Conference paper deadline: TENCON 2011

The deadline for paper submission to the IEEE Region 10 Conference (IEEE TENCON) 2011 is 1st May, 2011. This conference will be held 21 - 24 November in Bali, Indonesia.

Updated website on Evolving Connectionist Systems

I have just updated the Literature section on the website Evolving Connectionist Systems. There are many new references to papers on the algorithms and applications of evolving connectionist systems.

Conference submission deadline: Neuroinformatics 2011

The deadline for submission of abstracts to Neuroinformatics 2011 is April 19, 2011. This conference will be held in Boston, USA, 4 - 6 September, 2011.

Conference paper deadline: IEEE CIMSA 2011

The deadline for abstracts submitted to the IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence for Measurement Systems and Applications 2011 (IEEE CIMSA 2011) is 15 April 2011. This conference will be held in Ottawa, Canada, 19 - 21 September, 2011.

Conference paper deadline: IEEE CIG 2011

The deadline for papers submitted to the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence in Games (IEEE CIG 2011) is 30 March 2011. This conference will be held in Seoul, Korea, 31 August to 3 September, 2011.

Conference paper deadline: RAICS 2011

The deadline for papers submitted to the IEEE Recent Advances in Intelligent Computational Systems (RAICS) 2011 is 28 February 2011. This conference will be held in Thiruvananthapuram, India, 22-24 September, 2011.

Conference paper deadline: KES 2011

The deadline for papers submitted to the 15th conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems (KES 2011) is March 1st 2011. This conference will be held in Kaiserslautern, Germany, 12-14 September, 2011.

Conference paper deadline: ICARIS 2011

The paper submission deadline for the 10th International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems (ICARIS 2011) is 28th February 2011. This conference will be held at the University of Cambridge, UK, 18-21 July, 2011.

Conference paper deadline: ICONIP 2011

The paper submission deadline for the International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP) 2011 is June 1, 2011. This conference will be held in Shanghai, China, November 14-17, 2011.

Associate Professor Mark Laws

I returned home from holiday yesterday to the heart-breaking news that Associate Professor Mark Laws had drowned. He leaves behind his wife, three daughters and five grandchildren.

Mark was a gifted researcher, a loving and devoted husband and father, and my friend.

Mark and I did our PhDs together in the old Knowledge Engineering Lab at the University of Otago. For years we shared an office, worked together, and partied together. With a handful of others from the lab, he made my time as a post-grad not only bearable, but fun.

He was devoted to his family - I still remember how proud he was of his daughters achievements, and how happy he was when his first grand-child was born. It's for them that I feel the most.

Over the last few years we hadn't seen each other as much as we would have liked, but every time I saw him, he had a big smile and welcoming hug for me. I learned so much from him and I'm immensely grateful to have had him in my life.

I still can't believe that he's gone.

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).

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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.

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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.