Conference paper deadline: CEC 2011

The deadline for submitting paper to the 2011 Congress on Evolutionary Computation is 15 January, 2011. This conference will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, June 5 - 8, 2011.

Conference paper deadline: IJCNN 2011

The deadline for papers submitted to the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2011 is February 1, 2011. IJCNN will be held July 31 - August 5 in San Jose, California.

IJCNN is one of the premier conference on neural networks and is well worth attending.

Academic publishing

An excellent essay by Phil Clapham on the need for academics to publish their research. One of his rules, that I am trying to apply to my own work, is to have at least one paper under review at any given time.

This means, though, that I should also be writing at least one paper at any given time, while also generating sufficient publishable results for at least one paper at any given time.

While this does encourage the practice of breaking research projects into small, easily published chunks, I suspect it may also encourage further proliferation of single publon papers.

Conference paper deadline: KES AMSTA 2011

The deadline for submitting papers to the 5th International KES Symposium on Agents and Multi-agent Systems – Technologies and Applications (KES AMSTA 2011) is 20 December 2010. This conference will be held in Manchester, UK, 29 June - 1 July, 2011.

Conference paper deadline: INNS-IESNN

The deadline for papers submitted to the 2011 International Neural Network Society International Educational Symposium on Neural Networks is 30 September 2010. This conference will be held in Lima, Peru, 25-27 January, 2011.

This symposium is sponsored by the International Neural Network Society.

Conference paper deadline: NaBIC 2010

The paper submission deadline for the second conference on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing (NABIC) 2010 is 15 August 2010. This conference will be held in Kitakyushu, Japan, December 15-17, 2010.

The first international conference I ever attended was held in Kitakyushu, in 1998. It is a very nice city, although I would recommend getting a hotel away from the rail lines: the freight trains run all night!

New Website on Evolving Connectionist Systems

I've just launched a website on Evolving Connectionist Systems (ECoS). ECoS are a class of constructive neural networks that learn very quickly and that do not suffer from catastrophic forgetting. The website has overviews of several ECoS algorithms, a comprehensive listing of the ECoS literature, and also links to the ECoS Toolbox, which is a collection of Windows command-line tools that implement several ECoS algorithms.

Update: this website is now at http://ecos.watts.net.nz/

Conference paper deadline extension: KDIR 2010

The deadline for the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval (KDIR) 2010 has been extended to 4th June 2010.

Conference paper extension: ICNC 2010

The deadline for the International Conference on Neural Computation (ICNC) 2010 has been extended to 31 May 2010.

International Neural Network Society - Australian Chapter

I'm a member of the INNS, the International Neural Networks Society, which is a good organisation to belong to if you're interested in neural networks. I'm in the process of setting up a regional chapter for Australia. If you are a member of the INNS and live in Australia, please contact me so I can add you to my mailing list for this chapter.

Conference paper deadline: KDIR 2010

The paper submission deadline for the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval (KDIR) 2010 is May 20, 2010. This conference will be held in Valencia, Spain, 25-28 October, 2010.

Conference paper deadline: ISICA 2010

The paper submission deadline for the International Symposium on Intelligence Computing and Applications (ISICA) 2010 has been extended to May 20, 2010. This symposium will be held in Wuhan, China, 22-24 October, 2010.

Conference announcement: IJCNN 2011

Tutorial, special session, competition and paper deadlines have just been released for the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2011. This will be held in San Jose, California, July 31 - August 5, 2011.

Competition proposals are due August 31, 2010.

Special session, tutorial and workshop proposals are due December 1, 2010.

Papers are due February 1, 2011.

What is computational intelligence?

While I was giving a presentation last week to my new research group (the Global Ecology Group at the University of Adelaide), I was asked by an ecologist, "What is computational intelligence?"

This is one of those questions that sound really simple, but is actually really hard to answer. At WCCI 2008 in Hong Kong, I attended a panel session on the future of computational intelligence. The panelists spent almost the entire time arguing over what computational intelligence is.

One answer is that computational intelligence is a sub-group of artificial intelligence. But classical AI tends to be more of a top-down approach, that is, the developer tells the machine what it needs to know to solve the problem. To me, computational intelligence is a bottom-up approach, where the algorithm learns what it needs to know to solve the problem.

There are, of course, many algorithms that learn from data, like the C4.5 algorithm for building decision trees, that most people would not consider to be computational intelligence, so I will extend the definition above to include bio-inspired algorithms. That is, algorithms that are inspired by biological processes such as living brains (artificial neural networks), evolution (evolutionary computation), flocking (particle swarm optimisation, which is often included in evolutionary computation) and path-following in ants (ant colony optimisation, which is also often included in evolutionary computation).

However, fuzzy rule-based systems are usually included in the definition of computational intelligence, despite their top-down approach and lack of biological inspiration (although there are ways of constructing fuzzy rules directly from data, like using backpropagation to train the rules and fuzzy membership functions).

The website of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (of which I am a member) defines the scope of the society as:

"The Field of Interest of the Society shall be the theory, design, application, and development of biologically and linguistically motivated computational paradigms emphasizing neural networks, connectionist systems, genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming, fuzzy systems, and hybrid intelligent systems in which these paradigms are contained."

Which is good enough for me. I don't think there will ever be a universally-accepted definition of what computational intelligence is, but that's probably a good thing, because it allows plenty of scope for the field to grow.

Conference paper deadline: ICONIP 2010

The deadline for paper submission to the International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP) 2010 is 14 July 2010. This conference will be held in Sydney, Australia, November 29 - December 3, 2010.

I used to be a regular contributor to ICONIP, but I have had to scale back my involvement in recent years due to budgetary constraints of the positions I've been working in (the last one I attended was ICONIP'08 in Auckland). ICONIP tends to be fairly good quality and good value. Also, I used to live in Sydney, and I can strongly recommend it as a beautiful city in which to hold a conference.

Conference paper deadline: ICNC / ICFC / ICEC 2010

The deadlines for paper submission to the International Conference on Neural Computation (ICNC), International Conference on Fuzzy Computation (ICFC) and International Conference on Evolutionary Computation (ICNC) are all 18 May 2010. These three conference will be held jointly in Valencia, Spain, 24-26 October, 2010. One registration grants access to all three conferences.

Posting hiatus

Myself and my family will be moving to Adelaide next week, where I will be taking up a new position as a research fellow in ecological modelling. Since this will involve a fair amount of chaos and interrupted net access, posting to this blog will be quite sporadic over the next few weeks.

Conference paper deadline: VSST 2010

The paper submission deadline for the symposium VSST 2010 (website in French) is May 15, 2010. This symposium includes themes on web intelligence and mining temporal data, topics which are strongly related to computational intelligence. The symposium will be held in Toulouse, France, in October 2010.

AI in Second Life

The IEEE Computer Society is building an AI learning centre on its island in Second Life. It's intended to be a place where AI technologies can be shown off to the public, including the use of intelligent virtual guides (the first of which is based on the famous strategist Sun Tzu, author of the Art of War).

It strikes me as a good idea, and a fairly safe way of testing out technologies in a fairly real-world setting (for various values of "safe" and "real world"). I wonder how much cross-over there will be between this project and the AI in games research community?

Perhaps I will be taking a closer look at Second Life in the future.

Conference paper deadline: IPMU 2010

The deadline for paper submissions to the International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems (IPMU) 2010 is January 17th, 2010. This conference will be held in Dortmund, Germany, 28th June - 2nd July, 2010.