Monday, July 18, 2011

Call for papers: SEAL 2012

The deadline for submitting papers to the 9th International Conference on Evolution and Learning (SEAL) 2012 is 1 May 2012. This conference will be held in Hanoi, Vietnam, 16-19 December, 2012.

Friday, July 15, 2011

IEEE Computational Intelligence Society social media presence expands

The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society now has presences on several more social media sites. This expansion is due to the ongoing work of the Social Media Subcommittee.

The first of the new sites is the CIS blog: http://ieee-cis.blogspot.com/. This is the source of and archive for news and announcements from the society. When a new post is published on the blog, it is automatically distributed to the other social media presences, using the methods described in this report.

The major social media sites are:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecis
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/IEEE.CIS
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=75152

Newer presences are now up at the following sites:

Identica: http://identi.ca/ieeecis
Plurk: http://www.plurk.com/ieeecis
Qaiku: http://www.qaiku.com/home/ieeecis/
Jaiku: http://ieeecis.jaiku.com/
Tumblr: http://ieeecis.tumblr.com/
Shoutitout: http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecis

More expansions are planned for the near future. I will blog about them when they happen.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Conference paper deadline: ICONIP 2012

The paper submission deadline for the International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP) 2012 is May 15, 2012. This conference will be held in Doha, Qatar, November 26-29, 2012.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Call for papers: PPSN 2012

The deadline for submitting papers to the 12th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN) 2012 is March 15 2012. This conference will be held in Taormina, Italy, September 1-5, 2012.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Call for papers: ICARIS 2012

The deadline for submitting papers to the 11th International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems (ICARIS) 2012 is 1 March 2012. This conference will be held in Taormina, Italy, 28-21 July, 2012.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Call for papers: AAMAS 2012

The deadline for submission of abstracts to the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2012 is 7 October 2011, with full papers due 12 October 2011. This conference will be held in Valencia, Spain, 4-8 June 2012.

Conference paper deadline: ISSNIP 2011

The deadline for submitting papers to the Seventh International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing (ISSNIP) 2011 is 31 July 2011. This conference will be held in Adelaide, Australia, 6-9 December, 2011.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Conference paper deadline: ICFSNC 2012

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.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Universities are Important

I'm going a little bit off the topic of this blog in this post, but since most of the research in computational intelligence is done at universities it's still relevant. In a post at the Forbes.com blog, Nathan Furr discusses four myths on why universities don't matter anymore (they do). The most salient are the top three:


1) You can teach yourself everything
2) You can teach yourself everything online
3) I don't use anything I learned at college


In regards to 1) and 2), from my own experience some students do think that: one comment on a course evaluation for the data processing course I taught in 2003 was along the lines of "this course doesn't teach anything that an enterprising student couldn't learn online". The counterpoint to that is that if they hadn't done my course, they wouldn't know what they would need to teach themselves. In other words, they wouldn't know that they didn't know.

In regards to number 3, people who say that probably just don't realise that they are using stuff they learned at university. In my own case, my undergraduate education is in software engineering and systems development, my PhD is in computational intelligence, and now I do research in ecological modelling. With every project I do in ecological modelling, I have been able to apply what I learned as either an undergrad or during my PhD.

I've spent my professional life working at universities, and I will be the first to admit that, like every human enterprise, they have their flaws: I've seen people promoted because of their political skill rather than their research, teaching skill, or managerial ability, only to have them run their departments into the ground. I've seen people build entire careers on a single piece of research, then spend the rest of their lives giving the same talk over and over again. But universities do far more useful things than bad things, so they are worth keeping around.