Conference paper deadline: ICOMLAI 2011

The paper submission deadline for the International Conference on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (ICOMLAI) 2011 is February 1st, 2011. This conference will be held in Penang, Malaysia, June 1-2 2011.

Conference paper deadline: IWANN 2011

The paper submission deadline for the International Workshop on Artificial Neural Networks 2011 (IWANN 2011) is 21 January 2011. This workshop will be held in Torremolinos, Spain, 8-10 June, 2011.

Conference paper deadline: CISIS'11

The paper submission deadline for the 4th annual conference on Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems 2011 (CISIS'11) is 21 January 2011. This conference will be held in Torremolinos, Spain, 8-10 June 2011.

Call for papers: CDMC 2011

Posted by request of Dr Paul S. Pang of the Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand, and the Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute (KEDRI) at Auckland University of Technology (AUT).

---

The competition is associated with the 4th International Cybersecurity and Data Mining workshop (CDM2011), which is an associated event to the 18th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP2011), Shanghai, China, November 14 - 17 2011.

The entry is open to researchers from community at large. The proceedings of the competition is planned to be published in a journal special issue—details of this is to be determined.

Venue: Hang Zhou, reputed as Silicon Valley in Paradise, is one of the important tourist attractions in China for its natural beauty and historical and cultural heritages. The workshop will be held on 18th, November 2011 (Friday) in Hang Zhou, China.

Objectives: The purpose of the 2nd ICONIP Cybersecurity Data Mining Competition is to increase awareness of Cybersecurity and the potential of industrial applications, and to give young researchers exposure to the main issues related to the topic and to ongoing work in this area. The focus of this competition is on string sequences analysis towards application of knowledge discovery techniques for protecting personal computer information by means of detection, prevention, and response to various attacks.

Prizes and Awards: We have set prizes for the competition. The top ranking teams of all 3 data mining tasks will be eligible to win a cash prize of NZ $3000. Additional prize may be available as travel grants for deserving participants to help them attend the ICONIP2011 conference and/or the CDM2011 workshop.

Paper submissions and publications: Papers for method description of up to 8 pages are required to be submitted online following the Springer LNCS format. Selected and extended papers will be published in special issues of international journals after the conference. Posters are expected to be in A1 size to fit our boards, otherwise they may not be displayed in poster session.

Deadline for submission: The final submission deadline is the 31st of July 2011, and the competition results will be announced by the 18th, November 2011.

Conference paper deadline: KES-AMSTA-11

The paper submission deadline for the KES Conference 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.

Guest post: WCCI Conference Report

This is a guest post by my colleague and friend Dr Brendon Woodford of the Department of Information Science at the University of Otago. Brendon writes about the 2010 World Congresss on Computational Intelligence, which was held in Barcelona, Spain, July 18-23.

---

The 2010 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI'2010) was held at the Centre De Convencions Internacional De Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, between the 18^th and 23^rd of July, 2010. This conference, held biyearly, is a combination of IEE The International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), the IEEE International Conference on Fussy Systems (Fuzz-IEEE), and the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). A total of 1715 papers were presented over five days with up to 17 parallel sessions going on at any one time. At a guess there were over 2000 delegates at the congress itself.

Prior to the conference proper, a set of tutorials on the Sunday was presented on a wide range on topics from an introduction to evolutionary game theory to the foundations of computational intelligence in the context of knowledge-based medicine.

The main highlight of the Sunday evening was the Welcome Reception at the Convention Centre itself which enabled me and my colleagues to catch up with old friends and make new connections.

Most of the plenary sessions were held mid-morning across the week. Monday's plenary was presented by Dr. Sushmita Mitra on hybridization with rough sets, Prof. Dr. Habil. Rudolf Kruse talked on Temporal Aspects in Data Mining at the Tuesday plenary, Prof. Dr. Pedro Larrañaga spoke on probabilistic graphical models and evolutionary computation, an in-depth talk on The evolution of fuzzy clustering was presented by Dr. Enrique H. Ruspini, and finally Dr. Shiro Usui presented on the PLATO platform for collaborative brain system modeling. My impression from these talks was that the themes of hybrid techniques applied to real-world problems appeared to be a strong thread across all the talks.

In terms of the paper presentations, most of the subject matter ranged from the development or extension to theories of computational intelligence to applications of existing techniques to real-world problems. An emerging thread of some of the presentations which I had not been party to was the emphasis on how such work has been targeted to industry with a few to create stronger links between the research community and big business. This concept was cemented in a panel session on "Computational Intelligence in Industry: Promises and Challenges" which presented some cases studies on how research groups around the world have forged links with corporations to better their business.

The gala dinner was not held at the conference venue but at Alfonso XIII's Palace, in the Fira of Barcelona, a majestic building which hosted all delegates in its vast dining space. As part of the event, an ceremony was held to honour outstanding research with such categories as the Best Paper Awards.

The final social event I could attend was the Concert at the “Palau de la Música Catalanathe” in which the Camera Musicae Orquestra performed "The Eight Seasons"; a variation of Vivaldi's Four Seasons which each original movement accompanied by an extra movement by composer Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992). Although I could not make it myself, I was reliably informed that it was a world class performance.

Images of the more social parts of the conference can be found at http://www.wcci2010.org/photo-gallery

The presentation of my IJCNN accepted paper was held directly after lunch on the last day of the conference. Although the numbers of delegates had dwindled over the week, there was still enough in attendance to provide me with good feedback on the presented work.

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.

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.

Conference paper deadline: EIS 2010

The deadline for paper submission to the International Symposium on Evolving Intelligent Systems (EIS) 2010 is 15 January 2010. This symposium will be held in Leicester, UK 29th March to 1st April, 2010.

Conference paper deadline: KES AMSTA 2010

The deadline for paper submissions to the 4th International KES Symposium on Agents and Multi-agent Systems – Technologies and Applications is January 15, 2010. This conference will be held in Gdynia, Poland on the 23rd-25th June, 2010.

Turing Test for Game Bots

The Turing Test is very well known not only within the CI community but within the general public. Made really simple, a machine is intelligent if a human carrying out a conversation with that machine can't tell if it is a machine. In other words, we think it is intelligent, therefore it is intelligent.

A similar test has been proposed for game bots. It is described as follows:

"Suppose you are playing an interactive video game with some entity. Could you tell, solely from the conduct of the game, whether the other entity was a human player or a bot? If not, then the bot is deemed to have passed the test."

Playing games requires, in my opinion, more intelligence than having a conversation. It requires comprehension of the gaming environment, at least on some level, as well as anticipation of the actions of the player and the formulation and application of strategy. I have a suspicion that true general purpose AI will come from the gaming world. There's even a dedicated journal for it, the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

The best part of this is that playing games can be part of your job.