Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Reminder: Paper deadline IJCNN 2012
A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks is December 19, 2011. This conference is part of the 2012 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2012) and is held concurrently with the 2012 Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) and IEEE Conference on Fuzzy Logic (Fuzz-IEEE). WCCI 2012 will be held in Brisbane, Australia, June 10-15, 2012.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Reminder: paper submission deadline for IEEE-IS
A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Systems (IEEE-IS) is 20 December 2011. This conference will be held in Sofia, Bulgaria, September 6-8, 2012.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Google Scholar Citations
Google has just launched a useful tool for academics: Google Scholar Citations. This is a service on top of Google Scholar that allows you to track the number of citations each of your publications has received. One of the metrics by which academics are judged is the number of citations their publications have received, the theory being that good and useful papers will be cited more than papers that are not useful, or good. This has been encapsulated by measures such as the h-index: to have an h-index of n, you must have at least n-papers that have been cited at least n-times each. It is useful for things like grant applications to be able to quote the number of citations you have received and your current h-index, insofar as convincing the grants committees that you can do the work you propose.
It was possible to track citations with Google Scholar in the past, and to calculate your h-index manually, but this could be a bit laborious and error-prone: Scholar Citations makes it a lot easier. I was impressed to see that even with a common name like mine (there are a lot of Michael Watts in the world, and some of them are also academics) the software found almost all of my publications - there are a few that aren't available online yet - and to find the citations to them. I was quite pleased to find that I had a few more citations than I thought.
It was possible to track citations with Google Scholar in the past, and to calculate your h-index manually, but this could be a bit laborious and error-prone: Scholar Citations makes it a lot easier. I was impressed to see that even with a common name like mine (there are a lot of Michael Watts in the world, and some of them are also academics) the software found almost all of my publications - there are a few that aren't available online yet - and to find the citations to them. I was quite pleased to find that I had a few more citations than I thought.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Conference paper deadline: EANN
The deadline for submitting papers to the 13th International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks (EANN 2012) is 31 March 2012. This conference will be held in London, UK, 20-23 September, 2012.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Reminder: paper submission deadline ICONIP 2012
A reminder that 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 12-15, 2012.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Call for papers: Applications of ECoS
Special issue of Evolving Systems on
Applications of Evolving Connectionist Systems
Guest Editor
Scope
The topic of this special issue is “Applications of Kasabov’s Evolving Connectionist Systems”.
In modern society, the volume and rate of data production are huge and set to increase. To process and utilise this avalanche of data, methods are needed that can rapidly and accurately model it as it becomes available. These models must be able to learn throughout their lifetimes, without forgetting what they have previously learned, and be able to explain themselves.
Kasabov’s Evolving Connectionist Systems (ECoS) are able to fulfil each of these requirements. They are a class of constructive neural networks that learn via structural growth and adaptation. They have a fast, one-pass learning algorithm, where all that can be learnt from the data is learned in the first training pass. Because of their open structure, they exhibit continuous, life-long learning whereby the structure expands as necessary to accommodate new data. Finally, they have a strong resistance to catastrophic forgetting following additional training on new data.
Examples of ECoS networks include the Evolving Fuzzy Neural Network (EFuNN), which was the first ECoS network published and is characterised by embedded fuzzy logic elements. There is also the Simple Evolving Connectionist System (SECoS), which is essentially an EFuNN with the fuzzy elements removed, and the Dynamic Evolving Fuzzy Inference System (DENFIS) for discovering Takagi-Sugeno style fuzzy rules. Many ECoS networks use fuzzy rule extraction algorithms that allow for the explanation of what the networks have learned, in a comprehensible manner.
ECoS networks are well suited to applications that are dealing with new data continuously and that have dynamic, time-critical aspects. Previous applications of ECoS include:
- Stock market prediction and macroeconomic modelling
- Speech recognition, especially multi-speaker speech recognition
- Bioinformatics and medical modelling
- Image and video parsing
- Robot control
- Information system security
The special issue is concerned with all aspects of the application of ECoS networks to real-life problems and data sets. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Applications of ECoS to real-world problems
- Data mining of complex data sets using ECoS
- Comparisons of ECoS with other algorithms over real-world data sets
- Modifications of ECoS algorithms to fit them to real-world problems
Proposed Schedule
- Submission due date: 16 April, 2012
- Preliminary notification of acceptance: 4 June, 2012
- Revised manuscripts due: 9 July, 2012
- Final acceptance notification: 6 August, 2012
- Final version due: 3 September, 2012
- Intended publication date: January, 2013
Submission
The special issue invites original contributions within the specified scope. Manuscripts must not be under review elsewhere, nor can they have been previously published. Extended conference papers must contain at least 30% new material. Please format all manuscripts according to the Instructions for Authors:
Please submit all papers via the online submission system:
Friday, November 11, 2011
Reminder: paper submission 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.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Conference paper deadline: KES-AMSTA 2012
The deadline for submitting papers to the 6th KES International Conference on Agents and Multi-agent Systems - Technologies and Applications (KES-AMSTA-2012) is 20 December 2011. This conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, 25-27 June, 2012.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Hang in there
A wise person once told me that doing a PhD is as much a test of endurance as it is a test of intelligence. You face years of late nights, mountains of literature, numerous false-starts and dead-ends, and the nagging fear in the back of your mind that it might not be all that worth it.
Whether or not it is worth it is a question that only you can answer. Financially, it probably isn't. People who do PhDs tend to earn less over their lives than those who do not. They take longer to settle down and tend to delay parenthood and home-ownership until later in life. On the other hand, a PhD is your ticket into academia: the chances of getting a good, stable academic position without a PhD are, now, practically nil. A PhD can also gain you respect from the community: although I seldom use my title, it is useful when I do. Finally, there is the satisfaction of knowing that you achieved something most people never will, or never could. Personally, I did a PhD because I wanted to see if I could. It was the challenge of doing it that appealed to me. With my undergrad degree (first class honours in Information Science) I could have gone into the corporate world and made a very good living. I'd probably be in a high management position now, making a lot more money than I am making as a researcher, but I'd probably be miserable at the same time, because I'd never know how far I could have gone in research. And at the end of my life, I'd be asking myself, how much of a difference did I really make?
There are several factors that contribute to a successful PhD. Firstly, you must have a good supervisor. In fact, I'd go as far to say that you need two supervisors, one senior and one junior. By that I mean that you need one supervisor who is an established academic who is well-respected in their field, and another supervisor who has recently completed their PhD. This is because the junior supervisor still remembers what it is like to do a PhD in the current time, while someone who did their PhD twenty years ago has probably forgotten. You must actively engage with your supervisors, to make sure that they are up-to-date with what you are doing and what you plan to do. A supervisor who is ignorant of what you are doing is a useless supervisor. Don't keep them in the dark!
You must have a clear idea of what your PhD is about. In other words, you must have a hypothesis, and research questions, and research goals. I even went so far as to make these explicit in the introduction to my thesis. It might take you a while to be clear about these, but you'll save a lot more time in the long run.
You must not underestimate the requirements for a PhD. Most universities award a PhD for "a significant original contribution to knowledge" (although most of them do not define "significant" "original" or "contribution"). So, a new algorithm for determining the contributions of the input variables of a neural network probably wouldn't be enough for a PhD, while the algorithm in the context of a rigorous theoretical analysis of the neural network itself, along with an analysis of the algorithm, probably would.
You must not over-estimate the requirement for a PhD. In other words, you're not going to find a cancer cure, or discover the Higgs boson, or bring peace to the Middle East during the course of your PhD. Your PhD research problem needs to be enough for a PhD, and no more. Feature-creep kills PhDs as easily as it kills software projects. From chatting with more senior academics, I've come to believe that this is a more common problem than underestimating a PhD. A good supervisor will help you define the scope of your PhD project, while a bad supervisor will not. Get rid of a bad supervisor and find a better one. Or, at least seek help elsewhere.
You must stick with it. Everyone has a period during their PhD when it all looks hopeless, when you don't want to go on and just want to pack it all in. Hang in there. If you've decided that it's worth it before starting your PhD, it probably is still worth it, even if you don't feel like it. The enormous high you will get when you pass your examination is something you'll not feel often in your life (I found out I had passed my PhD examination two weeks before becoming a father, so I had all of my enormous highs in a short period of time).
It is likely that your examiners will want you to make some revisions to your thesis. Don't take this personally! The best thing to do is to just shut the hell up, make the changes as quickly as you can, and get the degree confirmed. Don't waste too much time arguing with the examiners, unless they are egregiously wrong (one of my examiners was egregiously wrong, in several places, and making the changes he wanted would have made my thesis worse, not better. In the end, I had to show my examination convener a pile of literature that showed that the examiner was wrong, and educate him on how innumerate the examiner was).
When you have passed your PhD exam, the next step is to get a job. If you want to be an academic, that means getting a post-doc. If you're organised, or lucky, then you might even have a post-doc organised before you finish your PhD. Don't restrict your search to just the field you did your PhD in. My PhD was in computational intelligence, but my two post-docs were in ecological informatics, and my current position is in ecological modelling. I'm not an ecologist, by any stretch of the imagination (although I do know a lot about ecology now) but because I am a flexible and fairly clever person I was able to work in these fields, and work effectively. Know what skills you have, and know how to advertise them to potential post-doc supervisors.
Once you're in a post-doc position, the only goal you should have is to publish as many papers as you can, as widely as you can and as quickly as you can. It can also be good to co-supervise some PhD students of your own, to attend conferences, edit journal special issues, and generally show the world that you are a good, hard-working and professional researcher.
But, above all, you must hang in there!
Whether or not it is worth it is a question that only you can answer. Financially, it probably isn't. People who do PhDs tend to earn less over their lives than those who do not. They take longer to settle down and tend to delay parenthood and home-ownership until later in life. On the other hand, a PhD is your ticket into academia: the chances of getting a good, stable academic position without a PhD are, now, practically nil. A PhD can also gain you respect from the community: although I seldom use my title, it is useful when I do. Finally, there is the satisfaction of knowing that you achieved something most people never will, or never could. Personally, I did a PhD because I wanted to see if I could. It was the challenge of doing it that appealed to me. With my undergrad degree (first class honours in Information Science) I could have gone into the corporate world and made a very good living. I'd probably be in a high management position now, making a lot more money than I am making as a researcher, but I'd probably be miserable at the same time, because I'd never know how far I could have gone in research. And at the end of my life, I'd be asking myself, how much of a difference did I really make?
There are several factors that contribute to a successful PhD. Firstly, you must have a good supervisor. In fact, I'd go as far to say that you need two supervisors, one senior and one junior. By that I mean that you need one supervisor who is an established academic who is well-respected in their field, and another supervisor who has recently completed their PhD. This is because the junior supervisor still remembers what it is like to do a PhD in the current time, while someone who did their PhD twenty years ago has probably forgotten. You must actively engage with your supervisors, to make sure that they are up-to-date with what you are doing and what you plan to do. A supervisor who is ignorant of what you are doing is a useless supervisor. Don't keep them in the dark!
You must have a clear idea of what your PhD is about. In other words, you must have a hypothesis, and research questions, and research goals. I even went so far as to make these explicit in the introduction to my thesis. It might take you a while to be clear about these, but you'll save a lot more time in the long run.
You must not underestimate the requirements for a PhD. Most universities award a PhD for "a significant original contribution to knowledge" (although most of them do not define "significant" "original" or "contribution"). So, a new algorithm for determining the contributions of the input variables of a neural network probably wouldn't be enough for a PhD, while the algorithm in the context of a rigorous theoretical analysis of the neural network itself, along with an analysis of the algorithm, probably would.
You must not over-estimate the requirement for a PhD. In other words, you're not going to find a cancer cure, or discover the Higgs boson, or bring peace to the Middle East during the course of your PhD. Your PhD research problem needs to be enough for a PhD, and no more. Feature-creep kills PhDs as easily as it kills software projects. From chatting with more senior academics, I've come to believe that this is a more common problem than underestimating a PhD. A good supervisor will help you define the scope of your PhD project, while a bad supervisor will not. Get rid of a bad supervisor and find a better one. Or, at least seek help elsewhere.
You must stick with it. Everyone has a period during their PhD when it all looks hopeless, when you don't want to go on and just want to pack it all in. Hang in there. If you've decided that it's worth it before starting your PhD, it probably is still worth it, even if you don't feel like it. The enormous high you will get when you pass your examination is something you'll not feel often in your life (I found out I had passed my PhD examination two weeks before becoming a father, so I had all of my enormous highs in a short period of time).
It is likely that your examiners will want you to make some revisions to your thesis. Don't take this personally! The best thing to do is to just shut the hell up, make the changes as quickly as you can, and get the degree confirmed. Don't waste too much time arguing with the examiners, unless they are egregiously wrong (one of my examiners was egregiously wrong, in several places, and making the changes he wanted would have made my thesis worse, not better. In the end, I had to show my examination convener a pile of literature that showed that the examiner was wrong, and educate him on how innumerate the examiner was).
When you have passed your PhD exam, the next step is to get a job. If you want to be an academic, that means getting a post-doc. If you're organised, or lucky, then you might even have a post-doc organised before you finish your PhD. Don't restrict your search to just the field you did your PhD in. My PhD was in computational intelligence, but my two post-docs were in ecological informatics, and my current position is in ecological modelling. I'm not an ecologist, by any stretch of the imagination (although I do know a lot about ecology now) but because I am a flexible and fairly clever person I was able to work in these fields, and work effectively. Know what skills you have, and know how to advertise them to potential post-doc supervisors.
Once you're in a post-doc position, the only goal you should have is to publish as many papers as you can, as widely as you can and as quickly as you can. It can also be good to co-supervise some PhD students of your own, to attend conferences, edit journal special issues, and generally show the world that you are a good, hard-working and professional researcher.
But, above all, you must hang in there!
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Cargo Cult Statistics
One of the nice things about working in a world-class ecology group is the statistical rigor with which ecologists analyse their results. Unfortunately, this rigor is often missing in computational intelligence. Although I touched on some of these issues in a previous post on Minimum requirements for computational intelligence papers, I recently read an article (that shall remain anonymous) that actually made me groan. While I am starting to notice more papers with repeated trials, and even investigating several parameters, the analysis of these results leave a lot to be desired.
Sometimes it is enough to simply list the mean and standard deviation of your accuracy measures. By itself, the mean is useful as a statistic that represents the population of accuracies that the algorithm yielded. The standard deviation is also good as a measure of spread of the values. But if your standard deviation is large, that needs some comment in the paper on why the algorithm is so variable? This is even more important when comparing different algorithms. An author might for example like to say that a neural network trained with evolutionary programming is better than logistic regression for their application, but if they are seeing a coefficient of variation of more than 60% then that implies that the algorithm is giving highly variable or even inconsistent results. To say that these results show that ANN are better than regression, without any statistical tests for significant differences is simply nonsense.
Even if you do do such tests, you need to make sure that you are using the correct tests. What is the distribution of your results? Are they normally distributed? If they are not normally distributed, then you can't use simple parametric tests of significant differences like t-tests. If you are comparing several groups of numbers then a n-way ANOVA is more appropriate than performing n t-tests. These kinds of comparisons, of several groups of numbers, are very common in computational intelligence (the authors are comparing different algorithms over several data sets, or with different parameterisations) but I can't remember ever seeing a paper that mentioned ANOVA (if you can prove me wrong, please do so in the comments).
I call this kind of shallow statistical analysis Cargo Cult Statistics.The term is inspired by Richard Feynman's famous speech about Cargo Cult Science. In this case, it means that while it looks like the authors are doing a statistical analysis of their results (they are calculating the means and standard deviations) it isn't really so, because they are missing out a huge amount of analysis that might actually tell them something useful about their results.
Now, I'm still learning about statistics (but, I'm still learning about everything, and will be until the day I die). But at least I know to ask someone with a better knowledge of statistics than me for advice on how to analyse my results, and I think it makes my papers much better.
Sometimes it is enough to simply list the mean and standard deviation of your accuracy measures. By itself, the mean is useful as a statistic that represents the population of accuracies that the algorithm yielded. The standard deviation is also good as a measure of spread of the values. But if your standard deviation is large, that needs some comment in the paper on why the algorithm is so variable? This is even more important when comparing different algorithms. An author might for example like to say that a neural network trained with evolutionary programming is better than logistic regression for their application, but if they are seeing a coefficient of variation of more than 60% then that implies that the algorithm is giving highly variable or even inconsistent results. To say that these results show that ANN are better than regression, without any statistical tests for significant differences is simply nonsense.
Even if you do do such tests, you need to make sure that you are using the correct tests. What is the distribution of your results? Are they normally distributed? If they are not normally distributed, then you can't use simple parametric tests of significant differences like t-tests. If you are comparing several groups of numbers then a n-way ANOVA is more appropriate than performing n t-tests. These kinds of comparisons, of several groups of numbers, are very common in computational intelligence (the authors are comparing different algorithms over several data sets, or with different parameterisations) but I can't remember ever seeing a paper that mentioned ANOVA (if you can prove me wrong, please do so in the comments).
I call this kind of shallow statistical analysis Cargo Cult Statistics.The term is inspired by Richard Feynman's famous speech about Cargo Cult Science. In this case, it means that while it looks like the authors are doing a statistical analysis of their results (they are calculating the means and standard deviations) it isn't really so, because they are missing out a huge amount of analysis that might actually tell them something useful about their results.
Now, I'm still learning about statistics (but, I'm still learning about everything, and will be until the day I die). But at least I know to ask someone with a better knowledge of statistics than me for advice on how to analyse my results, and I think it makes my papers much better.
Wednesday, November 2, 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.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Reminder: paper submission deadline 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.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Reminder: conference 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.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Conference paper submission deadline: BICS 2012
The deadline for submitting papers to the International Conference on Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems (BICS) 2012 is 15 January 2012. This conference will be held in Shenyang, China, 11-14 July, 2012.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Reminder: paper submission deadline for ISNN 2012
A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 2012 International Symposium on Neural Networks (ISNN 2012) is 15 January 2012. This symposium will be held in Shenyang, China, July 11-14, 2012.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Reminder: Paper submission deadline for ICNC-FSKD 2012
A reminder that 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.
Tuesday, October 25, 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.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Paper submission deadline: CBR-MD 2012
The deadline for submitting papers to the International Workshop Case-Based Reasoning (CBR-MD) 2012 is 13 April 2012. This workshop will be held in Berlin, Germany, 20 July 2012.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Call for papers: UCNC 2012
The deadline for submitting papers to the 11th Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC) 2012 is 26 March 2012. This conference will be held in Orleans, France, 3-6 September, 2012.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Call for papers: ESANN 2012
The deadline for submitting papers to the European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning (ESANN) 2012 is 30 November 2011. This symposium will be held in Bruges, Belgium, 25-27 April, 2012.
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