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Melanie Hilario
hilario at cui.unige.ch
Mon Jan 8 06:39:21 EST 1996
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Neural Networks and Structured Knowledge (NNSK)
Call for Contributions
ECAI '96 Workshop
to be held on August 12/13, 1996 during the
12th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
from August 12-16, 1996 in Budapest, Hungary
Contributions are invited for the workshop "Neural Networks and Structured
Knowledge" to be held in conjunction with ECAI'96 in Budapest, Hungary.
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Description of the Workshop
Neural networks mostly are used for tasks dealing with information presented in
vector or matrix form, without a rich internal structure reflecting relations
between different entities. In some application areas, e.g. speech processing
or forecasting, types of networks have been investigated for their ability to
represent sequences of input data. Whereas approaches to use neural networks
for the representation and processing of structured knowledge have been around
for quite some time, especially in the area of connectionism, they frequently
suffer from problems with expressiveness, knowledge acquisition, adaptivity and
learning, or human interpretation. In the last years much progress has been
made in the theoretical understanding and the construction of neural systems
capable of representing and processing structured knowledge in an adequate way,
while maintaining essential capabilities of neural networks such as learning,
tolerance of noise, treatment of inconsistencies, and parallel operation. The
goal of this workshop is twofold: On one hand, existing mechanisms are
critically examined with respect to their suitability for the acquisition,
representation, processing and interpretation of structured knowledge. On the
other hand, new approaches, especially concerning the design of systems based
on such mechanisms, are presented, with particular emphasis on their
application to realistic problems.
The following topics lie within the intended scope of the workshop:
Concepts and Methods:
* extraction, injection and refinement of structured knowledge from, into
and by neural networks
* inductive discovery/formation of structured knowledge
* combining symbolic machine learning techniques with neural lerning
paradigms to improve performance
* classification, recognition, prediction, matching and manipulation of
structured information
* neural methods that use or discover structural similarities
* neural models to infer hierarchical categories
* structuring of network architectures: methods for introducing
coarse-grained structure into networks, unsupervised learning of internal
modularity
Application Areas:
* medical and technical diagnosis: discovery and manipulation of structured
dependencies, constraints, explanations
* molecular biology and chemistry: prediction of molecular structure
unfolding, classification of chemical structures, DNA analysis
* automated reasoning: robust matching, manipulation of logical terms, proof
plans, search space reduction
* software engineering: quality testing, modularisation of software
* geometrical and spatial reasoning: robotics, structured representation of
objects in space, figure animation, layouting of objects
* other applications that use, generate or manipulate structures with neural
methods: structures in music composition, legal reasoning, architectures,
technical configuration, ...
The list of topics and potential application areas above indicates an important
tendency towards neural networks which are capable of dealing with structured
information. This can be done on an internal level, where one network is used
to represent and process knowledge for a task, or on a higher level as in
modular neural networks, where the structure may be represented by the
relations between the modules.
The central theme of this workshop will be the treatment of structured
information using neural networks, independent of the particular network type
or processing paradigm. Thus the workshop theme is orthogonal to the issue of
connectionist/symbolic integration, and is not intended as a continuation of
the more philosphically oriented discussion of symbolic vs. subsymbolic
representation and processing.
Workshop Format
Our hope is to attract 20-30 people for the workshop; the maximum will be 40.
The setup of the workshop is specifically designed to encourage an informal and
interactive atmosphere (not a mini-conference with a number of formal talks and
2 minutes of questions after a talk).
The workshop will be based on the following points:
* Talks will have break-points where audience participation is requested
* For each talk, at least two organizers or participants will be acting as
commentators
* There will be discussion sessions specifically devoted to a particular
topic of interest, with mandatory contributions from the participants If
time permits, one session could be plenary, and another in small groups.
The plenary session would discuss a broad topic of general interest, e.g.
benefits and problems of different approaches to use neural networks for
the representation and processing of structured knowledge. The group
sessions would concentrate on specific application areas.
* Preprints of the contributions will be made available to the participants
electronically in advance
* Statements of interest as well as the willingness to act as commentators
for other participants' talks are requested from the participants
* Self-Introduction of participants at the beginning of the workshop
Organizing Committee
Franz Kurfess (chair)New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, USA
Daniel Memmi LIFIA-IMAG Grenoble, France
Andreas Kuechler Universitaet Ulm, Germany
Arnaud Giacometti Universite de Tours, France
Contact
Prof. Franz Kurfess
Computer and Information Sciences Dept.
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Newark, NJ 07102, U.S.A.
Voice : +1/201-596-5767
Fax : +1/201-596-5767
E-mail: franz at cis.njit.edu
Program Committee*
Venkat Ajjanagadde - University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Ethem Alpaydin - Bogazici University
C. Lee Giles - NEC Research Institute
Melanie Hilario - University of Geneva (co-chair)
Steffen Hoelldobler - TU Dresden
Mirek Kubat - University of Ottawa
Guenther Palm - Universitaet Ulm
Hava Siegelman - Technion (Israeli Institue of Technology)
Alessandro Sperduti - University of Pisa (co-chair)
* Tentative list--names of other PC members will be added as
confirmations come in.
Submission of Papers
Contributions should be received no later than March 15. Papers should be no
longer than 8 pages; preferred format is one column and of A4 (8 1/2" x 11")
size with 3/4" margins all round. The first page of a contribution must contain
the following information: title, author(s) name and affiliation, mailing
address, phone and fax number, e-mail address, an abstract of ca. 300 words,
and three to five keywords. All submissions will be acknowledged by electronic
mail; correspondence will be sent to the first author.
All submitted papers will be reviewed by at least two members of the program
committee. In addition to the technical quality of a submission, we will also
take into consideration the potential for discussion in order to stimulate the
interactive character of the workshop. If possible, accepted papers will be
made electronically available to participants in advance. Workshop proceedings
will be distributed to participants by ECAI organizers. We are also currently
in negotiations with publishers about an edited volume of workshop
contributions, or a special issue in a journal.
If you intend to submit a paper please do not hesitate to contact the
organizing committee as soon as possible so that the workshop can be formed and
planned further.
Electronic submissions are strongly encouraged (see the procedure described
below). If you cannot submit your paper electronically (due to technical
problems or the lack of technical facilities), please send 3 hardcopies to:
Andreas Kuechler
Department of Neural Information Processing
University of Ulm
Oberer Eselsberg
89069 Ulm
Germany
Participation and Registration
Participation without a full contribution is possible. In this case we request
a statement of interest (to be sent to the Workshop Chair franz at cis.njit.edu)
and the willingness to act as commentator for an accepted contribution, which
will be made available in advance. Preference will be given to attendees with a
paper. To cover costs, a fee of ECU 50 for each participant of each workshop in
addition to the normal ECAI-96 conference registration fee will be charged by
the main conference organizers. Please note that attendees of workshops MUST
register for the main ECAI conference.
Schedule
Submission deadline March 15, 1996
Notification of acceptance/rejection April 15, 1996
Final version of papers due May 15, 1996
Deadline for participation without paper June 15, 1996
Date of the workshop August 12/13, 1996
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Electronic submission procedure
This is a two-step procedure:
1. Please send an email with the subject 'nnsk-submission' to
nnsk-submission at neuro.informatik.uni-ulm.de
in ASCII-format with the title, author name(s) and affiliation, mailing
address, phone and fax number, e-mail address, an abstract of ca. 300
words, and three to five keywords. Correspondence (unless otherwise
indicated) will be sent to the first author. Specify how you will send
your paper (ftp or e-mail). Papers should be submitted in
Postscript-format (please avoid exotic or out-of-date systems for the
generation of the postscript file). UNIX-file format is preferred, large
files should be compressed (using 'compress' or 'gzip'). If you choose the
ftp option, please use the file-name <first-author>.ps and add this name
to your email.
2. There will be two alternatives:
* ftp Option:
Connect via anonymous ftp to neuro.informatik.uni-ulm.de and 'put' your
file in the incoming/nnsk-submission directory (please note that this
directory is set to write-only).
Here is an example of how to upload a file:
unix> gzip Andreas.Kuechler.ps
unix> ftp neuro.informatik.uni-ulm.de
Connected to neuro.informatik.uni-ulm.de.
220 neuro FTP server (SunOS 4.1) ready.
Name (neuro.informatik.uni-ulm.de:andi): ftp
331 Guest login ok, send ident as password.
Password:
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
ftp> cd incoming/nnsk-submission
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> bin
200 Type set to I.
ftp> put Andreas.Kuechler.ps.gz
200 PORT command successful.
150 Binary data connection for Andreas.Kuechler.ps.gz (134.60.73.27,2493).
226 Binary Transfer complete.
local: Andreas.Kuechler.ps.gz remote: Andreas.Kuechler.ps.gz
54800 bytes sent in 0.12 seconds (4.5e+02 Kbytes/s)
ftp> bye
221 Goodbye.
unix>
* e-mail Option:
Send an e-mail with the subject 'paper: ' to
nnsk-submission at neuro.informatik.uni-ulm.de
and include your postscript-file <first-author>.ps (please avoid exotic
email-formats and mailers). Be sure to 'uuencode' compressed files before
sending them. Here is an example of how to send a (compressed and
uuencoded) file (via UNIX):
unix> gzip Andreas.Kuechler.ps
unix> uuencode Andreas.Kuechler.ps.gz Andreas.Kuechler.ps.gz |
mail -s 'paper: mytitle/Andreas.Kuechler'
nnsk-submission at neuro.informatik.uni-ulm.de
unix>
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Latest information can be retrieved from the NNSK WWW-page
http://www.informatik.uni-ulm.de/fakultaet/abteilungen/ni/ECAI-96/NNSK.html.
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