Thursday, September 15, 2011
Reminder: paper submission deadline for PPSN 2012
A reminder that 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.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Reminder: paper deadline for SIAM SDM 12
A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) 2012 is 14 October 2011. This conference will be held in Anaheim, California, April 26-28, 2012.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Multi-lingual social internetworking
As I promised in this post, the social media sites of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) are now available in several new languages: in the last week, we have set up sites in Korean, Greek, German and Spanish.
I have also posted a document describing how it works: in short, a post is published on the CIS blog, which is then automatically translated by Yahoo! Pipes, then sent to the social media sites. So, it is now possible to follow IEEE CIS news in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Korean, Greek, German and Spanish. These are machine translations, so they can be a bit off sometimes, but I'm told that for the most part they're OK.
A complete listing of the English language social media sites is in this post. The addresses for the Chinese, French and Portuguese sites are listed in this post. Finally, the Korean, Greek, German and Spanish sites are as follows:
Korean
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeeciskr
Greek
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisgr
http://ieeecisgr.jaiku.com
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisgr
http://ieeecisgr.tumblr.com
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisgr
German
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisde
http://ieeecisde.jaiku.com
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisde
http://ieeecisde.tumblr.com
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisde
Spanish
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecises
http://ieeecises.jaiku.com
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecises
http://ieeecises.tumblr.com
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecises
I have also posted a document describing how it works: in short, a post is published on the CIS blog, which is then automatically translated by Yahoo! Pipes, then sent to the social media sites. So, it is now possible to follow IEEE CIS news in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Korean, Greek, German and Spanish. These are machine translations, so they can be a bit off sometimes, but I'm told that for the most part they're OK.
A complete listing of the English language social media sites is in this post. The addresses for the Chinese, French and Portuguese sites are listed in this post. Finally, the Korean, Greek, German and Spanish sites are as follows:
Korean
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeeciskr
Greek
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisgr
http://ieeecisgr.jaiku.com
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisgr
http://ieeecisgr.tumblr.com
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisgr
German
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisde
http://ieeecisde.jaiku.com
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisde
http://ieeecisde.tumblr.com
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisde
Spanish
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecises
http://ieeecises.jaiku.com
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecises
http://ieeecises.tumblr.com
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecises
Monday, September 12, 2011
On plagiarism
Plagiarism is one of the most unpleasant things to deal with when teaching. Panos Ipeirotis wrote a blog post that stimulated some discussion, and was then removed because of legal threats. In short, he detected a fairly large amount of plagiarism in a class, but calling the students out on it created a lot of antipathy towards him, leading to a lower student evaluation, which adversely effected his own financial propects.
The later discussions suggested setting assignments that are impossible for the students to plagiarise. During my tenure teaching at the University of Otago, I saw my fair share (or more than my fair share) of plagiarism, and some of it was pretty bad.
The worst I saw was while teaching my second-year data processing course. It's not like it was difficult to detect, either: the copied portions stood out because the writing style was completely different. A few seconds with Google was usually enough to find the exact source. The easiest-detected case of plagiarism I dealt with was when a student copied from the laboratory manual - which I had written. There were so many cases of plagiarism in that course that the higher-ups changed the way in which plagiarism was dealt with: originally, all cases of plagiarism were sent to the dean of School. After a few weeks of me sending students to them, the regulation was changed to sending them to the head of department. The only penalty the students received, though, was a zero for the work that they had plagiarsied in. By the end of the year, I'd detected more plagiarism than the rest of the department put together, which raises the question: did more students plagiarise in my course, or was I just better at detecting them? If the former, was it because my course was harder? Because it was a required course that the students weren't really interested in? Or were the students really not smart enough to do the course without cheating? If the latter, why did I detect more than the other teaching staff? Was I the only one who read the assignments carefully? Did the other teaching staff not care? Or was it that the assessments in other courses were such that plagiarism was harder to commit in the first place, that is, more practically oriented?
While most of the plagiarism I dealt with was from undergrads, I have come across it reviewing papers, as well. Again, it was easy to detect: most of the paper was written very badly, apart from two or three paragraphs. Again, a few seconds work on Google was enough to find the original source. Needless to say, the paper was rejected. Since it was only a conference paper, I doubt that there were any repercussions on the authors.
As far as student plagiarism is concerned, I agree with the notion that it is better to spend time setting assessments that can't be plagiarised. The one course I taught that never had a problem with plagiarism was my fourth-year computational intelligence course. Now, that is partly likely to be because the students were highly-motivated, honours-level students, but also because of the nature of the lectures and assessment. Rather than me giving lectures twice a week, students took turns researching and presenting on a topic. There was a list of permissible topics for each week, so that the presentations followed the curriculum I had set out for the course, the students got support in researching their talk, and I went over each presentation before it was given. The practical work was entirely project-oriented, where again the students selected a project that interested them. This actually worked very well: it taught the students valuable skills and left no scope for plagiarism. I wonder, though, how well it would work for third or even second year students?
Perhaps a more important question is, why do students plagiarise? If we could answer that question, could plagiarism be eradicated? Or would there always be some students who are simply so desperate (or so unable / unwilling to do the work) that they will always plagiarise?
The later discussions suggested setting assignments that are impossible for the students to plagiarise. During my tenure teaching at the University of Otago, I saw my fair share (or more than my fair share) of plagiarism, and some of it was pretty bad.
The worst I saw was while teaching my second-year data processing course. It's not like it was difficult to detect, either: the copied portions stood out because the writing style was completely different. A few seconds with Google was usually enough to find the exact source. The easiest-detected case of plagiarism I dealt with was when a student copied from the laboratory manual - which I had written. There were so many cases of plagiarism in that course that the higher-ups changed the way in which plagiarism was dealt with: originally, all cases of plagiarism were sent to the dean of School. After a few weeks of me sending students to them, the regulation was changed to sending them to the head of department. The only penalty the students received, though, was a zero for the work that they had plagiarsied in. By the end of the year, I'd detected more plagiarism than the rest of the department put together, which raises the question: did more students plagiarise in my course, or was I just better at detecting them? If the former, was it because my course was harder? Because it was a required course that the students weren't really interested in? Or were the students really not smart enough to do the course without cheating? If the latter, why did I detect more than the other teaching staff? Was I the only one who read the assignments carefully? Did the other teaching staff not care? Or was it that the assessments in other courses were such that plagiarism was harder to commit in the first place, that is, more practically oriented?
While most of the plagiarism I dealt with was from undergrads, I have come across it reviewing papers, as well. Again, it was easy to detect: most of the paper was written very badly, apart from two or three paragraphs. Again, a few seconds work on Google was enough to find the original source. Needless to say, the paper was rejected. Since it was only a conference paper, I doubt that there were any repercussions on the authors.
As far as student plagiarism is concerned, I agree with the notion that it is better to spend time setting assessments that can't be plagiarised. The one course I taught that never had a problem with plagiarism was my fourth-year computational intelligence course. Now, that is partly likely to be because the students were highly-motivated, honours-level students, but also because of the nature of the lectures and assessment. Rather than me giving lectures twice a week, students took turns researching and presenting on a topic. There was a list of permissible topics for each week, so that the presentations followed the curriculum I had set out for the course, the students got support in researching their talk, and I went over each presentation before it was given. The practical work was entirely project-oriented, where again the students selected a project that interested them. This actually worked very well: it taught the students valuable skills and left no scope for plagiarism. I wonder, though, how well it would work for third or even second year students?
Perhaps a more important question is, why do students plagiarise? If we could answer that question, could plagiarism be eradicated? Or would there always be some students who are simply so desperate (or so unable / unwilling to do the work) that they will always plagiarise?
Friday, September 9, 2011
Conference paper deadline: ICSI 2012
The deadline for papers submitted to the Third International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ICSI) 2012 is December 31, 2011. This conference will be held in Shenzhen, China, June 17-20, 2012.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Call for papers: PRICAI 2012
The deadline for papers submitted to the 12th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI) 2012 is March 1, 2012. This conference will be held in Kuching, Malaysia, September 3-7, 2012.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Reminder: paper deadline for AAMAS 2012
A reminder that 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.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Conference paper deadline: ICNC-FSKD 2012
The deadline for submitting papers to the 8th International Conference on Natural Computation and 9th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery is 15 November 2011. These conferences will be jointly held in Chongqing, China, 29-31 May, 2011.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Reminder: paper deadline for KES-IIMSS 2012
A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services (KES IIMSS 2012) is 1st December 2011. This conference will be held in Gifu, Japan, 23-25 May 2012, simultaneously with the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Decision Technologies.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Reminder: paper submission deadline for KES-IDT 2012
A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Decision Technologies (KES-IDT 2012) is 1 December 2011. This conference will be held in Gifu, Japan, 23-25 May, 2012.
Reminder: paper submission deadline for ICARIS 2012
A reminder that 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, September 1, 2011
Reminder: paper deadline ICFSNC 2012
A reminder that 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.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
The problem with academic journals
George Monbiot nicely summarises the problems with academic journals as they currently stand.
Monbiot argues that this has the effect of shutting cutting-edge science behind extremely high paywalls, which has the effect of making science inaccessible to most of the population. When this happens, is it any surprise that hokum like the anti-vaccination movement takes hold in the population? Or that creationist baloney circulates so widely?
I think it's time for scientists, and leading scientists at that, to start submitting more to open-access journals. More importantly, it's time for managers and funding bodies to ditch the overly simplistic measures of performance that are derived from impact factors. Otherwise, things are not going to end well.
- Journals get their content for free (papers submitted by authors).
- Journals get their quality control for free (reviewers volunteering their time).
- Journals get their editors for free (more volunteers).
- Journals charge thousands of dollars per year for subscriptions.
Monbiot argues that this has the effect of shutting cutting-edge science behind extremely high paywalls, which has the effect of making science inaccessible to most of the population. When this happens, is it any surprise that hokum like the anti-vaccination movement takes hold in the population? Or that creationist baloney circulates so widely?
I think it's time for scientists, and leading scientists at that, to start submitting more to open-access journals. More importantly, it's time for managers and funding bodies to ditch the overly simplistic measures of performance that are derived from impact factors. Otherwise, things are not going to end well.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Reminder: paper deadline for CINTI 2011
A reminder that the deadline to submit papers to the 12th IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Informatics (CINTI) 2011 is September 30 2011. This conference will be held in Budapest, Hungary, November 21-22 2011.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Conference paper deadline: ECAI 2012
The deadline for papers submitted to the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) 2012 is 6 March 2012. This conference will be held in Montpellier, France, 27-21 August, 2012.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Reminder: Paper submission deadline for PAKDD 2012
A reminder that the deadline for submitting abstracts to the 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) 2012 is 25 September 2011. This conference will be held in Kuala Lumpur 29 May - 1 June, 2012.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Multi-Lingual Social Media
The social media presences of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society now include sites in languages other than English. This work has been carried out by the Social Media subcommittee, and so far, we have set up sites for Chinese (Simplified), French and Portuguese.
More sites are being developed and I'll blog about those when they become available. I'm also working on a report describing how the automatic translation is done, similar to this previous post on connecting social media sites. The English language sites are listed in this post. The new sites are listed below.
Chinese
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeeciscn
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeeciscn
http://www.plerb.com/ieeeciscn
http://ieeecis-cn.tumblr.com/
http://zuosa.com/ieeecis
http://ieeeciscn.jaiku.com/
http://digu.com/opi37q
http://www.qaiku.com/home/ieeeciscn/
http://www.plurk.com/ieeeciscn
http://weibo.com/ieeecis
French
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisfr
http://ieeecisfr.tumblr.com/
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisfr
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisfr
http://ieeecisfr.jaiku.com/
Portuguese
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecispt
http://ieeecispt.tumblr.com/
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecispt
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecispt
http://ieeecispt.jaiku.com/
More sites are being developed and I'll blog about those when they become available. I'm also working on a report describing how the automatic translation is done, similar to this previous post on connecting social media sites. The English language sites are listed in this post. The new sites are listed below.
Chinese
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeeciscn
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeeciscn
http://www.plerb.com/ieeeciscn
http://ieeecis-cn.tumblr.com/
http://zuosa.com/ieeecis
http://ieeeciscn.jaiku.com/
http://digu.com/opi37q
http://www.qaiku.com/home/ieeeciscn/
http://www.plurk.com/ieeeciscn
http://weibo.com/ieeecis
French
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisfr
http://ieeecisfr.tumblr.com/
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisfr
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisfr
http://ieeecisfr.jaiku.com/
Portuguese
http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecispt
http://ieeecispt.tumblr.com/
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecispt
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecispt
http://ieeecispt.jaiku.com/
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Reminder: Paper deadline for IEEE CIBCB 2012
A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the 2012 conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology is November 20, 2011. This conference will be held in San Diego, California, May 9-12, 2012.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Reminder: Paper deadline ACIIDS 2012
The deadline for papers submitted to the 4th Asian Conference on Intelligent Information and Database Systems (ACIIDS) 2012 is September 15, 2011. This conference will be held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, March 19-21, 2012.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Reminder: paper deadline for IEA AIE 2012
A reminder that the paper submission deadline for the 25th International Conference on Industrial, Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA AIE) 2012 is 11 November, 2011. This conference will be held in Dalian, China, June 9-12, 2012.
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