Call for Participation for ISIS

[ISIS conference]

  ISIS CONFERENCE: INFORMATION, STATISTICS AND INDUCTION IN SCIENCE

		    *** Call for Participation ***

			 Old Melbourne Hotel
			 Melbourne, Australia
			  20-23 August 1996


			  INVITED SPEAKERS:

	   Henry Kyburg, Jr. (University of Rochester, NY)
			 Marvin Minsky (MIT)
		 J. Ross Quinlan (Sydney University)
    Jorma J. Rissanen (IBM Almaden Research, San Jose, California)
	       Ray Solomonoff (Oxbridge Research, Mass)


This conference will explore the use of computational modeling to
understand and emulate inductive processes in science.  The problems
involved in building and using such computer models reflect
methodological and foundational concerns common to a variety of
academic disciplines, especially statistics, artificial intelligence
(AI) and the philosophy of science.  This conference aims to bring
together researchers from these and related fields to present new
computational technologies for supporting or analysing scientific
inference and to engage in collegial debate over the merits and
difficulties underlying the various approaches to automating inductive
and statistical inference.

About the invited speakers:

Henry Kyburg is noted for his invention of the lottery paradox (in
   "Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief", 1961) and his research
   since then in providing a non-Bayesian foundation for a probabilistic
   epistemology.

Marvin Minsky is one of the founders of the field of artificial
   intelligence.  He is the inventor of the use of frames in knowledge
   representation, stimulus for much of the concern with nonmonotonic
   reasoning in AI, noted debunker of Perceptrons and recently the
   developer of the "society of minds" approach to cognitive science.

J. Ross Quinlan is the inventor of the information-theoretic approach
   to classification learning in ID3 and C4.5, which have become
   world-wide standards in testing machine learning algorithms.

Jorma J. Rissanen invented the Minimum Description Length (MDL)
   method of inference in 1978, which has subsequently been widely
   adopted in algorithms supporting machine learning.

Ray Solomonoff developed the notion of algorithmic complexity in 1960,
   and his work was influential in shaping the Minimum Message Length
   (MML) work of Chris Wallace (1968) and the Minimum Description Length
   (MDL) work of Jorma Rissanen (1978).

		      =========================
		      Tutorials (Tue 20 Aug 96)
		      =========================

10am - 1pm:
   Tutorial 1: Peter Spirtes "Automated Learning of Bayesian Networks"
   Tutorial 2: Michael Pazzani "Machine Learning and Intelligent Info Access"
2pm - 5pm:
   Tutorial 3: Jan Zytkow "Automation of Scientific Discovery"
   Tutorial 4: Paul Vitanyi "Kolmogorov Complexity & Applications"


About the tutorial leaders:

Peter Spirtes is a co-author of the TETRAD algorithm for the induction
   of causal models from sample data and is an active member of the
   research group on causality and induction at Carnegie Mellon University.

Mike Pazzani is one of the leading researchers world-wide in machine
   learning and the founder of the UC Irvine machine learning archive.
   Current interests include the use of intelligent agents to support
   information filtering over the Internet.

Jan Zytkow is one of the co-authors (with Simon, Langley and Bradshaw)
   of "Scientific Discovery" (1987), reporting on the series of
   BACON programs for automating the learning of quantitative scientific
   laws.

Paul Vitanyi is co-author (with Ming Li) of "An Introduction to
   Kolmogorov Complexity and its Applications (1993) and of much
   related work on complexity and information-theoretic methods of
   induction.  Professor Vitanyi will be visiting the Department
   of Computer Science, Monash, for several weeks after the
   conference.

A limited number of free student conference registrations or tutorial
registrations will be available by application to the organizers in
exchange for part-time work during the conference.

Program Committee:
        Hirotugu Akaike, Lloyd Allison, Shun-Ichi Amari,
        Mark Bedau, Jim Bezdek, Hamparsum Bozdogan, Wray Buntine,
        Peter Cheeseman, Honghua Dai, David Dowe, Usama Fayyad, Doug
        Fisher, Alex Gammerman, Clark Glymour, Randy Goebel, Josef
        Gruska, David Hand, Bill Harper, David Heckerman, Colin
        Howson, Lawrence Hunter, Frank Jackson, Max King, Kevin Korb,
        Henry Kyburg, Rick Lathrop, Ming Li, Nozomu Matsubara,
        Aleksandar Milosavljevic, Richard Neapolitan, Jon Oliver,
        Michael Pazzani, J. Ross Quinlan, Glenn Shafer, Peter Slezak,
        Padhraic Smyth, Ray Solomonoff, Paul Thagard, Neil Thomason,
        Raul Valdes-Perez, Tim van Gelder, Paul Vitanyi, Chris
        Wallace, Geoff Webb, Xindong Wu, Jan Zytkow.

Inquiries to:
        isis96 at cs.monash.edu.au
        David Dowe (chair):		dld at cs.monash.edu.au
        Kevin Korb (co-chair):		korb at cs.monash.edu.au or
        Jonathan Oliver (co-chair):	jono at cs.monash.edu.au

Detailed up-to-date information, including registration costs and further
details of speakers, their talks and the tutorials is available on the WWW at:
        http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/~jono/ISIS/ISIS.shtml

                           - David Dowe, Kevin Korb and Jon Oliver.
=======================================================================