Information Retrieval List Digest 422 (September 17, 1998) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-422.txt IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 September 17, 1998 Volume XV, Number 36 Issue 422 ****************************************************************** I. QUERIES 1. Summary of Responses to "UNIQUE NLP" (and CONCLUSION) 2. Number/Percentage of Web-Only E-Journals III. NOTICES A. Publications 1. [WASHINGTON-UPDATE] EDUCAUSE Washington Update 9-14-98 2. Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice_, second edition B. Meetings 1. PA Expo99 2. IRAL'98 3. NGITS '99 4. Visualization 98 5. NIPS '98 ****************************************************************** I. QUERIES I.1. Fr: Philip A. Bralich Re: Summary of Responses to "UNIQUE NLP" (and CONCLUSION) SUMMARY: About two weeks ago I requested information concerning NLP software that offered the ability to do a q&a exchange between animations and a user similar to the "ChatterBox" software (free) we have at http://www.haptek.com. Here is a summary of the responses I got and a short commentary on each. In addition, I have added a few that I have found via Microsoft concerning a parrot named "Perdy" and similar characters. Take a look for yourself and you can see the degree to which these different companies and research institutions are making it possible to chat with computers and animations for fun, Internet searches, and information exchange. 1. You should have a look at the work by Boris Katz at the MIT AI lab. He's been working on a system called START for some time that does such things and more. See the web page at http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/infolab/ for more info. 2. The Information Science Institute at USC (www.isi.edu) did a lot of work in that area about 10 years ago, using, I believe, their PENMAN syntax analyzer. I think the project was lead by Ed Hovy, who was still a director there last year but seems to have left since. There was also a Dr. Christiensen (spelling?) but he has returned to Australia, probably at McQuarrie University with MAK Halliday. Not much help, but you can try emailing ISI staff: some may remember. 3. Kevin Lenzo has a bot named url which stores information and answers questions online, from multiple users, phrased similarly. url hangs out in MUSHes, but I don't remember which ones. It seems that you developed a kind of chatterbot or digital secretary. There are many chatterbots developed. You can see the other chatterbots 'http://www.toptown.com/hp/sjlaven/' 4. The Microsoft and several other industry sites for this research are at: http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/ui/persona/home.htm http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/projects/interface9495-srct.html http://merl.co.jp http://www.csl.sony.co.jp http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/cmu.edu/misc/mosaic/common/omega/web/frontdoor. html http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gva/gvatop.html http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/projects/cait/index.html CONCLUSION: While all these sites have interesting applications for speech and animations they do not have the ability to put in factual information and then query for that information. Usually they have a key word search ability which allows them to return particular paragraphs from a body of data based on the key words of a query. However, to ask and answer questions like the following only seems to be possible with ChatterBox at http://www.haptek.com. There were no announcements of the development of such technology at these other companies. Who was the first president of the United States? Who invented the telescope? When did Columbus come to America? Hey Mickey, Where did you find that treasure map? What is your email address? What is your fax number? and so on. Phil Bralich Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. President and CEO Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 Tel: (808)539-3920 Fax: (808)539-3924 bralich@hawaii.edu http://www.ergo-ling.com ********** I.2. Fr: Gerry Mckiernan Re: Number/Percentage of Web-Only E-Journals _Number/Percentage of Web-only E-Journals_ For a Think Piece on the application of Intelligent Software Agents for Identifying, Organizing and Managing E-Serials, I am interested in learning about the number of _Web-Only_ E-journals that are currently available. By Web-only e-journals, I mean networked journals that do *not* have a parallel print counterpart. [I am aware of the **excellent** review article by Steve Hitchcock, Les A. Carr and Wendy Hall published in _Serials_ (10(3), (Nov.1997): 285-299 entitled "Web Journals Publishing: A UK Perspective" Also available at URL: http://www.mmrg.ecs.soton.ac.uk/publications/archive/hitchcock1997/ that offers a fine historical review and analysis of Web journal publishing. [It is well-worth The Read!] While I would prefer an overall number/percentage, data on specific fields (e.g., Science, Technology, and/or Medicine (STM)) would also be of interest. Those interested in becoming better acquainted with Intelligent Software Agents may wish to wish my clearinghouse _LibraryAgents(sm)_ that provides links to major Agent resource sites. _LibraryAgents(sm) is available at: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/Agents.htm As Always, Any and All Contributions, Queries, Questions, Concerns, Critiques, Comments, etc. are most welcome. Joy! Gerry McKiernan Theoretical Librarian and Curator, CyberStacks(sm) Iowa State University Ames IA 50011 gerrymck@iastate.edu http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/ ****************************************************************** III. NOTICES III.A.1. Fr: EDUCAUSE Re: [WASHINGTON-UPDATE] EDUCAUSE Washington Update 9-14-98 EDUCAUSE: Transforming Education through Information Technologies EDUCAUSE WASHINGTON UPDATE --- SEPTEMBER 14, 1998 IN THIS ISSUE: FCC REPORT ANALYZES REGULATION OF CABLE INTERNET SERVICES U.S. COURT OF APPEALS DEALS SETBACK TO RBOCS >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Written from EDUCAUSE's Washington office, "The EDUCAUSE Washington Update" is a free service of EDUCAUSE. If you would like more information about the Update or would like to offer comments or suggestions, please contact Garret Sern at gsern@educause.edu. To subscribe to the Washington Update send an e-mail to listserv@listserv.educause.edu with the command "subscribe update firstname lastname" in the body of the message. To unsubscribe send a "signoff update" command to listserv@listserv.educause.edu. ********** III.A.2. Fr: GSLIS Publications Office Re: Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice_, second edition Multimedia sources and the Internet featured in second edition of _Indexing and Abstracting_ _Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice_, second edition By F. W. Lancaster (ISBN 0-87845-102-1; 426 pages; cloth; $47.50 plus shipping) CHAMPAIGN, IL--Award-winning author F.W. Lancaster has revised his widely used text,Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice, to address growing complexities in the field. New chapters in the second edition feature multimedia sources and indexing within the Internet; chapters on text searching, automatic processing methods, and the future of indexing and abstracting are substantially revised. The first nine chapters, covering basic principles and theories, are updated and the section of practical exercises is modified by use of the current edition of UNBIS Thesaurus. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines are now involved in content analysis activities that formerly were the sole concern of members of the library and information science field. At the same time, indexing and abstracting have grown in interest within other major disciplines, such as medicine. As a result, relevant articles have become increasingly scattered throughout varied literatures, and a wide range of technologies such as linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and pattern recognition now impinge upon the subject matter of this book, providing the impetus for updating a text noted for both its practicality and attention to theoretical underpinnings. As with the first edition, Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice remains primarily a text for teaching the subject. However, it also holds value for managers of information services and others concerned with indexing, abstracting, and all related issues of content analysis. Chapters focus on indexing principles, indexing practice, consistency and quality of indexing, the types and functions of abstracts, writing and evaluating the abstract, enhancing indexing, natural language in information retrieval, automated indexing and abstracting, indexing of multimedia sources, indexing within the Internet, and the future of indexing and abstracting services. The section of exercises provides concrete illustrations of the text's major points. _Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice_, second edition, is available from The GSLIS Publications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 501 E. Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820 Phone: (217) 333-1359 Fax: (217) 244-7329 E-mail: puboff@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/puboff (Prepayment required: VISA, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and checks payable to "The University of Illinois"; individuals in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin include sales tax; bookstores and wholesalers receive a ten percent discount.) >>>>>>>>>> F. W. Lancaster, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science, is the recipient of numerous awards for his books in the field of library and information science. The first edition of _Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice_, which appeared in 1991, won the "Best Information Science Book Award" in 1992 from the American Society for Information Science. An additional three of his books have earned this ASIS "Best Book" award, and another two have received awards from the American Library Association. _Technology and Management in Library and Information Services_ (co-authored with Beth Sandore) is listed on Library Journal's 1998 best professional reading list. Professor Lancaster is the editor of _Library Trends_, the premier thematic quarterly journal in the field of American librarianship, produced by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. The Publications Office of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (217) 333-1359 phone, (217) 244-7329 FAX puboff@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/puboff ********** III.B.1. Fr: info@pap.com Re: PA Expo99 CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION 19th - 23rd April 1999 Commonwealth Institute, London, UK www.practical-applications.co.uk/Expo99 PA Expo99 is sponsored and supported to date by: AgentLink, Agent Society, Amzi!, AIAI, CompulogNet, FIPA, IF Computer ISL, LPA, PC AI, Prolog Development Centre, PrologIA, Siemens WhiteCross Systems and is held in co-operation with AAAI. PA Expo99 is a world leading international conference and exhibition featuring the following five events. PAAM99 - The Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agents 19-21 April 1999 www.practical-applications.co.uk/PAAM99/ PADD99 - The Practical Application of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 21-23 April 1999 www.practical-applications.co.uk/PADD99/ PACLP99 - The Practical Application of Constraint technologies and Logic Programming 19-21 April 1999 www.practical-applications.co.uk/PACLP99/ PAKeM99 - The Practical Application of Knowledge Management 21-23 April 1999 www.practical-applications.co.uk/PAKeM99/ PAJAVA99 - The Practical Application of Java 21-23 April 1999 www.practical-applications.co.uk/PAJAVA99/ PA Expo99: The Practical Application Expo is a unique five-day multi-technology, multi-track event which takes place every Spring in London. PA Expo combines the peer-to-peer review process of an academic conference with the commercial relevance of an applied industrial event. This contrast of theory and practice, research and deployment is rarely found elsewhere, and makes an ideal forum for participants to network and share ideas. PA Expo offers a rich blend of tutorials, invited talks, refereed papers, panel discussions, poster sessions, social agenda and a full industrial exhibition. The result is a varied technical programme that caters for delegates of various levels of expertise, from beginner to advanced practitioner, in a pleasant and productive environment. You are invited to register your interest in PA Expo99 by completing the reply form below. Venue: PA Expo99 will take place at The Commonwealth Conference and Events Centre. It enjoys a prime location in the heart of London, strategically situated in Royal Kensington and Chelsea, leading onto High Street Kensington which is home to one of London's premier shopping areas, and a selection of quality hotels and restaurants. Call for Submissions: Your submission should describe one of the following: Commercially available products Internally deployed solutions Fully advanced pre-production prototypes There are two types of submission available: 1.Paper: Paper submissions will be refereed by the programme committee and should be no more than 20 pages in length. Accepted papers will have 30 minutes to present their papers at the conference. 2.Industrial Report: In recognition of the applied nature of PA Expo, we encourage the submission of Industrial Reports. This type of submission is intended for professionals who have little time to write a full paper, but who nevertheless, would like the opportunity to present the benefits of their application at the conference. Please forward a short paper (no more than 6 pages) describing your application. Submission Policies: Submissions need to meet the conference objectives and achieve a balance between application and theory and with this in mind we have produced guidelines to help you achieve this. Please visit our web site for further information where you will find a link to the guidelines on the Call for Papers page. Papers and Industrial Reports will be published in the proceedings but note that there will be a clear indication as to the type of submission. In some cases, revisions to submissions will be requested by the programme committee. Authors are responsible for making the required revisions and submitting the final or the revised version by the due date. Submissions from nonEnglish speakers are strongly encouraged, however we would ask that your paper is proofread by a native English speaker, if possible, before submission. Submission Deadlines: PAKeM and PACLP Papers: December 7th Reports: January 11th PAAM, PADD and PA Java Papers and Reports: January 11th Five copies of your submission, in English, should be received by the conference organisers, on or before the due date. Formatting instructions (Word), can be downloaded from the relevant web site. Please also submit an electronic version of your submission as a PDF file or Word document. The email address for this will be made available in due course. Please include a cover page including: 1.Full Contact Details 2.A Short Abstract Important Note: Please use the following address when sending your submissions to us. PA Expo99 54 Knowle Avenue Blackpool Lancs FY2 9UD UK Call for Exhibitors: The conference also provides an opportunity for software vendors and developers to demonstrate their systems. You are invited to contact the organiser to arrange for your application to be exhibited at the event. The Practical Application Company PO Box 137 Blackpool Lancs FY2 9UN UK Tel: +44 (0)1253 358081 Fax: +44 (0)1253 353811 email: info@pap.com WWW: http://www.practical-applications.co.uk/TPAC ********** III.B.2. Fr: K. Rajaraman Re: IRAL'98 CALL FOR PARTICPATION The 3rd International Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Languages - IRAL'98 15-16 October, 1998 Organized by, and to be held at: Kent Ridge Digital Labs (KRDL) Singapore (Note: KRDL is a new Research Institute incorporating the former Institute of Systems Science and the Information Technology Institute) In cooperation with: ACM SIGIR (pending) ACM Hong Kong Chapter SIG-NLP, Information Processing Society of Japan SIG-DBS, Information Processing Society of Japan SIG-KLC, Korea Information Science Society Japanese Association for Natural Language Processing Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing, Taiwan Singapore Computer Society URL: http://sdmc.krdl.org.sg/IRAL98 ABOUT THE WORKSHOP: The purpose of the IRAL workshop is to bring together researchers and developers who are interested in exchanging new ideas and presenting results in the field of information retrieval (IR), with an emphasis on the issues related to Asian languages and multilingual applications. The first International Workshop was held with the name "Information Retrieval with Oriental Languages" in 1996, in Taejon, Korea, and the second, renamed as "Information Retrieval with Asian Languages" to increase the scope, was held in Tsukuba City in Japan in 1997. LOCATION OF THE WORKSHOP Kent Ridge Digital Labs 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace Singapore 119613 Please see web site: http://sdmc.iss.nus.sg/IRAL98 for details. Note that KRDL was formerly the Kent Ridge Digital Labs (ISS) and is located within the National University of Singapore. WORKSHOP PROGRAM 15 October: Day 1 0830: Registration Note: bus from Novotel Orchid Inn will arrive by 0830 0900: IRAL'98 Workshop Starts Introduction - Dr Mun-Kew Leong, IRAL'98 Organizing Chair Welcome Address - Dr Hwee-Boon Low, IRAL'98 General Chair 0915: Keynote Speech "Chinese Information Processing: The Past, Present and Future" Prof Kim-Teng Lua, National University of Singapore 1015: tea break 1045: session I: Phrase Based Approaches Chair: TBA "Document Indexing based on Noun Compound Analysis and Term Normalization" J.Yoon, K.S.Choi, KAIST, Korea S.Yang, M.Song, Yonsei University, Korea "Chinese Text Classification for Multiple Users Using Phrase Based Approach" X.Jiang, Y.Jin, Q.Qiang, H.Zhu, Nanjing University, China "Towards Automatic Multilevel Indexing for Thai Text Information Retrieval" A.Kawtrakul, C.Thumkanon, Kasetsart University, Thailand P.McFetridge, Simon Fraser University, Canada 1230: lunch 1400: session II: User Approaches Chair: TBA "A Utility-based Information Retrieval System for User Information Usage - UBIR System" Y.Chun, M.Ishima, A.Fujii, T.Ishikawa, ULIS, Japan "Retrieval of Chinese Documents using Handwriting Input" G.Loudon, M.K.Leong, KRDL, Singapore "Improving Retrieval Effectiveness with Hyperlink Information" W.K.Joo, S.H.Myaeng, Chungnam National University, Korea 1545: tea break 1615: session III: Handling the News Chair: TBA "Numerical Information Extraction from Newspaper's Article" K.Saito, Y.Iwai, N.Tamura, H.Nakagawa, Yokohama National University, Japan "Application of Query Expansion Techniques in Probabilistic Japanese News Filtering" T.Sakai, G.J.F.Jones, M.Kajiura, K.Sumita, Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corporation, Japan "Automatic Semantic Analysis of Television News Captions" I.Ide, H.Tanaka, University of Tokyo, Japan 1800: End of day one 1830: IRAL'98 Welcome Reception This will be held at the KRDL Rooftop Patio. An alternative venue will be announced in case of rain. 2030: shuttle back to Novotel Orchid Inn 16 October: Day 2 0855: Day two starts Workshop announcements 0900: Session IV: Data Structures and Databases Chair: TBA "Variable Bit-Block Compression Signature for English-Chinese Information Retrieval" I.Chan, R.Luk, HK Polytechnic University "PSFC - A Partitioned Signature File Indexing Approach for Chinese Information Retrieval" C.Y.Wong, W.Lam, K.F.Wong, Chinese University of HK "Development of an Interpreter that Translates Queries in Malayalam Language to SQL" S.M.Idicula, S.D.Peter, K.P.Jacob, Cochin University, India 1045: tea break 1115: Session V: Cross-Language IR and MT for IR Chair: TBA "Cross-lingual Information Retrieval using Automatically Generated Multilingual Keyword Clusters" N.Kando, A.N.Aizawa, NACSIS, Japan "Cross-Language Similar Document Retrieval from Comparable English-Chinese Texts" C.K.Huang, Y.J.Oyang, National Taiwan University L.F.Chien, IIS, Academia Sinica, Taiwan "Quantitative Study of On-Line and Real-Time Language Translation On the World Wide Web" G.W.Bian, H.H.Chen, National Taiwan University 1300: lunch (1hr 30mins) 1430: Call For Participation - 4th IRAL workshop - PRICAI Cross-language Workshop - others? 1445: Session VI: Structural and Contextual Approaches Chair: TBA "Information Retrieval using Structured Index for Japanese Text" A.Matsumura, A.Takasu, J.Adachi, NACSIS, Japan "Automatic Identificaion of Standard Words Corresponding to Misspelled Words based on Contextual Similarity" B.R.Park, B.H.Yun, H.C.Rim, Korea University, Korea "Improvement of Intelligent Network News Reader HISHO" H.Ozaku, K.Uchimoto, H.Isahara, Kansai Advanced Research Center, Japan 1630: End of Workshop REGISTRATION FEE Regular: US$100 (including tax) Full-time student (with student-id): US$50 (including tax) Both the regular and student registration include a copy of the workshop proceedings as well as lunch on both days, tea-breaks, and the Workshop Welcome Reception. Registration and payment information will be announced later, and can also be found on the workshop web site. REGISTRATION INFORMATION WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION Overall Chair: Hwee-Boon Low, Kent Ridge Digital Labs, Singapore Workshop Organizing Committee: Mun-Kew Leong (program chair), Kent Ridge Digital Labs, Singapore Christopher Khoo (publicity), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore K. Rajaraman, Information Technology Institute, Singapore Victorine Chen-Toh (logistics), Kent Ridge Digital Labs, Singapore Workshop Steering Committee: Tetsuya Ishikawa, University of Library and Information Science, Japan Kam-Fai Wong, Chinese University, Hong Kong Sung-Hyon Myaeng, Chungnam National University, Korea Lee-Feng Chien, Academia Sinica, Taiwan Mun-Kew Leong, Kent Ridge Digital Labs, Singapore Program Committee: Jun Adachi, NACSIS, Japan Jun-ichi Aoe, University of Tokushima, Japan Christopher Khoo, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Ling Cao, Kent Ridge Digital Labs, Singapore Hsin-Hsi Chen, National Taiwan University, Taiwan Key-Sun Choi, KAIST, Korea Schubert Foo, National Technological University, Singapore Asanee Kawtrakul, Kasetsart University, Thailand Kui-Lam Kwok, Queens College, CUNY, USA Hyuk-Chul Kwon, Pusan National University, Korea Wai Lam, Chinese University, Hong Kong Dik L. Lee, University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Geunbae Lee, POSTECH, Korea Joon-Ho Lee, Soonsil University, Korea Kunio Matsui, Fujitsu Labs, Japan Hiroshi Nakagawa, Yokohama National University, Japan Yasushi Ogawa, Ricoh Labs, Japan K. Rajaraman, Information Technology Institute, Singapore Hae-Chang Rim, Korea University, Korea Shuicai Shi, Beijing Information Technology Institute, China Dong-Wook Shin, Chungnam National Univ, Korea Von-Wun Soo, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan Sam-Yuan Sung, National University of Singapore, Singapore Takenobu Tokunaga, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan Ross Wilkinson, CSIRO, Australia Mei-Mei Wu, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan Xiling Zhou, Beijing Information Technology Institute, China ********** III.B.3. Fr: Opher Etzion Re: NGITS '99 Preliminary Call for Papers The Fourth Workshop on Next Generation Information Technologies and Systems (NGITS'99) Havat Habaron Hotel Zikhron-Yaakov, Israel July 5-8, 1999 The Fourth Workshop on Next Generation Information Technologies (NGITS'99) will be held on July 5-8, 1999 at Zikhron-Yaakov, Israel. This forum has been meeting in Israel on a biannual basis since 1993, bringing together active members of the international research community interested in information technology and knowledge based systems. Like its predecessors, this workshop will provide a forum for original presentations on both the theory and the practice in this field. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) - Database and knowledge-base Management Systems and Technology - RDBMS and OO DBMS - heterogeneous and distributed DBMS - active and temporal DBMS - Data intensive applications on the World Wide Web - information retrieval - integration with DBMSs - e-business and e-commerce - Data Warehousing and Workflow - integration of information sources - the use of ontologies to describe business rules - the management of change in the enterprise - OLAP - Data Mining - Knowledge Discovery and Acquisition - Information retrieval and filtering systems (not necessarily as part of the WWW) - Digital libraries - IS analysis and design methods/methodologies, and CASE tools. - Data Quality and Integrity - the use of logical, statistical and other methods to ensure the compliance of data with their specifications - Performance - query processing and access methods - the tradeoff between the quality of the data in the warehouse and the performance of the loading/verification process In this fourth meeting of NGITS, we would like to have special emphasis on the following issues: - future applications whose realization would become possible as a result of next generation information technologies - successful application of methods and technologies from diverse areas of computer science, such as programming languages, operating systems, and networking, to the topics at hand - solutions to the Year 2000 crisis: since this is the last NGITS workshop this millennium, the real consequences of this issue will become apparent shortly afterwards While the main format used in NGITS'99 will be of paper presentation, we strongly encourage the use of complementary media such as demos and multimedia presentations. We shall facilitate the means to use these during the workshop (including live hookups to the Internet). The conference will also feature invited speakers, panels, and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions. There will be formal proceedings. An effort will be made to publish the proceedings in the LNCS series. Important Dates: Paper submission Due: January 25, 1999. Acceptance Notification: March 8, 1999 Final version due: May 8, 1999 Conference Co-Chairs: Opher Etzion Moshe Tennenholtz IBM Research Lab Technion Haifa, ISRAEL Haifa, ISRAEL Program Committee Co-Chairs: Ron Pinter Shalom Tsur IBM Research Lab Information Technology Laboratory Haifa, ISRAEL Hitachi America, Ltd. Santa Clara, CA, USA Program committee and exact submission instructions will be announced in a few weeks. ********* III.B.4. Fr: David Ebert Re: Visualization 98 IEEE Visualization 98 October 18 - 23, 1998 Sheraton Imperial Hotel Research Triangle Park, North Carolina Advanced Registration Deadline: September 25, 1998 Visualization is a vital research and applications frontier shared by entertainment fields. The ninth IEEE Visualization conference focuses on interdisciplinary methods. It supports collaboration among developers and users of visualization methods across all of science, engineering, medicine, and commerce. The conference week will include tutorials, symposia, and mini-workshops Sunday through Tuesday, and papers, panels, case studies, and late-breaking hot topics presentations Wednesday through Friday. The deadline for conference and hotel advance registration is September 25th. For more information see the IEEE Visualization 98 web site at: (http://www.erc.msstate.edu/conferences/vis98) Three local items of interest include: -- A one-day hands-on workshop entitled "An Introduction to Scientific Visualization with AVS/Express", on Sunday October 18, 1998, hosted by the North Carolina Supercomputing Center. (http://www.ncsc.org/training/workshop/) -- A Tour of the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Scientific Visualization Center, on Tuesday October 20, 1998, from 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM. (http://www.epa.gov/vislab/svc/outreach/ieee_vis98/index.html) -- An Open House hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Graphics & Imaging Cluster, on Thursday, October 22, 1998, from 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM. (http://www.cs.unc.edu/~glasgow/VIS98.html) The Information Visualization 98 Symposium has now announced their keynote and capstone speakers. George Robertson of Microsoft will provide the Keynote Address on Monday, October 19th and Edward Tufte will provide the Capstone Address on Tuesday, October 20th. The keynote speaker for the Volume Visualization 98 Symposium will be Jim Foley. His address will be on Monday, October 19th. The keynote speaker for the main Visualization 98 Conference will be Pat Hanrahan of Stanford University. His address will open IEEE Visualization 98 on Wednesday, October 21st. The conference climaxes with a Capstone Address by Turner Whitted, of Microsoft Research, on October 23rd, 1998. We hope you will join us in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina for IEEE Visualization 98. Dr. David S. Ebert Computer Science & Electrical Engineering Department -- U. of Maryland Baltimore County 1000 Hilltop Circle Baltimore, MD 21250 ebert@umbc.edu or http://www.umbc.edu/~ebert ********** III.B.5. Fr: Stefan Wermter Re: NIPS '98 NIPS*98 Conference Workshop (part of International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems) December 4 and 5, 1998 Breckenridge, Colorado, USA Call for papers Hybrid Neural Symbolic Integration Stefan Wermter, University of Sunderland, UK (chair) Ron Sun, University of Alabama, USA (co-chair) Invited speakers and panelists include Garry Cottrell, University of California, San Diego Joachim Diederich, University of Queensland, Australia Jerry Feldman, ICSI, Berkeley, USA Lee Giles, NEC, Princeton, USA Franz Kurfess, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA Noel Sharkey, University of Sheffield, UK Hava Siegelman, Technion, Israel David Waltz, NEC, Princeton, USA Description and motivation: In the past it was very controversial whether neural or symbolic approaches alone will be sufficient to provide a general framework for intelligent processing. In recent years, the field of hybrid neural symbolic processing has seen a remarkable development. The motivation for the integration of symbolic and neural models of cognition and intelligent behavior comes from many different sources. From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, a symbolic interpretation of an artificial neural network architecture is desirable, since the brain has a neuronal structure and the capability to perform symbolic processing. This leads to the question how different processing mechanisms can bridge the large gap between, for instance, acoustic or visual input signals and symbolic reasoning for instance for language processing, inferencing, etc. From the perspective of knowledge-based processing, hybrid neural/symbolic representations are advantageous, since different mutually complementary properties can be integrated. Symbolic representations have advantages with respect to easy interpretation, explicit control, fast initial coding, dynamic variable binding and knowledge abstraction. On the other hand, neural representations show advantages for gradual analog plausibility, learning, robust fault-tolerant processing, and generalization to similar input. Since these advantages are mutually complementary, a hybrid symbolic connectionist architecture can be useful if different processing strategies have to be supported. Areas of interest: - Integration of symbolic and neural techniques for - integrating techniques for language and speech processing - integrating different modes of reasoning and inferencing - combining different techniques in data mining - integration for vision, language, multimedia - hybrid techniques in knowledge based systems - combining fuzzy/neuro techniques - neural/symbolic techniques and applications in engineering - Exploratory research in - emergent symbolic behavior based on neural networks - interpretation and explanation of neural networks - knowledge extraction from neural networks - various forms of interacting knowledge representations - dynamic systems and recurrent networks - evolutionary techniques for cognitive tasks (language, reasoning, etc) - Autonomous learning systems for cognitive agents that utilize both neural and symbolic learning techniques Format: The workshop should provide a forum for presenting and discussing theory and practice of neural/symbolic integration. The format will consist of position statements/panel, group discussion and individual paper presentations. We intend to reserve a significant portion of time for open discussion. The proposed length of the workshop is two days. Suggested panels are: 1. Connectionist models for language, vision, inferencing. What are principles for neural/symbolic representation? 2. Hybrid neural models for new media (multimedia, web searching, digital libraries, etc) What will be the impact of hybrid techniques in the future? Submission: It is intended to publish the results after the workshop, for instance in a book by Springer if there is sufficient interest. We invite papers that can take two forms: short position papers (around 4 pages) or full papers (up to 12 pages). We intend to process submissions electronically. Please a postscript file via ftp (see below). The paper format should be compatible with latex article format: 11pt, 12 pages maximum, including title, address and email address, abstract, figures, references. Notifications will be sent by email to the first author. Postscript files can be uploaded with anonymous ftp. Please send a notification message to stefan.wermter@sunderland.ac.uk ftp isis.sunderland.ac.uk (157.228.12.13) login: anonymous password: cd pub/wermter binary put or quit The paper must arrive not later than 25th September 1998 at the address below. Submission Deadline: 25th September 1998 For an update on invited speakers, panel and information please see http://osiris.sunderland.ac.uk/~cs0stw/wermter/workshops/nips-workshop.html Please send correspondence to: NIPS Workshop Contact >>>>>>>>>> Professor Stefan Wermter Research Chair in Intelligent Systems University of Sunderland School of Computing & Information Systems St Peters Way Sunderland SR6 0DD United Kingdom phone: +44 191 515 3279 fax: +44 191 515 2781 email: stefan.wermter@sunderland.ac.uk http://osiris.sunderland.ac.uk/~cs0stw/ ****************************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, Division of Library Automation, 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA. 94607-5200. Send subscription requests and submissions to: nancy.gusack@ucop.edu Editorial Staff: Nancy Gusack nancy.gusack@ucop.edu Cliff Lynch (emeritus) cliff@cni.org The IRLIST Archives is set up for anonymous FTP. 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