Machine Learning List: Vol. 15, No. 23

Machine Learning List <[email protected]> Sun, 28 Dec 2003 20:27:35 -0800
Newsgroups gmane.comp.ai.machine-learning
Message-ID <[email protected]>
                 Machine Learning List: Vol. 15, No. 23
                       Sunday, December 28, 2003

Contents
  Calls for Papers/Participation
    CfP 2nd Int'l German Conf. on Multi-Agent System Technologies
    Int'l Conf. on Autonomic Computing (ICAC-04) - Call for Tutorials
    Loft 2004 CFP
    GECCO-2004 Workshop: Adaptaion, Approximation, and Learning...
    CFP: Self-organization in Representations for EAs, GECCO WS...
    MobiQuitous 2004 - Call for Papers
    CFP:  AAAI-04 Workshop on Challenges in Game AI
    First IFIP Conf. on AI Applications and Innovations
    ECML/PKDD 2004: Call for Papers
    ECML/PKDD 2004: Call for Tutorials and Workshops
    PAIS CFP
    KDD-2004 First Call for Papers
    CFP: Special Issue on "Autonomic Computing and Automation
    ESSLLI 2004 Workshop CfP: NLP for Multimedia Applications
    CATALOG '04: first CFP (corrected dates)
    KDD-2004: CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS
    CFP: Biological Appl. of Genetic and Evol. Computation (BioGEC)
  Other Meeting Announcements
    E-CAP2004_ITALY Deadline extension Jan 7
    EXTENDED DEADLINE FUSION 2004
  Career Opportunities
    POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT
    Jobs at Amazon.com in Seattle
    Graduate assistantships available
  Miscellaneous Announcements
    ML Thesis wins 2003 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
    JMLR: Special Issue on Independent Components Analysis


The Machine Learning List is moderated.  Contributions should be
relevant to the scientific study of machine learning.  Please send
submissions for distribution to: [email protected].  For requests to be
added, removed, or to change your email address, send email to:
[email protected].

To keep mailings to a manageable size, please keep submissions brief.
For meeting announcements, do highlight the meeting Web site and the
goals of the event but omit information such as the program committee
and talk schedules.  Also, only first calls for papers/participation
and brief change of deadline announcements will be included.  The ML
List moderator reserves the right to omit/edit submissions to meet
these criteria.

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

From: Rainer Unland <[email protected]>
Subject: CfP 2nd Int'l German Conf. on Multi-Agent System Technologies
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 19:10:16 +0100

                 SECOND INTERNATIONAL GERMAN CONFERENCE ON
                 MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM TECHNOLOGIES (ATES'04)

                         September 29 - 30, 2004
                Erfurt, Germany, Fair and Convention Center

                     http://www.gi-vki.de/MATES04/

IMPORTANT DATES
 Submission of papers:                 May, 21, 2004
 Submission of tutorial proposals:     June 18, 2004
 Submission of exhibit/demo proposals: July 9,  2004
 Notification of authors:              June 21, 2004
 Camera-ready papers:                  July 9,  2004

AIMS & SCOPE

The German conference on Multi-agent system TEchnologieS (MATES)
provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, users (members of
business and industry) and developers, to present and discuss latest
advances in research work, as well as prototyped or fielded systems of
intelligent agents. The conference covers the whole range from theory
to application of agent- and multi-agent technologies in order to
promote theory and application of agents and multi-agent systems. The
conference features an exhibition of practical applications with an
advanced concept of agency, as well as introductory and expert
keynotes/tutorials on practical aspects of agent-based computing.

For the second time the German special interest group on Distributed 
Artificial Intelligence jointly with the steering committee of MATES 
organizes this international conference in order to promote theory and 
application of agents and multi-agent systems. Building on the sequence 
of agent-related events in Germany in the past such as VDI 1998 
(Chemnitz), VertIS 2001 (Bamberg), and KI 2002 (Aachen), the MATES 
conference series now is exclusively devoted to agents and multi-agent 
systems, and the cross-fertilization between agent theory and 
application. MATES’04 is conducted as an integral part of the fifth 
international conference NetObject Days 2004 in an exciting joint event. 
 conference language is English.

Moreover, it is co-located with other agent-related events, especially 
the 8th International Woprkshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA) 
2004 (http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/cia2004/index.html), and the autumn 
FIPA (Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agents (www.FIPA.org)) meeting. 
Finally, it is intended to exhibit and present the most relevant agent 
 and real-world agent-based applications.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The topics of interest for MATES'04 include, but are not limited to:
 Agent architectures and multi-agent platforms
 Agents for e-business and e-government
 Agents in novel applications, e.g. bioinformatics and the semantic
web 
 Agent to non-agent interoperability, mobile agents, agent-based
services 
 Agent-oriented software engineering
 Autonomous robots and robot teams
 Coordination, collaboration, and agent communication languages
 Interface agents, believable agents and user modelling
 Modelling of teams, groups, and organizations
 Commitment, delegation, responsibility, and obligations in artificial
and hybrid societies
 Semantic of the dynamics of  organizational models
 Roles and structures, adaptive learning and cognition in 
organizational models
 Multi-agent learning and planning
 Negotiation, auctions, argumentation, and conflict resolution
 Robustness, fault tolerance, scalability and performance measurement
 Social simulation and cognitive modelling with agents
 Standards for agents and multi-agent systems

EXHIBITION & COURSES

Integral part of the technical program will be an exhibition of a
variety of tools for the development, especially agent platforms, and
prototypes of all kinds of practical applications of agent and
multi-agent technology at the conference venue. Introductory and
advanced courses given by experts in the field will particularly focus
on practical aspects of agent technology including the engineering and
effective use of software agents and multi-agent systems in industrial
applications in different domains. Those who wish to present a course
should specify the topic, contents, and length of their course.

PROCEEDINGS

The proceedings of MATES'04 will be published as a volume in the
Springer series of Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence (LNAI).

SUBMISSION DETAILS

For preparation of papers to be submitted please follow the
instructions for authors available at the Springer LNCS Web page:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.  For those not using
the Springer LNCS style files: The paper must be formatted in A4 size
using 10 point Times. (If Times is not available, please use one of
the similar fonts widely used in phototypesetting.)  Printing area
should be 12.2 x 19.3 cm, and the interline distance should be
arranged in such a way that some 42 to 45 lines occur on a full-text
page.

The length of each paper including figures and references should not
exceed 12 pages. All papers must be written in English and submitted
either in postscript or PDF format. Papers that have been accepted or
are under review by other conferences, workshops, or journals are not
eligible for submission. Submissions not conforming to the above
requirements may be rejected without review. In case you submit a
postscript file please check whether it is printable on a standard
postscript-level-2 printer. You may submit your paper

via E-Mail to [email protected] (strongly preferred; please
   send zipped PS, PDF or WinWord files only)

or by normal mail: In that case, please send 5 copies (unstapled pages) 
of your contribution to

European region: Ingo J. Timm
University of Bremen, Center for Computing Technologies (TZI), P.O.Box 
33 04 40, 28334 Bremen, Germany

American/Australasian/Asian region: Jörg Denzinger
University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, 
Canada T2N 1N4

CONTACT

(America/ Australia/Asia and general inquiries)
Jörg Denzinger
University of Calgary, Canada
Phone: 1-403-220-5574
Fax: 1-403-284-4707
[email protected]
http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~denzinge

(Europe and exhibits inquiries)
Ingo J. Timm
University of Bremen, Germany
Phone: +49-421-2189740
Fax:   +49-421-2187196 [email protected]
http://www.tzi.de/~inti

(tutorials inquiries)
Gabriela Lindemann
Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
Phone: +49-30-20933170
Fax:  +49-30-20933168
[email protected]
http://www.ki.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~lindeman	CONTACT

(workshops inquiries)
Rainer Unland
University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Phone: +49-201-1833421
Fax: : +49-201-1832419
[email protected]

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

From: "Jayaprakash, Madhu K" <[email protected]>
Subject: Int'l Conf. on Autonomic Computing (ICAC-04) - Call for Tutorials
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 13:57:45 -0800

                         Call For Tutorials
        International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC-04)
                http://www.autonomic-conference.org

   In conjunction with the 13th International World Wide Web Conference
          Sheraton Hotel, New York, NY, May 17-18, 2004

OVERVIEW & GOALS

The International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC-04) is a
forum for researchers, engineers, application & service developers and
users to present their latest advances in the field of autonomic
computing. An integral part of this conference will be tutorials
conducted by industry & academia professionals.

We are actively seeking proposals for half or full day tutorials on
any area of interest to the autonomic computing community to be held
in conjunction with ICAC-04. As this is the first conference in a
series, we would like to focus on more introductory tutorials catering
to a more general audience. Topics of interest include, but are not
limited to:

* Self-managing system components, such as storage, network, server,
  client, and database. Emphasis should be placed on interactions with
  other components, or techniques or lessons that may generalize to
  other components.

* AI and other generic technologies for self-managing components
  including statistical, machine learning, and optimization
  techniques, planning, knowledge representation, reasoning, fault
  diagnosis, policies, sensing, and monitoring.

* General architectures for individual components or for autonomic
  computing systems as a whole, based on Open Grid Services, Web
  Services, or more novel paradigms based on biological, economic,
  social, or other analogies.

* Toolkits, development environments, and languages for autonomic
  computing. Support for building individual components of autonomic
  computing systems or applications.

* Technologies to support inter-element interactions, such as SLAs,
  negotiation protocols and algorithms, and conversation support.

* System-level technologies or services that entail interactions among
  two or more components of self-managing systems, such as dependency 
  analysis, problem localization or remediation, workload management,
  provisioning, and health monitoring.

* Autonomic computing systems or prototype systems that exhibit
  self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, and/or
  self-protection.

* Human interaction with autonomic systems, including user studies,
  interfaces for monitoring and controlling behavior, and techniques
  for defining, distributing, and understanding policies.

* Fundamental science of self-managing systems: understanding,
  controlling, or exploiting emergent behavior, theoretical
  investigations of coupled feedback loops, robustness, and other
  related topics. 

SUBMISSION DETAILS

A tutorial proposal should contain the following information:

* A brief description of the tutorial

* The target audience and a description of why the tutorial topic
  would be of interest to a substantial part of the Autonomic Computing
  audience 

* The objectives of the tutorial

* Prerequisite knowledge required in order to attend the tutorial

* A detailed outline of the topics to be presented

A tutorial proposal should also include names, affiliation and
biographical sketches of the speaker(s). Please also state the
intended length (half or full) of the tutorial, and the Audio/Video
and infrastructure requirements.

IMPORTANT DATES

Please submit your tutorial proposal to the tutorial chair (mazin dot
s dot yousif at intel dot com) no later than 11:59PM on January 30th
2004 for consideration.

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

From: Wiebe van der Hoek <[email protected]>
Subject: Loft 2004 CFP
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 08:45:32 +0000 (GMT)

                     CALL FOR PAPERS: LOFT6
"Logic and the Foundations of the Theory of Games and Decisions"
	 Leipzig (Germany), July 16 - 18, 2004

ORGANIZERS
   Giacomo BONANNO (University of California Davis,U.S.A.)
   Wiebe van der HOEK (University of Liverpool, U.K.)
   Pierfrancesco LA MURA (Handelshochschule, Leipzig, Germany)
   Arnis VILKS (Handelshochschule, Leipzig, Germany)

AIMS OF THE CONFERENCE

This is the sixth in a series of conferences on the applications of
logical methods to foundational issues in the theory of individual and
interactive decision-making. The previous five conferences took place
at CIRM (Marseille, France) in January 1994 and at ICER (Torino,
Italy) in December 1996, December 1998, July 2000 and July 2002.

The complete programs of the last five conferences are at
    http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/bonanno/LOFT.html
  
The aim of the LOFT conferences is to promote exchange across
different disciplines. Preference is given to papers which bring
together the work and problems of several fields, such as game and
decision theory, logic, computer science and artificial intelligence,
philosophy, cognitive psychology, mathematics and mind sciences. Among
the topics of particular relevance are:

- Modal logic: epistemic and deontic logic, multi-agent logic,
temporal logic, dynamic logic, probabilistic and multi-valued logic,
logic of belief revision.

- Foundations of game and decision theory: epistemic foundations of
solution concepts, information processing and communication in games,
belief formation and revision in games.

- Learning and information-processing models: economic aspects of
information processing, learning in game-theoretic contexts, inductive
learning and inductive decision making.

- Bounded rationality approaches to game and decision theory.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

The three-day conference will include 6 invited lectures and 15
contributed papers. Potential contributors should send an extended
abstract of approximately 3 pages in electronic format (pdf, dvi, MS
Word or text), indicating "LOFT6 submission" in the Subject field, to:
[email protected]

The deadline for submission is March 31, 2004, and authors will be
notified of acceptance decisions by May 15, 2004.

Those who wish to participate in the conference without submitting a
paper should express their interest to the Organizing Committee by
sending an e-mail to [email protected]

PUBLICATION OF CONTRIBUTED PAPERS

Selected papers from the previous LOFT conferences were published in a
volume by Kluwer Academic Press and in the following journals: Theory
and Decision, Mathematical Social Sciences, Games and Economic
Behavior, Bulletin of Economic Research and Research in Economics.  It
is the intention of the organizers to publish a selection of the
papers presented at LOFT6 in a suitable platform.

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

From: Jiri Ocenasek <[email protected]>
Subject: GECCO-2004 Workshop: Adaptaion, Approximation, and Learning...
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 17:39:35 +0100 (MET)

               GECCO-2004 Workshop Call for Papers 
Adaptation, Approximation, and Learning in Evolutionary Computation
 
                   to be held as part of the
   Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO)
                    Seattle, Washington USA
           June 26-30, 2004 (Saturday - Wednesday)
               http://www.isgec.org/gecco-2004/

DESCRIPTION OF THE WORKSHOP TOPIC:

The goal of introducing learning to EAs to enhance their efficiency
has quite some history: In evolution strategies (ES), this form of
learning is usually referred to as 'adaptation' and was developed
since the beginnings of ES in the 1970's.  In genetic algorithms (GA),
the learning is called 'estimation of distribution' or 'learning
probability distributions' and has been the subject of intensive
research starting in the 1990's. Moreover, in the last years the topic
of learning functions, called 'approximation', has gained increasing
attention from many researchers. Although belonging to the same
community, there has not been so much interaction between the
researchers from the different fields to work together towards an
increasing efficiency of their algorithms. However, the underlying
ideas are often similar. Therefore, we propose to bring together
researchers from the field of ES and GA to discuss their ideas. Under
the unifying concept of learning, we hope that this exchange will
result in interesting new ideas and will lead to novel, rigorous and
efficient algorithms.

WORKSHOP AND PAPER FORMAT:

The workshop will run for half a day. The program will include:
o  1-2 presentation by invited speakers
o  paper presentations (each about 20 minutes)
o  Panel discussion:
   "Summary and future work" 

Please see the GECCO 2004 paper submission details for the format of
the papers.

IMPORTANT DATES:

March 21  Paper submission (from 4 to 10 pages, only PDF accepted). 
          Please send your paper to Jiri Ocenasek ([email protected]).

April 5   Notification of paper acceptance/rejection.

April 14  Camera ready paper (only PDF accepted).

June 27   Workshop in Seattle.

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS:

Jiri Ocenasek, Sibylle Mueller, Stefan Kern, Nikolaus Hansen, Petros
Koumoutsakos 

Contact person:  
   Dr. Jiri Ocenasek
   Computational Lab & Institute of Computational Science
   Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zuerich
   ETH Zentrum, HRS H9 
   CH-8092 Zuerich
   Switzerland
Email:       [email protected]
Phone:       +41 1 632 6410 
Fax:         +41 1 632 1703

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

From: "Ivan Garibay" <[email protected]>
Subject: CFP: Self-organization in Representations for EAs, GECCO WS...
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 14:26:40 -0500

             Workshop Announcement and Call for Papers

Self-organization in Representations for Evolutionary Algorithms:
                Building complexity from simplicity 
               http://ivan.research.ucf.edu/SOEA.htm

                   to be held as part of the
      Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO)
                    Seattle, Washington USA
             June 26-30, 2004 (Saturday - Wednesday)
                http://www.isgec.org/gecco-2004/

Papers submission deadline: March 1, 2004 (email: [email protected])

The success of evolutionary algorithms in a wide range of otherwise
intractable problems has promoted its use. As evolutionary algorithms
are applied to increasingly difficult problems that require
increasingly complex solutions, they face a number of problems:
premature convergence to suboptimal solutions, stagnation of search in
large search spaces, negative epistatic effects, disruption of large
building blocks, among others. Natural evolution, on the other hand,
seems to not have any problem evolving strikingly complex
self-organized solutions.  Self-organization is present in almost
every level of natural evolution: gene regulation networks, proteins
interaction networks, metabolic pathways, cellular organization, etc;
but it is not usually present in evolutionary algorithms. Nature
evolves instructions that produce organisms by a process of
self-organization. Perhaps the self-organization of genotypic
instructions into phenotypes is a key missing ingredient necessary for
unleashing the evolution of complex and scalable solutions with
emergent phenomena such as: scale-free-ness, adaptability, innovation,
evolvability, and robustness. This workshop will focus on
domain-independent methods for representing complex solutions with
relatively simple self-organizable building blocks.

Topics of interest include (not limited to)

* Models of complexity building using self-organization 
* Self-organized development: embryogenesis, growth 
* Emergent behavior in representations 
* Methods of fitness assignment for self-organized individuals 
  (the price of non-programmability) 
* Methods of design and evaluation of self-organizable building blocks
* Scalability of self-organizational processes to high complexities 
* Self-organization theoretical approaches: complexity, chaos,
  synergetics, self-organized criticality, non-equilibrium
  thermodynamics, etc.  
* Artificial self-organized systems 
* NFL: what can we trade to get complexity and scalability in
  solutions?  

Workshop Format

This workshop seeks to bring together researchers from diverse problem
domains to informally discuss issues related to the representation of
complex solutions using self-organization of simple building blocks
for evolutionary algorithms in particular, and the issue of building
complexity from simplicity in general. We plan to have a series of
short technical presentations followed by a panel discussion.  We
welcome technical papers describing completed or on-going research as
well as position papers outlining current research issues, approaches
or research agendas. We also welcome suggestions to panel
discussions. Preprints will be circulated by email prior to the
meeting.

Workshop Submission Instructions:

Please submit a 3-4 page outline of a proposed contribution via email
to [email protected] in PS or PDF format.  Accepted papers will be
published in the GECCO-2004 workshops proceedings.

Important Dates

Papers Due: March 1, 2004
Acceptance notices: March 17, 2004
Early Registration (GECCO-2004): March 19, 2004
Camera Ready: April 16, 2004
Workshop: June 27, 2004

Attendance: Open to all GECCO 2004 attendees 

Organizers:
 Ivan I. Garibay, Greg Holifield and Dr. Annie S. Wu
 Evolutionary Computation Laboratory - University of Central Florida

For more information, comments or suggestions please email Ivan Garibay 
at [email protected] or visit http://ivan.research.ucf.edu/SOEA.htm

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

From: [email protected]
Subject: MobiQuitous 2004 - Call for Papers
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 04:01:20 +0000

             PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT and CALL FOR PAPERS
                         MobiQuitous 2004
                    http://www.mobiquitous.org

           The First Annual International Conference on
      Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services
        August 22-25, 2004   Boston, Massachusetts, USA
                    (ACM sponsorship pending)

The combination of mobile and ubiquitous computing is emerging as a
promising new paradigm with the goal to provide computing and
communication services all the time, everywhere, transparently and
invisibly to the user, using devices embedded in the surrounding
physical environment. In this context, the communication devices, the
objects with which they interact, or both may be mobile. The
implementation of such a paradigm requires advances in wireless
network technologies and devices, development of infrastructures
supporting cognitive environments, and discovery and identification of
ubiquitous computing applications and services. The first ACM Annual
International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: networking
and services (Mobiquitous 04) will cover all these aspects,
representing a forum where practitioners and researchers coming from
the many areas involved in ubiquitous solutions design and deployment
will be able to interact exchanging the cross-layer experiences needed
to build the overall ubiquitous systems. Areas addressed by the
conference include: applications, service-oriented computing,
middleware, networking, agents, knowledge management and databases.

PAPERS: Technical papers describing original, previously unpublished
research, not currently under review by another conference or journal,
are solicited. The conference is interested in contributions
addressing all the areas associated with mobile and ubiquitous
architectures, infrastructure and services. Technical works clearly
identifying how the specific contributions fit to an overall working
solution are particularly of interest. Topics include, but are not
limited to, the following feature topics:

* Ubiquitous architectures and systems 
* Wearable computing and personal area network 
* Wireless technologies for mobile and ubiquitous communications 
  (Bluetooth, ZigBee, 802.15.x, WiFi) 
* Wireless Internet access in ubiquitous systems 
* Reconfigurability and personalization of wireless network 
* Service discovery mechanisms, knowledge discovery, matching and 
  composition mechanisms 
* Wireless/mobile service management and delivery 
* Security, privacy and social issues of mobile and ubiquitous systems 
* Peer-to-peer knowledge management 
* Emerging industrial/business scenarios 
* Multimodal interfaces (speech, video kinetic, tactile) 
* Smart spaces 
* Ad hoc and sensor networking 
* Localization and tracking 
* Context and location aware application 
* Multimedia encoding and transcoding 
* Middleware services 
* Agent technologies in ubiquitous, wearable, and mobile systems 
* Hardware and software platforms for ubiquitous systems, and testbeds 
* User interfaces
* Toolkits, development environments, and languages for ubiquitous
  computing 
* Ontologies for mobile and ubiquitous computing

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS: All paper submissions will be handled
electronically (see the conference web page for details). Authors
should prepare a Portable Document Format (PDF) or postscript version
of their full paper.  Papers must not exceed 8 pages double column (US
Letter size, 8.5 x 11 inches) including text, figures and
references. The font size must be at least 10 points.

PUBLICATION: All submitted papers will be rigorously reviewed by
technical program committee members. Accepted papers will be published
in the conference proceedings.  Papers of particular merit will be
proposed for publication in the ACM/Kluwer Wireless Networks journal.

TUTORIALS: Proposals for tutorials are solicited.  Evaluation of
tutorial proposals will be based on the expertise and experience of
the instructors, and on the relevance of the subject matter.
Potential instructors are requested to submit a tutorial proposal of
at most 5 pages, including a biographical sketch, to the Tutorial
Chair by March 1, 2004.

DEMOS: Proposals for research and industrial demos are solicited.  A
maximum of 3 pages should be submitted which include a description of
the demo and needed equipment. Proposals should be submitted to the
Demo Chair, which will be announced shortly.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission due:         FEBRUARY 1 2004
Notification of acceptance:   APRIL 30 2004
Camera-ready version due:     MAY 15 2004

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

From: "Dan Fu" <[email protected]>
Subject: CFP:  AAAI-04 Workshop on Challenges in Game AI
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 14:10:15 -0500

The AAAI-04 Workshop on Challenges in Game AI
Call for Participation

1 Description of the Workshop

The science of game development is still in its infancy. While
researchers and developers seek a better understanding and awareness
of game AI problems and techniques, dialog between these two
communities is limited.  This workshop seeks to identify the problems
currently facing game AI programmers, to explore the emerging
techniques within development circles, and to highlight AI research
that could be of potential use.

2 Topics

The workshop will address contemporary challenges and promising
directions for game AI research and development. It aims to identify
practices that can advance the state of the art.

Broad areas of investigation include:

AI Methodologies:
 . Current problems and novel solutions
 . Impact of architecture decisions on the development process
 . Sharing and re-use of AI systems 
AI and Game Design:
 . Integrating designer control with autonomous system and agent behavior
 . Balancing the goals of smart AI and good gameplay 
 . Making AI apparent and relevant to the player
Case Studies:
 . Lessons learned in development practice

Technical areas of interest include but are not limited to:
architectures, action planning, decision-making, multiple agent
coordination, dynamic gameplay generation, learning, natural language
interaction, characters, emotion, interface standards, and tools.

3 Format of Workshop

The workshop will combine invited talks, panels, short presentations
and roundtable discussion. Those wishing to submit for the workshop
should address one of the above topic(s); those wishing to attend
should signal their intent. Based on papers and responses, the
workshop committee will identify common ground among participants and
plan accordingly.

4 Submission Requirements

Papers should be between 1000 to 2500 words (about two to five pages)
in length and identify positions, issues, novel solutions, or new
directions. Accepted papers will be made available to all workshop
participants. Submissions should be emailed as PDF or RTF. Please
contact Dan Fu about other formats. If email is not possible, send
three hard copies to the address below.

5 Important Dates

Submission deadline: March 12, 2004
Notification date: April 23, 2004
Final date for camera-ready copy to AAAI: May 25, 2004

6 Submission Address

Dan Fu
Stottler Henke
951 Mariners Island Blvd, Suite 360
San Mateo, CA 94404
973-746-7032
[email protected]

7 Workshop Committee

. Dan Fu, Stottler Henke (co-chair), [email protected]
. Jeff Orkin, Monolith Productions (co-chair), [email protected]
. Robin Hunicke, Northwestern University, [email protected]
. Craig Reynolds, Sony Computer Entertainment America,
  [email protected]

8 Workshop URL

Latest workshop information is at http://www.stottlerhenke.com/gameai

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

From: "Max Bramer" <[email protected]>
Subject: First IFIP Conf. on AI Applications and Innovations
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 16:38:28 -0000

AIAI 2004
First IFIP Conference on
Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations
http://www.ifiptc12.org/

Toulouse, France
August, 22-27, 2004

The AIAI Conference is an integral session in the IFIP World Computer
Congress program.  All submissions will be reviewed by an
international Program Committee.  All accepted papers will appear in
the official IFIP Conference Proceedings published by Kluwer Academic
Publishers.  AIAI will bring together researchers, engineers and
practitioners.  AIAI will interest researchers, IT professionals and
consultants by examining technologies and applications of demonstrable
value.  AIAI will focus on profitable intelligent systems and
technologies.

Submission

[1] February 9th 2004 -- Email a plain text abstract of your paper
including the title, authors, abstract and email contact to:
[email protected]

[2] February 16, 2004 -- Submit your full paper to the conference web
site: http://www.wcc2004.org/ Submitted papers must be original,
unpublished, and not submitted to another journal or conference for
consideration of publication.  Papers must be written in English; they
should be at most 10 pages long in total, including bibliography, in
the Kluwer format [http://www.wkap.com/ifip/styles/]. [NB: some copies
of the printed IFIP brochure ask for 16 pages - that is a misprint.]
Accepted papers will be presented at the conference, as either oral or
poster presentations, and published in the official IFIP conference
proceedings by Kluwer Academic Publishers.  At least one author of
each accepted paper is required to register with the conference and to
present the paper.

Call for Papers
Deadlines: abstracts February 9, 2004; full papers February 16, 
2004

AIAI focuses on real world applications; therefore authors should
highlight the benefits of AI technology for industry and services.
Novel approaches to solving business and industrial problems, using
AI, will emerge from this conference.  Papers describing advanced
prototypes, systems, tools and techniques and general survey papers
indicating future directions are also encouraged.  Papers describing
original work are invited in any of the areas listed below.
Acceptance will be based on quality, relevance and originality, and,
above all, on the practical value of the work.  Both full research
papers and professional work-in-progress reports are welcome.  There
will be both oral and poster presentations.

	 Industrial Applications of Artificial Intelligence 
	 Intelligent Decision Support Systems 
	 Integration of AI with other Technologies 
	 Evaluation of AI Systems
	 AI Languages, Programming Techniques and Tools
	 Knowledge Acquisition 
	 Expert Knowledge-based Systems 
	 Fuzzy Logic and Plausible Inference
	 Neural Networks
	 Evolutionary Computation and Algorithms 
	 Speech and Natural Language Interfaces
	 Machine Vision
	 Intelligent Information Retrieval 
	 Genetic Algorithms 
	 Planning and Scheduling 
	 Bayesian Networks and Stochastic Reasoning
	 Evolutionary Programming
	 Learning and Adaptive Systems
	 Intelligent Agents
	 Distributed AI Algorithms, Techniques, and Applications
	 Distributed AI Systems and Architectures 
	 Intelligent Tutoring Systems 
	 Structured and Unstructured Datamining
	 Case-Based Reasoning Systems
	 Hardware and Robotics
	 Social Impact, Acceptance and Implications of AI 
	 Intelligent Systems Engineering and Design Methodologies
	 Ontologies and Semantic Web
	 Knowledge and Information Management
	 Business Process Management and Enterprise Portals
	 Organisational Memory Knowledge Systems
	 Inter-organisational KM portals
	 KM, E-Learning and Enterprise Portals

Organisation

Conference General Chairs
  Professor John Debenham [[email protected]]
    IFIP TC12 & University of Technology, Sydney
  Dr. Eunika Mercier-Laurent 
    IFIP TC12 & AFIA (Association Francaise pour l'Intelligence 
Artificielle)

Conference Program Chairs
  Professor Max Bramer
    Chair -- IFIP TC12 & University of Portsmouth
  Professor Vladan Devedzic [[email protected]]
    IFIP TC12 & University of Belgrade

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

From: "ECML/PKDD 2004 Announcement" <[email protected]>
Subject: ECML/PKDD 2004: Call for Papers
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 11:55:58 +0100

Call for Papers

ECML/PKDD-2004
Pisa, Italy, September 20-24, 2004
http://ecmlpkdd.isti.cnr.it
[email protected]

The 15th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) and the 8th
European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery
in Databases (PKDD) will be co-located in Pisa, Italy, September
20-24, 2004. The combined event will comprise presentations of
contributed papers and invited speakers, a wide program of workshops
and tutorials, a demo session, and a discovery challenge.

Important dates 

- Submission deadline: Monday April 19, 2004 
- Notification of acceptance: Monday June 7, 2004
- Camera-ready copies due: Monday June 28, 2004 
- Conferences: Monday September 20 through Friday September 24, 2004 

Paper submission 

High quality research contributions pertinent to any aspects of
machine learning and knowledge discovery are called for, ranging from
principles to practice; particular attention will be paid to papers
describing innovative, challenging applications.

There will be a single electronic submission procedure, where authors
should indicate whether they submit their paper to ECML, PKDD, or
both. In the latter case, the topic of the joint submission must be
within the scope of both conferences; accepted joint submissions will
be assigned to the most appropriate of the conferences. Student
submissions should be clearly indicated on the submission form. All
submissions will be reviewed by the respective program committees.

The papers must be in English and should be formatted according to the
Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
guidelines. Authors instructions and style files can be downloaded at
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.  The maximum length of
papers is 12 pages. The proceedings of ECML and PKDD will be published
as two separate volumes by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in
Artificial Intelligence series and will be available at the
conference.

Simultaneous submissions to other conferences are allowed, provided
this fact is clearly indicated on the submission form. Simultaneous
submissions that are not clearly specified as such will be rejected.
Accepted papers will appear in the ECML/PKDD conference proceedings
only if they are withdrawn from proceedings of other conferences.

Best Paper Awards 

KDNet and Kluwer will honour the best papers and the best student
papers with awards.  The awards will be based on the significance and
originality of the contributions.

ECML Call for Papers

The European Conference on Machine Learning series intends to provide
an international forum for the discussion of the latest high quality
research results in machine learning and is the major European
scientific event in the field. Submissions of papers that describe the
application of machine learning methods to real-world problems are
encouraged, particularly exploratory research that describes novel
learning tasks and applications requiring non-standard techniques.
Submissions that demonstrate both theoretical and empirical rigor are
especially encouraged.

Topics of interest (non-exhaustive list): 

- artificial neural networks
- Bayesian networks 
- case-based reasoning 
- computational models of human learning 
- computational learning theory 
- cooperative learning 
- decision trees
- discovery of scientific laws
- evolutionary computation 
- grammatical inference
- incremental induction and on-line learning
- inductive logic programming 
- information retrieval and learning 
- instance based learning
- kernel methods  
- knowledge acquisition and learning 
- knowledge base refinement 
- knowledge intensive learning 
- machine learning of natural language 
- meta learning
- multi-agent learning 
- multi-strategy learning 
- planning and learning 
- reinforcement learning 
- revision and restructuring   
- statistical approaches 
- unsupervised learning 
- vision and learning

PKDD Call for Papers

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) is the ability
to extract useful patterns from large amounts of data stored in
databases, data warehouses or other information repositories.  KDD is
a combination of many research areas: databases, statistics, machine
learning, automated scientific discovery, artificial intelligence,
visualization, and high performance computing. KDD focuses on the
value that is added by the creative combination of the contributing
areas.  The European Conference on Principles and Practice of
Knowledge Discovery in Databases series intends to provide an
international forum for the discussion of the latest high quality
research results in KDD and is the major European scientific event in
the field. Submissions are invited that describe empirical and
theoretical research in all areas of KDD, as well as submissions that
describe challenging applications of KDD.

Topics of interest (non-exhaustive list): 

Algorithms and techniques
- classification
- clustering
- frequent patterns
- rule discovery
- statistical techniques and mixture models
- constraint-based mining
- incremental algorithms
- scalable algorithms
- distributed and parallel algorithms
- privacy preserving data mining
- multi-relational data mining
Data mining and databases
- database integration
- OLAP and data warehouse integration
- data mining query languages
- data mining query optimization
Data pre-processing
- dimensionality reduction
- data reduction
- discretization
- uncertain and missing information handling
Foundations of data mining
- complexity issues
- inductive databases
- knowledge (pattern) representation
- global vs. local patterns
- logic for data mining
- statistical inference and probabilistic modelling 
Innovative applications
- mining bio-medical data
- web content, structure and usage mining
- semantic web mining
- mining governmental data, mining for the public administration
- personalization 
- adaptive data mining architectures
- invisible data mining
KDD process and process-centric data mining
- models of the KDD process
- standards for the KDD process
- background knowledge integration
- collaborative data mining
- vertical data mining environments
Mining different forms of data
- graph, tree, sequence mining
- semi-structured and XML data mining
- text mining 
- temporal, spatial, and spatio-temporal data mining
- data stream mining
- multimedia mining
Pattern post-processing
- quality assessment
- visualization
- knowledge interpretation and use

For more information, please visit http://ecmlpkdd.isti.cnr.it

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

From: "ECML/PKDD 2004 Announcement" <[email protected]>
Subject: ECML/PKDD 2004: Call for Tutorials and Workshops
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 11:57:03 +0100

   The 15th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML-04)
                                  and
   The 8th European Conference on Principles and Practice of
           Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD-04)
               20-24 September 2004, Pisa, Italy
                  http://ecmlpkdd.isti.cnr.it


JOINT CALL FOR TUTORIALS AND WORKSHOPS

The ECML/PKDD-2004 organizing committee invites proposals for
tutorials and workshops to be held on Monday and Tuesday, September
20-21, immediately preceding the main ECML/PKDD-2004 conference. We
invite proposals for up to six half-day tutorials and six full day
workshops. Proposals for a workshop/tutorial combination are also
welcome (see below). The scope of the proposal should be consistent
with the conference themes as described in the ECML/PKDD-2004 Call for
Papers (see URL above).

Workshops provide organizers and participants with an opportunity to
discuss current topics in machine learning and/or data mining in a
small and interactive atmosphere. Thus, any topic that is of current
interest to a sufficient number of participants from the two
communities could be the focus of a workshop. Workshops can
concentrate in-depth on research topics, but can also be devoted to
application issues, or to questions concerning the economic and social
aspects of machine learning and data mining.

Tutorials are intended to provide independent instruction on topics
from the field of machine learning or data mining. Introductions to
other research domains that could fertilize the ML/DM field with new
challenges or solutions are also welcome. Each tutorial should
- attract a large enough audience;
- be presented by highly qualified persons with a demonstrable
  background and teaching experience in the tutorial area;
- be well-focused, so that its core content can be covered in a 3.5
  hour tutorial slot (incl. a 30 minute break);
- be accompanied by comprehensive notes written in clear, standard
  English;
- cope with the wide diversity in the audience, or else be accompanied
  by a complete list of tutorial prerequisites;
- cover the overall picture, without a bias towards the presenters'
  own work;
- be free of commercial or sales-oriented material.

As workshops and tutorials are in a sense complementary, we also
welcome proposals for combined tutorial-workshop events. The general
idea is that the tutorial gives an introduction to the field of the
workshop, making the workshop accessible to a broader audience.

For practical information on the workshops and tutorials, and for
details on the submission procedure, please refer to the detailed call
for workshops and tutorials that is available at
http://ecmlpkdd.isti.cnr.it/.

IMPORTANT DATES

- Workshop/tutorial proposal deadline: March 8, 2004
- Workshop/tutorial acceptance notification: March 22, 2004
- Workshop Call For Papers for web: April 8, 2004
- Tutorial summary for web: April 8, 2004
- Workshop paper submission deadline: June 14, 2004
- Workshop paper acceptance notification: July 5, 2004
- Workshop paper camera-ready deadline: July 12, 2004
- Workshop proceedings (camera/web-ready): July 19, 2004
- Tutorial notes (camera/web-ready): July 19, 2004
- Start conference: September 20, 2004

CONTACT INFORMATION

Tutorial Chairs

Katharina Morik
Computer Science Department
University of Dortmund
Campus Süd - Baroper Straße 301,
D-44227 Dortmund, Germany
[email protected]
Phone: +49 231 7555101
Fax:   +49 231 7555105

Franco Turini
Department of Informatics
University of Pisa
via F. Buonarroti, 2
I-56127 Pisa, Italy
[email protected]
Phone: +39 050 2212753
Fax:   +39 050 2212726

Workshop Chairs

Donato Malerba
Department of Informatics 
University of Bari
via Orabona 4,
I-70126 Bari, Italy
[email protected]
Phone: +39 080 5443269
Fax:   +39 080 5443269

Mohammed J. Zaki
Department of Computer Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 
Troy, New York 12180-3590 
USA
[email protected]
Phone: +1 518 2766340
Fax:   +1 518 2764033

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

From: "Padraig Cunningham" <[email protected]>
Subject: PAIS CFP
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 11:10:18 -0000

PAIS 2004
3rd Prestigious Applications Intelligent Systems Conference
Valencia (Spain), August 25-27th, 2004
Call for Papers

Submissions are invited for "Prestigious Applications of Intelligent
Systems" (PAIS-2004) a sub-conference of ECAI 2004.

This event is created to highlight significant successful applications
of intelligent system technology. The purpose of the event is to
provide a forum for industry practitioners to learn about the power
and applicability of selected intelligent system techniques and share
experience on the applicability, development and deployment of
intelligent systems in industry. This will be the largest showcase in
Europe of real applications using intelligent system technology and
the ideal place to meet with those working to make successful
intelligent system based applications.

The Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems event will present
papers describing successful applications of intelligent
systems. Although associated with ECAI, it has a separate review
process conducted by experts in the application of intelligent system
technologies. Papers are selected to highlight critical areas of
success (and failure) and to present the benefits and lessons of value
to other developers. Submitted papers should make these points
clear. Accepted papers will be published in a special section of the
ECAI 2004 proceedings.

Submission details are available at:
http://www.dsic.upv.es/ecai2004/

Important dates:
13 Feb 2004 Deadline for PAIS papers summaries
18 Feb 2004 Deadline for papers
2 May 2004 Notification of acceptance
31 May 2004 Camera-ready copies of papers
25-27 Aug 2004 PAIS-2004, Valencia

Programme Committee Chair
Pádraig Cunningham,
Trinity College Dublin, IRL,

For more information, please visit http://www.dsic.upv.es/ecai2004/

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

From: Xindong Wu <[email protected]>
Subject: KDD-2004 First Call for Papers
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 10:11:01 -0500 (EST)

KDD-2004 First Call for Papers

CALL FOR RESEARCH PAPERS

KDD-2004
THE TENTH ACM SIGKDD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY AND DATA MINING

August 22-25, 2004
Seattle, WA, USA

http://www.acm.org/sigkdd/kdd2004 or http://www.kdd2004.com

IMPORTANT DATES:

Submission Deadlines:

Electronic Abstract Submission: Feb. 20, 2004 *at noon PST*
Electronic Paper Submission: Feb. 27, 2004 *at noon PST*

Submission Format:
Camera-Ready (no more than 10 pages), electronic submissions *in PDF
format only*

Notification of acceptance/rejection: May 21, 2004
Camera-ready papers due: June 4, 2004

During the past years, the ACM SIGKDD conference has established
itself as the premier international conference on knowledge discovery
and data mining with an attendance of 600-900 people. To continue with
this tradition, the tenth ACM SIGKDD conference will provide a forum
for researchers from academia, industry, and government, developers,
practitioners, and the data mining user community to share their
research and experience. The SIGKDD conference will feature keynote
presentations, oral paper presentations, poster presentations,
workshops, tutorials, and panels, as well as the KDD Cup
competition. Papers on all aspects of knowledge discovery and data
mining are solicited.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Applications of data mining (biomedical, e-commerce, defense)
- Data and result visualization
- Data mining and data warehousing
- Data mining for community generation, social network analysis, and
  graph-structured data
- Foundations of data mining
- KDD framework and process
- Mining data streams
- Mining high-dimensional data
- Mining text and semi-structured data
- Multi-media data mining
- Novel data mining algorithms
- Spatial and temporal data mining
- Security and privacy issues
- Interactive and online data mining
- Pre-processing and post-processing for data mining
- Robust and scalable statistical methods

Abstracts and full papers must be submitted electronically at the
conference Web site (see URL above). Abstracts must be submitted on or
before February 20, 2004, 12 noon PST (Pacific Standard Time). An
abstract may not contain more than 250 words. No paper will be
considered without having the abstract submitted on time. Full papers
must be submitted on or before February 27, 2004, at 12 noon PST. This
is a FIRM deadline. Papers must be no more than 10 pages in length,
inclusive of all figures, tables, references and appendices.  Papers
should be submitted in ACM proceedings format (two columns, 9pt font,
approx. 1in margins). Templates are available at
http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. Papers must be
submitted in PDF format. Authors are solely responsible for ensuring
that their submissions display and print properly.

All papers will be judged based on their technical merits,
originality, relevance to KDD, and presentation clarity. Papers should
describe original work that has not been published before, is not
under review elsewhere, and may not be submitted elsewhere during
KDD-2004's review period (specialized workshops with a limited
audience excluded).

A separate call is being issued for industrial/government track
papers; see the conference Web site at the URL above. Reviewers can
assign research track submissions to the industrial/government track
and vice-versa, if they feel this to be more appropriate. Calls for
workshop, tutorial and panel proposals can also be found at the
conference Web site.

The KDD-2004 Best Paper awards recognize the best paper in two
categories: fundamental research and applications/applied
research. Fundamental research papers are judged by the significance
and originality of their contribution. Applications/applied research
papers are judged by the practical impact and current or potential
usefulness of the work. In both cases, the clarity and quality of
presentation are also considered.

KDD-2004 will also award scholarships to selected students to help
defray the cost of participating in the conference. Details will
appear on the conference Web site.
 
For more information, visit
  http://www.acm.org/sigkdd/kdd2004 or http://www.kdd2004.com

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

From: "Tianfield, Huaglory" <[email protected]>
Subject: CFP: Special Issue on "Autonomic Computing and Automation
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 17:16:33 -0000

Call for Papers

Special Issue on "Autonomic Computing and Automation"
at Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, published by
Elsevier

Deadline for submissions: 31 December 2003

Details are available on
http://www.gcal.ac.uk/cms/research/Downloads/cfp(1).pdf

Guest Editors:
Professor H Tianfield, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK 
Professor R Unland, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

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

From: Declerck <[email protected]>
Subject: ESSLLI 2004 Workshop CfP: NLP for Multimedia Applications
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 16:41:32 +0100

                         CALL FOR PAPERS
                  NLP for Multimedia Applications
             http://www.dfki.de/~declerck/esslli04.htm
                         16-20 August, Nancy

organised as part of the European Summer School on Logic, Language and
Information 
ESSLLI 2004 (http://esslli2004.loria.fr/) 9-20 August, 2004 in Nancy

Workshop Organizers:
Thierry Declerck ([email protected])
Elisabeth André ([email protected])

Workshop Purpose:

The Workshop aims to provide a discussion platform between advanced
PhD students and researchers, who are interested in the topics
typically addressed at ESSLLI, and possible multimedia applications
involving research results from Language Processing. The submissions
should not necessarily describe achieved work, but can present
advanced ideas on how to combine NLP and Multimedia applications.

Workshop Topics:

The workshop will explore some issues on the role natural language
processing (NLP) can play within the increasing number of multimedia
(MM) applications that more and more are influencing our everyday
life. Multimodality can be addressed as well, as long as multimedia
aspects are considered. Main questions to be addressed will be:

- How to integrate multimedia input including natural language (spoken
or written);  
- How to combine natural language with other media in order to
generate high quality multimedia output; 
- How to make use of NL for efficient access to MM archives, Including
interactive retrieval; 
- Multimedia segmentation, indexing, summarization, and presentation;
- Multimedia and multimodal interaction;
- How to extend multilingual NLP applications (like Question Answering
etc) into a  multi-source and multimedia setting; 
- Representation (and reasoning about) of multimedia/multimodal
discourse and context 

The workshop will also investigate the type of formalisms and
standards to be used for this integration task. Contributions on basic
research and on running or achieved projects dealing with the topics
are welcome.

Papers addressing one or more of the following topics are also
welcome, but there should be some clear possible relationships to NLP,
including logical issues: MPEG, multimedia/multimodal content, coding
schemes, metadata, knowledge representation for multimedia content
(multimedia ontologies), semantic annotation of multimedia content or
search, retrieval and Web applications.

Submission details:

Authors are invited to submit full papers describing original work or
proposals on the topics mentioned above. Submissions should not exceed
8 pages and are not anonymous. The following formats are accepted: PDF
or PS. Please send your submissions electronically to Thierry Declerck
([email protected]), mentioning "NLP_MM Submission" in the subject line
of your mail. Your submission will be reviewed by at least two
reviewers of the Programme Committee or additional reviewers. The
accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings published by
ESSLLI.  The format for the final version will be following the ACL
style (details on the ACL 2002 styles can be found at
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~lindek/acl02/style/). So the submissions
should ideally be conformant to this one.

Workshop Format:

The Workshop is part of ESSLLI and is open to all ESSLLI participants.
It will consist of five 90-minute sessions held over five consecutive
days in the second Week of ESSLLI. There will 2 or 3 slots for paper
presentation and discussion per session.  On the first day the
organisers will give an introduction to the workshop topics.

Important Dates:
Submissions: March 5, 2004
Notification: April 19, 2004
ESSLLI early registration: May 1, 2004
Preliminary programme: April 23, 2004
Final programme: June 25, 2004
Workshop: August 16-20, 2004

Further Information: 
About ESSLLI: ESSLLI 2004 in Nancy
About the Workshop: http://www.dfki.de/~declerck/esslli04.htm

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

From: Jonathan Ginzburg <[email protected]>
Subject: CATALOG '04: first CFP (corrected dates)
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 01:24:41 +0000

                         First Call for Papers
                            CATALOG'04
EIGHTH WORKSHOP ON THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF DIALOGUE (SEMDIAL)
                         Pompeu Fabra University
                             Barcelona
                          July 19-21 2004

            Workshop URL: http://www.upf.edu/catalog04

Catalog'04 will be the eighth in a series of workshops that aims to
bring together researchers working on the semantics and pragmatics of
dialogues in fields such as artificial intelligence, formal semantics
and pragmatics, computational linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.
The Dial/Log conferences are always stimulating and fun and Barcelona,
which will host ACL 2004 immediately following Catalog'04, is a great
place to visit. Barcelona will also host, during the summer of 2004,
its 'Forum 2004', a huge cultural fair full of events, exhibits, and
performances (http://www.barcelona2004.org/eng/). So mark your
calendar now.

INVITED SPEAKERS:

Massimo Poesio (University of Essex),
Michael Tannenhaus (University of Rochester), 
Two other speakers to be announced

We invite abstracts on all topics related to the semantics and
pragmatics of dialogues, including, but not limited to:

- models of common ground/mutual belief in communication
- modelling agents' information states and how they get updated
- multi-agent models and turn-taking
- goals, intentions and commitments in communication
- semantic interpretation in dialogues
- reference in dialogues
- ellipsis resolution in dialogues
- dialogue and discourse structure
- interpretation of questions and answers
- nonlinguistic interaction in communication
- natural language understanding and reasoning in spoken dialogue systems
- multimodal dialogue systems
- dialogue management in practical implementations
- categorisation of dialogue moves or speech acts in corpora
- designing and evaluating dialogue systems

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:

Authors should submit an anonymous extended abstract of at most 5
single-column pages (for talks with a duration of 25' plus 10'
discussion) together with a separate page specifying the authors'
names, affiliation, address, and e-mail address. The abstracts should
be submitted electronically (in postscript, html, ascii, or pdf
format) to: <[email protected]> Submissions have to be in English,
which is the workshop language. For the accepted talks, a LaTeX style
will be made available for the preparation of the final version.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Abstracts due: March 12, 2004
Acceptance notice: May 5, 2004
Final version due: June 5, 2004
Conference: July 19-21, 2004

ORGANIZATION:

The workshop will take place at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in the city
of Barcelona (exact venue to be announced). The local committee is
chaired by Enric Vallduví.

For more information, visit http://www.upf.edu/catalog04

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

From: "Gabor Melli" <[email protected]>
Subject: KDD-2004: CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 19:01:26 -0800

      CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS
      KDD-2004
      THE TENTH ACM SIGKDD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
      ON KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY AND DATA MINING

      August 22-25, 2004
      Seattle, WA, USA

      http://www.acm.org/sigkdd/kdd2004/workshops.html
      or http://www.kdd2004.com

Workshops Chair:
Myra Spiliopoulou
Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg
myra[AT]iti.cs.uni-magdeburg.de

IMPORTANT DATES:
Workshop proposals due: March 5, 2004
Notification of acceptance/rejection: March 29, 2004

The KDD-2004 organizing committee invites proposals for workshops to
be held in conjunction with the conference.  The purpose of a workshop
is to provide participants with the opportunity to present and discuss
novel research ideas on active and emerging topics of knowledge
discovery and data mining. A workshop should also support the
interaction and feedback among topic specialists from academia,
industry and government.

The organizers of approved workshops are required to announce the
workshop and call for papers, gather submissions, conduct the
reviewing process and decide upon the final workshop program. They
must also prepare an informal set of workshop proceedings to be
distributed with the registration materials at the conference. They
may choose to form organizing or program committees for assistance in
these tasks.

PROPOSAL DETAILS

Proposals should be no more than three pages in length and must
include the following:
   #  Description of the workshop topic and the associated research
issues
   #  Reasons why an ACM SIGKDD workshop on this topic should
take place
   #  Description of the anticipated target group(s) of attendees
   #  Contact information (address, email, phone) for all organizers,
      and specification of a designated primary contact person

The organizers are encouraged to provide the following additional
information if possible:
   #  A preliminary list of reviewers
   #  A list of potential authors
   #  A list of potential attendees

Proposers are encouraged to have their drafts reviewed by potential
workshop participants before submission.

Workshop proposals should be sent per e-mail to the Workshops Chair,
Myra Spiliopoulou (myra[AT]iti.cs.uni-magdeburg.de) by March 5,
2004. Submissions must be either in PDF or in ASCII format without
markups.

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

From: "Jason H. Moore" <[email protected]>
Subject: CFP: Biological Appl. of Genetic and Evol. Computation (BioGEC)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 15:51:48 -0600

CALL FOR PAPERS
AAAI - GECCO 2004 Workshop on:
Biological Applications of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation
(BioGEC) 
http://chgr.mc.vanderbilt.edu/BioGEC/

Summary

The field of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GEC) has greatly
benefited by borrowing ideas from the biological sciences.  Recently,
it has become clear that GEC can help solve biological problems, and
thereby "repay its debt".

The third annual workshop on Biological Applications of Genetic and
Evolutionary Computation (BioGEC), organized in connection with the
2004 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2004) in
Seattle, is intended to explore and critically evaluate the
application of GEC to biological problems.  Specifically, the goal is
to bring biologists and computer scientists together to foster an
exchange of ideas that will yield emergent properties that will move
the field forward in unpredictable ways.

Workshop Date and Location

Sunday, June 27, 2004 (2 hours)

Held as part of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
(GECCO-2004) Seattle, Washington USA June 26-30, 2004 (Saturday -
Wednesday)
http://www.isgec.org/gecco-2004/

Call for Papers

In order to facilitate interaction and discussion, the workshop
invites papers in the form of commentaries, essays, perspectives,
surveys, tutorials, and reviews that focus on ideas for discussion
rather than specific research results.  Investigators interested in
presenting research results are encouraged to submit their papers to
the GECCO track on biological applications
(http://gal4.ge.uiuc.edu:8080/GECCO-2004/prog-tracks.html).  Questions
that might be addressed in a paper include (but are not limited to):

1) What biological problems are GEC methods well-suited for?
2) What biological problems are GEC methods not well-suited for?
3) Which of the many GEC methods should be used for a specific
biological
problem?
4) What are the successes and failures of GEC for a specific
biological problem?
5) What impact has GEC had on biology/bioinformatics?
6) Should all biologists/bioinformaticists be using GEC?
7) What is the future of GEC for solving biological problems?
8) What GEC software tools are available for use by
biologists/bioinformaticists?
9) What unanswered questions in GEC are relevant to solving biological
problems?

Presentations will be selected according to papers submitted to the
workshop organizers.  Criteria for selection of papers for the
workshop include:

1) Paper addresses an important question on the use of GEC for solving
biological problems.
2) Paper contributes to the diversity of topics covered by the
workshop. 
3) Paper is well-written.
4) Paper focuses on ideas for discussion and interaction rather than
new research results.

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.  The
best papers will be invited to contribute to a special issue of the
journal "Frontiers in Biosciences" (http://www.bioscience.org/) to be
published summer or fall of 2004.

Please send 1-10 page papers (PDF or Word) to Jason H. Moore
([email protected]) and Marylyn D. Ritchie
([email protected]) by Sunday, March 7, 2003.  The format
for manuscripts submitted to the workshop is that used for the
Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.
Please see the GECCO-2004 website for details of the LNCS style and
format (http://gal4.ge.uiuc.edu:8080/GECCO-2004/submissions.html).

Important Dates

March 7, 2004: papers due
March 17, 2004: acceptance notices
March 19, 2004: early registration for GECCO-2004
April 16, 2004: camera ready revisions due
June 27, 2004: BioGEC workshop

Workshop Organizers

Jason H. Moore, Ph.D.
Marylyn D. Ritchie, Ph.D.

[email protected]
[email protected]

Phone:615-343-5852
Fax:615-343-8619

Surface address:

Center for Human Genetics Research
519 Light Hall
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN, USA 37232-0700

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


From: Lorenzo Magnani <[email protected]>
Subject: E-CAP2004_ITALY Deadline extension Jan 7
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 18:42:04 -0800

CALL FOR PAPERS
DEADLINE EXTENSION: NEW DEADLINE
JAN 7, 2004 (1000 words abstract or PPT file) SEE BELOW!
 
                     COMPUTING AND PHILOSOPHY
                          E-CAP2004_ITALY
         Pavia, Italy, Collegio Ghislieri, June 3-5, 2004
                        Chair: Lorenzo Magnani

       http://www.unipv.it/webphilos_lab/courses/progra2.html

GENERAL INFORMATION
 
From Thursday 3 to Saturday 5 June 2004 (three days) the International
European Conference ``COMPUTING AND PHILOSOPHY'' will be held at the
University of Pavia (near Milan, Italy).

GENERAL INFORMATION

The Computational Philosophy Laboratory and the Department of
Philosophy of the University of Pavia will be hosting the European
Computing and Philosophy (CAP) conference from the 3rd to the 5th of
June.

PROGRAM

The conference will deal with all aspects of the "computational turn"
that is occurring within the discipline of Philosophy. We solicit
papers that examine topics pertaining to computing and philosophy from
the following list.

RELEVANT RESEARCH AREAS

We call for papers that cover topics pertaining to computing and
philosophy from the following list:

    * Cognitive Science, Epistemology, and Metaphysics
    * Abductive reasoning, Scientific discovery,  Creative processes
    * Internal and External Representations in Cognitive Science
    * Simulation, Embodiment, and Distributed Reasoning in
      Computational Models of Cognitive   
    * Problem of Consciousness in Philosophy
    * New Models of Logic Software
    * Computer-based Learning and Teaching Strategies and Resources
    * Ethics and Computers
    * The Impact of Distance Learning on the Teaching of Philosophy
    * The Role of Computers as Tools for Philosophical Research

SUBMISSIONS OF PAPERS

The deadline for submission is 19th December 2003 - though late
submissions will be considered.

Authors should submit an electronic version - formatted in Microsoft
Word or RTF, but also in PDF or POSTSCRIPT ( in this last case please
include source - DOC, TEX, etc., file) - of an extended abstract
(total word count aproximately 1000 words).  The file should also
contain a 300 WORD abstract that will be used for the conference web
site/booklet.  Contributions expressed in PPT files are also accepted
along with or in place of the 1000 words abstract.

not later than
JANUARY 7, 2004

Please send all submissions to Prof. Magnani at the address
[email protected] (if the previous address does not work please
use [email protected])

For more information, visit
http://www.unipv.it/webphilos_lab/courses/progra2.html 

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

From: <[email protected]>
Subject: EXTENDED DEADLINE FUSION 2004
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 17:13:07 +0100

                 EXTENDED DEADLINE: JANUARY 15, 2004
                    CALL FOR PAPERS - FUSION 2004

      The Seventh International Conference on Information Fusion
                          Stockholm, Sweden
                        June 28 - July 1, 2004
     Sponsored by the International Society of Information Fusion

                      http://www.fusion2004.org

The International Conference on Information Fusion is organized every
year with the focus of bringing together scientists and practitioners
working on methods for information fusion and management of
uncertainty.  In 2004 the conference is being held in Stockholm,
Sweden. Authors are invited to submit papers describing theoretical,
methodological or application advances in information fusion and
management of uncertainty, with submission of non-traditional topics
being encouraged.  All accepted papers will be published in the
conference proceedings, available at the conference. Tutorials will be
held on June 28, with technical paper presentations on June 29 - July
1, 2004. The conference will also feature plenary talks by invited
speakers.

Important Dates

Submission of draft papers: January 15, 2004 (EXTENDED DEADLINE)
Proposals for tutorial sessions: February 1, 2004
Notification of acceptance of tutorials: February 15, 2004
Notification of acceptance of papers: March 15, 2004
Submission of final papers: May 1, 2004

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Theoretical and technical advances:

Information modeling and learning
Probability and statistics
Fuzzy sets and rough sets
Fuzzy logic and expert systems methods
Possibility theory
Measure of information and uncertainty
Evidence theory
Belief Networks
Approximate reasoning
Random sets
Neural networks
Genetic algorithms
Data analysis
Artificial intelligence
Logic
Bayesian methods
Stochastic methods
Processing of imprecise information
Nonlinear estimation and filtering
Semiotics
Optimization
Evolutionary computation
Machine learning

Algorithms and systems:

Target detection and tracking
Target recognition and classification
Data association
Sensor registration
Image or sensor data fusion
Pattern recognition
Clustering
Classification
Intelligent agents
Belief updating
Machine intelligence
Database fusion
Knowledge-based systems
Data mining
Sensor or resource management
Valuation-based systems
Integrated systems
Distributed systems
System design
Evolutionary development of fusion systems
Computer network security
Algorithms and performance
Hardware and software issues
Belief networks

Applications:

Radar and communications
Signal and image processing
Defense systems
Robotics and control
Manufacturing and automation
Diagnostics and fault detection
Vehicles and transportation systems
Navigation positioning and guidance
Information Retrieval
Economy business and finance
Surveillance and situation assessment
Remote sensing and geo-information
Medicine biology and diagnostics
Decision support systems
Data acquisition and testing
Machine vision and learning
Security and safety applications
Situation and threat assessment
Multicriteria and Group decision making
Fuzzy control
Hybrid systems
Image processing
Pattern recognition
Aggregation methods

Location

The conference will be held at Clarion Hotel Stockholm
(www.clarionstockholm.com). It is beautifully located on Sodermalm,
one of the islands forming Stockholm City. The hotel is about 3 km
from the City Center and can conveniently be reached by subway.
Stockholm is a historical and a cultural city. There are about 70
museums and plenty of guided tours. More information about tourism in
Stockholm can be found at www.stockholmtown.com.

Submission Instructions
Draft Paper Submission Papers are required by the due date of January
15, 2004 for review by the technical program committee. Papers submitted
for review should represent original, previously unpublished work. All
papers will be submitted electronically through the Fusion 2004 web
site. Each paper should be 6 to 8 pages of length, written in English;
LATEX, Frame Maker and MS Word style guides will be provided on the web
site. (www.fusion2004.org).

Submission Process
Authors should visit the conference web site and follow the instructions
to submit their papers before the due date. Papers must be submitted
electronically using pdf-formats. For reference, the following
information must be submitted at the web site with each paper. (1) paper
title and topic, (2) name of authors and affiliations (including address
and email), (3) abstract of no more than 150 words.

Paper Acceptance
The Program Committee wishes to ensure that Fusion 2004 will be a
conference of highest quality, and therefore the contributions will be
thoroughly evaluated for originality, significance, clarity, and
scientific soundness. Each paper will be refereed by 2 - 3 researchers.
Notification of accepted papers will be made by March 15, 2004. After
notification, authors must submit updated papers through the final due
date of May 1, 2004. All accepted papers will be published in the
conference proceedings and cd-rom, to be available at the conference.

Special Sessions
Proposals for special sessions are solicited. Proposers should submit a
one-paragraph theme for their session plus a list of committed paper
titles, paper abstracts, authors and their contact information to
[email protected] by November 1, 2003 (with a target of 6 papers, and a
minimum of 3 papers per special session). Notification of acceptance of
special sessions will be given by November 15, 2003. Accepted special
sessions will at that time be advertised on the Fusion 2004 web site.
Papers intended for special sessions will need to pass the review
process like all submitted papers. Thus, draft papers of accepted
special sessions are to be submitted on the Fusion 2004 web site by
January 15, 2004 for review by the program committee. Proposers of
accepted sessions will serve as session chairs and additional reviewers
for papers in their sessions. 

Tutorial Sessions
On the first day of the conference   June 28   there will be tutorial
sessions on fundamentals of information fusion and its applications.
Proposals for tutorial sessions are solicited. Session organizers are
expected to submit a theme and schedule for their session plus a list of
lecturers and their contact information to [email protected] by February
1, 2004. See the web site for additional information.

Swedish Defence Research Agency
International Society of Information Fusion

For more information, visit http://www.fusion2004.org

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

From: Colleen Seifert <[email protected]>
Subject: POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 12:11:15 -0500

University of Michigan
Department of Psychology

Decision Making

The Department of Psychology, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in
cognitive psychology starting September 2004.  Candidates with
interests in decision making, including reasoning, affect,
negotiations, and neural bases are encouraged to apply.  We seek
applicants who have a strong research program and are committed to
excellent teaching.  Evaluation of candidates will begin January 15,
2004, and will continue until the position is filled.  Applicants
should submit a cover letter, vita, three letters of recommendation,
evidence of teaching excellence, and reprints to: Cognitive Search
Committee, The Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 525
East University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1109.  Women and minorities are
encouraged to apply.  The University of Michigan is committed to a
diverse campus community through affirmative action and equal
opportunity and is responsive to the needs of dual career couples.  We
assure reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities
Act.

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

From: "Weigend, Andreas" <[email protected]>
Subject: Jobs at Amazon.com in Seattle
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 02:33:23 -0800

Software Development Positions at Amazon.com in Seattle, WA
in Machine Learning, Statistical Analysis, Fraud Detection,
Computational Marketing etc.

Do you want to build quantitative models millions of people will use,
based on data from the world's largest online laboratory? Are you
passionate about formulating relevant questions, and producing
solutions to initially ill-defined problems? Do the challenges and
opportunities of terabytes of data excite you? Can you think
abstractly, and apply your ideas to the real world? Can you contribute
to the big picture, and are not afraid to handle the details?

Amazon.com is solving incredibly interesting problems in areas
including consumer behavior modeling, pricing and promotions,
personalization and recommendations, reputation management, fraud
detection, computational marketing, customer acquisition and
retention. Emphasizing measurement and analytics, we build and
automate solutions that leverage instant feedback and the Web's scale.

We are looking for people with the right blend of vision, curiosity,
and hands-on skills, who want to be part of a highly visible,
intellectually vibrant, entrepreneurial team. Ideal candidates will
have a track record of creating innovative solutions. They will
typically have a graduate degree in computer science, physics,
statistics, electrical engineering, bioinformatics, or another
computational science.

More information can be found at www.weigend.com/amazonjobs.html. If
this interests you, please email your resume by January 31, 2004
directly to [email protected], clearly indicating your interests
and strengths. Thank you.

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

From: Professor Ron Sun <[email protected]>
Subject: Graduate assistantships available
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 15:06:27 -0500 (EST)

I am looking for a few Ph.D students.

The Ph.D program of the Cognitive Science department at RPI is
accepting applications. Graduate assistantships and other forms of
financial support for graduate students are available.

Prospective graduate students with interests in Cognitive Science,
especially in learning and skill acquisition and in the relation
between cognition and sociality, are encouraged to apply.  Prospective
applicants should have background in computer science (the equivalent
of a BS in computer science), and have some prior exposure to
artificial intelligence, connectionist models (neural networks),
multi-agent systems, and other related areas.  Students with a
Master's degree already completed are preferred.

RPI is a top-tier research university.  This new department has
identified the Ph.D program and research as its primary missions. The
department is conducting research in a number of areas: computational
cognitive modeling, human and machine learning, multi-agent
interactions, neural networks and connectionist models, human and
machine reasoning, artificial intelligence, cognitive engineering, and
so on.

See the Web page below regarding my research:
  http://wwww.cogsci.rpi.edu/~rsun

For the application procedure, see
  http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/
The application deadline is Jan.15, 2004.

If you decide to apply, follow the official procedure as outlined on
the Web page. Send me a short email (in plain text, ASCII) after you
have completed the application.

Professor Ron Sun
Cognitive Science Department
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
110 Eighth Street, Carnegie 302A
Troy, NY 12180, USA

phone: 518-276-3409
fax:   518-276-8268
email: [email protected]
web:   http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/~rsun

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

From: Pedro M Domingos <[email protected]>
Subject: ML Thesis wins 2003 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 18:40:26 -0800

The Ph.D. thesis "Learning to Map between Structured Representations
of Data", by AnHai Doan, at the University of Washington, has won the
2003 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. The dissertation is online at

  http://anhai.cs.uiuc.edu/home/thesis.html

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

From: "David 'Pablo' Cohn" <[email protected]>
Subject: JMLR: Special Issue on Independent Components Analysis
Date: 24 Dec 2003 11:20:04 -0800

The Journal of Machine Learning Research (www.jmlr.org) is pleased to
announce publication of the Special Issue on Independent Components
Analysis, guest edited by Te-Won Lee, Jean-François Cardoso, Erkki Oja
and Shun-ichi Amari.

This has been (by far) the largest special issue we have undertaken,
covering 43 submissions and 14 accepted papers, for a total of 344
pages. We would like to thank the authors, editors, reviewers and JMLR
volunteers that made it all possible. Enjoy!

------
Introduction to Special Issue on Independent Components Analysis
    Te-Won Lee, Jean-François Cardoso, Erkki Oja, Shun-ichi Amari
    pp. 1175-1176.

Dependence, Correlation and Gaussianity in Independent Component Analysis
    Jean-François Cardoso
    pp. 1177-1203.

Beyond Independent Components: Trees and Clusters
    Francis R. Bach, Michael I. Jordan
    pp. 1205-1233.

Energy-Based Models for Sparse Overcomplete Representations
    Yee Whye Teh, Max Welling, Simon Osindero, Geoffrey E. Hinton
    pp. 1235-1260.

Blind Source Separation via Generalized Eigenvalue Decomposition
    Lucas Parra, Paul Sajda
    pp. 1261-1269.

ICA Using Spacings Estimates of Entropy
    Erik G. Learned-Miller, John W. Fisher III
    pp. 1271-1295.

MISEP -- Linear and Nonlinear ICA Based on Mutual Information
    Luís B. Almeida
    pp. 1297-1318.

Blind Separation of Post-nonlinear Mixtures using Linearizing
Transformations and Temporal Decorrelation
    Andreas Ziehe, Motoaki Kawanabe, Stefan Harmeling, Klaus-Robert Müller
    pp. 1319-1338.

A Multiscale Framework For Blind Separation of Linearly Mixed Signals
    Pavel Kisilev, Michael Zibulevsky, Yehoshua Y. Zeevi
    pp. 1339-1363.

A Maximum Likelihood Approach to Single-channel Source Separation
    Gil-Jin Jang, Te-Won Lee
    pp. 1365-1392.

Statistical Dynamics of On-line Independent Component Analysis
    Gleb Basalyga, Magnus Rattray
    pp. 1393-1410.

Blind Source Recovery: A Framework in the State Space
    Khurram Waheed, Fathi M. Salem
    pp. 1411-1446.

Overlearning in Marginal Distribution-Based ICA: Analysis and Solutions
    Jaakko Särelä, Ricardo Vigário
    pp. 1447-1469.

ICA for Watermarking Digital Images
    Stéphane Bounkong, Borémi Toch, David Saad, David Lowe
    pp. 1471-1498.

A Generative Model for Separating Illumination and Reflectance from Images
    Inna Stainvas, David Lowe
    pp. 1499-1519.


These papers complete Volume 4 of the Journal of Machine Learning
Research. They, and all other JMLR papers are available electronically
at http://www.jmlr.org in PostScript and PDF formats. The papers of
Volumes 1, 2 and 3 are also available electronically from the JMLR
website, and in hardcopy from the MIT Press; please see
http://mitpress.mit.edu/JMLR for details.

------------------------------
End of ML-LIST Digest Vol 15, No. 23
************************************