Conference paper deadline: KES-IDT-11

The deadline for submitting papers to the 3rd International Conference on Decision Technologies 2011 (KES-IDT-11) is 1st February 2011. This conference will be held at the University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece, 20-22 July 2011.

Call for papers: ICCCI 2011

The deadline for papers submitted to the International Conference on Collective Intelligence (ICCCI) 2011 is 15 March 2011. The conference will be held in Gdynia, Poland, 21-23 September, 2011.

Missing Value Imputation

An interesting paper in Neural Networks: "Missing value imputation on missing completely at random data using multilayer perceptrons" by Esther-Lydia Silva-Ramíreza, Rafael Pino-Mejíasb, Manuel López-Coelloa, and María-Dolores Cubiles-de-la-Vegac.

In short, they have demonstrated that MLP can be used to impute values that are randomly missing from data sets. They also examine which learning algorithms and network architecture give the best results.

One thing that I would be interested in finding out, though, is how well an ANN trained on the imputed data would perform. In other words, in a situation where you had to impute data to train an ANN, how well would that ANN perform compared to one trained on the complete data set?

Congratulations to Professor Warren Tate, of the Department of Biochemistry at my alma mater the University of Otago, who has been awarded the Rutherford Medal, New Zealand's highest award for scientific research.

Professor Tate and I published some work together (alternative link) several years ago, and apart from being a top scientist, he is also a very nice guy.

Call for papers: IWANN 2011

This is posted at the request of Dr Leonardo Franco. The International Work Conference in Artificial Neural Networks 2011 (IWANN 2011) will be held in Torremolinos, Spain, 8-10 June 2011.


Call for papers Iwann 2011

The IWANN biennial meeting seeks to provide a discussion forum for scientists, engineers, educators and students about the latest ideas and realizations in the foundations, theory, models and applications of hybrid systems inspired on nature (neural networks, fuzzy logic and evolutionary systems) as well as in emerging areas related to the above items. As in previous editions of IWANN, it also aims to create a friendly environment that could lead to the establishment or strengthening of scientific collaborations and exchanges among attendees.

During the present edition, the following associated satellite Workshops
will be organized:

• CISIS'11 4th International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems
  

• ISCIF'11 - 1st International Workshop of Intelligent systems for context-based information fusion
  

• IWAAL'11 - III International Workshop on Ambient Assisted Living
  

The proceedings will include all the presented communications to the conference. As in previous editions of IWANN, we are arranging the publication of the proceedings with Springer-Verlag on Lecture Notes on Computer Science (LNCS) series, and the books will be available on-site. It is also foreseen the publication of an extended version of selected papers in a special issue on several specialized journals (such as Neurocomputing, Elsevier).

IWANN is included in the ranking of the best conferences established by the Computer Science Conference Ranking based on the "Estimated Impact of Conference (EIC,2009)", concretely in position 55 among 701 considered (in the Artificial Intelligence field), and in the rank B in Computing Research and Education Association (CORE). Also the IWANN papers are indexed by CiteSeer.IST, and by the organization Computing Research and Education Association (CORE).

Conference paper deadline: FUZZ-IEEE 2011

The paper submission deadline for the 2011 IEEE Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE 2011) is January 15 2011. This conference will be held in Taipei, Taiwan (ROC) from 27-30 June, 2011.

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.