodation can be found at the above mentioned web page. From ma_s435@crystal.king.ac.uk Wed Apr 24 03:55:15 1996 Received: from lucy.cs.wisc.edu (lucy.cs.wisc.edu [128.105.2.11]) by sea.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id DAA16194 for ; Wed, 24 Apr 1996 03:54:56 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU (TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU [128.2.254.108]) by lucy.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id DAA08934 for ; Wed, 24 Apr 1996 03:54:54 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU by telnet-1.srv.cs.CMU.EDU id aa07013; 23 Apr 96 20:47:34 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU id aa07003; 23 Apr 96 20:26:52 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU id aa07266; 23 Apr 96 20:25:54 EDT From: Dimitris Tsaptsinos Organization: Kingston University (Science) To: Contacts Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 10:23:51 GMT0BST Subject: EANN96 Conference Reply-to: D.Tsaptsinos@kingston.ac.uk Message-ID: <6184177557@crystal.kingston.ac.uk> INVITATION FOR PARTICIPATION AND PROGRAM OUTLINE International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks (EANN '96) King's College London Strand campus, London, England June 17--19, 1996 The International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks (EANN '96) is the second conference in the series. The conference is a forum for presenting the latest results on neural network applications in technical fields. 156 papers from over 20 countries have been accepted for oral presentation after a review of the abstracts. Some more information on the conference EANN '96 is available on the world wide web site at http://www.lpac.ac.uk/EANN96, and on EANN '95 at http://www.abo.fi/~abulsari/EANN95.html Conference secretariat E-mail address : eann96@lpac.ac.uk Address : EANN '96, c/o Dr. D. Tsaptsinos, Kingston University, Mathematics, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE, UK. Fax: +44 181 5477419 Organisers and co-sponsors Systems Engineering Association IEEE UK Regional Interest Group on Neural Networks London Parallel Applications Centre Neural CCS Ltd. IEE (British Institution of Electrical Engineers) Professional Group C4 Conference chairmen: Abhay Bulsari and Dimitris Tsaptsinos Registration information The conference fee is sterling (GBP) 360. The conference fee can be paid by a bank cheque or a bank draft (no personal cheques) payable to EANN '96, to be sent to EANN '96, c/o Dr. D. Tsaptsinos, Kingston University, Mathematics, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE, UK. The fee includes attendance to the conference and the proceedings. Registration form can be sent to you by e-mail and you may return it by e-mail (or post or fax) once the conference fee has been sent. A registration form sent before the payment of the conference fee is not valid. For more information, please ask eann96@lpac.ac.uk The tentative program outline is as on the following page. The detailed program will be prepared in the end of April. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PROGRAM OUTLINE International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks (EANN '96) Room A Room B Monday, 17 June 0800 Registration 0830 Opening 0845 Vision (1) Control Systems (1) 1200 --- lunch break --- 1330 Vision (2) Control Systems (2) 1630 Discussion session on Vision Discussion session on Control Tuesday, 18 June 0830 Biomedical Engineering Mechanical Engineering 1200 --- lunch break --- 1330 Process Engineering Robotics 1500 Chemical Engineering 1630 Discussion session on Chemical Engineering Wednesday, 19 June 0830 Speech and signal processing Metallurgical Engineering 1030 Classification systems Discussion session on Metallurgy 1200 --- lunch break --- 1330 Hardware Applications General Applications 1600 Hybrid systems 1800 Closing The indicated times are approximate and changes are still possible. From marshall@cs.unc.edu Wed Apr 24 10:43:34 1996 Received: from lucy.cs.wisc.edu (lucy.cs.wisc.edu [128.105.2.11]) by sea.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id KAA24877 for ; Wed, 24 Apr 1996 10:43:28 -0500 Received: from cs.uwa.oz.au (bilby.cs.uwa.oz.au [130.95.1.11]) by lucy.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id KAA13261 for ; Wed, 24 Apr 1996 10:43:25 -0500 Received: from (mafm@koala.cs.uwa.oz.au [130.95.116.22]) by cs.uwa.oz.au (8.6.8/8.5) with SMTP id RAA12280; Wed, 24 Apr 1996 17:49:30 +0800 Message-Id: <199604240949.RAA12280@cs.uwa.oz.au> From: Jonathan Marshall To: reinforce@cs.uwa.edu.au Subject: Final CFP: Society for Math Psych conference, Chapel Hill, NC Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 12:08:37 -0400 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS 29th Annual MATHEMATICAL PSYCHOLOGY Meeting 1-4 August 1996 Sponsored by the Society for Mathematical Psychology and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The 29th Annual Mathematical Psychology Meeting will be held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The meetings will follow the usual format with paper sessions over two and a half days (2-4 August) with a banquet after the first day of papers. The Organizing Committee consists of Christina A. Burbeck, Elliot Hirshman, Jonathan A. Marshall (Co-Chair), Nestor Schmajuk, Thomas S. Wallsten (Co-Chair), and Yiu-Fai Yung. Keynote speakers: Amnon Rapoport, Stephen Grossberg. Programs of past meetings appear in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology and may be consulted for ideas concerning symposia as well as for ideas about areas that have not recently been covered. All members of the Society for Mathematical Psychology are welcome to make suggestions for symposia and invited speakers to the Program Committee as soon as possible. Possible special symposia at the meeting include: - Games and Human Behavior, in honor of Amnon Rapoport - Models of Binding Mechanisms in Vision Papers for the Mathematical Psychology Meeting may be submitted by regular members, student members, and nonmembers. Any one person may present only one paper but may be a coauthor of other papers, or may be an invited speaker or symposium participant. Papers will be limited to those in which mathematical, statistical, and simulation methods play a significant role in the development of psychological ideas or in the interpretation of results. Purely theoretical developments should clearly relate to some psychological issue or contribute to methodologies of obvious use in psychology. Experimental results should bear directly on some mathematical or simulation model. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abstracts of papers must be received by 30 April 1996. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Papers are accepted on the basis of their quality and suitability and not according to the author's affiliation with the Society. For oral papers, presentation time will be limited to 25 minutes including five minutes for discussion. Sessions will be strictly timed. This year, we are considering adding a poster session. If there are sufficient submissions, we will do so. Poster presentations have the advantage of longer discussion time, less formality, and closer audience contact. The "status" associated with poster presentations will be equal to that associated with oral presentations. Submissions must include the following information: 1. For all authors and co-authors: - Names - Institutional affiliations - Mailing addresses - E-mail addresses - Telephone and fax numbers - Membership status in the Society for Mathematical Psychology (member, student member, or nonmember) 2. A specification of which co-author will present the paper at the meeting 3. Your preference for spoken/poster presentation: (a) Only wish to present a spoken paper (b) Prefer spoken paper, willing to give a poster (c) No preference; either spoken or poster is fine (d) Prefer poster, willing to give a spoken paper (e) Only willing to present a poster 4. Title of paper 5. Category of the paper. Choose the most appropriate category: (a) categorization (b) cognition and language (c) judgment, decision, and choice (d) information processing and performance (e) learning and memory (f) measurement and scaling (g) methodology and statistics (h) neural/neurophysiological modeling (i) physiology (j) psychophysics (k) sensation and perception (l) social psychology (m) other (please specify) 6. An abstract of 150-250 words E-mail submission of abstracts (and all other information) is greatly preferred, since this will facilitate compiling (without retyping) of an abstract book to be distributed at the meeting. The abstracts will also be published in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology after the meeting. Please e-mail your abstract in plain (ASCII) text format if possible, without MIME encoding, uuencoding, TeX formatting, or other modifications. Send abstracts to: Professor Jonathan A. Marshall Math Psych '96 Program Committee Department of Computer Science CB 3175, Sitterson Hall University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175, U.S.A. E-mail marshall@cs.unc.edu Tel +1-919-962-1887, fax +1-919-962-1799 Address symposium outlines, and invited speaker suggestions to: Professor Thomas S. Wallsten Math Psych '96 Program Committee Department of Psychology CB 3270, Davie Hall University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270, U.S.A. E-mail tom.wallsten@unc.edu Tel +1-919-962-2538, fax +1-919-962-2537 Send all other questions concerning the Mathematical Psychology Meeting to: Ms. Colleen R. Schwoerke Division of Continuing Education CB 1020, Friday Center University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1020, U.S.A. E-mail smp96@cs.unc.edu Tel +1-919-962-6298, fax +1-919-962-2061 Expenses: We anticipate that the registration fee will be $90 ($45 for students). The fee includes the banquet dinner and all conference materials. A late fee of $15 will apply to registrations after July 12. Low-cost dorm accommodations will be available, as will standard hotel rooms. Travel: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is approximately 20-25 minutes from the Raleigh-Durham International Airport (RDU). Information about accommodations and transportation will be sent in May or early June to members of the Society for Mathematical Psychology; others should contact Colleen Schwoerke at the above address. Information about the Society for Mathematical Psychology is available via the World Wide Web at http://www.socsci.uci.edu/smp/. This announcement is available at http://www.cs.unc.edu/~marshall/math.html. Sponsors: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology, Department of Computer Science Society for Mathematical Psychology ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From payman@ebs330.eb.uah.edu Thu Apr 25 01:08:22 1996 Received: from lucy.cs.wisc.edu (lucy.cs.wisc.edu [128.105.2.11]) by sea.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id BAA09884 for ; Thu, 25 Apr 1996 01:08:13 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU (TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU [128.2.254.108]) by lucy.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id BAA28476 for ; Thu, 25 Apr 1996 01:08:11 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU by telnet-1.srv.cs.CMU.EDU id aa08846; 25 Apr 96 0:27:14 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU id aa08770; 24 Apr 96 22:10:23 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU id aa08246; 24 Apr 96 22:09:49 EDT Received: from CS.CMU.EDU by B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU id aa01922; 24 Apr 96 19:25:23 EDT Received: from uahis1.uah.edu by CS.CMU.EDU id aa20323; 24 Apr 96 19:24:50 EDT Received: from ebs330 by uahis1 with SMTP ; Wed, 24 Apr 96 18:09:48 CST Received: from anahita.eb.uah.edu.uah.edu by ebs330 (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA20688; Wed, 24 Apr 96 18:12:20 CDT Date: Wed, 24 Apr 96 18:12:20 CDT From: Payman Arabshahi Message-Id: <9604242312.AA20688@ebs330> To: connectionists@cs.cmu.edu Subject: IEEE NNC launches web newsletter Cc: marks@u.washington.edu The IEEE Neural Networks Council announces the launching of its newsletter on the World Wide Web. "CONNECTIONS" (ISSN 1068-1450) will appear quarterly and will be the place for various NNC related news of meetings, conferences, and events, as well as in depth reports on NNC committees and their activities, book reviews, and a technology column overviewing the latest research trends in the field of computational intelligence. Please visit our first issue on the web, in the newsletter section of the NNC Homepage at http://www.ieee.org/nnc Contents, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1996: NEWS - NNC ExCom: Minutes of the Meeting of March 24, 1996 ...... K. Haines - Report on CIFEr'96 ....................................... R. Golan - Upcoming NNC events ...................................... Ed. - NNC Awards ............................................... M. Hassoun - Homepage news and overview FOCUS - Fuzzy Systems Technical Committee ........................ H. Berenji - Council Personality Profiles ............................. Ed. - New Book Review .......................................... Ed. - NNC Regional Interest Group Report ....................... M. Y. Chow TECHNOLOGY - A Virtual Reality Interface to Complex Neural Network Software Simulations ...................... T.P. Caudell -- Payman Arabshahi Tel : (205) 895-6380 Dept. of Electrical & Computer Eng. Fax : (205) 895-6803 University of Alabama in Huntsville payman@ebs330.eb.uah.edu Huntsville, AL 35899 http://www.eb.uah.edu/ece From N.Sharkey@dcs.shef.ac.uk Fri Apr 26 19:10:11 1996 Received: from lucy.cs.wisc.edu (lucy.cs.wisc.edu [128.105.2.11]) by sea.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id TAA14152 for ; Fri, 26 Apr 1996 19:10:04 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU (TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU [128.2.254.108]) by lucy.cs.wisc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id TAA02578 for ; Fri, 26 Apr 1996 19:10:02 -0500 Received: from TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU by telnet-1.srv.cs.CMU.EDU id aa11388; 26 Apr 96 18:23:26 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by TELNET-1.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU id aa11386; 26 Apr 96 17:53:39 EDT Received: from DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU by DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU id aa10099; 26 Apr 96 17:53:04 EDT Received: from CS.CMU.EDU by B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU id ac25995; 26 Apr 96 15:18:08 EDT Received: from gw.dcs.shef.ac.uk by CS.CMU.EDU id aa05190; 26 Apr 96 13:13:24 EDT Received: from freud.dcs.shef.ac.uk by dcs.shef.ac.uk (4.1/DAVE-1.0) id AA09596; Fri, 26 Apr 96 15:30:25 BST Date: Fri, 26 Apr 96 15:30:25 BST From: Noel Sharkey Message-Id: <9604261430.AA09596@dcs.shef.ac.uk> To: connect-bb@ed.eusip, incon@dcs.shef.ac.uk, reinforce@cs.uwa.edu.au, gann-list@cs.iastate.edu, neuron-request@CATTELL.psych.upenn.edu, alife@cognet.ucla.edu, cogpsy@neuro.psy.soton.ac.uk, connectionists@cs.cmu.edu, epsynet%uhupvm1.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu, elsnet-list@cogsci.ed.ac.uk, irl-net%irlearn.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu, arpanet-bboards@edu.mit.lcs.mc, hybrid-list@cs.ua.edu, colt@cs.uiuc.edu, ilpnet@ijs.si, cphc-jobs@ukc.ac.uk Subject: 3 Research Studentships available Cc: A.Sharkey@dcs.shef.ac.uk PLEASE PASS ON TO ANY FINAL YEAR UNDERGRADUATES OR MASTERS WHO ARE SEEKING FUNDED PHD PLACES. Sorry if you receive this more than once. 3 RESEARCH STUDENTSHIPS IN NEURAL COMPUTING AND ROBOTICS Department of Computer Science University of Sheffield Three funded PhD studentships are available, two from from 1st August, and one from end of September, 1996. The first of these is restricted to British Students only and the other 2 are for students from countries within the European Community. 1. Neural Computing. Projects on any topic within the field of neural computing will be considered. Two areas of particular interest are (a) Improving the reliability of neural computing applications through the use of ensembles of nets and (b) Cognitive modelling, transfer and interference. 2. Autonomous Mobile Robotics. The project would provide an ideal opportunity for a creative student to work on the development of ``intelligent'' behaviour on a mobile robot. Neural computing techniques have already been applied in our lab to develop a number of low level behaviours on a Nomad200. The student would be expected to develop higher level behavioural control. There are a number of different approaches that could be taken. For example: using representations developed at the lower levels to induce higher level behaviours or using a human and animal developmental paradigm. However, nothing is set in stone for this project and a good proposal will go a long way. 3. Pharmaceutical Robotics Aim: The development of a neural computing system for coordinating robot arms in the task of mixing dangerous drugs. This project is in collaboration with the Pharmacy Unit at the Northern General Hospital. Their problem is that they currently employ more than twenty highly-qualified specialist staff to spend a large part of their day involved in the rather tedious task of mixing drugs. Since many of the drugs are very dangerous to humans (such as anti-cancer drugs), much of the work has to take place inside a sealed glass case that is accessed by attached gloves (a glove box). The solution is to put robot arms into the cases and let them do most of the work. It should be noted that this is a research project and offers a number of interesting robotics problems. The student would not be expected to develop a commercial system. Further information about neural computing within the Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks (AINN) research group can be viewed on WWW: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/groups/nn (This will not be ready to view until Wednesday, 1st, May). Application forms may be obtained from our PhD admission secretary Jill Martin jill@dcs.shef.ac.uk. Or write to Ms J. Martin, Department of Computer Science, 211 Portabello St., Sheffield, S1 4DP, S. Yorks, UK. Forms should be accompanied by a short proposal (less than a page) about what the applicant would like to work on, but this does not commit the applicant.