Reminder: paper deadline ICFSNC 2012

A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Neural Computing (ICFSNC) 2012 is 30 November 2011. This conference will be held in Barcelona, Spain, April 11-13, 2012.

The problem with academic journals

George Monbiot nicely summarises the problems with academic journals as they currently stand.

• Journals get their content for free (papers submitted by authors).
• Journals get their quality control for free (reviewers volunteering their time).
• Journals get their editors for free (more volunteers).
• Journals charge thousands of dollars per year for subscriptions.

Yet, academics must publish in journals to advance their careers: university managers and funding bodies all like the nice, simple metric of counting the number of publications an academic has published in high-impact journals. And most of the high-impact journals are the ones that cost thousands per year.
 
Monbiot argues that this has the effect of shutting cutting-edge science behind extremely high paywalls, which has the effect of making science inaccessible to most of the population. When this happens, is it any surprise that hokum like the anti-vaccination movement takes hold in the population? Or that creationist baloney circulates so widely?

I think it's time for scientists, and leading scientists at that, to start submitting more to open-access journals. More importantly, it's time for managers and funding bodies to ditch the overly simplistic measures of performance that are derived from impact factors. Otherwise, things are not going to end well.

Reminder: paper deadline for CINTI 2011

A reminder that the deadline to submit papers to the 12th IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Informatics (CINTI) 2011 is September 30 2011. This conference will be held in Budapest, Hungary, November 21-22 2011.

Conference paper deadline: ECAI 2012

The deadline for papers submitted to the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) 2012 is 6 March 2012. This conference will be held in Montpellier, France, 27-21 August, 2012.

Reminder: Paper submission deadline for PAKDD 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submitting abstracts to the 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) 2012 is 25 September 2011. This conference will be held in Kuala Lumpur 29 May - 1 June, 2012.

IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Multi-Lingual Social Media

The social media presences of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society now include sites in languages other than English. This work has been carried out by the Social Media subcommittee, and so far, we have set up sites for Chinese (Simplified), French and Portuguese.

More sites are being developed and I'll blog about those when they become available. I'm also working on a report describing how the automatic translation is done, similar to this previous post on connecting social media sites. The English language sites are listed in this post. The new sites are listed below.

Chinese


http://twitter.com/#!/ieeeciscn
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeeciscn
http://www.plerb.com/ieeeciscn
http://ieeecis-cn.tumblr.com/
http://zuosa.com/ieeecis
http://ieeeciscn.jaiku.com/
http://digu.com/opi37q
http://www.qaiku.com/home/ieeeciscn/
http://www.plurk.com/ieeeciscn
http://weibo.com/ieeecis

French


http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisfr
http://ieeecisfr.tumblr.com/
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisfr
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisfr
http://ieeecisfr.jaiku.com/

Portuguese

http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecispt
http://ieeecispt.tumblr.com/
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecispt
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecispt
http://ieeecispt.jaiku.com/

Reminder: Paper deadline for IEEE CIBCB 2012

A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the 2012 conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology is November 20, 2011. This conference will be held in San Diego, California, May 9-12, 2012.

Reminder: Paper deadline ACIIDS 2012

The deadline for papers submitted to the 4th Asian Conference on Intelligent Information and Database Systems (ACIIDS) 2012 is September 15, 2011. This conference will be held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, March 19-21, 2012.

Reminder: paper deadline for IEA AIE 2012

A reminder that the paper submission deadline for the 25th International Conference on Industrial, Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA AIE) 2012 is 11 November, 2011. This conference will be held in Dalian, China, June 9-12, 2012.

Teaching computational intelligence

Mengjie Zhang at Victoria University of Wellington discusses his experiences teaching computational intelligence in this article in the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (access depends on your institution). What he describes seems like a fairly logical course structure. I thought I'd add my own experiences teaching computational intelligence at the University of Otago several years ago, to provide an alternative course structure.

The course I taught was a required course for third year honours students in the Department of Information Science. It was taught over one semester per year, and I taught it 2000-2003. I usually had between 15 to 30 students in it, with the number being a bit less near the end of my time teaching as the collapse in enrollments in Information Science started to bite. In addition, I usually had one or two students from other departments, usually biochemistry, as they found what I taught particularly useful.

The course was divided into five sections: data processing; rule-based and fuzzy rule-based systems; artificial neural networks; evolutionary computation; applications of computational intelligence. There were two one-hour lectures and one two-hour lab session per week.

The overall focus of the course was answering the question "What is computational intelligence and how do I use it to solve problems?".To this end, a large part of the course was focused on a small group project (two or three students per group) worth 30% of the final course grade. Students had to select a problem and data set, analyse the data, build an intelligent model to solve the problem the data was related do, and finally build a small prototype piece of software that solved the problem. The structure of the project was inspired by a survey of employers, commissioned by the Information Science department, which found that employers wanted graduates who could:

1. work in a group
2. write coherent reports
3. give effective presentations

Point 1 was addressed by making the project a small group project. Point 2 was addressed by requiring three reports during the course of the project, each worth 8% of the final grade. Finally, point 3 was addressed by requiring an in-class presentation to accompany each report, which were each worth 2% of the final grade.
The material presented in the lectures covered the relevant algorithms and techniques from both a theoretical and practical aspect, covering how the algorithms work and how they can be applied to solving problems. The theoretical aspects were reinforced by ten weekly problem sets, which were worth 2% of the final grade each. The practical aspects were reinforced by the weekly practical / laboratory sessions. These used MATLAB with the relevant toolboxes and were largely aimed at providing the students with the skills and knowledge they needed to do the project work.

The final assessment component was a 50% exam. I would have liked to have set an exam worth a bit less than that, but the University regulations at the time prevented me from doing that.

Overall, the students were very happy with the course. Apart from being well-organised, they found it interesting and useful. At least one project group even managed to publish their project in an international conference.

The lectures that I presented for this course are available here. At some point, I will make the laboratory and assessment material available as well.

While I enjoy my current research job a great deal, I do find myself missing teaching, and would like to return to it one day.

Call for papers: KES-IIMSS 2012

The deadline for submitting papers to the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services (KES IIMSS 2012) is 1st December 2011. This conference will be held in Gifu, Japan, 23-25 May 2012, simultaneously with the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Decision Technologies.

Conference paper deadline: KES-IDT 2012

The deadline for submitting papers to the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Decision Technologies (KES-IDT 2012) is 1 December 2011. This conference will be held in Gifu, Japan, 23-25 May, 2012.

Call for papers: IEEE-IS

The deadline for submitting papers to the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Systems (IEEE-IS) is 20 December 2011. This conference will be held in Sofia, Bulgaria, September 6-8, 2012.

Reminder: paper deadline for Collective Intelligence 2012

A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the 2012 conference on Collective Intelligence is 4 November, 2011. This conference will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 18-20, 2012.

Reminder: Paper submission deadline for ICCIEA 2011

A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Engineering Applications (ICCIEA) 2011 is 1 September 2011. This conference will be held in Bhubaneswar, India, 16-17 October, 2011.

Reminder: paper deadline for EAIS 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the IEEE Workshop on Evolving and Adaptive Intelligent Systems (EAIS) 2012 is 1 November 2011. This conference will be held in Madrid, Spain, 17-18 May, 2012.