From manuel.lopes at inria.fr Wed May 1 17:33:49 2013 From: manuel.lopes at inria.fr (Manuel Lopes) Date: Wed, 1 May 2013 23:33:49 +0200 (CEST) Subject: Connectionists: Last Call for RSS Workshop on Active learning in robotics: Exploration, Curiosity, and Interaction In-Reply-To: <577517688.15453086.1365697961907.JavaMail.root@inria.fr> Message-ID: <284540141.23690999.1367444029376.JavaMail.root@inria.fr> Last Call! Robotics Science and Systems, June 27, Berlin Workshop on Active learning in robotics: Exploration, Curiosity, and Interaction Workshop description Applications of robots are expanding at a fast rate and are expected to operate in less controllable and harder to model domains. Learning and adaptation becomes essential to deploy robots that continuously interact with the environment, acquire new data during operation and use them to improve its performance by developing new skills or improving and adapting its models. How should a robot acquire and use this stream of data? How can it close the action-perception loop to efficiently learn models and acquire skills? Researchers in robotics, statistics and machine learning have answered these questions from different perspectives and setups: active learning, submodular optimization, exploration strategies, multi-armed bandits among many others. All such approaches provide ways for the robot to choose better data to learn, reducing the time and energy used while at the same time improving generalization capabilities. The goal of this workshop is to show how formalisms developed in different communities can be applied in a multidisciplinary context as it is robotics research. It will bring together researchers to build bridges between these different perspectives and to exchange ideas about representations and methods for active learning in robotics. In addition to the classical exploration problem, the workshop will also explore connections with new trends such as using intrinsic motivation to model curiosity and drive exploration towards the acquisition of unknown skills or the development of active strategies for human-robot interaction in the context of co-working or learning from a human teacher. Keywords: Active Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Markov Decision Processes, Exploration/Exploitation, Intrinsic Motivation Call for contributions: We solicit contributed presentations in all areas of active learning applied in robotics including, but not limited to: exploration, reinforcement learning, active sensing and perception, intrinsic motivation, active manipulation, human-robot co-working. The workshop aims to foster discussion between the different active strategies. Therefore, we will accept already published materials as well as unpublished work. Contributions will be evaluated in terms of its relevance to the workshop topic. Accepted contributions will be given an oral presentation or poster (plus spotlight talk) at the workshop. Important dates: Paper Submission: May 7, 2013 Paper Notification: May 15, 2013 Workshop Dates: June 27, 2013 Submission can be done at: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rss13-ws-alr See webpage for more details: https://webdiis.unizar.es/~montesan/web/index.php/rss2013wsactivelearning --------------------------------------------------------------- Manuel Lopes - Researcher flowers.inria.fr/mlopes FLOWERS team Phone: +33524574179 200, avenue de la Vieille Tour 33405 Talence, Cedex, France --------------------------------------------------------------- From irodero at cac.rutgers.edu Wed May 1 11:27:18 2013 From: irodero at cac.rutgers.edu (Ivan Rodero) Date: Wed, 1 May 2013 11:27:18 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: IC3-2013 - Call for Papers In-Reply-To: <6F339279-23CD-4553-95DF-B1F906F948E3@rutgers.edu> References: <51EC7783-DCAD-4364-B1DC-576C726BAA31@rutgers.edu> <6F339279-23CD-4553-95DF-B1F906F948E3@rutgers.edu> Message-ID: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please accept our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this CFP! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ================================================================================ CALL FOR PAPERS The Sixth International Conference on Contemporary Computing (IC3-2013) NOIDA, (outskirts of New Delhi), India August 8 ? 10, 2013 Technical Sponsor: IEEE Delhi Section http://www.jiit.ac.in/jiit/ic3/ ================================================================================ Computing is an ever-evolving area. The International Conference on Contemporary Computing, is jointly organized every year since 2008 by the Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India and the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA. It focuses on topics that are of contemporary interest to computer and computational scientists and engineers. In the past, IC3 has had speakers from MIT, UC Berkley, Harvard University, CMU, University of Texas, Columbia University, University of Southern California, UC Santa Barba, University of Minnesota, University of Florida, Georgia State University, University of Geneva, IITs, IIITs, Yahoo Research, Google, Adobe Systems, IBM Research, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Air Force Research Laboratory (USA), Cisco Systems, Intel Labs, TCS Innovation Labs, SETLabs (now Infosys Labs), ST Microelectronics, Landis + Gyr, Strand Life Sciences, and Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, etc. Past conference proceeding have been published in Springer?s Communications in Computer and Information Science Series, ISSN: 1865:0929. CCIS is abstracted/indexed in ISI Proceedings, Scopus, DBLP. IC3-2013 will bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government to deliberate upon the algorithmic, systemic, applied, and educational aspects of contemporary computing. The conference will be held in NOIDA (outskirts of New Delhi), India. The conference will feature world-class keynote speakers, exhibits, special sessions, tutorials, and paper presentations. Conference Tracks: (i) Algorithms, (ii) Systems (Hardware & Software), (iii) Applications, (iv) Education A partial list of areas of interest follows: Distributed and Cloud Computing Parallel and Multi-core Computing System/network-on-chip Reconfigurable architectures Novel Algorithmic Paradigms Algorithms Machine Learning Intelligent Systems Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery Big Data Analytics Information Security Mobile Computing Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing Entertainment Technology and Cultural Informatics Multimedia Computing Next generation Internet Embedded Systems and Robotics Human Computer Interaction Information and Collaboration Systems E-commerce Software Engineering Bio-informatics and Scientific Computing Wireless Networking Medical Informatics Computational Finance Remote Sensing Computing Education E-learning Education Informatics Research Methods for Computing Paper Submission Guidelines: Authors are invited to submit manuscripts that demonstrate original unpublished research. Please see the conference website http://www.jiit.ac.in/jiit/ic3 for paper submission procedures and detailed guidelines. Papers will be reviewed by experts and selected for presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings based on their clarity, originality, relevance and significance. Accepted papers, only when presented in the Conference (numbered 31296 in the IEEE Record) by duly registered authors, shall be uploaded to IEEE Xplore. Important Dates: Submission Deadline: May 30, 2013 (HARD, NO EXTENSIONS) Author Notification: June 30, 2013 Final Manuscripts and Registration: July 10, 2013 Conference Organization: Patrons: Jaiprakash Gaur Manoj Gaur Steering Committee: Yaj Medury, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, India S. C. Saxena, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, India Sartaj Sahni, University of Florida, USA Sanjay Ranka, University of Florida, USA Srinivas Aluru, Iowa State University, USA & IIT Bombay, India Manish Parashar, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA Guna Seetharaman, Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, NY, USA Narendra Ahuja, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA & ITRA, MCIT India Pankaj Jalote Director, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi Sanjay Goel, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, India Advisory Committee: SK Kak, VC, Mahamaya Technical University Shiban K Koul, IIT Delhi and Chairman IEEE Delhi Section, India Om Vikas, Former Director, IIITM, Gwalior K. Karmeshu, JNU, Delhi India K.K. Biswas, IIT Delhi, India S.K. Gupta, IIT Delhi, India A.B. Bhattacharyya, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, India Krishna Gopal, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, India K.Kant, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, India RC Jain, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, India Abdul Quaiyum Ansari, JMI, New Delhi and IEEE, Delhi Section, India General Co-chairs Sartaj Sahni, University of Florida, USA Hari Om Gupta, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, India Sanjay Goel, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, India Program Co-Chair Manish Parashar, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA Albert Zomaya, University of Sydney, Australia Track Co- Chairs Algorithms Jianer Chen, Texas A&M University, USA Applications Jian-Nong Cao, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Systems Pascal Bouvry, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg Education Sushil K. Prasad, Georgia State University Publicity Co-Chairs Rajkumar Buyya, University of Melbourne, AUS Paolo Bellavista, University of Bologna, Italy Koji Nakano, Hiroshima University, Japan Masoud Sadjadi, Florida International University, USA Bhardwaj Veeravalli, University of Singapore, Singapore Divakar Yadav, JIIT, India Shishir Kumar, Jaypee University of Engineering and Technology, India Nitin, Jaypee University of Information Technology, India Website Administration Sandeep Singh, JIIT, India Publication Committee Vikas Saxena, JIIT Noida, India (Publication Chair) Satish Chandra, JIIT, India Maneesha Srivastava, JIIT, India Chetna Gupta, JIIT, India Buddha Singh, JIIT, India Advitiya Sinha, JIIT, India Sangeeta Lal, , JIIT, India Graphic Design Anuja Arora, JIIT, India Registration and Local Arrangement Co-Chairs Prakash Kumar, JIIT, India Saurabh K. Raina, JIIT, India Manish K Thakur, JIIT, India Sangeeta Mittal, JIIT, Noida Shikha Mehta, JIIT, Noida -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: CFP_IC3_2013.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 117869 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- ============================================================= Ivan Rodero, Ph.D. Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute (RDI2) NSF Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing (CAC) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Office: CoRE Bldg, Rm 625 94 Brett Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8058 Phone: (848) 228-6474 Fax: (732) 445-0593 Email: irodero at rutgers dot edu WWW: http://nsfcac.rutgers.edu/people/irodero ============================================================= From ted.carnevale at yale.edu Wed May 1 21:04:39 2013 From: ted.carnevale at yale.edu (Ted Carnevale) Date: Wed, 01 May 2013 21:04:39 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: NEURON 2013 Summer Course Message-ID: <5181BBA7.9050406@yale.edu> Space is still available in the NEURON 2013 Summer Course, but the registration deadline is Friday, May 24, so you should act soon if you want to learn the latest about constructing and using models with NEURON. For a course description and the on-line registration form, see http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/static/courses/nscsd2013/nscsd2013.html I should also mention that, in response to requests from registrants who have already signed up, we are offering the option of additional instruction on network models and simulations with parallel hardware. This material will be covered in a day and a half of lectures and exercises that will start immediately after the end of the regular Summer Course; a supplementary fee of $350 will be charged to cover the cost of extra handout materials, catering, and on-campus housing for two extra nights. --Ted From salah at boun.edu.tr Wed May 1 02:59:00 2013 From: salah at boun.edu.tr (Ali Salah) Date: Wed, 1 May 2013 09:59:00 +0300 Subject: Connectionists: CFP: IEEE TAMD Special Issue on Behavior Understanding and Developmental Robotics Message-ID: IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development Special Issue on Behavior Understanding and Developmental Robotics Final Call for Papers We solicit papers that inspect scientific, technological and application challenges that arise from the mutual interaction of developmental robotics and computational human behavior understanding. While some of the existing techniques of multimodal behavior analysis and modeling can be readily re-used for robots, novel scientific and technological challenges arise when one aims to achieve human behavior understanding in the context of natural and life-long human-robot interaction. We seek contributions that deal with the two sides of this problem: 1- Behavior analysis for developmental robotics: Robots need to be capable to learn dynamically and incrementally how to interpret, and thus understand multimodal human behavior. This includes for example learning the meaning of new linguistic constructs used by a human, learning to interpret the emotional state of particular users from para-linguistic or non-verbal behavior, characterizing properties of the interaction or learning to guess the intention, and potentially the structure of goals of a human based on its overt behavior. Furthermore, robots need in particular to be capable of learning new tasks through interaction with humans, for example using imitation learning or learning by demonstration. This heavily involves the capacity for learning how to decode teaching behavior, including linguistic and non-linguistic cues, feedback and guidance provided by humans, as well as inferring reusable primitives in human behavior. 2- Behavior analysis through developmental robotics: Developmental social robots can offer stimulating opportunities for improving scientific understanding of human behavior, and especially to allow a deeper analysis of the semantics and structure of human behavior. Humans tend to interpret the meaning and the structure of other's behaviors in terms of their own action repertoire, which acts as a strong helping prior for this complex inference problem. Since robots are also embodied and have an action repertoire, this can be used leveraged as an experimental and theoretical tool to investigate human behavior, and in particular, the development and change of behavior over time. Topics include the following, among others: Adaptive human-robot interaction Action and language understanding Sensing human behavior Incremental learning of human behavior Learning by demonstration Intrinsic motivation Robotic platforms for behavior analysis Multimodal interaction Human-robot games Semiotics for robots Social and affective signals Imitation Contributions can exemplify diverse approaches to behavior analysis, but the relevance to developmental robotics should be clear and explicitly argumented. In particular, it should involve one of the following: 1) incremental and developmental learning techniques, 2) techniques that allow adapting to changes in human behavior, 3) techniques that study evolution and change in human behavior. Interested parties are encouraged to contact the editors with questions about the suitability of a manuscript. Editors: ? Albert Ali Salah, Bogazi?i University, salah at boun.edu.tr ? Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, INRIA, pierre-yves.oudeyer at inria.fr ? ?etin Meri?li, Carnegie Mellon University, cetin at cmu.edu ? Javier Ruiz-del-Solar, Universidad de Chile, jruizd at ing.uchile.cl Three kinds of submissions are possible: ? Regular papers, up to 15 double column pages, should describe new empirical findings that utilize innovative methodological and/or analytic techniques. ? Correspondence papers, up to 8 double column pages, can focus on a limited set of relevant aspects in depth. ? Survey papers, describing classes of behavior analysis approaches in developmental robotics. Before submitting a survey paper, the authors should contact the guest editors. Instructions for authors: http://cis.ieee.org/ieee-transactions-on-autonomous-mental-development.html We are accepting submissions through Manuscript Central at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tamd-ieee (please select ?Human Behavior Understanding? as the submission type) When submitting your manuscript, please also cc it to the editors. Timeline: 15 May 2013: Deadline for paper submission (Extended) 15 July 2013: Notification of the first round of review results 15 October 2013: Final version 20 October 2013: Electronic publication December 2013: Printed publication -- Dr. Albert Ali Salah Bogazici University, Computer Engineering Dept. 34342 Bebek - Istanbul, Turkey Phone: +90 212 359 (7774) http://www.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/~salah/ Bogazici University, Cognitive Science MA Program http://www.cogsci.boun.edu.tr "If you are interested in Cognitive Sciences in Turkey, please consider joining the two communication groups established by the CogSci programs of METU and Bogazici Univ.; one in LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4348599) and the other in GoogleGroups: cogsci-news-tr (http://groups.google.com/group/cogsci-news-tr?hl=en)." From yael at Princeton.EDU Wed May 1 14:12:48 2013 From: yael at Princeton.EDU (Yael Niv) Date: Wed, 1 May 2013 14:12:48 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: Submissions to RLDM2013 are now open (deadline: June 16) Message-ID: <02AA476C-7FFE-4F4B-8B84-8B3909CA04E3@Princeton.EDU> The 1st Multidisciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM2013) www.rldm.org Oct 25-27, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA ====================================================== Submissions to RLDM2013 are now being accepted at https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/RLDM2013 Deadline: 16 June 2013, midnight UTC-11 We invite extended abstracts for contributed poster presentations. We welcome submissions of original research related to "learning and decision making over time to achieve a goal", coming from any discipline or disciplines, describing empirical results from human, animal, robot or artificial agent experiments, and/or theoretical work, simulations and modeling. Contributions should be aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, but not at the expense of technical excellence. This is an abstract-based meeting, with no published conference proceedings. As such, work that is intended for, or has been submitted to, other conferences or journals is also welcome, provided that the intent of communication to other disciplines is clear. Submissions should consist of a summary (max 2000 characters; text only), and an extended abstract of between one and four pages (including figures and references). LaTeX and RTF templates, and sample submissions, are available from www.rldm.org/submit.html To submit your abstract please go to https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/RLDM2013 Submissions will be reviewed for relevance to the topic and for quality. Exceptional abstracts will be selected for poster spotlight presentations, and for a best poster talk. IMPORTANT DATES: Submissions open: 1 May 2013 Submissions close: 16 June 2013, midnight UTC-11 (American Samoa Time) Notification of acceptance: by early August, 2013 Early registration: 31 August 2013 Meeting: 25-27 October 2013, Princeton, NJ To ensure that you receive future announcements about RLDM2013 please join our mailing list at http://tinyurl.com/RLDMlist (you must log in to google to see the "join list" button, and choose 'all emails' in the options). RLDM2013 confirmed speakers: http://rldm.org/rldm2013/list-of-speakers/ RLDM2013 Programme Committee: http://rldm.org/rldm2013/committees/rldm2013-pc/ (TBD) From chiestand at salk.edu Sun May 5 09:21:17 2013 From: chiestand at salk.edu (Chris Hiestand) Date: Sun, 5 May 2013 15:21:17 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: CfP: Neural Information Processing Systems 2013 Message-ID: Neural Information Processing Systems Conference and Workshops December 5-10, 2013 Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA http://nips.cc/Conferences/2013/ Deadline for Paper Submissions: Friday, May 31, 2013, 11 pm Universal Time (4 pm Pacific Daylight Time). Submit at: https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/NIPS2013/ Submissions are solicited for the Twenty-Seventh Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers in all aspects of neural and statistical information processing and computation, and their applications. The conference is a highly selective, single track meeting that includes oral and poster presentations of refereed papers as well as invited talks. The 2013 conference will be held on December 5-8 at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. One day of tutorials (December 5) will precede the main conference, and two days of workshops (December 9-10) will follow it at the same location. Note that differently from previous years, the conference will start on a Thursday. Submission process: Electronic submissions will be accepted until Friday, May 31, 2013, 11 pm Universal Time (4 pm Pacific Daylight Time). As was the case last year, final papers will be due in advance of the conference. However, minor changes such as typos and additional references will still be allowed for a certain period after the conference. Reviewing: As in previous years, reviewing will be double-blind: the reviewers will not know the identities of the authors. However, differently from previous years, anonymous reviews and meta-reviews of accepted papers will be made public after the end of the review process. Evaluation Criteria: Submissions will be refereed on the basis of technical quality, novelty, potential impact, and clarity. Dual Submissions Policy: Submissions that are identical (or substantially similar) to versions that have been previously published, or accepted for publication, or that have been submitted in parallel to other conferences are not appropriate for NIPS and violate our dual submission policy. Exceptions to this rule are the following: 1. Submission is permitted of a short version of a paper that has been submitted to a journal, but has not yet been published in that journal. Authors must declare such dual-submissions either through the CMT submission form, or via email to the program chairs at program-chairs at nips.cc. It is the authors? responsibility to make sure that the journal in question allows dual concurrent submissions to conferences. 2. Submission is permitted for papers presented or to be presented at conferences or workshops without proceedings, or with only abstracts published. Previously published papers with substantial overlap written by the authors must be cited so as to preserve author anonymity (e.g. ?the authors of [1] prove that ??). Differences relative to these earlier papers must be explained in the text of the submission. It is acceptable to submit to NIPS 2013 work that has been made available as a technical report (or similar, e.g. in arXiv) without citing it. While this could compromise the authors' anonymity, reviewers will be asked to refrain from actively searching for the authors? identity or disclose to the area chairs if their identity is known to them. The dual-submission rules apply during the NIPS review period which begins May 31 and ends September 5, 2013. Submission Instructions: All submissions will be made electronically, in PDF format. Papers are limited to eight pages, including figures and tables, in the NIPS style. An additional ninth page containing only cited references is allowed. Complete submission and formatting instructions, including style files, are available from the NIPS website, http://nips.cc. Supplementary Material: Authors can submit up to 10 MB of material, containing proofs, audio, images, video, data or source code. Note that the reviewers and the program committee reserve the right to judge the paper solely on the basis of the 9 pages of the paper; looking at any extra material is up to the discretion of the reviewers and is not required. Technical Areas: Papers are solicited in all areas of neural information processing and statistical learning, including, but not limited to: * Algorithms and Architectures: statistical learning algorithms, kernel methods, graphical models, Gaussian processes, Bayesian methods, neural networks, deep learning, dimensionality reduction and manifold learning, model selection, combinatorial optimization, relational and structured learning. * Applications: innovative applications that use machine learning, including systems for time series prediction, bioinformatics, systems biology, text/web analysis, multimedia processing, and robotics. * Brain Imaging: neuroimaging, cognitive neuroscience, EEG (electroencephalogram), ERP (event related potentials), MEG (magnetoencephalogram), fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), brain mapping, brain segmentation, brain computer interfaces. * Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence: theoretical, computational, or experimental studies of perception, psychophysics, human or animal learning, memory, reasoning, problem solving, natural language processing, and neuropsychology. * Control and Reinforcement Learning: decision and control, exploration, planning, navigation, Markov decision processes, game playing, multi-agent coordination, computational models of classical and operant conditioning. * Hardware Technologies: analog and digital VLSI, neuromorphic engineering, computational sensors and actuators, microrobotics, bioMEMS, neural prostheses, photonics, molecular and quantum computing. * Learning Theory: generalization, regularization and model selection, Bayesian learning, spaces of functions and kernels, statistical physics of learning, online learning and competitive analysis, hardness of learning and approximations, statistical theory, large deviations and asymptotic analysis, information theory. * Neuroscience: theoretical and experimental studies of processing and transmission of information in biological neurons and networks, including spike train generation, synaptic modulation, plasticity and adaptation. * Speech and Signal Processing: recognition, coding, synthesis, denoising, segmentation, source separation, auditory perception, psychoacoustics, dynamical systems, recurrent networks, language models, dynamic and temporal models. * Visual Processing: biological and machine vision, image processing and coding, segmentation, object detection and recognition, motion detection and tracking, visual psychophysics, visual scene analysis and interpretation. Demonstrations and Workshops: There is a separate Demonstration track at NIPS. Authors wishing to submit to the Demonstration track should consult the Call for Demonstrations. The workshops will be held at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, December 9-10. The upcoming call for workshop proposals will provide details. Web URL: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2013/CallForPapers From jobs at intelligent-autonomous-systems.de Sun May 5 13:06:22 2013 From: jobs at intelligent-autonomous-systems.de (Jan Peters @ IAS TU Darmstadt) Date: Sun, 5 May 2013 19:06:22 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Robotics & Machine Learning Positions @ TU Darmstadt Message-ID: Open Robotics & Machine Learning Positions ====================================== The Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab (IAS) at the Technical University of Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt) is seeking for several highly qualified postdoctoral researchers as well as talented Ph.D. students with strong interests in one or more of the following research topics: * Machine Learning for Robotics (especially Reinforcement Learning, Imitation, and Model Learning) * Tactile Exploration, Robot Grasping and Manipulation * Interaction Learning, Intent Modeling and Inference * Whole-body Contacts in Humanoid Robotics * Robot Control, Learning for Control * Robot Table Tennis Outstanding students and researchers from the areas of robotics and robotics-related areas including machine learning, control engineering or computer vision are welcome to apply. The candidates are expected to conduct independent research and at the same time contribute to ongoing projects in the areas listed above. Successful candidates can furthermore be given the opportunity to work with undergraduate, M.Sc. and Ph.D. students. *** PROSPECTIVE APPLICANTS: PLEASE MEET JAN PETERS *** *** AT ICRA IF YOU ATTEND *** Due to IAS' strong ties to the Max Planck Institutes for Intelligent Systems and Biological Cybernetics, the University of Southern California, as well as to the Honda Research Institute, there will be ample opportunities of collaboration with these institutes. POSITION REQUIREMENTS Ph.D. position applicants need to have a Master's degree in a relevant field (e.g., Robotics, Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics & Optimization, Math and Physics) and have exhibited their ability to perform research in either robotics or machine learning. A successful Post-doc applicant should have a strong robotics and/or machine learning background with a track record of top-tier research publications, including relevant conferences (e.g., RSS, ICRA, IROS or ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, NIPS, AISTATS) and journals (e.g., AURO, TRo, IJRR or JMLR, MLJ, Neural Computation) . A Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical or Mechanical Engineering (or another field clearly related to robotics and/or machine learning) as well as strong organizational and coordination skills are a must. Expertise in working with real robot systems is a big plus for all applicants. HOW TO APPLY? All complete applications submitted through our online application system found at http://www.ias.tu-darmstadt.de/Jobs/Application will be considered. There is no fixed deadline: the positions will be filled as soon as possible. Ph.D. applicants should provide at least a research statement, a PDF with their CV, degrees, and grade-sheets, and two references who are willing to write a recommendation letter. PostDoc applicants require three references and, in addition, should provide their top three publications. Please ensure to include a link to your research web-site as well as your date of availability. Applicants are encouraged to contact Jan Peters, Marc Deisenroth, Heni Ben Amor and Gerhard Neumann during the upcoming ICRA, R:SS or ICML conferences. Candidates giving a presentation at one of these conferences are invited to send a corresponding note to us. MORE INFORMATION? VISIT: http://www.ias.tu-darmstadt.de/Jobs/InformationForApplicants From alessandro.torcini at cnr.it Thu May 2 12:26:26 2013 From: alessandro.torcini at cnr.it (Alessandro Torcini) Date: Thu, 2 May 2013 18:26:26 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Workshop at CNS 2013 Message-ID: We have 2 empty slots for oral contributed presentations (15 minutes each) at the following workshop Relevance of Synaptic Plasticity for Multistable Behaviour in Neural Systems organized by Alessandro Torcini (Institute of Complex Systems, Firenze, Italy) Christian Hauptmann (Research Center Juelich, Juelich, Germany) at TwentySecond Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting CNS*2013 CNS*2013, July 18, 2013 in Paris Details on the workshop can be found here http://neuro.fi.isc.cnr.it/index.php?page=CNS2013 If you are interested to submit a proposal send an abstract with references to alessandro.torcini at cnr.it and c.hauptmann at fz-juelich.de within 01st June 2013 the selected oral presentations will be notified by June 15th From gros at itp.uni-frankfurt.de Mon May 6 09:55:37 2013 From: gros at itp.uni-frankfurt.de (Prof. Claudius Gros) Date: Mon, 6 May 2013 15:55:37 +0200 (CEST) Subject: Connectionists: Fully funded PhD position in complex systems/theoretical neurosciences Message-ID: I would like to bring your attention to our PhD-program in Complex Dynamical Systems Theory / Computational Neurosciences At the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Goethe University Frankfurt Field(s): complex systems theory, computational neurosciences neural models and networks, dynamical systems Application deadline: June 1st, 2013 Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Claudius Gros E-mail: cgr at itp.uni-frankfurt.de Address: Institute for Theoretical Physics, Goethe University Frankfurt, Job description: Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD position at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Frankfurt University. We are developing new models and generative principles for the brain using a range of toolsets from dynamical systems theory and computational neurosciences. Examples are new objective functions and generating functionals for multistability, transient state dynamics and self-limiting Hebbian plasticity rules. Several subjects are available for the announced PhD thesis including studies of the brain dynamics, and of the sensorimotor loop, using generating functionals, and/or studies of new synaptic plasticity rules interpolating smoothly between spiking and rate-encoding neurons. The work will include analytical investigations and numerical simulations of neural models and neural networks, using the toolset of dynamical systems theory. The candidates should have a Diploma/Master in physics with an excellent academic track record and good computational skills. Experience or strong interest in the fields of complex systems, computational neurosciences, dynamical systems theory and/or artificial or biological cognitive systems is expected. The degree of scientific research experience is expected to be on the level of a German Diploma/Master. The appointments will start summer 2013, for up to three years. Interested applicants should submit a curriculum vitae, a list of publications and arrange for two letters of reference to be sent to the address below. Prof. Dr. C. Gros Institute for Theoretical Physics Goethe University Frankfurt Max-von-Laue-Str. 1 60438 Frankfurt am Main Germany cgr at itp.uni-frankfurt.de http://itp.uni-frankfurt.de/~gros ***************************************** *** Prof. Dr. Claudius Gros *** *** +49 (0)69 798 47818 *** *** http://itp.uni-frankfurt.de/~gros *** ***************************************** -------------------------------------------------------- --- Complex and Adaptive Dynamical Systems, A Primer --- --- A graduate-level textbook, Springer (2008/09/10) --- -------------------------------------------------------- From etienne.roesch at gmail.com Tue May 7 14:23:43 2013 From: etienne.roesch at gmail.com (=?windows-1252?Q?Etienne_Beno=EEt_Roesch?=) Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 19:23:43 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: A new mailing list dedicated to coupled EEG-fMRI! Message-ID: <3C4E3FA8-FC31-47AF-AEF8-E88783CCCEAC@gmail.com> Dear all, I am happy to launch a new mailing list dedicated to coupled EEG-fMRI. The purpose of this list is the diffusion of information, papers, announcements and discussion of the various aspects related to the coupled recording of EEG and fMRI. Please advertise as you see fit. Anyone can subscribe, including students, faculties or unaffiliated. Commercial interests are welcome to subscribe too, but this list is not meant to provide an easy outlet to potential customers. For the time being, the list is not going to be moderated, but this policy may change if necessary. Abusive accounts will be unsubscribed. If you are interested to join us, please visit: http://www.lists.rdg.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/eeg-fmri Best regards, Etienne ??? Dr. Etienne B. Roesch Lecturer in Cognitive Science University of Reading, UK From kirsch at bcf.uni-freiburg.de Sun May 5 09:57:19 2013 From: kirsch at bcf.uni-freiburg.de (Janina Kirsch) Date: Sun, 5 May 2013 15:57:19 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Call for applications ----- BCF/NWG-Course: Analysis and Models in Neurophysiology, Freiburg, Germany Message-ID: <00c801ce4998$8a901c80$9fb05580$@bcf.uni-freiburg.de> %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %% BCF/NWG-Course: Analysis and Models in Neurophysiology %% %% October 6-11, 2013 %% %% Application deadline: June 30, 2013 %% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %% Aim of the course %% The course is intended to provide advanced Diploma/Masters and PhD students, as well as young researchers from the neurosciences with approaches for the analysis of electrophysiological data and the theoretical concepts behind them. http://www.bcf.uni-freiburg.de/events/conferences-workshops/20131006-nwgcourse The course includes various topics such as ? Neuron models and spike train statistics ? Point processes and correlation measures ? Systems and signals ? Local field potentials and synaptic plasticity The course will consist of lectures in the morning and and matching exercises using Matlab and Mathematica. Experience with these software packages will be helpful but is not required for registration. The participants should have a basic understanding of scientific programming. This course is designated especially for advanced diploma/M.Sc.-students and PhD-students (preferentially in their first year). %% Faculty %% ? Dr. Stefan Rotter, Bernstein Center Freiburg, University of Freiburg ? Dr. Sonja Gruen, Research Center J?lich ? Dr. Ulrich Egert, Biomicrotechnology, Department of Microsystems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Freiburg ? Dr. Ad Aertsen, Neurobiology & Biophysics, Faculty of Biology, University of Freiburg, %% Application %% Please apply by sending an email containing your CV and a meaningfull letter of motivation to nwg-course at bcf.uni-freiburg.de The course is limited to 20 participants. Course fees: NWG members: 50 Euro others: 125 Euro %% Course venue %% Bernstein Center Freiburg, Lecture Hall and Computerlab (ground floor), Hansastr. 9a, 79104 Freiburg, Germany http://www.bcf.uni-freiburg.de/contact/findus %% Contact %% Dr. Janina Kirsch, Bernstein Center Freiburg Germany Tel: +49 761 203 9575 Fax: +49 761 203 9559 E-Mail: nwg-course at bcf.uni-freiburg.de From morgado at uma.pt Tue May 7 03:58:27 2013 From: morgado at uma.pt (Morgado Dias) Date: Tue, 07 May 2013 08:58:27 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Last CFP - IEEE WISP 2013 - Special Session on Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence Message-ID: <5188B423.3050900@uma.pt> Dear Researcher, We are organizing a Special Session on Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence at the 8th IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Signal Processing to be held in Funchal, Madeira Island, Portugal from 16 to 18 of September 2013. The aim of the special session is to bring together researchers using Artificial Intelligence Tools that can be applied to Signal Processing, with the hope to function as a support for the improvement of current technologies and the growth of new integrated methodologies for the use of Artificial Intelligence Tools and solutions to Signal Processing. The session scope includes but is not limited to the following topics: Applications of Artificial Neural Networks, Fuzzy-Logic and other Artificial Intelligence Tools to Signal Processing Training algorithms Architecture of Artificial Intelligence Tools Hardware implementation of Artificial Intelligence Tools Processing of biological signals Industrial applications of Artificial Intelligence Dates and deadlines for the Call for Papers: Paper submission - May 15, 2013 Acceptance notification - June 9, 2013 Full paper submission and early payment - July 15, 2013 Best regards, Morgado Dias General Co-Chair WISP 2013 -- Com os melhores cumprimentos, Com os melhores cumprimentos, Morgado Dias *Universidade da Madeira * *Morgado Dias * Electr?nica e Telecomunica??es Pr?-Reitor da Universidade da Madeira Presidente da APCA www.apca.pt *morgado at uma.pt* Tel.: 291-705307 *International Symposium on Intelligent Signal Processing - WISP 2013* *http://www.trivent.hu/WISP2013/* ** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From y.hayashi at reading.ac.uk Sun May 5 09:07:55 2013 From: y.hayashi at reading.ac.uk (Yoshikatsu Hayashi) Date: Sun, 5 May 2013 13:07:55 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Fully funded PhD Studentship, Fast and Furious: the nature of anticipation Message-ID: <1E34BE02E76A394C8DA8EE9251795C82939B89@VIME-MBX2.rdg.ac.uk> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From terry at salk.edu Wed May 8 07:16:07 2013 From: terry at salk.edu (Terry Sejnowski) Date: Wed, 08 May 2013 04:16:07 -0700 Subject: Connectionists: NEURAL COMPUTATION - May 1, 2013 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Neural Computation - Contents -- Volume 25, Number 5 - May 1, 2013 Letters Impact of Spike-train Auto-structure on Probability Distribution of Joint-spike Events Gordon Pipa, Sonja Gruen, and Carl van Vreeswijk Ambient GABA Responsible for Age-related Changes in Multistable Perception Osamu Hoshino A Detailed and Fast Model of Extracellular Recordings Luis Alejandro Camunas-Mesa, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga Model Reductions for Inference: Generality of Pairwise, Binary, and Planar Factor Graphs Frederik Hewitt Eaton, Zoubin Ghahramani Learning Spatial Invariance With the Trace Rule in Non-uniform Distributions Jasmin Leveille, Thomas Hannagan Semi-stability of Steepest Descent With Momentum for Quadratic Functions Naimin Zhang A Study on L2-Loss (Squared Hinge-Loss) Multi-Class SVM Chih-Jen Lin, Ching-Pei Lee Relative Density-Ratio Estimation for Robust Distribution Comparison Makoto Yamada, Masashi Sugiyama, Taiji Suzuki, Takafumi Kanamori, and Hirotaka Hachiya ------------ ON-LINE -- http://www.mitpressjournals.org/neuralcomp SUBSCRIPTIONS - 2013 - VOLUME 25 - 12 ISSUES USA Others Electronic Only Student/Retired $70 $193 $65 Individual $124 $187 $115 Institution $1,035 $1,098 $926 Canada: Add 5% GST MIT Press Journals, 238 Main Street, Suite 500, Cambridge, MA 02142-9902 Tel: (617) 253-2889 FAX: (617) 577-1545 journals-orders at mit.edu ------------ From lubica at cs.otago.ac.nz Tue May 7 21:22:31 2013 From: lubica at cs.otago.ac.nz (Lubica Benuskova) Date: Wed, 8 May 2013 13:22:31 +1200 Subject: Connectionists: =?iso-8859-1?q?AI=9213_Call_for_Tutorials?= Message-ID: <8dea6f5dfaf7afcf43ee8939270ec249.squirrel@chasm.otago.ac.nz> The 26th Australasian Conference on Artificial Intelligence AI'13, 3-6 December, 2013, Dunedin, New Zealand http://ai2013.otago.ac.nz/ We invite proposals for the tutorial program to be held on Tuesday 3 Dec 2013 immediately prior to the main technical program of the AI?13 (4-6 December 2013). Tutorial topics include, but are not restricted to, the following topics listed at: http://ai2013.otago.ac.nz/call-for-papers/. IMPORTANT DATES Proposal submission deadline: 01 July 2013 Proposal acceptance notification: 19 Aug 2013 Deadline for posting the tutorial call for participation: 26 Aug 2013 Provisional attendees list: 07 Oct 2013 Final list of attendees: 04 Nov 2013 REQUIREMENTS for Tutorial Proposal (2 pages) The 1st page should contain the following information: - Title, abstract and tentative contents in syllabus-like form - Proposed duration (i.e. half day = 3 hours or full day = 2 x 3 hours) - Intended audience and prerequisite knowledge: what the attendees should already know The 2nd page on background information on the presenter(s) should contain: - Names, affiliations, homepages, contact details and short biographies of presenter(s) - Information about previous tutorials (title, location, number of attendees, etc.) if any - Tutorial materials such as handouts or slides should be included if already available, but are not required for submission. SELECTION of tutorials to be included in the final AI ?13 program will be based upon: scientific/technical interest of the topics, quality of the proposal, balance of topics, and the capacity of the conference tutorial program. Authors of proposals addressing similar and/or overlapping content areas and/or audiences may be requested to merge their proposals. All tutorial proposals should be submitted by the deadline, via e-mail, to the AI?13 tutorial chair: lubica at cs.otago.ac.nz Lubica Benuskova, PhD Tutorial Chair phone: (+64 3) 479 8587 Department of Computer Science University of Otago Dunedin, New Zealand http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/homepages/lubica/ From ahu at cs.stir.ac.uk Thu May 9 08:12:26 2013 From: ahu at cs.stir.ac.uk (Dr Amir Hussain) Date: Thu, 9 May 2013 13:12:26 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: 2nd Call for Applications: International Summer School on Cognitive Computation, Stirling, Scotland, UK, 25-30 Aug 2013 Message-ID: Spaces are still available in the 2013 International Summer School on Cognitive Computation, to be held at the University of Stirling, Scotland, UK, from 25-30 August 2013: http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/events/COGCOMP2013/ The next round of applications will close on Monday, 27 May 2013, and places are limited, so you should act soon if you want to learn about the latest brain-inspired cognitive technologies for engineering the intelligent systems of tomorrow! The five-day School programme will consist of a set of tutorial-style lectures, all delivered by experts of international standing combined with hands-on practical sessions for constructing and working with the techniques and applications covered in the course material. Registration fee (without accommodation): ?250 (fee covers all course materials, lunches, coffees and School dinner). Registration fee including Accommodation: Choice of 4-6 nights (?450-?500-?550) full-board (breakfast, lunch and dinner inclusive) on-Campus accommodation in single en-suite rooms. Scholarships Available: The School sponsor: Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance (SICSA), will cover the ?500 registration fee for PhD students in computer science departments of SICSA member Scottish universities (for a full list of SICSA Universities, see: http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/about/SICSA_Universities). The number of SICSA scholarships is limited and a decision on ranking will be taken if necessary. Up to two competitive places are also being generously sponsored by the IEEE UK-RI Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Chapter. Overview: Cognitive Computation is an emerging discipline that links together neurobiology, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.The vision of this Summer School is to empower participants with an interdisciplinary understanding of some of the key underlying methodologies, concepts and techniques in cognitive computation, and their strengths and limitations (demonstrated by a range of real-world case studies). Participants will also learn of future directions in this exciting multi-disciplinary field. Topics covered will include: perception, action, affective and cognitive learning and memory, attention, decision making and control, social cognition, language processing and communication, reasoning, pattern recognition, problem solving, and consciousness. There will also be a Research Poster Session and Exhibition (organized by Springer). Audience: The School is intended for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers working in all areas of cognitive computation, including its theoretical, applied, artificial and natural dimensions. More generally, it will appeal to researchers interested in biologically inspired computing techniques and applications, for example: machine learning, computational intelligence, cognitive and computational neuroscience, machine consciousness, neural hardware implementations and biologically inspired robotics and systems. Although the course will have substantial technical content, no prerequisites are required beyond a good background/first-degree in computer science/informatics or a related subject. For details of the School programme and application process, please see: http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/events/COGCOMP2013/ We hope to see you soon in Stirling! Amir --- Professor Amir Hussain Personal Chair in Computing Science School of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland, UK E-mail: ahu at cs.stir.ac.uk Tel/Fax: +44 (0)1786 467437 / 464551 http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~ahu/ http://www.springer.com/12559/ -- The University of Stirling is ranked in the top 50 in the world in The Times Higher Education 100 Under 50 table, which ranks the world's best 100 universities under 50 years old. The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nessler at igi.tu-graz.ac.at Fri May 10 00:21:18 2013 From: nessler at igi.tu-graz.ac.at (Bernhard Nessler) Date: Fri, 10 May 2013 06:21:18 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: New Paper: Bayesian Computation Emerges in Generic Cortical Microcircuits through Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity Message-ID: Dear colleagues, I would like to draw your attention to a new paper we recently published in PLoS Computational Biology. The paper is available at: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003037 TITLE: Bayesian Computation Emerges in Generic Cortical Microcircuits through Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity AUTHORS: Bernhard Nessler, Michael Pfeiffer, Lars Buesing, Wolfgang Maass ABSTRACT: The principles by which networks of neurons compute, and how spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) of synaptic weights generates and maintains their computational function, are unknown. Preceding work has shown that soft winner-take-all (WTA) circuits, where pyramidal neurons inhibit each other via interneurons, are a common motif of cortical microcircuits. We show through theoretical analysis and computer simulations that Bayesian computation is induced in these network motifs through STDP in combination with activity-dependent changes in the excitability of neurons. The fundamental components of this emergent Bayesian computation are priors that result from adaptation of neuronal excitability and implicit generative models for hidden causes that are created in the synaptic weights through STDP. In fact, a surprising result is that STDP is able to approximate a powerful principle for fitting such implicit generative models to high-dimensional spike inputs: Expectation Maximization. Our results suggest that the experimentally observed spontaneous activity and trial-to-trial variability of cortical neurons are essential features of their information processing capability, since their functional role is to represent probability distributions rather than static neural codes. Furthermore it suggests networks of Bayesian computation modules as a new model for distributed information processing in the cortex. Any comments or opinions are very welcome! Best regards Bernhard Nessler -- ========================================================= DI Bernhard Nessler Institute for Theoretical Computer Science Graz University of Technology Inffeldgasse 16b, A-8010 Graz, Austria -------------------------------------------------------- nessler at igi.tugraz.at http://www.igi.tugraz.at/ Tel.: ++43 316 873-5823 Fax: ++43 316 873-5805 ========================================================= From v.steuber at herts.ac.uk Thu May 9 06:28:44 2013 From: v.steuber at herts.ac.uk (Steuber, Volker) Date: Thu, 9 May 2013 11:28:44 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: PhD studentships in Computational Neuroscience In-Reply-To: <18EF08266D889C41A14D1099C7102CE2BDDC7AC6A8@UH-MAILSTOR.herts.ac.uk> References: <18EF08266D889C41A14D1099C7102CE2BDDC7AC6A8@UH-MAILSTOR.herts.ac.uk> Message-ID: <18EF08266D889C41A14D1099C7102CE2BDE3EE23B2@UH-MAILSTOR.herts.ac.uk> PhD Positions in Computational Neuroscience Science and Technology Research Institute University of Hertfordshire UK We invite applications for PhD studentships in the Biocomputation Research Group at the Science and Technology Research Institute at the University of Hertfordshire. PhD projects will involve computer simulations of biologically detailed models of neurons and neuronal networks in order to study information processing in the brain. More details about our research can be found on our home page http://homepages.stca.herts.ac.uk/~comqvs/ and in our publications, in particular: Reinoud Maex and Volker Steuber (2013). An integrator circuit in cerebellar cortex. European Journal of Neuroscience (in press). Volker Steuber and Dieter Jaeger (2012). Modeling the generation of output by the cerebellar nuclei. Neural Networks (epub ehead of print). Thiago Matos Pinto, Maria Schilstra and Volker Steuber (2012). The effective calcium / calmodulin concentration determines the sensitivity of CaMKII to the frequency of calcium oscillations. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Information Processing in Cells and Tissues IPCAT 2012, Cambridge, UK, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7223, 131-135. Volker Steuber, Nathan Schultheiss, R Angus Silver, Erik De Schutter and Dieter Jaeger (2011). Determinants of synaptic integration and heterogeneity in rebound firing explored with data-driven models of deep cerebellar nucleus cells. Journal of Computational Neuroscience 30, 633-659. Jason Rothman, Laurence Cathala, Volker Steuber and R. Angus Silver (2009). Synaptic depression enables neuronal gain control. Nature 457, 1015-1018. Applicants should have good computational and numerical skills and an excellent first degree in computer science, biology, maths, physics, neuroscience, or a related discipline. Successful candidates are eligible for a research studentship award from the University (approximately GBP 13,600 per annum bursary plus the payment of the standard UK/EU student fees). Applicants from outside the UK or EU are eligible, but will have to pay half of the overseas fees out of their bursary. Information about the current tuition fees can be found under http://www.herts.ac.uk/courses/fees-and-funding/postgraduate/home.cfm. Research in Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire has been recognized as excellent by the latest Research Assessment Exercise, with 55% of the research submitted being rated as world leading or internationally excellent. The Science and Technology Research Institute provides a stimulating environment, offering a large number of specialised and interdisciplinary seminars as well as general training opportunities. The University of Hertfordshire is situated in Hatfield, just north of London. Please contact Dr Volker Steuber for informal enquiries. Application forms are available under http://homepages.stca.herts.ac.uk/~comqvs/positions.html and should be returned to Mrs Lorraine Nicholls, Research Student Administrator, STRI, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield, Herts, AL10 9AB, Tel: 01707 286083. The short-listing process will begin on 7 June 2013. From Vittorio.Murino at iit.it Fri May 10 03:07:51 2013 From: Vittorio.Murino at iit.it (Vittorio Murino) Date: Fri, 10 May 2013 09:07:51 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: 4th PAVIS School on CVPR - Large Scale Visual Recognition of Object Instances and Categories - A. Zisserman, A. Vedaldi Message-ID: <518C9CC7.5030802@iit.it> Apologise for multiple posting ==================================================================== Call for Participation 4th PAVIS School on Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, and Image Processing September 18-20, 2013 ? Sestri Levante (GE), Italy LARGE SCALE VISUAL RECOGNITION OF OBJECT INSTANCES AND CATEGORIES -------------------------------------------------------------------- Invited speakers * Andrew Zisserman, University of Oxford, UK * Andrea Vedaldi, University of Oxford, UK The goal of this school is to introduce a number of state-of-the-art fundamental techniques in image understanding as well as to demonstrate the use of open source software to implement them in applications. Theoretical aspects that will be covered include image representations suitable for registration, object instance, and object category matching (including regions of interest, local descriptors, descriptor metrics, quantisation, indexing, and historamming) as well as machine learning techniques to train models for given object types (linear and non-linear large scale support vector machines and related kernel representations and optimisation methods). Alternating with the theoretical sessions, in a series of guided experiments the students will explore how such ideas can be implemented in software by using MATLAB and open source libraries such as VLFeat. *********************************************************************** * REGISTRATION DEADLINE: July 15, 2013 * * Interested applicants are invited to send an expression of interest * * at pavisschool2013 at iit.it asking for participation. * * For Ph.D. candidates please attach a Curriculum vitae and a letter * * from your supervisor in support to the request. * *********************************************************************** Notice that, due to the limited number of places, applications are subject to acceptance, and for this reason, early registrations or expressions of interest are encouraged. The attendees are expected to bring a laptop with a working version of MATLAB since practical experiments will be performed during the school using open source libraries such as VLFeat. Registration Fees - 150 euro for Ph.D. and undergraduate students. - 250 euro for post docs, researchers, and other people working directly in a university or a research institute. - 300 euro for everybody else. Director: Prof. Vittorio Murino Local Organizers: Vittorio Murino, Matteo Bustreo, Carlos Beltran- Gonzalez, Alessio Del Bue. This school follows a series of intensive courses, targeting PhD students and researchers in the areas of Computer Vision, Image Processing, and Pattern Recognition. The course is residential, spanning 3 days, so that attendees can install a more productive interaction with the lecturers. It is organized and sponsored by PAVIS (Pattern analysis and Computer Vision) department of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova (Italy). The course will take place in the beautiful Baia del Silenzio in Sestri Levante (http://g.co/maps/xqnyr), located between the city of Genova and the border to Tuscany. The school is structured in a such way that attendees can install a more productive interaction with the lecturers. For more information please visit: http://tinyurl.com/4th-pavis-school The school is endorsed by GIRPR (Gruppo Italiano Ricercatori in Pattern Recognition). ========================================================================= -- Vittorio Murino **************************** Prof. Vittorio Murino, Ph.D. PAVIS - Pattern Analysis & Computer Vision IIT Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Via Morego 30 16163 Genova, Italy Phone: +39 010 71781 504 Mobile: +39 329 6508554 Fax: +39 010 71781 236 E-mail: vittorio.murino at iit.it http://www.iit.it/pavis.html *************************************************************************** From riccardo.zecchina at polito.it Fri May 10 05:57:25 2013 From: riccardo.zecchina at polito.it (Riccardo Zecchina) Date: Fri, 10 May 2013 11:57:25 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: faculty position in quantitative biology and neuroscience at ICTP Message-ID: Please find hereafter the announcement of a faculty position in quantitative biology at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste (Italy). ICTP has a close collaboration with the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA, Trieste) where several research groups in neuroscience are active. ICTP is an International Institution, as such the announced salary should be understood as net salary. ________________________________________________________________________ FACULTY POSITION in QUANTITATIVE BIOLOGY The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) seeks applications for a faculty position in quantitative biology starting from 1 October 2013. ICTP, based in Trieste, Italy, provides a top class multi-disciplinary research environment in theoretical sciences, with cutting edge research, education and training, and it has been a driving force behind global efforts for the advancement of science in the developing world. We are now seeking to establish a new research section in quantitative biology in order to respond to the theoretical challenges arising from recent advances in large-scale experiments in biology and neurosciences. The programme will be open to, and actively seeking collaborations with, external partners. Areas of interest include: biological networks; genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics; bioinformatics, machine learning and statistical inference approaches to biological systems; population genetics and evolution biology; and systems and computational neuroscience. The successful applicant will play a leading role in establishing the new section, promoting cutting-edge research in quantitative biology, and graduate student supervision. Applicants should have an outstanding international reputation and a solid track record in obtaining external funding. The position will be at the P3 UNESCO level, with a starting salary of $89200. Other benefits include family allowance, home travel, education grant for dependent children, pension plan and medical insurance. Applicants should submit their application through the UNESCO website ( https://unesco.taleo.net/careersection/2/joblist.ftl) before 4 June 2013. For further information please contact qbio at ictp.it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From derry.fitzgerald at dit.ie Fri May 10 10:38:02 2013 From: derry.fitzgerald at dit.ie (Derry Fitzgerald) Date: Fri, 10 May 2013 15:38:02 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: 3rd Call for Papers: Special Issue on Informed Acoustic Source Separation; EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing Message-ID: <518D064A.6030407@dit.ie> We apologize for cross-distribution and multiple copies. *************************************************** 2nd CALL FOR PAPERS EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing Special Issue on Informed Acoustic Source Separation The complete call of papers is accessible at: http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/sites/10233/pdf/H9386_DF_CFP_EURASIP_JASP_A4_3.pdf DEADLINE: PAPER SUBMISSION: 31st May 2013 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Short Description The proposed topic of this special issue is informed acoustic source separation. As source separation has long become a field of interest in the signal processing community, recent works increasingly point out the fact that separation can only be reliably achieved in real-world use cases when accurate prior information can be successfully incorporated. Informed separation algorithms can be characterized by the fact that case-specific prior knowledge is made available to the algorithm for processing. In this respect, they contrast with blind methods for which no specific prior information is available. Following on the success of the special session on the same topic in EUSIPCO 2012 at Bucharest, we would like to present recent methods, discuss the trends and perspectives of this domain and to draw the attention of the signal processing community to this important problem and its potential applications. We are interested in both methodological advances and applications. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): ? Sparse decomposition methods ? Subspace learning methods for sparse decomposition ? Non-negative matrix / tensor factorization ? Robust principal component analysis ? Probabilistic latent component analysis ? Independent component analysis ? Multidimensional component analysis ? Multimodal source separation ? Video-assisted source separation ? Spatial audio object coding ? Reverberant models for source separation ? Score-informed source separation ? Language-informed speech separation ? User-guided source separation ? Source separation informed by cover version ? Informed source separation applied to speech, music or environmental signals ? ? ------------------- Guest Editors Taylan Cemgil, Bogazici University, Turkey, Tuomas Virtanen, Tampere University of Technology, Finland, Alexey Ozerov, Technicolor, France, Derry Fitzgerald, Dublin institute of Technology, Ireland, Lead Guest Editor: Ga?l Richard, Institut Mines-T?l?com, T?l?com ParisTech, CNRS-LTCI, France. T? an teachtaireacht seo scanta ? thaobh ?bhar agus v?reas ag Seirbh?s Scanta R?omhphost de chuid Seirbh?s? Faisn?ise, ITB?C agus meastar ? a bheith sl?n. http://www.dit.ie This message has been scanned for content and viruses by the DIT Information Services E-Mail Scanning Service, and is believed to be clean. http://www.dit.ie From sala038 at aucklanduni.ac.nz Thu May 9 00:44:04 2013 From: sala038 at aucklanduni.ac.nz (shafiq burki) Date: Thu, 9 May 2013 16:44:04 +1200 Subject: Connectionists: 2nd Call For Chapters: Bio-Inspired Data Mining Techniques. Message-ID: Appologies for cross posting. *********************************** *2nd CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS:* *Proposal Submission Deadline: May 30, 2013* Biologically-Inspired Techniques for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Advances in Data Mining and Database Management (ADMDM) Book Series A book edited by Dr. Shafiq Alam, Dr. Yun Sing Koh, and Prof. Gillian Dobbie University of Auckland, New Zealand Website: https://conference.fos.auckland.ac.nz/bdm/biokdd/index.html To be published by IGI Global: http://bit.ly/13tKOjc *********************** Introduction *********************** Biological inspired data mining techniques have been intensively used in different data mining applications such as data clustering, classification, association rule mining, sequential pattern mining, outlier detection, feature selection and information extraction in many application areas, such as healthcare and bioinformatics. The techniques include Neural Networks, Fuzzy Systems, Genetic Algorithms, Ant Colony Optimization, Particle Swarm Optimization, Artificial Immune Systems, Culture Algorithms, Social evolution, and Artificial Bee Colony Optimization. A huge increase in the number of papers and citations in the area has been observed in the past decade, which is clear evidence of the popularity of these techniques. *********************** Objective of the Book *********************** The aim of this book is to highlight the contemporary research in the area of Biologically-Inspired techniques in different data mining domains, and the implementation of these techniques in real life data mining problems. The book will publish some of the state of the art work in this area and share the good practices that have enabled this area grow and flourish. The book will also contribute to extending the knowledge by providing quality work from established researchers that can be used by new researchers in the area. The book calls for high quality chapters outlining current research, literature surveys, theoretical and empirical studies, and other relevant work including but not limited to the following areas: 1. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) - PSO based clustering - PSO based classification - PSO based outlier detection - PSO based feature selection 2. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) - ACO based clustering - ACO based classification - ACO based feature selection - ACO based association rules mining - ACO based sequential patterns mining 3. Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) - Intrusion detection using AIS - Clustering using AIS - Decision support system using AIS 4. Bee Colony Optimization (BCO) - BCO for pattern matching - Clustering using BCO 5. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) - ANN based pattern matching and discover - Classification rules discovery using ANN - Forecasting using ANN 6. Genetic Algorithms (GA?s) - Clustering, classification and parameter tuning using GA?s - GA?s based feature extraction and selection 7. Fuzzy systems (FS) - Fuzzy clustering - Fuzzy classification - Fuzzy Association rules discovery ********************** Target Audience ********************** The primary target of this book is the research community in the area of computational intelligence, machine learning, and data mining. However, the book is equally of interest for other KDD areas such as data analysis and preprocessing, big data management, web mining, optimization based data mining, and recommender systems. Specifically, it will be very useful for researchers from computational intelligence and evolutionary computation to update their knowledge about different application areas of their research, experimentation, and evaluation methods in the area of KDD. ***************************** Submission Procedure ***************************** Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before April 30, 2013, a 2-3 page chapter proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by May 15, 2013 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by August 30, 2013. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project. Publisher This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the ?Information Science Reference? (formerly Idea Group Reference), ?Medical Information Science Reference,? ?Business Science Reference,? and ?Engineering Science Reference? imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2014. Important Dates May 31, 2013: Proposal Submission Deadline June 15, 2013: Notification of Acceptance August 30, 2013: Full Chapter Submission October 30, 2013: Review Results Returned November 30, 2013: Final Chapter Submission February 15, 2014: Final Deadline ******************************************* Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word document) or by mail to: Dr. Shafiq Alam Department of Computer Science UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND Tel.: +6493737599 ext. 82128 ? Fax: +6493737453 E-mail: sala038 at aucklanduni.ac.nz ************************************ -- Kind Regards, Shafiq Alam Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland, New Zealand. *http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/research/groups/kmg/shafiq.html* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From huajin.tang at gmail.com Sat May 11 00:15:02 2013 From: huajin.tang at gmail.com (Huajin Tang) Date: Sat, 11 May 2013 12:15:02 +0800 Subject: Connectionists: CFP: Invited Sesson "Cognitive Computing and Applications" at IEEE CIS-RAM 2013 Message-ID: Call for Papers: You are welcomed to submit papers to the Invited Session on "Cognitive Computing and Applications" at the 6th IEEE CIS-RAM 2013. The topics include but are not limited to neuro-inspired computation, cognitive systems, and applications in robotics, sensory information processing, etc. All papers accepted and presented at CIS-RAM 2013 will be published by IEEE and indexed by ISI Proceedings, Scopus, and EI Compendex database. Selected papers will be shortlisted for Special Issues at the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems (Intech) and Computational Cognitive Science (Springer). Please use the code "THJ" when you submit papers to the Invited Session. Any inquiry can be directed to me. Please refer to more details about the IEEE CIS-RAM 2013 conference in its CFP appended below. Sincerely, Huajin Tang, Ph.D. Institute for Infocomm Research, htang at i2r.a-star.edu.sg ==================================== Call For Papers 6th IEEE Int'l Joint Conference on Cybernetics and Intelligent Systems (CIS) & Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics (RAM) 12-15 November 2013 Manila and Pico de Loro Beach & Country Club, Philippines Conference webpage: www.cis-ram.org/2013 7,017 islands tourism: www.itsmorefuninthephilippines.com Enquiries: cisram2013 at gmail.com ------------------------------ IMPORTANT DATES/DEADLINES Conference/Invited Session paper submission: 11 June 2013 Notification of acceptance: 11 August 2013 Final camera-ready manuscript: 11 September 2013 Registration: 11 September 2013 ------------------------------ THE VENUE: PHILIPPINES We invite you to the beautiful islands of the Philippines. CIS-RAM will be held in two locations: Manila and a resort 2 hours away (by land or boat) from Manila. The capital of the Philippines?its heart and soul?is Manila. Metropolitan Manila is where the country's most prestigious business addresses and the trendiest leisure establishments are found. By day, it hums with the bustle of commerce and, by night, throbs with the excitement of varied, world class entertainment. Catch a glimpse of the many wonders we offer you as you visit our 7,107 islands. To find out more why it's more fun in the Philippines, please visit the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADNgEHFDYzo ------------------------------ PROGRAMS AND TOPICS All conference papers will be presented in Manila on 12-13 November 2013. Special sessions, workshops and social tours will be organized at Pico de Loro Beach and Country Club on 14-15 November 2013. (Virtual tour: www.hamilocoast.com/hamilo/virtualtour/Hamilo_Beach_Club_Pool.html). Spouse programs and post-conference tours to the surrounding islands can be arranged through conference event organizer upon request. The conference welcomes paper submissions from researchers, practitioners, and students in the areas of Cybernetics, Intelligence, Systems, Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics. Related topics include but not limited to human-robot collaborative systems, hybrid intelligent systems, control, multi-agent systems, discrete event systems, soft computing, fuzzy systems, neural networks, genetic algorithm, evolutionary computation, image processing, computer vision, tactile sensing, sensor & actuator networks, environmental systems, systems biology, cyber-physical systems, decision support systems, system of systems, personal and service robotics, vision, unmanned systems, haptics, modeling, planning and control, kinematics, mechanics, and mechanism design, legged and wheeled robots and distributed autonomous robotic systems. ------------------------------ PAPER SUBMISSIONS, SPECIAL SESSIONS & SPECIAL ISSUES IN JOURNALS Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers (6 pages) through the online submission system. All papers accepted and presented at CIS-RAM 2013 will be published by IEEE and indexed by ISI Proceedings, Scopus, and EI Compendex database. Potential Special Session organizers are invited to enlist six or more papers with cohesive topics to form invited sessions. Please contact our program chairs for more details if you would like to organize invited sessions. Selected papers will be shortlisted for special issues in related international journals. We look forward to meeting you at CIS-RAM 2013! Sincerely yours, John-John Cabibihan (NUS) CIS General Chair Marcelo Ang, Jr (NUS) RAM General Chair Kay Chen Tan (NUS) Huajin Tang (A*STAR) Prospero Naval (UP) CIS Program Chair & Co-Chairs I-Ming Chen (NTU) Shaohui Foong (SUTD) Edwin Calilung (DLSU) RAM Program Chair & Co-Chairs Haoyong Yu (NUS) Invited Sessions Chair -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From daniel.navarro at adelaide.edu.au Fri May 10 20:24:38 2013 From: daniel.navarro at adelaide.edu.au (Dan Navarro) Date: Sat, 11 May 2013 09:54:38 +0930 Subject: Connectionists: Postdoctoral position in Computational Cognitive Science Message-ID: The computational cognitive science group at the University of Adelaide (Australia) is seeking a post-doctoral researcher to contribute to a project focused on problems of inductive inference. Project PIs are Dan Navarro and Amy Perfors. The research project investigates how different assumptions about the nature and origin of data lead to different inferences, both in a normative sense and in human behaviour. From a modelling perspective the project is interested in developing Bayesian models of human induction, and in understanding how these relate to more traditional psychological models. Position Requirements You should have: - PhD in cognitive science, psychology, computer science, statistics, or other related discipline - Experience in implementing and interpreting probabilistic models (in particular, Bayesian modelling, MCMC techniques). Additional desirable characteristics: - Previous experience developing new cognitive models - Matlab or R skills (although other programming languages are also acceptable) - Experience in psychological experimental design and data analysis Term of Position This position is available from 1 August 2013 (although the starting date is flexible) for an initial period of 1 year with the possibility of renewal for another year depending on funding. Salary Salary: A$74,001 - A$79,435 per annum. The successful applicant will be appointed at an appropriate level within this range depending on qualifications and relevant experience. An employer superannuation contribution of 9% also applies. Applications The closing date is 15 June 2013. Applications received after this date will be accepted but cannot be guaranteed equal consideration. Your application should: - include your r?sum?/Curriculum Vitae - address the selection criteria - quote the job reference number (18047) - include your Australian residency status (non-Australian candidates are fine) - include the names, addresses and/or email details of three referees. Email applications to Dr Amy Perfors at amy.perfors at adelaide.edu.au Further Information - Feel free to email us with any questions! - Our lab website: ua.edu.au/ccs - The official job posting: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/jobs/current/18047/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From terry at salk.edu Sat May 11 22:26:04 2013 From: terry at salk.edu (Terry Sejnowski) Date: Sat, 11 May 2013 19:26:04 -0700 Subject: Connectionists: NEURAL COMPUTATION - June 1, 2013 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Neural Computation - Contents -- Volume 25, Number 5 - June 1, 2013 Articles Emergence of Optimal Decoding of Population Codes Through STDP Stefan Habenschuss, Helmut Puhr, and Wolfgang Maass Randomly Connected Networks Have Short Temporal Memory Peter Latham, Edward Wallace, and Hamid Reza Maei Letters New Supervised Learning Theory Applied to Cerebellar Modeling for Suppression of Variability of Saccade Endpoints Masahiko Fujita A New Supervised Learning Algorithm for Spiking Neurons Yan Xu, Xiaoqin Zeng, and Shuiming Zhong Efficient Sample Reuse in Policy Gradients With Parameter-based Exploration Tingting Zhao, Masashi Sugiyama, Hirotaka Hachiya, Voot Tangkaratt, and Jun Morimoto The Support Feature Machine: Classification With the Least Number of Features and Its Application to Neuroimaging Data Sascha Klement, Silke Anders, and Thomas Martinetz Parameter Learning for Alpha-Integration Heeyoul Choi, Seungjin Choi, and Yoonsuck Choe Causality in Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Models in the Presence of Latent Gaussian Confounders Zhitang Chen, Lai Wan Chan Simple Neural-like P Systems for Maximal Independent Set Selection Lei Xu, Peter Jeavons ------------ ON-LINE -- http://www.mitpressjournals.org/neuralcomp SUBSCRIPTIONS - 2013 - VOLUME 25 - 12 ISSUES USA Others Electronic Only Student/Retired $70 $193 $65 Individual $124 $187 $115 Institution $1,035 $1,098 $926 Canada: Add 5% GST MIT Press Journals, 238 Main Street, Suite 500, Cambridge, MA 02142-9902 Tel: (617) 253-2889 FAX: (617) 577-1545 journals-orders at mit.edu ------------ From neumann at ias.tu-darmstadt.de Sun May 12 14:41:39 2013 From: neumann at ias.tu-darmstadt.de (Gerhard Neumann) Date: Sun, 12 May 2013 20:41:39 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Call for Posters - RSS 2013 Workshop on "Hierarchical and Structured Learning for Robotics " Message-ID: <518FE263.6030906@ias.tu-darmstadt.de> CALL FOR POSTERS RSS 2013 WORKSHOP ON "Hierarchical and Structured Learning for Robotics" ================================================================================================== Title: Hierarchical and Structured Learning for Robotics Organizers: Gerhard Neumann (neumann at ias.tu-darmstadt.de, TU Darmstadt) George Konidaris (gdk at csail.mit.edu, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) Freek Stulp (freek.stulp at ensta-paristech.fr, ENSTA - ParisTech) Jan Peters (peters at ias.tu-darmstadt.de, TU Darmstadt and MPI for Intelligent Systems) WWW: http://www.ias.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/Workshops/RSS2013 ABSTRACT: Learning robot control policies in complex real-world environments is a major challenge for machine learning due to the inherent high dimensionality, partial observability and the high costs of data generation. Treating robot learning as a monolithic machine problem and employing off-the-shelf approaches is unrealistic at best. However, the physical world can yield important insights into the inherent structure of control policies, state or action spaces and reward functions. For example, many robot motor tasks are also hierarchically structured decision tasks. For example, a tennis playing robot has to combine different striking movements sequentially. During locomotion there are at least three behaviors simultaneously active as a robot has to combine its gait generation with foot placement and balance control. First domain-driven skill learning approaches have already yielded impressive recent successes by incorporating such structural insights into the learning process. Hence, a promising route to more scalable policy learning approaches includes the automatic exploitation of the environment's structure, resulting in new structured learning approaches for robot control. Structured and hierarchical learning has been an important trend in machine learning in recent years. In robotics, researchers often ended up naturally at well-structured hierarchical policies based on discrete-continuous partitions (e.g., define local movement generators as well as a prioritized operational space control for combining them) with nested control loops at several different speeds (i.e., fast control loops for smooth and accurate movement achievement, slower loops for model-predictive planning). Furthermore, evidence from the fields cognitive sciences indicate that humans also heavily exploit such structures and hierarchies. Although such structures have been found in human motor control, are favored in robot control and exist in machine learning, the connections between these fields have not been well explored. Transferring insights from structured prediction methods, which make use of the inherent correlation in the data, to hierarchical robot skill learning may be a crucial step. General approaches for bringing structured policies, states, actions and rewards into robot reinforcement learning may well be the key to tackle many challenges of real-world robot environments and an important step to the vision of intelligent autonomous robots which can learn rich and versatile sets of motor skills. This workshop aims to reveal how complex motor skills typically exhibit structures that can be exploited for learning reward functions and to find structure in the state or action space. In order to make progress towards the goal of structured learning for robot control, this workshop aims at researchers from different machine learning areas (such as reinforcement learning, structured prediction), robotics and related disciplines (e.g., control engineering, and the cognitive sciences). We particularly want to focus on the following important topics for structured robot learning which have a big overlap from several of these fields: - Efficient representations and learning methods for hierarchical policies - Learning in several layers of hierarchy - Structured representations for motor control and planning - Skill extraction and skill transfer - Sequencing and composition of behaviors - Hierarchical Bayesian Models for decision making and efficient transfer learning - Low-dimensional manifolds as structured representations for decision making - Exploiting correlations in the decision making process - Prioritized control policies in a multi-task reinforcement learning setup These challenges are important steps to building intelligent autonomous robots and may potentially motivate new research topics in the related research fields. FORMAT: The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers which are interested in structured representations, reinforcement learning, hierarchical learning methods and control architectures. Among these general topics we will focus on the following questions: Structured representations: - How to efficiently use graphical models such as Markov random fields to exploit correlations in the decision making process? - How to extract the relevant structure (e.g. low dimensional manifolds, factorizations...) from the state and action space? - Can we efficiently model structure in the reward function or the system dynamics? - How to learn good features for the policy or the value function? - What can we learn from structured prediction? Representations of behavior: - What are good representations for motor skills? - How can we efficiently reuse skills in new situations? - How can we extract movement skills and elemental movements from demonstrations? - How can we compose skills to solve a combination of tasks? - How can we represent versatile motor skills? - How can we represent and exploit the correlations over time in the decision process? Structured Control: - How to efficiently use structured representations for planning and control? - Can we learn task-priorities and use similar policies as in task-prioritized control? - How to decompose optimal control laws into elemental movements ? - How to use low-dimensional manifolds to control high-dimensional, redundant systems? - Can we use chain or tree-like structures as policy representation to mimic the kinematic structure of the robot? Hierarchical Learning Methods: - How can we efficiently apply abstractions to the control problem? - How to efficiently learn at several layers of hierarchy? - Which policy search algorithms are appropriate for which hierarchical representation? - Can we use hierarchical inverse reinforcement learning to acquire skill reward functions, and priors over selecting those skills? - How can we decide when to create new skills or re-use known ones? - How can we discover and generalize important sub-goals in our movement plan? Skill Transfer: - How can we efficiently transfer skills to new situations? - Can we use hierarchical Bayesian models to learn in several layers of abstraction also in decision making? - How to transfer learned models or even value functions to new tasks? IMPORTANT DATES June 1st - Deadline of submission for Posters June 4th - Notification of Poster Acceptance SUBMISSIONS Extended abstracts (1 pages) will be reviewed by the program committee members on the basis of relevance, significance, and clarity. Accepted contributions will be presented as posters but particularly exciting work may be considered for talks. Submissions should be formatted according to the conference templates and submitted via email to neumann at ias.tu-darmstadt.de. ORGANIZERS Gerhard Neumann, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt George Konidaris, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Freek Stulp, ENSTA - ParisTech Jan Peters, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems LOCATION AND MORE INFORMATION The most up-to-date information about the workshop can be found on the RSS 2013 webpage. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From d.polani at herts.ac.uk Mon May 13 11:05:45 2013 From: d.polani at herts.ac.uk (Daniel Polani) Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 16:05:45 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: PhD Studentships on Information Processing and Self-Organization in Adaptive Systems Message-ID: <20881.329.205399.243584@gargle.gargle.HOWL> ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// PhD Studentships Available on INFORMATION PROCESSING AND SELF-ORGANIZATION IN ADAPTIVE BIOLOGICAL AND ARTIFICIAL SYSTEMS Adaptive Systems Research Group School of Computer Science University of Hertfordshire, UK ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// PhD studentships are available in the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire in the topics of Artificial Life, especially for the study of principles behind information processing in adaptive, complex and self-organizing systems and the emergence and growth of complexity, a research area which has witnessed a dramatic increase of interest in the last years. We use mathematical methods, with particular emphasis on an arsenal of recently developed techniques based on Shannon's information theory, to describe, understand or construct such systems in the context of AI/robotics and biology. Questions of interest and possible research directions include, but are not limited to: - information-theoretic approaches towards a mathematically founded understanding of information processing and the perception-action loop in agents; fundamental quantitative constraints governing the interaction between an agent and its environment - theoretically grounded pathways towards a systematic way to generate self-organization in complex systems and autonomous increase in complexity - biologically plausible methods based on information theory for creating Artificial Intelligence systems from first principles - fundamental principles underlying biological (e.g. neural) computation (with opportunities to collaborate with the Biocomputation Research Group) The prospective candidates should have a keen interest in contributing to a new and highly dynamic research area and a strong background in Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics, Statistics or another relevant computational discipline. In particular, they should demonstrate excellent programming skills in one or more major computer languages. A mathematical/numerical background would be desirable, ideally including probability theory and data modelling/neural network techniques. The envisaged research will take place in the vibrant and enthusiastic research environment of the Adaptive Systems Research Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire which offers a large number of specialized and interdisciplinary seminars as well as general training opportunities. Research in Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire has been recognized as excellent by the latest Research Assessment Exercise, with 55% of the research submitted being rated as world leading or internationally excellent. The University of Hertfordshire is located in Hatfield, Hertfordshire UK which is considered the "northern green belt" of London. Hatfield is close to London (less than 25 minutes by train to Kings Cross), has convenient access to Stansted, Luton and Heathrow airports and is not far from the historic town of St. Albans. Successful candidates are eligible for a research studentship award from the University (which includes approximately GBP 13,600 per annum bursary and the payment of the standard UK/EU student fees). Applicants from outside the UK or EU are eligible, but will have to pay half of the overseas fees out of their bursary. Information about the current tuition fees can be found at http://www.herts.ac.uk/courses/fees-and-funding/postgraduate/home.cfm Contact for informal inquiries on the research topic: Dr. Daniel Polani (E-mail: d.polani at herts.ac.uk) Application forms are available from http://homepages.stca.herts.ac.uk/~comqvs/ApplicationFormUHStudentship.doc and should be returned to Mrs Lorraine Nicholls, Research Student Administrator, STRI University of Hertfordshire College Lane Hatfield AL10 9AB Hertfordshire UK Tel: 01707 286083 Email: l.nicholls at herts.ac.uk. Applications should also include two references and transcripts of previous academic degrees. The shortlisting process will begin on 7. June 2013. From ted.carnevale at yale.edu Tue May 14 09:33:29 2013 From: ted.carnevale at yale.edu (Ted Carnevale) Date: Tue, 14 May 2013 09:33:29 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: registration deadline for NEURON summer course Message-ID: <51923D29.4050908@yale.edu> A few seats remain open in the NEURON summer course, but you'll have to act quickly because the registration deadline is Friday, May 24--less than two weeks from today. For more information about the course and the on-line registration form see http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/static/courses/nscsd2013/nscsd2013.html --Ted From marcel.van.gerven at gmail.com Mon May 13 08:01:12 2013 From: marcel.van.gerven at gmail.com (Marcel van Gerven) Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 14:01:12 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Postdoctoral position in Bayesian modelling of brain networks Message-ID: <7B1CE6F6-59D9-46DF-A8DB-423FFD41B8D9@gmail.com> Postdoctoral Position on the Project 'Bayesian Modelling of Brain Networks' (1.0 fte) Faculty of Social Sciences Vacancy number: 24.14.13 Closing date: 1 June 2013 Responsibilities As a postdoctoral researcher you will be working on the BAMBINO project (Bayesian modelling of brain networks) funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). One of your main duties will be to develop sophisticated Bayesian inference methods for estimating changes in cognitive processing, using diffusion MRI, functional MRI and MEG data. The main focus will be on data fusion, latent variable modelling, and time series analysis in challenging large-scale applications. New methods will be developed in collaboration with Prof. Heskes, who is research director of the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences and an expert on approximate inference methods. As a postdoctoral researcher, you will help develop this new research line and assist in teaching and supervising Master?s and PhD students. The position provides the opportunity to conduct world-class research as a key member of an interdisciplinary team. Work environment The Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour consists of three research centres: the Centre for Cognition, the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging and the Centre for Neuroscience. The Donders Institute focuses on state-of-the-art cognitive neuroscience with a multidisciplinary approach, and offers excellent lab and neuroimaging facilities, PhD supervision and courses, and technical support. The project is embedded within the Donders Institute?s research theme ?Brain Networks and Neuronal Communication? and will be supervised by Dr Marcel van Gerven, head of the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience group. Dr van Gerven is based at the Donders Centre for Cognition. You will also collaborate intensively with researchers from the Institute for Computing and Information Science, which has an outstanding track record in statistical machine learning. The Donders Institute is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building a culturally diverse intellectual community, and as such encourages applications from women and minorities. Radboud University offers a parental leave scheme and on-campus day care. What we expect from you We are looking for a highly motivated candidate with a PhD degree in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or a related field of study. Excellent math and programming skills and a background in statistical machine learning are prerequisites. Experience in cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging is not required. You should have an excellent scientific track record, excellent organizational and communicative skills, a strong motivation, and excellent skills in written and spoken English. What we have to offer We offer you: - employment: 1.0 fte; - in addition to the salary: an 8% holiday allowance and an 8.3% end-of-year bonus; - the minimum salary for the postdoctoral position is ?3,227 and the maximum salary (based on full-time employment) ?4,418 gross/month; - The initial salary depends on relevant work experience; - appointment for a minimum of 3 years, with the possibility of extension; - you will be classified as a Researcher level 3 in the Dutch university job-ranking system (UFO). Are you interested in our excellent employment conditions? Other Information Starting date: preferably September 2013. Would you like to know more? Further information on: Donders Institute/research Dr. Marcel van Gerven Telephone: +31 24 3655931 E-mail: m.vangerven at donders.ru.nl Applications Are you interested? It is Radboud University Nijmegen's policy to only accept applications by e-mail. Please send your application, stating vacancy number 24.14.13, to vacancies at socsci.ru.nl, for the attention of HRM-Department, before 1 June 2013. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From irodero at cac.rutgers.edu Wed May 15 00:39:44 2013 From: irodero at cac.rutgers.edu (Ivan Rodero) Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 00:39:44 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: CiSE Extreme Data - Call for Papers In-Reply-To: References: <51EC7783-DCAD-4364-B1DC-576C726BAA31@rutgers.edu> <6F339279-23CD-4553-95DF-B1F906F948E3@rutgers.edu> Message-ID: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please accept our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this CFP! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Call for Papers Computing in Science & Engineering Extreme Data Submissions due: March 2014 Estimated Publication date: November 2014 The current era of extreme data culled from a range of diverse data sources, ranging from extreme scale simulations to instruments, experiments, and pervasive sensors and systems, has the potential for revolutionizing science, engineering, and society in general. However, the expanding distribution and dynamism of the data, increasing data heterogeneity and uncertainty about its quality and availability, as well as the growing costs (time and energy) associated with transporting and processing this data, requires new paradigms and practices in data management and analytics, as well as supporting software stacks before this potential can be realized. The goal of this special issue of CiSE is to explore the fundamental challenges ? as well as the state of the art in solutions ? of extreme data. From innovative algorithmic formulations to implementation frameworks and software stacks, what can accelerate insights from extreme data? End-to-end application workflows and relevant experiences with real applications are of particular interest. Published by the IEEE Computer Society and the American Institute of Physics, CiSE magazine features the latest computational science and engineering research in an accessible format, along with departments covering news and analysis, CSE in education, and emerging technologies. We strongly encourage submissions that include multimedia, data, and community content, which will be featured on the IEEE Computer Society website along with the accepted papers. For more information please see http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/cscfp4 Questions? Contact guest editors Manish Parashar, Rutgers University (parashar at rutgers.edu) or George K. Thiruvathukal, Loyola University Chicago (gkt at cs.luc.edu). Submission Guidelines Authors are asked to submit high-quality original work that has neither appeared in nor is under consideration by other journals. All submissions will be peer-reviewed following standard journal practices. Manuscripts based on previously published conference papers must be extended substantially to include at least 30 percent new material. Manuscripts should be written in the active voice, should be no longer than 7,200 words (counting each standard figure and table as 250 words), and should follow the style and presentation guidelines of CiSE (see www.computer.org/cise/author for details). Please submit your article using the online manuscript submission service at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee. When uploading your article, select the appropriate special-issue title under the category "Manuscript Type." Also include complete contact information for all authors. If you have any questions about submitting your article, contact the peer review coordinator at cise at computer.org. ============================================================= Ivan Rodero, Ph.D. Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute (RDI2) NSF Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing (CAC) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Office: CoRE Bldg, Rm 625 94 Brett Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8058 Phone: (848) 228-6474 Fax: (732) 445-0593 Email: irodero at rutgers dot edu WWW: http://nsfcac.rutgers.edu/people/irodero ============================================================= From dwang at cse.ohio-state.edu Wed May 15 10:25:04 2013 From: dwang at cse.ohio-state.edu (DeLiang Wang) Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 10:25:04 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: NN Special Issue on Autonomous Learning Message-ID: <51939AC0.3090402@cse.ohio-state.edu> Neural Networks - Volume 41, May 2013 http://www.journals.elsevier.com/neural-networks Editorial ? Special Issue on Autonomous Learning Asim Roy, Bruno Apolloni, Leonid Perlovsky, Ali Minai Cognitive memory Bernard Widrow, Juan Carlos Aragon Mirror neurons, language, and embodied cognition Leonid I. Perlovsky, Roman Ilin Controlling working memory with learned instructions J.C. Sylvester, J.A. Reggia, S.A. Weems, M.F. Bunting Efficient online bootstrapping of sensory representations Alexander Gepperth Autonomous learning derived from experimental modeling of physical laws Igor Grabec Real-time model learning using Incremental Sparse Spectrum Gaussian Process Regression Arjan Gijsberts, Giorgio Metta Detecting and preventing error propagation via competitive learning Thiago Christiano Silva, Liang Zhao Growing self-organizing trees for autonomous hierarchical clustering Nhat-Quang Doan, Hanane Azzag, Mustapha Lebbah Self-organizing adaptive map: Autonomous learning of curves and surfaces from point samples Marco Piastra Methods for pattern selection, class-specific feature selection and classification for automated learning Asim Roy, Patrick D. Mackin, Somnath Mukhopadhyay First experiments with POWERPLAY Rupesh Kumar Srivastava, Bas R. Steunebrink, J?rgen Schmidhuber Learning invariant face recognition from examples Marco K. M?ller, Michael Tremer, Christian Bodenstein, Rolf P. W?rtz Autonomous learning in humanoid robotics through mental imagery Alessandro G. Di Nuovo, Davide Marocco, Santo Di Nuovo, Angelo Cangelosi Autonomous reinforcement learning with experience replay Pawel Wawrzynski, Ajay Kumar Tanwani Intrinsically motivated action?outcome learning and goal-based action recall: A system-level bio-constrained computational model Gianluca Baldassarre, Francesco Mannella, Vincenzo G. Fiore, Peter Redgrave, Kevin Gurney, Marco Mirolli Dynamic evolving spiking neural networks for on-line spatio- and spectro-temporal pattern recognition Nikola Kasabov, Kshitij Dhoble, Nuttapod Nuntalid, Giacomo Indiveri Modeling the insect mushroom bodies: Application to a delayed match-to-sample task Paolo Arena, Luca Patan?, Vincenzo Stornanti, Pietro Savio Termini, Bianca Z?pf, Roland Strauss A spiking neuron model of the cortico-basal ganglia circuits for goal-directed and habitual action learning Fabian Chersi, Marco Mirolli, Giovanni Pezzulo, Gianluca Baldassarre Modulation for emergent networks: Serotonin and dopamine Juyang Weng, Stephen Paslaski, James Daly, Courtland VanDam, Jacob Brown From guangliang.li2010 at gmail.com Wed May 15 05:23:23 2013 From: guangliang.li2010 at gmail.com (Guangliang Li) Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 11:23:23 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Deadline extension--2013 Reinforcement Learning Competition and ICML Workshop Message-ID: Deadline extended! The paper submission deadline for the 2013 Reinforcement Learning Competition and ICML Workshop, has been extended to May 21st . *Note: Revisions can be made at any time in EasyChair before the new deadline.* ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ** 2013 Reinforcement Learning Competition and ICML Workshop 20-21 June 2013 Atlanta, USA https://sites.google.com/site/rlcomp2013/icml_workshop * * Competition goal After a four year hiatus, the reinforcement learning competition is back. The primary aim of the competition is to test both general and domain-specific reinforcement learning algorithms, using an unbiased and transparent methodology. As a side-effect, the competition will generate a set of benchmarks domains and benchmark results in those domains, which can then be used as a basis of comparison in future work. In the reinforcement learning competition , researchers can test their algorithms and insights in a friendly competitive way, on new and challenging domains. The reinforcement learning competition has not been organized for a while, but will take place again this year after a long hiatus. The primary aim of the competition is to test both general and domain-specific reinforcement learning algorithms, using an unbiased and transparent methodology. The domains used in the competition will form a set of benchmarks, and the results of the submitted algorithms will form a body of benchmark results, which researchers can then use as a basis of comparison in future work. A secondary aim is to discuss methodological approaches for comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. This remains an issue in reinforcement learning in general. Another important aim is to ensure the continuing existence of the competition, and the prevention of further hiatuses. Our aim is to ensure that the competition will organized annually again, from this year onward. To this extend we will try to build up an organization of interested researchers. As in the previous years, the competition will be hosted at http://www.rl-competition.org/ The format will be remain as is. Agents may compete in one or more of a set of known domains. This set will include a polyathlon event, where the agents compete in a sequence of arbitrary environments. We envisage the actual competition to take place in *June 2013*. ICML Workshop on the Reinforcement Learning Competition 2013 (WRLCOMP) The competition is associated with an ICML Workshop in conjunction with ICML 2013 . The ICML reinforcement learning competition workshop will bring together researchers, who participated in the competition, in order to present and discuss their results. We will evaluate what works, and also under what conditions established methods may not work so well. In this way we hope to broaden our insight into state-of-the-art RL algorithms, and important properties of RL problems. The workshop will be organized along the lines of the domains. One time slot will be reserved for each competition category winner. In addition, all competition entrants will be invited to submit a short paper describing their approach. We will reserve a special time slot for papers on methodological problems that arise when comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/site/rlcomp2013/icml_workshop** Topics 1. For entrants All entrants are additionally invited to submit a paper describing the approach used in the competition, including findings and ideas that relate to more general research questions. 2. For everyone You are invited to submit a paper discussing methodological issue when comparing reinforcement learning algorithms, including but not limited to the following topics: Effects of PRNGs in large-scale comparisons Experimental design for an unbiased evaluation Metrics for performance evaluation Reproducibility of results Robustness of algorithms Statistical testing standards for reinforcement learning Submission Interested authors should format their papers according to ICML formatting guidelines, available here: http://icml.cc/2013/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/icml2013stylefiles.tar.gz Papers should not exceed 4 pages and are due by May 15, 2013. All papers must be submitted as PDF, and be made through Easychair at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wrlcomp2013 Important Dates Domains available: April 1 Testing starts: May 1 Competition: June 1 Paper Submission Deadline: May 21, 2013 Author Notification: June 1, 2013 Workshop: June 20-21, 2013 -- ---------------------- Guangliang Li PhD student, Intelligent Autonomous Systems Group Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam Room C3.258A Email: G.Li at uva.nl http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gli/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nicolas.usunier at hds.utc.fr Wed May 15 07:50:41 2013 From: nicolas.usunier at hds.utc.fr (nicolas.usunier at hds.utc.fr) Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 13:50:41 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: =?iso-8859-1?q?PhD_studentship_in_machine_learnin?= =?iso-8859-1?q?g_in_Compi=E8gne_=28France=29?= Message-ID: <20130515135041.15652k0n6vry0hhc@webmail.utc.fr> A fully-funded PhD studentship in Machine Learning is available at Universit? Technologique de Compi?gne (France) **Title** New methods for learning with multiple objectives **Supervision** Nicolas Usunier, Associate Professor (nicolas.usunier at hds.utc.fr) Yves Grandvalet, CNRS Senior Researcher (yves.grandvalet at hds.utc.fr) **Dates** position open in Fall 2013 **Research Team** The student will be based in the Heudiasyc laboratory in Compi?gne (France) and join the DI team headed by Yves Grandvalet. He/she will be supervised by Nicolas Usunier (www.hds.utc.fr/~nusunier/) and Yves Grandvalet(www.hds.utc.fr/~grandval/). Heudiasyc is a joint laboratory with the Universit? de Technologie de Compi?gne (UTC) and the French governmental agency for research (CNRS). In 2011, it was rated A+ (the highest rate) by the French Research evaluation agency (AERES). Heudiasyc fosters interdisciplinary research on information science and technology including machine learning, uncertain reasoning, operations research, robotics and knowledge management. In 2011 Heudiasyc was awarded with an excellence project (LabEx) on the ? Control of Technological Systems of Systems ?. **Context** Most learning algorithms are designed in a risk minimization framework, where the risk is defined as the expectation of a task-dependent cost function on the data distribution. While machine learning algorithm are nowadays applied on a variety of tasks and large-scale datasets, it turns out that the only algorithms for which strong theoretical guarantees are proved correspond to the simplest cost functions for the tasks of classification, regression or structured prediction. In real-life applications however, the final performance of a learning system is often measured by more complex indicators of the true end-user satisfaction. Examples of such performance indicators include non-trivial trade-offs between per-class precision and recall (like macro-averaged F1 scores) in multiclass classification, or trade-offs between relevance and diversity in search engines or recommender systems. There is currently no learning algorithms that can provably and efficiently optimize such performance indicators. The starting point of the PhD subject is that the principle of minimizing a single real-valued cost function either (1) does not give sufficient degrees of freedom to specify all aspects of the performance of a prediction function, or (2) leads to cost functions with a complex structure, which cannot be optimized with usual (e.g. convex optimization) approaches. **Subject** The goal of the project is to design new multi-objective approaches to machine learning, in order to develop methods that can optimize performance indicators that are non-trivial trade-offs between different cost functions. The intended results are the design and analysis of convex multi-objective, machine learning algorithms to problems where convex single-objective approaches are inadequate. Experimental studies can be conducted in different application domains, such as search engines, recommender systems or technological systems of systems in collaboration with other researchers of the laboratory. **Requirements** The PhD candidate should have or expect to obtain a MSc or equivalent in computer science or mathematics. The following qualities are desirable : strong interests in machine learning or statistics ; excellent record of academic and/or professional achievement ; strong mathematical skills ; strong programming skills ; good written and spoken communication skills in French or English. **Contact and Application** Applicants should send a CV and a brief statement of research interests by e-mail at nicolas.usunier at hds.utc.fr. From jlam at bccn-tuebingen.de Tue May 14 16:50:34 2013 From: jlam at bccn-tuebingen.de (Judith Lam) Date: Tue, 14 May 2013 22:50:34 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: 3 weeks left for abstract submission - Bernstein Conference 2013 - Call for Abstracts Message-ID: <5192A39A.1090302@bccn-tuebingen.de> REMINDER: Call for Abstracts: Bernstein Conference 2013 Deadline of abstract submission: May 31, 2013 ************************************************************** Workshops September 24-25, 2013 Main Conference September 25-27, 2013 ************************************************************** The Bernstein Conference on Computational Neuroscience started out as the annual meeting of the Bernstein Network (www.nncn.de) and has become the largest European Conference in Computational Neuroscience in recent years. This year, the Conference is organized by the Bernstein Center Tuebingen and will take place September 25-27, 2013. In addition, there will be a series of pre-conference workshops on September 24-25, 2013. The Bernstein Conference is a single-track conference, covering all aspects of Computational Neuroscience and Neurotechnology, and sessions for poster presentations are an integral part of the conference. We now invite the *submission of abstracts for poster presentations* from all relevant areas. Due to space limitations we will accept 250 abstracts for posters which will be presented in two sessions on Wednesday and Thursday evening. Additionally, a small number of abstracts will be selected for contributed talks. Accepted abstracts will be published online and will be citable via Digital Object Identifiers (DOI). DETAILS FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION: For abstract submission visit: http://www.bernstein-conference.de/abstracts Deadline: May 31, 2013 CONFERENCE DATE AND VENUE: Workshops September 24-25, 2013, Brechtbau, Wilhelmstr. 50, Tuebingen, Germany Main Conference September 25-27, 2013, Neue Aula, Geschwister Scholl Platz, Tuebingen, Germany For more information on the conference, please visit the website: http://www.bernstein-conference.de PhD STUDENT SYMPOSIUM: September 28, 2013 PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Matthias Bethge, Michael Black, Michael Brecht, Jakob Macke, Anthony Movshon, Felix Wichmann, Fred Wolf ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Matthias Bethge (General Chair) Judith Lam, Jakob Macke, Felix Wichman We look forward to seeing you in Tuebingen in September! -- Dr. Judith Lam Executive Coordinator Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience T?bingen Eberhard Karls University of T?bingen Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics http://www.bccn-tuebingen.de/about-bccn/contact.html Otfried-M?ller-Str. 25, 72076 T?bingen Tel: +49 7071 29 89019 Fax: +49 7071 29 25015 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mail at mkaiser.de Wed May 15 10:17:01 2013 From: mail at mkaiser.de (Marcus Kaiser) Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 15:17:01 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Two PostDoc positions Modelling Human Brain Development (Simulation and Neuroimaging) Message-ID: Dear all, The human brain is a complex system and while we know a bit about its organisation and function, relatively little is known about its development and how early changes can lead to brain diseases later on. Recent advances in neuroimaging, using diffusion tensor imaging, allow us to observe how brain connectivity changes from the embryonic to the adult stage. This project will analyse how the human brain network arises during development by combining data analysis with simulations of brain development ( http://www.greenbrainproject.org/ ). The following two positions are now available for up to 3 years to PostDocs or final year PhD students in an EPSRC-funded research project at Newcastle University. *Research Associate (Neuroimaging and Network Analysis) *Objectives of this position are to analyse neuroimaging data for different developmental stages and for healthy and pathological brains suffering from developmental diseases such as epilepsy or schizophrenia. Data analysis will include brain connectivity and standard anatomical features and might involve the establishing of novel methods for connectome analysis. We are seeking talented and enthusiastic research assistants with a PhD awarded in physics, mathematics, computer science, or related subjects; prior postdoctoral experience in the neurosciences is desirable. Good communication skills, very strong data analysis skills, and a track record of previous peer-reviewed journal publications. You will have experience with analysing neuroimaging data using Matlab/SPM or FSL and ideally have experience with diffusion imaging and brain connectivity analysis. The position will include brief visits to our partners in the UK, India, and Germany. *Research Associate (Computer Simulations and Modelling) *Objectives of this position are to develop a simulation of human brain development bridging different levels from the formation of pioneer fibres to the folding and connectivity changes over age. Simulations will be compared with real data on healthy and pathological human brain development to discover the underlying mechanisms. Finally, the performance of the artificially grown networks will be tested using the Manchester University SpiNNaker system. We are seeking talented and enthusiastic research assistants with a PhD awarded in physics, mathematics, computer science, or related subjects; prior experience in the neurosciences is desirable. Good communication skills, very strong software development skills, and a track record of previous peer-reviewed journal publications. You will have experience with large-scale software projects ideally using C/C++, GPU Computing, or Matlab. The position will include brief visits to our partners at Manchester University and abroad. *Research Environment *Neuroinformatics is one of the strategic areas of neuroscience research within Newcastle University (http://research.ncl.ac.uk/neuroinformatics/). Other areas include neuroimaging, psychophysics, systems neuroscience (visual, auditory, and motor system), ageing, brain-machine interfaces, and neurochips (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ion). Newcastle University hosts around 100 principal investigators in the neurosciences. *Living in Newcastle *Newcastle University, with 20,000 students, lies in the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne - an area in the North-East of England with around one million inhabitants. The university is at the centre of Newcastle which itself is on the main train-line between London and Edinburgh, both 20 minutes away from the airport and the beach by public transport. *How to apply *Information on the application procedure is available at http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AGN222/research-associate-computer-simulations/ http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AGN223/research-associate-neuroimaging-analysis/ The deadline for applications is 10 June. For more information contact Dr Marcus Kaiser (m.kaiser at ncl.ac.uk) or visit http://www.biological-networks.org/ Best, Marcus -- Best, Marcus -- Marcus Kaiser, Ph.D. Associate Professor (Reader) in Neuroinformatics School of Computing Science Newcastle University Claremont Tower Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK Lab website: http://www.biological-networks.org/ Neuroinformatics at Newcastle: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/neuroinformatics/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jutta.kretzberg at uni-oldenburg.de Thu May 16 15:21:45 2013 From: jutta.kretzberg at uni-oldenburg.de (Jutta Kretzberg) Date: Thu, 16 May 2013 21:21:45 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Auditory Cognition Summer School 2013 Message-ID: <519531C9.4020904@uni-oldenburg.de> *************************************************** Auditory Cognition Summer School 2013 *************************************************** 27 June ? 1 July at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, Germany Information on the Web:www.acsummerschool.org The third international summer school ?Auditory Cognition? will be held at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst (near Bremen) from 27 June to 1 July 2013. This institute, the collaborative research center ?The Active Auditory System? and the cluster of excellence ?Hearing4all? sponsor the five-day summer school that provides overview lectures, in-depth discussions and hands-on tutorials by an internationally renowned faculty. This year?s summer school focusses on three topics: Binaural processing and the analysis of auditory scenes (Rainer Beutelmann, Mathias Dietz, Georg Klump, Andrej Kral, Dan Tollin) Neurophysiological correlates of auditory scene analysis (Alexandra Bendixen, Stefan Debener, Mark Sch?nwiesner, Marten de Vos) Modeling the processes in auditory scene analysis (Tjeerd Andringa, Sue Denham, Istvan Winkler) We invite master and PhD students as well as postdoctoral fellows to participate in the summer school. Upon request certificates for the participation in the course can be provided. The deadline for application is 7 June 2013. Applications submitted before the deadline will be processed immediately and confirmed. To download the application form that shall be sent via email, please go to the websitewww.acsummerschool.org. Upon acceptance of the application it is necessary to immediately pay the registration fee to secure accommodation. From gaute.einevoll at umb.no Fri May 17 07:51:48 2013 From: gaute.einevoll at umb.no (Gaute Einevoll) Date: Fri, 17 May 2013 11:51:48 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Postdoctoral position in Computational Neuroscience (cellular/molecular modeling) in Norway/San Diego Message-ID: <50AADEA29903F5469B8A51DA48B9D4962665D230@A-EXCH-MBX2.ans.umb.no> There is an opening for a 3-year postdoctoral position in computational neuroscience (cellular/molecular modeling) in Norway/San Diego. The postdoc will work in a project funded by the Research Council of Norway - FriMedBio program. The research area is cellular and molecular modeling, and the goal is to identify and explore molecular signaling pathways and their neurophysiological role using data form brain imaging and whole genome studies. The work will involve various types of mechanistic and statistical modeling to investigate the polygenic contribution to development of human disorders, focusing on bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The positions are funded for three years, with up to two years outside Norway. The fellow will together with two other already hired postdocs be key scientific personnel in the project. We can offer an exciting research environment with a multidisciplinary profile and large opportunities for academic development. The postdocs will work at the KG Jebsen Centre for Psychosis research (TOP Study Group), and in close collaboration with the Computational Neuroscience Group at the Norwegian University of Life Science at ?s (compneuro.umb.no) and the Multimodal Imaging Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) (mmil.ucsd.edu). Application deadline: June 15th, 2013 For more information about the position (including how to apply), see http://uio.easycruit.com/vacancy/969893/70331?iso=gb. Contacts: Professor Ole Andreassen, phone + 47 99038893 , o.a.andreassen at medisin.uio.no, Professor Anders M. Dale amdale at gmail.com, Professor Gaute T Einevoll (Gaute.Einevoll at umb.no). %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Gaute T. Einevoll Department of Mathematical Sciences and Technology Norwegian University of Life Sciences, 1432 Aas, Norway ph. +47-64965433, mobile: +47-95124536 email: Gaute.Einevoll at umb.no, web: compneuro.umb.no, arken.umb.no/~gautei private address: Utsiktsveien 22A, 1369 Stabekk, Norway From guangliang.li2010 at gmail.com Fri May 17 10:22:05 2013 From: guangliang.li2010 at gmail.com (Guangliang Li) Date: Fri, 17 May 2013 16:22:05 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Deadline extended--2013 Reinforcement Learning Competition and ICML Workshop Message-ID: Deadline extended! The paper submission deadline for the 2013 Reinforcement Learning Competition and ICML Workshop, has been extended to May 21st . *Note: Revisions can be made at any time in EasyChair before the new deadline.* ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ** 2013 Reinforcement Learning Competition and ICML Workshop 20-21 June 2013 Atlanta, USA https://sites.google.com/site/rlcomp2013/icml_workshop * * Competition goal After a four year hiatus, the reinforcement learning competition is back. The primary aim of the competition is to test both general and domain-specific reinforcement learning algorithms, using an unbiased and transparent methodology. As a side-effect, the competition will generate a set of benchmarks domains and benchmark results in those domains, which can then be used as a basis of comparison in future work. In the reinforcement learning competition , researchers can test their algorithms and insights in a friendly competitive way, on new and challenging domains. The reinforcement learning competition has not been organized for a while, but will take place again this year after a long hiatus. The primary aim of the competition is to test both general and domain-specific reinforcement learning algorithms, using an unbiased and transparent methodology. The domains used in the competition will form a set of benchmarks, and the results of the submitted algorithms will form a body of benchmark results, which researchers can then use as a basis of comparison in future work. A secondary aim is to discuss methodological approaches for comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. This remains an issue in reinforcement learning in general. Another important aim is to ensure the continuing existence of the competition, and the prevention of further hiatuses. Our aim is to ensure that the competition will organized annually again, from this year onward. To this extend we will try to build up an organization of interested researchers. As in the previous years, the competition will be hosted at http://www.rl-competition.org/ The format will be remain as is. Agents may compete in one or more of a set of known domains. This set will include a polyathlon event, where the agents compete in a sequence of arbitrary environments. We envisage the actual competition to take place in *June 2013*. ICML Workshop on the Reinforcement Learning Competition 2013 (WRLCOMP) The competition is associated with an ICML Workshop in conjunction with ICML 2013 . The ICML reinforcement learning competition workshop will bring together researchers, who participated in the competition, in order to present and discuss their results. We will evaluate what works, and also under what conditions established methods may not work so well. In this way we hope to broaden our insight into state-of-the-art RL algorithms, and important properties of RL problems. The workshop will be organized along the lines of the domains. One time slot will be reserved for each competition category winner. In addition, all competition entrants will be invited to submit a short paper describing their approach. We will reserve a special time slot for papers on methodological problems that arise when comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/site/rlcomp2013/icml_workshop** Topics 1. For entrants All entrants are additionally invited to submit a paper describing the approach used in the competition, including findings and ideas that relate to more general research questions. 2. For everyone You are invited to submit a paper discussing methodological issue when comparing reinforcement learning algorithms, including but not limited to the following topics: Effects of PRNGs in large-scale comparisons Experimental design for an unbiased evaluation Metrics for performance evaluation Reproducibility of results Robustness of algorithms Statistical testing standards for reinforcement learning Submission Interested authors should format their papers according to ICML formatting guidelines, available here: http://icml.cc/2013/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/icml2013stylefiles.tar.gz Papers should not exceed 4 pages and are due by May 21, 2013. All papers must be submitted as PDF, and be made through Easychair at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wrlcomp2013 Important Dates Competition: Domains available: April 1 Testing starts: May 1 Instructions posted: May 26 Competition closed : June 3 Workshop: Paper Submission Deadline: May 21, 2013 Author Notification: June 1, 2013 Workshop: June 20-21, 2013 -- ---------------------- Guangliang Li PhD student, Intelligent Autonomous Systems Group Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam Room C3.258A Email: G.Li at uva.nl http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gli/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bowlby at bu.edu Fri May 17 11:53:15 2013 From: bowlby at bu.edu (Brian Bowlby) Date: Fri, 17 May 2013 11:53:15 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: 17th ICCNS conference: Final call for registration Message-ID: <39BED65A-5ED9-4DFD-BBD7-0F4DB70AC73F@bu.edu> SEVENTEENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COGNITIVE AND NEURAL SYSTEMS (ICCNS) June 4 ? 7, 2013 Boston University 677 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 02215 USA http://cns.bu.edu/cns-meeting/conference.html Sponsored by the Boston University Center for Adaptive Systems, Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology (CompNet), and Center of Excellence for Learning in Education, Science, and Technology (CELEST) with financial support from the National Science Foundation This interdisciplinary conference is attended each year by approximately 300 people from 30 countries around the world. As in previous years, the conference will focus on solutions to the questions: HOW DOES THE BRAIN CONTROL BEHAVIOR? HOW CAN TECHNOLOGY EMULATE BIOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE? The conference is aimed at researchers and students of computational neuroscience, cognitive science, neural networks, neuromorphic engineering, and artificial intelligence. It includes invited lectures and contributed lectures and posters by experts on the biology and technology of how the brain and other intelligent systems adapt to a changing world. The conference is particularly interested in exploring how the brain and biologically-inspired algorithms and systems in engineering and technology can learn. Single-track oral and poster sessions enable all presented work to be highly visible. Three-hour poster sessions with no conflicting events will be held on two of the conference days. Posters will be up all day, and can also be viewed during breaks in the talk schedule. This year's conference will include, in addition to regular invited and contributed talks and posters, two workshops on the topics: NEURAL DYNAMICS OF VALUE-BASED DECISION-MAKING AND COGNITIVE PLANNING and SOCIAL COGNITION: FROM BABIES TO ROBOTS See the url above for the complete program of invited speakers. CONFIRMED INVITED SPEAKERS Todd Braver (Washington University, St. Louis) Flexible neural mechanisms of cognitive control: Influences on reward-based decision-making Marisa Carrasco (New York University) Effects of attention on early vision Patrick Cavanagh (Universit? Paris Descartes) Common functional architecture for spatial attention and perceived location Robert Desimone [Plenary Speaker] (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Prefrontal-visual cortex interactions in attention Asif Ghazanfar (Princeton University) Evolving and developing communication through coupled oscillations Stephen Grossberg (Boston University) Behavioral economics and neuroeconomics: Cooperation, competition, preference, and decision-making Joy Hirsch (Yale University School of Medicine) Neural circuits for conflict resolution Roberta Klatzky (Carnegie Mellon University) Multi-modal interactions within and between senses Kevin LaBar (Duke University) Neural systems for fear generalization Randi Martin (Rice University) Memory retrieval and interference during language comprehension Andrew Meltzoff (University of Washington) How to build a baby with social cognition: Accelerating learning by generalizing across self and other Javier Movellan (University of California, San Diego) Optimal control approaches to the analysis and synthesis of social behavior Mary Potter (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Recognizing briefly presented pictures: Feedforward processing? Pieter Roelfsema (The Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience) Neuronal mechanisms for perceptual organization Daniel Salzman (Columbia University) Cognitive signals in the amygdala Daniel Schacter [Plenary Speaker] (Harvard University) Constructive memory and imagining the future Wolfram Schultz (University of Cambridge) Neuronal reward and risk signals Helen Tager-Flusberg (Boston University) Identifying early neurobiological risk markers for autism spectrum disorder in the first year of life Jan Theeuwes (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Prior history shapes selection James Todd (Ohio State University) The perception of 3D shape from texture Leslie Ungerleider (National Institutes of Health) Functional architecture for face processing in the primate brain Jeremy Wolfe (Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women's Hospital) How selective and non-selective pathways contribute to visual search in scenes REGISTRATION FORM Seventeenth International Conference on Cognitive and Neural Systems June 4 ? 7, 2013 Boston University 677 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 02215 USA Fax: +1 617 353 7755 Mr/Ms/Dr/Prof:_____________________________________________________ Affiliation:_________________________________________________________ Address:__________________________________________________________ City, State, Postal Code:______________________________________________ Phone and Fax:_____________________________________________________ Email:____________________________________________________________ The registration fee includes a conference reception and multiple daily coffee breaks. CHECK ONE: ( ) $135 Conference (Regular) ( ) $85 Conference (Student) METHOD OF PAYMENT: [ ] Enclosed is a check made payable to "Boston University" Checks must be made payable in US dollars and issued by a US correspondent bank. Each registrant is responsible for any and all bank charges. [ ] I wish to pay by credit card (MasterCard, Visa, or Discover Card only) Name as it appears on the card:___________________________________________ Type of card: _____________________________ Expiration date:________________ Account number: _______________________________________________________ Signature:____________________________________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: brochure (04-08-13).docx Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document Size: 71208 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From julian.mcauley at gmail.com Fri May 17 15:05:47 2013 From: julian.mcauley at gmail.com (Julian McAuley) Date: Fri, 17 May 2013 16:05:47 -0300 Subject: Connectionists: 2nd CFP: Eleventh Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs Message-ID: Eleventh Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs (MLG 2013) August 11, 2013 - Chicago, IL (co-located with KDD 2013) http://snap.stanford.edu/mlg2013/ Submission Deadline: June 6, 2013 This workshop is a forum for exchanging ideas and methods for mining and learning with graphs, developing new common understandings of the problems at hand, sharing of data sets where applicable, and leveraging existing knowledge from different disciplines. The goal is to bring together researchers from academia, industry, and government, to create a forum for discussing recent advances graph analysis. In doing so we aim to better understand the overarching principles and the limitations of our current methods, and to inspire research on new algorithms and techniques for mining and learning with graphs. To reflect the broad scope of work on mining and learning with graphs, we encourage submissions that span the spectrum from theoretical analysis, to algorithms and implementation, to applications and empirical studies. In terms of application areas, the growth of user-generated content on blogs, microblogs, discussion forums, product reviews, etc., has given rise to a host of new opportunities for graph mining in the analysis of social media. Social media analytics is a fertile ground for research at the intersection of mining graphs and text. As such, this year we especially encourage submissions on theory, methods, and applications focusing on the analysis of social media. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Theoretical aspects: * Computational or statistical learning theory related to graphs * Theoretical analysis of graph algorithms or models * Sampling and evaluation issues in graph algorithms * Analysis of dynamic graphs * Relationships between MLG and statistical relational learning or inductive logic programming Algorithms and methods: * Graph mining * Kernel methods for structured data * Probabilistic and graphical models for structured data * (Multi-) Relational data mining * Methods for structured outputs * Statistical models of graph structure * Combinatorial graph methods * Spectral graph methods * Semi-supervised learning, active learning, transductive inference, and transfer learning in the context of graph Applications and analysis: * Analysis of social media * Social network analysis * Analysis of biological networks * Knowledge graph construction * Large-scale analysis and modeling We invite the submission of regular research papers (6-8 pages) as well as position papers (2-4 pages). Authors whose papers are accepted to the workshop will have the opportunity to participate in a poster session, and some set may also be chosen for oral presentation. Timeline: Submission Deadline: June 6 Notification: June 25 Final Version: July 6 Workshop: August 11 Submission instructions can be found on http://snap.stanford.edu/mlg2013/instructions.html Please send enquires to jmcauley at cs.stanford.edu We look forward to seeing you at the workshop! Lada Adamic, Lise Getoor, Bert Huang, Jure Leskovec, Julian McAuley (chairs) Edoardo Airoldi, Leman Akoglu, Aris Anagnostopoulos, Arindam Banerjee, Christian Bauckhage, Francesco Bonchi, Ulf Brefeld, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Thomas Gaerner, Brian Gallagher, David Gleich, Marco Gori, Mohammad Hasan, Jake Hofman, Jiawei Han, Larry Holder, Manfred Jaeger, Tamara Kolda, U Kang, Kristian Kersting, Kristina Lerman, Bo Long, Sofus Macskassy, Thorsten Meinl, Prem Melville, Dunja Mladenic, Jennifer Neville, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Jan Ramon, Bing Tian Dai, Hanghang Tong, Chris Volinsky, Stefan Wrobel, Xifeng Yan, Xintian Yang, Philip Yu, Mohammed Zaki, Liang Zhang, Mark Zhang (program committee) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sebastian.risi at cornell.edu Fri May 17 12:13:31 2013 From: sebastian.risi at cornell.edu (Sebastian Risi) Date: Fri, 17 May 2013 12:13:31 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: Final CFP: AAAI 2013 Fall Symposium on How Should Intelligence be Abstracted in AI Research: MDPs, Symbolic Representations, Artificial Neural Networks, or _____? (Deadline May 24th) Message-ID: -- Final Call for Papers -- ** AAAI 2013 Fall Symposium: ?How Should Intelligence be Abstracted in AI Research: MDPs, Symbolic Representations, Artificial Neural Networks, or _____?? ** Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia (adjacent to Washington, DC). November 15-17, 2013 ** Schedule ** Full Paper/Extended Abstract Submission: May 24, 2013 Noti?cation: June 21, 2013 Final Camera-ready Paper/Extended Abstract: September 12, 2013 ** Keynote Speakers ** Andrew Ng (Stanford University, USA) Georg Striedter (University of California, Irvine, USA) Randall O'Reilly (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA) Risto Miikkulainen (University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA) More TBD Dear colleagues, We invite contributions to our AAAI 2013 Fall Symposium titled ?How Should Intelligence be Abstracted in AI Research: MDPs, Symbolic Representations, Artificial Neural Networks, or _____??. Each subfield of AI has a different perspective on intelligence and unspoken assumptions about what is critical to recreate it computationally. To better understand such differences, we aim to bring together a diverse group of AI researchers interested in discussing and comparing how intelligence and processes that might create it are abstracted in various subfields. For example, such discussion may include honest examination of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, and what features of biological intelligence are crucial or unnecessary to include in algorithms. We hope to encourage cross-pollination of ideas between researchers viewing intelligence in different ways (e.g. through the lens of MDPs or symbolic manipulation) and at different levels of abstraction (e.g. biologically-plausible neural simulations or restricted Boltzmann machines). One goal is to facilitate revising or creating new abstractions of intelligence and intelligence-generating processes. More information can be found here: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~risi/AAAISymposium2013/ Contributions related to how intelligence can or should be abstracted algorithmically in artificial intelligence research are invited. Extended abstracts that summarize the results of a research program along these lines are most welcome, as are personal position papers or contributions describing speculative work or work in progress. Works bridging traditionally separate AI paradigms are encouraged. Participants should be open to inspiration from work and ideas in other subfields, and be willing to step outside their intellectual comfort zones. Interested participants are encouraged to submit extended abstracts (no more than 2 pages), or full-length papers (up to 6 pages in AAAI format) in PDF format to sebastian.risi at cornell.edu. Accepted submissions will be published as citable, peer-reviewed papers in the AAAI technical report. Areas of interest include but are not limited to: - Different levels and types of knowledge representation and reasoning - Abstractions of the following: - Neural networks (e.g. deep learning networks, spiking ANNs, and plastic ANNs) - Learning (e.g. machine learning and reinforcement learning) - Biological development (e.g. generative and developmental systems, and developmental robotics) - Evolutionary search (e.g. digital evolution and evolutionary algorithms) - Biologically-inspired computation - Evolutionary robotics - Swarm intelligence - Artificial life - Philosophical arguments on characteristics of appropriate abstractions for AI The symposium will be held Friday - Sunday, November 15-17 at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia (adjacent to Washington, DC). We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you! -- Sebastian Risi, Joel Lehman, Jeff Clune -- Dr. Sebastian Risi Postdoctoral Fellow Creative Machines Laboratory Cornell University Email: sebastian.risi at cornell.edu Tel: (407) 929-5113 Web: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~risi/ From facsmelo at gmail.com Sat May 18 13:24:11 2013 From: facsmelo at gmail.com (Francisco S. Melo) Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 18:24:11 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Call for participation - The Geometry Friends Game AI Competition Message-ID: <699E1E36-4B6E-499D-9065-58D7C36AAFEA@gmail.com> Apologies for multiple postings. ---------------------------------- Call for participation - The Geometry Friends Game AI Competition Submission deadline: July 26 http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/geometryfriends/ Geometry Friends is a 2-player cooperative puzzle platformer game, where 2 players control 2 simple characters (a circle and a rectangle), with distinct characteristics, trying to collect all diamonds in a set of levels as fast as possible. The game promotes collaboration between the two players and presents challenging control of the characters in a simulated physics environment. It is an very interesting test-bed for AI agents. To successfully solve the several levels the AI agents need to: 1) Deal with coordination at different layers: from motion control (e.g. achieving perfect timing) to level resolution (e.g. devising shared plans); 2) Dealing with limited actuation situated in a simulated physics environment (with gravity and friction). 3) Solve platform (skill) based puzzles, which involves discovering the proper order to collect the diamonds and identifying the points where collaboration is need. The competition is held at IEEE Computational Intelligence in Games 2013: http://eldar.mathstat.uoguelph.ca/dashlock/CIG2013/ Give it Try! The organization committee, Rui Prada, Francisco Melo, Phil Lopes and Jo?o Quit?rio. -- Francisco S. Melo Assistant Professor at IST Senior Researcher at INESC-ID GAIPS - INESC-ID IST TagusPark Av. Prof. Dr. Cavaco Silva Room 2N7.15 2780-990 Porto Salvo PORTUGAL E-mail: fmelo at inesc-id.pt http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/~fmelo From danny.silver at acadiau.ca Sat May 18 09:19:51 2013 From: danny.silver at acadiau.ca (Danny Silver) Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 13:19:51 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Recent paper from joint efforts at Acadia University / Hong Kong University of Science and Technology In-Reply-To: <516556AC.9060009@imse-cnm.csic.es> Message-ID: <04B5F3F9A8AD8C48AEB38BE03529D7171A2F8ABA@exchange2.ad.acadiau.ca> We would like to bring to your attention the following position paper presented at the AAAI spring symposium, which might be of interest to some people on this list: Daniel L. Silver, Qiang Yang, Lianghao Li Lifelong Machine Learning Systems: Beyond Learning Algorithms Proceedings of the 2013 AAAI Spring Symposium on Lifelong Machine Learning, Stanford Uinversity, CA, p. 50-55, http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS13/paper/view/5802 Feedback and comment is greatly welcome. Best regards, Danny ======================= Daniel L. Silver, Ph.D. danny.silver at acadiau.ca Professor & Director, Jodrey School of Computer Science, Acadia University Office 310, Carnegie Hall, Wolfville, NS Canada B4P 2R6 p:902-585-1331 f:902-585-1067 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From grlmc at urv.cat Sun May 19 13:01:21 2013 From: grlmc at urv.cat (GRLMC) Date: Sun, 19 May 2013 19:01:21 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: SSTiC 2013: next registration deadline 26 May Message-ID: *To be removed from our mailing list, please respond to this message with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line* ********************************************************************* 2013 INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL ON TRENDS IN COMPUTING SSTiC 2013 Tarragona, Spain July 22-26, 2013 Organized by Rovira i Virgili University http://grammars.grlmc.com/SSTiC2013/ ********************************************************************* +++ next registration deadline: May 26 +++ ********************************************************************* AIM: SSTiC 2013 will be an open forum for the convergence of top class well recognized computer scientists and people at the beginning of their research career (typically PhD students) as well as consolidated researchers. SSTiC 2013 will cover the whole spectrum of computer science by means of 63 six-hour courses dealing with hot topics at the frontiers of the field. By actively participating, lecturers and attendees will share the idea of scientific excellence as the main motto of their research work. ADDRESSED TO: Graduate students from around the world. There are no pre-requisites in terms of the academic degree the attendee must hold. However, since there will be several levels among the courses, in the description of some of them reference may be made to specific knowledge background. SSTiC 2013 is appropriate also for people more advanced in their career who want to keep themselves updated on developments in the field. Finally, senior researchers will find it fruitful to listen and discuss with people who are main references of the diverse branches of computing nowadays. REGIME: 7 parallel sessions will be held during the whole event. Participants will be able to freely choose the courses they will be willing to attend as well as to move from one to another. VENUE: Palau Firal i de Congressos de Tarragona Arquitecte Rovira, 2 43001 Tarragona http://www.palaucongrestgna.com COURSES AND PROFESSORS: Divyakant Agrawal (Santa Barbara) [intermediate] Scalable Data Management in Enterprise and Cloud Computing Infrastructures Shun-ichi Amari (Riken) [introductory] Information Geometry and Its Applications James Anderson (Chapel Hill) [intermediate] Scheduling and Synchronization in Real-Time Multicore Systems Pierre Baldi (Irvine) [intermediate] Big Data Informatics Challenges and Opportunities in the Life Sciences Yoshua Bengio (Montr?al) [introductory/intermediate] Deep Learning of Representations Stephen Brewster (Glasgow) [advanced] Multimodal Human-Computer Interaction Bruno Buchberger (Linz) [introductory] Groebner Bases: An Algorithmic Method for Multivariate Polynomial Systems. Foundations and Applications Rajkumar Buyya (Melbourne) [intermediate] Cloud Computing Jan Camenisch (IBM Zurich) [intermediate] Cryptography for Privacy Jeffrey S. Chase (Duke) [intermediate] Trust Logic as an Enabler for Secure Federated Systems Larry S. Davis (College Park) [intermediate] Video Analysis of Human Activities Paul De Bra (Eindhoven) [intermediate] Adaptive Systems Marco Dorigo (Brussels) [introductory] An Introduction to Swarm Intelligence and Swarm Robotics Paul Dourish (Irvine) [introductory] Ubiquitous Computing in a Social Context Max J. Egenhofer (Maine) [introductory/intermediate] Qualitative Spatial Relations: Formalizations and Inferences Richard M. Fujimoto (Georgia Tech) [introductory] Parallel and Distributed Simulation David Garlan (Carnegie Mellon) [advanced] Software Architecture: Past, Present and Future Mario Gerla (Los Angeles) [intermediate] Vehicle Cloud Computing Georgios B. Giannakis (Minnesota) [advanced] Sparsity and Low Rank for Robust Data Analytics and Networking Ralph Grishman (New York) [intermediate] Information Extraction from Natural Language Francisco Herrera (Granada) [intermediate] Imbalanced Classification: Current Approaches and Open Problems Paul Hudak (Yale) [introductory] Euterpea: From Signals to Symphonies Using Haskell Niraj K. Jha (Princeton) [intermediate] FinFET Circuit Design George Karypis (Minnesota) [introductory] Introduction to Parallel Computing: Architectures, Algorithms, and Programming Aggelos K. Katsaggelos (Northwestern) [intermediate/advanced] Sparsity-based Advances in Image Processing Arie E. Kaufman (Stony Brook) [advanced] Advances in Visualization Carl Kesselman (Southern California) [intermediate] Biomedical Informatics and Big Data Hugo Krawczyk (IBM Research) [intermediate] An Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Authenticated Key Exchange Protocols Pierre L'Ecuyer (Montr?al) [intermediate] Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Simulation: Theory and Practice Laks Lakshmanan (British Columbia) [intermediate/advanced] Information and Influence Spread in Social Networks Wenke Lee (Georgia Tech) [introductory] DNS-based Monitoring of Malware Activities Maurizio Lenzerini (Roma La Sapienza) [intermediate] Ontology-based Data Integration Ming C. Lin (Chapel Hill) [introductory/intermediate] Physically-based Modeling and Simulation Jane W.S. Liu (Academia Sinica) [intermediate] Critical Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Preparedness and Response Satoru Miyano (Tokyo) [intermediate] How to Hack Cancer Systems with Computational Methods Aloysius K. Mok (Austin) [intermediate] From Real-time Systems to Cyber-physical Systems Hermann Ney (Aachen) [intermediate/advanced] Probabilistic Modelling for Natural Language Processing - with Applications to Speech Recognition, Handwriting Recognition and Machine Translation Cathleen A. Norris (North Texas) & Elliot Soloway (Ann Arbor) [introductory] Primary & Secondary Educational Computing in the Age of Mobilism Jeff Offutt (George Mason) [intermediate] Cutting Edge Research in Engineering of Web Applications David Padua (Urbana) [intermediate] Parallel Programming with Abstractions Bijan Parsia (Manchester) [introductory] The Semantic Web: Conceptual and Technical Foundations Massoud Pedram (Southern California) [intermediate] Energy Efficient Architectures and Information Processing Systems Charles E. Perkins (FutureWei) [intermediate/advanced] Beyond 4G Prabhakar Raghavan (Google) [introductory/intermediate] Web Search and Advertising Sudhakar M. Reddy (Iowa) [introductory] Design for Test and Test of Digital VLSI Circuits Phillip Rogaway (Davis) [introductory/intermediate] Provably Secure Symmetric Encryption Gustavo Rossi (La Plata) [intermediate] Topics in Model Driven Web Engineering Kaushik Roy (Purdue) [introductory/intermediate] Low-energy Computing Robert Sargent (Syracuse) [introductory] Validating Models Douglas C. Schmidt (Vanderbilt) [intermediate] Patterns and Frameworks for Concurrent and Networked Software Bart Selman (Cornell) [intermediate] Fast Large-scale Probabilistic and Logical Inference Methods Mubarak Shah (Central Florida) [intermediate/advanced] Visual Crowd Surveillance Ron Shamir (Tel Aviv) [introductory] Revealing Structure in Disease Regulation and Networks Satinder Singh (Ann Arbor) [introductory/advanced] Reinforcement Learning: On Machines Learning to Act from Experience Dawn Xiaodong Song (Berkeley) [introductory] Selected Topics in Computer Security Mike Thelwall (Wolverhampton) [introductory] Sentiment Strength Detection for the Social Web Julita Vassileva (Saskatchewan) [introductory/intermediate] Engaging Users in Social Computing Systems Philip Wadler (Edinburgh) [introductory] Topics in Lambda Calculus and Life Yao Wang (Polytechnic New York) [introductory/advanced] Video Compression: Fundamentals and Recent Development Gio Wiederhold (Stanford) [introductory] Software Economics: How Do the Results of the Intellectual Efforts Enter the Global Market Place Limsoon Wong (National Singapore) [introductory/intermediate] The Use of Context in Gene Expression and Proteomic Profile Analysis Michael Wooldridge (Oxford) [introductory] Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Ronald R. Yager (Iona) [introductory/intermediate] Fuzzy Sets and Soft Computing Philip S. Yu (Illinois Chicago) [advanced] Mining Big Data REGISTRATION: It has to be done at http://grammars.grlmc.com/SSTiC2013/Registration.php Since the capacity of the venue is limited, registration requests will be processed on a first come first served basis. The registration period will be closed when the capacity of the venue will be complete. FEES: They are the same (a flat rate) for all people by the corresponding deadline. They give the right to attend all courses. ACCOMMODATION: Information about accommodation is available on the website of the School. CERTIFICATE: Participants will be delivered a certificate of attendance. IMPORTANT DATES: Announcement of the programme: January 26, 2013 Six registration deadlines: February 26, March 26, April 26, May 26, June 26, July 26, 2013 QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION: Lilica Voicu: florentinalilica.voicu at urv.cat POSTAL ADDRESS: SSTiC 2013 Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC) Rovira i Virgili University Av. Catalunya, 35 43002 Tarragona, Spain Phone: +34-977-559543 Fax: +34-977-558386 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Ajuntament de Tarragona Diputaci? de Tarragona Universitat Rovira i Virgili From y.hayashi at reading.ac.uk Tue May 21 05:28:39 2013 From: y.hayashi at reading.ac.uk (Yoshikatsu Hayashi) Date: Tue, 21 May 2013 09:28:39 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Reminder of the deadline of application, 31th of May: Fully funded PhD Studentship Message-ID: <1E34BE02E76A394C8DA8EE9251795C8293C131@VIME-MBX2.rdg.ac.uk> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wwwkiycom.yobi at gmail.com Mon May 20 22:33:50 2013 From: wwwkiycom.yobi at gmail.com (In Youb Kim) Date: Tue, 21 May 2013 11:33:50 +0900 Subject: Connectionists: ICONIP 2013 - 2nd call for papers of ICONIP 2013 Message-ID: 2ND CALL FOR PAPERS *Download the 2nd call for papers*: http://dexco.cafe24.com/ICONIP2013/ICONIP2013-2nd Call for Papers_Final_s.pdf The 20th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2013), an annual conference of the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA), will be held from 3 - 7 November 2013 at EXCO, Daegu, Republic of Korea. We hope that you will take advantage of this unique opportunity to interact and share your experience with your colleagues and peers, and have a memorable and rewarding experience during your time in Daegu, Republic of Korea. *KEYNOTE / PLENARY SPEAKERS* The organizing committee is pleased to announce that outstanding keynote speaker and plenary speakers will give great speeches on ICONIP 2013 as below. ? Keynote Speaker *Prof. Shun-Ichi Amari*, Brain Science Institute, RIKEN, Japan ?Dreaming of Mathematical Neuroscience for Half a Century? ? Plenary Speakers *Prof. Yoshua Bengio*, University of Montreal, Canada ?Deep Learning of Representations? *Prof. Kunihiko Fukushima*, Kansai University, Japan ?How to design multi-layered neural networks for vision? *Prof. Soo-Young Lee*, KAIST, Korea ?Artificial Cognitive Systems with Active Learning and Situation Awareness Abilities: From Cognitive Science to Real-World Applications? *Prof. Naftali Tishby*, The Hebrew University, Israel ?Balanced information flow in perception and action - the key principle of computational intelligence?? *Prof. Zongben Xu*, Xi?an Jiaotong University, China ?Nonlinear Sparsitiy: Examples, Modeling and Applications? *CONFERENCE SCOPE AND THEMES* Prospective authors are invited to contribute high-quality papers related to the topics listed below. The scope of the conference includes, but is not limited to, the following areas: *Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence: *Theoretical, computational, or experimental studies of perception, psychophysics, learning and memory, inference and reasoning, problem solving, natural language processing, and neuropsychology. *Learning Theory, Algorithms, and Architectures: *Stability and convergence analysis, statistical learning algorithms, neural network models, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, kernel methods, graphical models, dimensionality reduction and manifold learning, statistical and information-theoretic methods, generalization, regularization and model selection, Gaussian processes and mixture models, matrix/tensor analysis, statistical physics of learning, and evolutionary algorithms. *Computational Neuroscience and Brain Imaging: *Theoretical and experimental studies of processing and transmission of information in biological neurons and networks, spiking neurons, visual and auditory cortex, neural encoding and decoding, plasticity and adaptation, brain imaging, neuroimaging, brain mapping, and brain segmentation. *Vision, Speech and Signal Processing:* Biological and machine vision, image processing and coding, visual perception and modeling, visual selective attention, visual coding and representation, object detection and recognition, motion detection and tracking, natural scene analysis, image processing, auditory perception and modeling, source separation, speech recognition and speech synthesis, speaker identification, and audio & speech retrieval. *Control, Robotics and Hardware Technologies: *Decision and control, exploration, planning, navigation, Markov decision processes, game playing, multi-agent coordination, neuro-fuzzy system, cognitive robotics, developmental robotics, analog and digital VLSI, neuromorphic engineering, computational sensors and actuators, microrobotics, bioMEMS, neural prostheses, photonics, and molecular & quantum computing. *Novel approaches and Applications:* Innovative applications that use machine learning, including systems for time series prediction, bioinformatics, systems biology, text/web analysis, multimedia processing, adaptive intelligent systems, brain-computer interfaces, granular computing, hybrid intelligent systems, neuroinformatics and neuroengineering, bioinformatics, information retrieval, data mining, and knowledge discovery. *PAPER SUBMISSION* Authors are invited to submit full-length papers (8 pages maximum) by the submission deadline through the online submission system. It is also possible to submit extended abstracts which include the aim or rationale for the following specific topics: *Neuroscience, Neuro-psychology, Industrial applications, Cognitive science, and Demonstration.* The submission of a paper implies that the paper is original and has not been submitted under review, or copyright-protected elsewhere and will be presented by an author if accepted. All submitted papers will be reviewed by area experts based on the criteria of originality, significance, quality, and clarity. The authors of accepted papers will have an opportunity to revise their papers and take consideration of the reviewers' comments and suggestions. The proceedings of ICONIP 2013 will be published by Springer in its series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Selected papers will be included in special issues of the following international journals. *? Neural Networks* *? Neurocomputing* *? Cognitive Computation* *? Cognitive Systems Research* *? Neural Processing Letters* *IMPORTANT DATES* Deadline for Special session, Tutorials and Workshops proposals ------------------- *15 May 2013* Deadline for extended abstract, regular and special session paper ------------------- *15 June 2013* Notification of acceptance ---------------- *1 August 2013* Deadline for Camera-ready final paper submission -------------- *15 August 2013* *CALL FOR SPECIAL SESSION / WORKSHOP PROPOSALS* ICONIP2013 welcomes proposals for special sessions/workshop. Special session will be held during the conference. The aim of a special session is to provide the state-of-the-art and current research direction in specific fields of neural information processing. The special sessions devoted to emerging topics with growing attention are particularly encouraged. We also invite proposals for full-day or half-day workshops in relevant and current topics in neural information processing. Workshops will be held on 3 November 2013, the first day of the conference. A workshop should include an introductory talk on the topic and will have final discussions at the end of the workshop. Apart from the introductory talk and the discussion, workshop should preferably include six or more additional presentations. *Researchers and prospective organizers are invited to submit a one-page proposal for a special session/workshop to the ICONIP 2013 secretariat or each chair via the following emails before **15 May 2013**.* *? ICONIP 2013 Secretariat*: iconip2013 at gmail.com *? Special session Chairs*: Prof. Sung-Bae Cho, Yonsei University, Korea / sbcho at cs.yonsei.ac.kr Prof. Seiichi Ozawa, Kobe University, Japan / ozawasei at kobe-u.ac.jp Prof. Liqing Zhang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China / zhang-lq at cs.sjtu.edu.cn *? Workshop Chairs*: Prof. Seong-Whan Lee, Korea University, Korea / swlee at image.korea.ac.kr Prof. Daijin Kim, POSTECH, Korea / dkim at postech.ac.kr Mr. Kyunghwan Kim, NT Research, Korea / kimk at ntresearch.net Each proposal should include the following information: - The title of the special session or workshop - The organizers with their affiliations - A description of why the topic is of special interest and how it fits to the scope of ICONIP - A list of potential authors or contributors - The name(s) of the presenter(s) of the introductory talk (Only for workshop proposal) - A theme for the discussion (Only for workshop proposal) For more details for special session/workshop proposals, please visit the ICONIP 2013 website (www.iconip2013.org). *Conference Committee* *Honorary Chair* *Shun-ichi Amari*, RIKEN, Japan *Soo-Young Lee*, KAIST, Korea *General Chair* *Minho Lee*, Kyungpook National University, Korea *Program Chair* *Akira Hirose*, The University of Tokyo, Japan *Zeng-Guang Hou*, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, China *Rhee Man Kil*, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea *Advisory Committee* *Jonathan H. Chan*, Thailand *Wlodzislaw Duch*, Poland *Kunihiko Fukushima*, Japan *Tom Gedeon*, Australia *Aike Guo*, China *Akira Iwata*, Japan *Nik Kasabov*, New Zealand *Irwin King*, Hong Kong *Noboru Onishi*, Japan *Ron Son*, USA *Il Hong Suh*, Korea *Shiro Usui*, Japan *DeLiang Wang*, USA *Lipo Wang*, Singapore *Jun Wang*, Hong Kong *Lei Xu*, Hong Kong *Takeshi Yamakawa*, Japan *Byoung-Tak Zhang*, Korea *Li-Ming Zhang*, China *Organizing Chair* *Hyeyoung Park*, Kyungpook National University, Korea *Workshop Chair* *Daijin Kim*, POSTECH, Korea *Kyunghwan Kim*, NT Research, Korea *Seong-Whan Lee*, Korea University, Korea *Special Session Chair* *Sung-Bae Cho*, Yonsei University, Korea *Seiichi Ozawa*, Kobe University, Japan *Liqing Zhang*, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China *Tutorial Chair* *Seungjin Choi*, POSTECH, Korea *Publication Chair* *Yoonsuck Choe*, Texas A&M University, USA *Hyung-Min Park*, Sogang University, Korea *Seong-Bae Park*, Kyungpook National University, Korea *Publicity Chair* *Kazushi Ikeda*, NAIST, Japan *Chi-Sing Leung*, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong *Shaoning Pang*, Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand *Registration Chair* *Min-Young Kim*, Kyungpook National University, Korea *Financial Chair* *Sang-Woo Ban*, Dongguk University, Korea *Local Arrangement Chair* *Doo-Hyun Choi*, Kyungpook National University, Korea *Jong-Seok Lee*, Yonsei University, Korea *Rammohan Mallipeddi*, Kyungpook National University, Korea *Secretariat* iconip2013 at gmail.com *DAEGU, KOREA* Daegu Metropolitan City is the third largest city in Korea and is located in the southeastern part of the Korean peninsula. With an efficient transportation network linked in all directions, Daegu Metropolitan City is a gateway to numerous cultural heritages and tourist attractions, all proudly displaying the unique Korean culture. The organizing committee of ICONIP 2013 welcomes you to experience and enjoy the following tour programs. *Historical/Cultural Tour - ?UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites?* Andong Folk Village, Yangdong Folk Village, Seokguram Grotto, Bulguksa Temple and Tripitaka Koreana. *Industrial Tour* The hub of knowledge-based industry in northeast Asia : Daegu Metropolitan City is a place where industry thrives. *Korean Waive Tour - Korean drama/movie Theme* Which is your favorite Korean drama or movie? If you are not sure, come and join us in this tour that includes the filming locations of drama ?Love Rain?, movie ?Dae Jang-Geum? and ?Queen Seon Deok?. *ACCOMMODATION* For all participants of ICONIP 2013, the organizing committee is pleased to offer sufficient rooms at hotels listed on ICONIP 2013 website with discount rates. To take advantage of these discounts, participants are kindly advised to make an on-line hotel reservation via the ICONIP 2013 website. *TRANSPORTATION* *International Travel* The major arrival points in Korea are the Incheon International Airport (Seoul), the Gimhae International Airport (Busan), and the Daegu International Airport (Daegu). For those who arrive at Incheon Airport, to take domestic airline or KTX (Korean train express) train is highly recommended. From Gimhae International Airport, you can also take KTX train as well as limousine buses heading to Daegu. Incheon International Airport (Seoul) 57 countries 174 cities Daegu International Airport (Daegu) 2 countries 5 cities / Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao, Shenyang, Bangkok Gimhae International Airport (Busan) 11 countries 25 cities / USA, Germany, Japan, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Russia, Thailand, Taiwan *Domestic Transportation* >From Incheon Int?l Airport (Seoul) Domestic Flight: 50 minute, 2 flights/day KTX: 140 minute, every 30 minute Limousine bus: 4 hours, 33 times/day >From Gimhae Int?l Airport (Busan) Limousine bus: 70 minute, every 40 minute ***For more details, please visit the ICONIP 2013 website ( www.iconip2013.org) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ICONIP2013-2nd Call for Papers.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 683084 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tim.fawcett at cantab.net Tue May 21 10:24:04 2013 From: tim.fawcett at cantab.net (Tim Fawcett) Date: Tue, 21 May 2013 15:24:04 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Conference: THE EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOURAL MECHANISMS, 5-6 Dec 2013, London Zoo Message-ID: We are pleased to announce that this year's ASAB Winter Conference will be held on 5-6 December, at the usual location of London Zoo (ZSL Meeting Rooms). The topic is 'The Evolution of Behavioural Mechanisms' and the keynote speakers will be Melissa Bateson, Reuven Dukas, Simon Laughlin and Marlene Zuk. For more information, to submit an abstract (deadline: 16 August) or to register your interest, please visit http://tinyurl.com/winterasab2013 or contact us at madorganiser at gmail.com. We look forward to seeing you in London! Tim Fawcett, Andy Higginson & Pete Trimmer Modelling Animal Decisions (MAD) group, University of Bristol -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dr Tim W. Fawcett Room B72 School of Biological Sciences University of Bristol Woodland Road Bristol BS8 1UG United Kingdom +44 117 9287478 (office) +44 7789 126382 (mobile) tim.fawcett at cantab.net www.timwfawcett.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bhammer at techfak.uni-bielefeld.de Mon May 20 12:37:01 2013 From: bhammer at techfak.uni-bielefeld.de (Barbara Hammer) Date: Mon, 20 May 2013 18:37:01 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: workshop NC^2 at GCPR'13 Message-ID: <519A512D.6010102@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de> CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS The Workshop New Challenges in Neurocomputing and Machine Learning (NC^2) with special focus topic on Interpretable Models in Machine Learning will be held in conjunction to GCPR'13 (http://www.gcpr2013.uni-saarland.de/) at September, 3rd, 2013, in Saarbr?cken, Germany. See: http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~bhammer/GINN/NC2/ Submissions are welcome connected to the following areas: * nonlinear dimensionality reduction, blind source separation, and visualization * models for very large or streaming data sets * parallelization and hardware implementations * models for non-euclidean data * recursive models and dynamic systems * adaptive data representation * bio-inspired models * challenges in machine learning * challenges in applications Submission deadline is 16.July 2013. ORGANIZERS: Barbara Hammer, Thomas Martinetz, Thomas Villmann PROGRAMM COMMITTEE: Michael Biehl, Colin Fyfe, Marco Gori, Fred Hamker, Sven Hellbach, Amaury Lendasse, Paulo Lisboa, Alessio Micheli, Jaakko Peltonen, Felix Reinhart, Martin Riedmiler, Fabrice Rossi, Frank-Michael Schleif, Udo Seiffert, Alessando Sperduti, Marc Strickert, Peter Tino, Heiko Wersing, Rolf W?rtz -- Prof. Dr. Barbara Hammer CITEC centre of excellence Bielefeld University D-33594 Bielefeld Phone: +49 521 / 106 12115 Fax: +49 521 / 106 12181 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From frank.ritter at psu.edu Sun May 19 11:53:19 2013 From: frank.ritter at psu.edu (Frank Ritter) Date: Sun, 19 May 2013 11:53:19 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: CogModel notes: ICCM13/BRIMS13/outlets/RFPs/Jobs/bone marrow Message-ID: This is based on the International Cognitive Modeling Conference mailing list that I maintain. I forward messages about twice a year. (this is the third one for ICCM 2013, and I think last.) The first announcement is driving this email -- tutorial program is up for ICCM 2013 in Ottawa, and registration will open soon. The rest indicate new publication outlets, resources, and jobs in Cog Sci and in cognitive modeling. I have also included an unusual item for the end. If you would like to be removed, please just let me know. I maintain it by hand to keep it small. I've added a conflict of interest note to each item. I've become more aware of CoI recently. (As an aside, PSU's web site requires exact dollar amounts for each stock owned and consulting fees, does yours? PSU says most universities do, and I know of none that do. Happy to correspond on this.) [Hypertext version available at http://acs.ist.psu.edu/iccm2013/iccm-mailing-may2013.html] cheers, Frank Ritter frank.e.ritter at gmail.com http://acs.ist.psu.edu http://www.frankritter.com **************************************************************** 1. ICCM 2013, Ottawa, 11-14 July 2013, registration open on 3 June http://www.iccm-conference.org/2013/schedule 2. ICCM 2012 tutorials: Soar/VPA/SDA/Quantum/C3trace, Ottawa, 11 Jul 13 http://acs.ist.psu.edu/iccm2013/tutorials.html 3. BRIMS 2013 to be held concurrent with ICCM 2013 http://brimsconference.org/ 4. Call For Papers 2013 AAAI Fall Symp. on Integrated Cognition, 15-17 nov 13 due, 24 may 13, http://intcog.ict.usc.edu 5. BICA 2013 Meeting, last call for papers, due 15 May 13, but.... http://bicasociety.org/meetings/2013 6. RFP: Perspectives on understanding http://www.varietiesofunderstanding.com, due 1 nov 13 7. Advances in Cognitive Systems Journal call http://www.cogsys.org/instructions/ 8. CfPapers - Second Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems http://www.cogsys.org, due 16 sept 13 9. CFPapers: The Computational Social Science Society of the Americas http://computationalsocialscience.org/csssa2013, due 3 june 13 10. CFPapers: J. of Interaction Science http://www.journalofinteractionscience.com/ 11. 25th APS Annual Convention, 23-26 May 13 Washington, DC http://www.psychologicalscience.org/convention 12. 1st International Summer School on Cog. Computation, 26-30 aug13 http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/events/COGCOMP2013, due 27 may 13 13. CfProposals: Research area for applied models, NIDRR, due 8 july 13 http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2013-05-07/pdf/2013-10824.pdf 14. CSIRO Intelligent Sensing and Systems Laboratory (ISSL) positions due, 26 may 13, http://www.csiro.au 15. Associate Professors in Computer Science at Aarhus University http://www.cs.au.dk/, due 15 aug 13 16. Call for bone marow donors http://www.nalinineedsyou.com **************************************************************** **************************************************************** 1. ICCM 2013, Ottawa, 11-14 July 2013, http://www.iccm-conference.org/2013/ The conference will be held from 11 to 14 July 2013 in Ottawa, Canada at Carleton Universitat. The tutorials will be held 11 July 2013. We hope to see you in Ottawa! The International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM) is the premier conference for research on computational models and computation-based theories of human behavior. ICCM is a forum for presenting, discussing, and evaluating the complete spectrum of cognitive modeling approaches, including connectionism, symbolic modeling, dynamical systems, Bayesian modeling, and cognitive architectures. ICCM includes basic and applied research, across a wide variety of domains, ranging from low-level perception and attention to higher-level problem-solving and learning. The chairs are: Robert L. West Terrence C. Stewart (tcstewar at uwaterloo.ca) [CoI disclosure: program committee and tutorial chair] **************************************************************** 2. ICCM 2012 tutorials: Soar/VPA/SDA/Quantum/C3trace, Ottawa, 11 Jul 13 http://acs.ist.psu.edu/iccm2013/tutorials.html The Tutorials program at the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM) 2013 will be held on 11 July 2013. It will provide conference participants with the opportunity to gain new insights, knowledge, and skills from a broad range of areas in the field of cognitive modeling. It includes/co-exists with two tutorials from BRIMS. The program includes: Quantum models of cognition and decision [Tutorial from the BRIMS Conference held jointly with ICCM] Busemeyer & Wang, Half day Modeling Human Performance in C3TRACE [Tutorial from the BRIMS Conference held jointly with ICCM] Warwick, Half day The Soar Cognitive Architecture John Laird, Full day How to analyze verbal protocols to support cognitive modeling Tenbrink, Half-day Measuring simulation-observation fit: An introduction to ordinal pattern analysis Throrngate, Half-day (1345-1700) [CoI disclosure: tutorial chair] **************************************************************** 3. BRIMS 2013 to be held concurrent with ICCM 2013 http://brimsconference.org/ >From Dan Cassenti, the general chair of BRIMS I am thrilled to announce that the BRiMS (Behavior Representation in Modeling & Simulation) Conference will be held this year after all. Originally, circumstances limiting financial support for BRiMS caused its cancellation from a planned event in San Antonio this March. After this cancellation, BRiMS executive leadership worked diligently and gained the support of the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM) leadership to form a partnership. Their gracious support allowed BRiMS to be co-located with ICCM 2013 (see http://www.iccm-conference.org/2013/node/1). As a BRiMS supporter, I hope you will have the opportunity to join us at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada from July 11 to July 14, 2013. Registration to BRiMS will be made through ICCM, so if you register for ICCM, you will be entitled to attend BRiMS talks. The presentation will be mostly mixed, except for serial BRiMS and ICCM tracks on one day (please contact me directly if you wish to register for only the serial BRiMS session, accommodations for this option will not be available on site during the conferences). Please see our new web site at https://cc.ist.psu.edu/BRIMS2013/ for more information. If you have questions or concerns, please contact me at this email address or with the phone number below. Hope you plan to attend! Best Regards, Dan Cassenti (410) 278-5859 [CoI disclosure: program committee] **************************************************************** 4. Call For Papers 2013 AAAI Fall Symp. on Integrated Cognition, 15-17 nov 13 due, 24 may 13, http://intcog.ict.usc.edu Call For Papers 2013 AAAI Fall Symposium on Integrated Cognition November 15-17, Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia Integrated Cognition is concerned with consolidating the functionality and phenomena implicated in natural minds/brains and/or artificial cognitive systems (virtual humans, intelligent agents or intelligent robots). The aim of this symposium is to bring together researchers from across the spectrum of approaches and perspectives to exchange research results and discuss how best to create an ongoing forum for such exchanges. The focus is on how the mind arises from the interaction of its constituent parts, and includes everything implicated in human-??level performance in complex environments. This includes not only traditional cognitive aspects - such as planning and problem solving, knowledge representation and reasoning, language and interaction, and learning - but also perception and control, personality and emotion, and motivation. It also includes not only integration across cognitive mechanisms, as is typical in work on cognitive architectures, but also across more abstract constraints on cognition. It furthermore includes work on across-level integration, including combining cognitive capabilities with aspects of lower levels, whether computational or neural; as well as integrating in aspects of higher levels, whether cognitive applications or the social band from Newell's time scales. Contributions to this symposium may cover the integration of mechanisms, capabilities, constraints, models, applications and levels; and may involve the creation, enhancement, evaluation and/or analysis of such combinations. Contributions may be in the form of technical papers with results on integrated cognition, panel discussions of key issues in integrated cognition, or proposals for new approaches to integrated cognition. The forum is open to all paradigms, with evaluation of submissions based on the general criterion of how much they further our understanding of integrated cognition. Proposals for discussion panels should involve 4 to 6 participants and include a description of the overall panel topic as well as abstracts for each panelist contributions. Papers and discussion panel proposals should be between 5 and 8 pages long, including references, in AAAI format (http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php). Submissions in PDF format are due by May 24, 2013 to either or both of the conference co-chairs by email only: Christian Lebiere Department of Psychology Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Email: cl at cmu.edu Phone: (412) 268-6028 Paul S. Rosenbloom USC Institute for Creative Technologies 12015 Waterfront Dr., Playa Vista, CA 90094 rosenbloom at usc.edu (310) 448-5341 Additional details about the symposium, such as a list of the full organizing committee and current schedule, can be found on the symposium web site at http://intcog.ict.usc.edu [CoI disclosure: program committee] **************************************************************** 5. BICA 2013 Meeting, last call for papers, due 15 May 13, but... http://bicasociety.org/meetings/2013 Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA), Fourth Annual Meeting of the BICA Society Kiev, Ukraine, September 14-15 (Saturday-Sunday) http://bicasociety.org/meetings/2013 Submission deadline is May 15th, but, if you need a short extension, email: Point of Contact: Alexei Samsonovich alexei at bicasymposium.com The BICA Society (http://bicasociety.org), V.M. Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (http://www.icyb.kiev.ua/?lang=en) O.O. Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (http://biph.kiev.ua/en/Main_Page) Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (http://www.univ.kiev.ua/en/) National Technical University of Ukraine (Kyiv Polytechnik Institute: http://inter.kpi.ua/) THIRD CALL FOR PAPERS The challenge of creating a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind, known as the BICA Challenge, calls for our joint efforts to develop biologically- inspired intelligent agents and co-robots that can be accepted and trusted by the human society as partners in various roles. To do this, we need to better understand at a computational level how natural intelligent systems develop their cognitive and learning functions. Specific task for BICA 2013 is to put together four major thrusts: neuro-, social, cognitive and computer sciences, approaching the same BICA Challenge from four different perspectives (B, I, C, A): B: Neuroscience, the goal of which is to understand how the brain works. I: Integration with social, economic, educational science, arts and humanities. C: Cognitive sciences, pursuing the goal to understand how the mind works. A: Artificial intelligence, attempting to replicate the complete complex of human intelligent behavioral capabilities in a machine. Therefore, specific topics spanning, but not limiting, the scope of BICA 2013 can be quite arbitrarily grouped as follows (the lists are sorted alphabetically): This 1.5-day conference including keynote talks, paper presentations, panel discussions and exhibits. Ad hoc working groups and breakout sessions together with informal panel discussions will help us to create an atmosphere of excitement and opportunity, supporting brainstorming and development of new collaborations. Consistent with this agenda, our captivating social program includes a welcome reception, high-standard coffee breaks, pre- ordered lunches, a Think Tank boat trip with a banquet on the river Dnepr, a trip to the Caves Monastery of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra - all included in the registration fee, that also covers publications, registration materials etc. The working language is English. Special issue of the journal BICA that will be printed before the conference and included in the registration package. Submit your paper at http://www.ees.elsevier.com/bica/ Manuscripts should be prepared according to the Guide for Authors (http://www.elsevier.com/journals/biologically-inspired-cognitive- architectures/2212-??683X/guide-for-authors). Submit with the comment in the first line of the cover letter relating your manuscript to BICA 2013 Paper categories include: Letter (~2500 words, up to 6 pages, preferred) and Research Article (~8000 words, up to 20 journal pages including references, figures and tables) Registration fee payment will be due after the conditional acceptance of your paper, before its final acceptance, and before the registration deadline for Authors that will be specified. Registration will open soon. Notifications of submission intent are requested and should be sent via email to alexei at bicasymposium.com as soon as possible Submission deadline is May 15, 2013 Further information about BICA 2013 can be found on the conference web page at http://bicasociety.org/meetings/2013. [CoI disclosure: no relation] **************************************************************** 6. RFP: Perspectives on understanding http://www.varietiesofunderstanding.com, due 1 nov 13 New Perspectives on the Psychology of Understanding Fordham University, with the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, invites proposals for the "New Perspectives on the Psychology of Understanding" funding initiative. Our aim is to encourage research from both new and established scholars working on projects related to understanding in its many forms. This $1.2 million RFP is intended to support empirical work in cognitive, developmental, educational, and other areas of psychology. Proposals can request between $50,000 and $225,000 for projects not to exceed two years in duration. We intend to make 7-8 awards. Timeline November 1, 2013 Letters of Intent due March 1, 2014 Invited full proposals due April 15, 2014 Full proposal decisions July 1, 2014 Research begins For more information, visit: http://www.varietiesofunderstanding.com All questions should be directed to: psychology at varietiesofunderstanding.com Psychology Director Tania Lombrozo, Assistant Professor of Psychology University of California, Berkeley Project Leader Stephen Grimm Associate Professor of Philosophy Fordham University [CoI disclosure: no relation] **************************************************************** 7. Advances in Cognitive Systems Journal call http://www.cogsys.org/instructions/ As you know, Advances in Cognitive Systems (http://www.cogsys.org/) is a new electronic journal, now in its second year, that publishes contributions in the original spirit of AI, which aimed to explain the mind in computational terms and reproduce the entire range of human cognition in computational artifacts. Advances in Cognitive Systems is associated with an annual conference of the same name, the first instance of which took place last December. The second volume of the journal served as the electronic proceedings of that meeting. I am writing to tell about a new policy that alters the relationship between journal and conference slightly: - Authors are still welcome to submit papers for publication either to the electronic journal or to the annual conference. - If a journal submission (16 pages) is received at least one month before the conference deadline and is accepted for publication, its authors will be invited to present a talk at the conference. - If a long submission (16 pages) to the conference is accepted for presentation at the meeting, it may either be included in the annual proceedings or be invited to appear in the journal. - If a short submission (8 pages) to the conference is accepted for presentation at the meeting, it will be included in the annual proceedings but not in the journal. This policy should spread submissions across the year, giving more flexibility to authors and reducing the load on reviewers while letting more researchers present their results at the conference. You can find more details at http://www.cogsys.org/instructions/ and in the call for papers to the Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems, which should be available shortly. Sincerely, Pat Langley, Editor Advances in Cognitive Systems [CoI disclosure: no relationship, on their mailing list] **************************************************************** 8. CfP - Second Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems http://www.cogsys.org, due 16 sept 13 Call For Papers - Second Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems We invite submissions to the Second Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems, which will take place in Baltimore, MD, on December 12, 13, and 14, 2013. This meeting will bring together researchers with interests in human-level intelligence, complex cognition, integrated intelligent systems, cognitive architectures, and related topics. The purpose is to provide a venue for research on the initial goals of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, which aimed to explain the mind in computational terms and to reproduce the entire range of human cognitive abilities in computational artifacts. Because many researchers remain committed to this original vision, there is need for a meeting that provides a place to present recent results and pose new challenges for the field. The conference welcomes work on any topic related to the representation or organization of complex mental structures, their use in multi-step cognition, or their acquisition from experience or instruction. Some functional capabilities that arise in this context include: - Conceptual Inference and Reasoning - Memory Storage and Retrieval - Language Processing - Social Cognition and Interaction - High-level Execution and Control - Problem Solving and Heuristic Search - Cognitive Aspects of Emotion and Personality - Metacognition and Meta-level Reasoning - Structural Learning and Knowledge Capture Some research communities already address such issues, including those dealing with cognitive architectures, cognitive robotics, commonsense reasoning, qualitative modeling, and many others. We especially encourage participation from those working in these and other areas who are interested in complex cognition, human-level intelligence, and related topics. Important Dates - Paper Submission: September 6th, 2013 - Author Notifications: October 11th, 2013 - Final Papers: November 15th, 2013 - Conference: December 12-14, 2013 Submissions should be either short (at most eight pages) or long (at most 16 pages). Short papers accepted for presentation at the meeting will appear in a separate conference proceedings. Long papers accepted for presentation may either be included in the proceedings or be invited to appear in the journal, Advances in Cognitive Systems, depending on the program chairs' decision. More information about submissions to the conference and journal can be found at: http://www.cogsys.org Program Chairs Matt Klenk Palo Alto Research Center John Laird University of Michigan Local Arrangement Chairs Marjorie McShane University of Maryland, Baltimore County Sergei Nirenburg University of Maryland, Baltimore County Organizing Committee Paul Bello Office of Naval Research Kenneth Forbus Northwestern University Ashok Goel Georgia Institute of Technology John Laird University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Pat Langley University of Auckland / Carnegie Mellon University Marjorie McShane University of Maryland, Baltimore County Sergei Nirenburg University of Maryland, Baltimore County [CoI disclosure: no relation] **************************************************************** 9. CFP: The Computational Social Science Society of the Americas http://computationalsocialscience.org/csssa2013, due 3 june 13 The Computational Social Science Society of the Americas Santa Fe, NM 22-25 August, 2013 You are invited to participate in the annual conference of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas (CSSSA). The conference will be held at The Bishop's Lodge in Santa Fe, New Mexico, August 22nd - 25th, 2013. Computational Social Science (CSS) is a scientific discipline where computational methods and simulation models of social dynamics are employed to offer new insights into social phenomena beyond what is available with traditional social science methods. The CSSSA 2013 Conference will bring together international practitioners of CSS to present peer reviewed research using computational social science methods. Keynote Speakers: Steven F. Railsback, Humboldt State University J. Doyne Farmer, Oxford University & Santa Fe Institute Special Sessions: Advances in Computational Social Science The committee invites high quality papers that discuss theoretical concerns and other non-model based contributions to the field. Limited space will be available for such papers and only the very best and most relevant of these submissions will be accepted. Models of War and Peace CSSSA 2013 will highlight a special session with the theme of "Models of War and Peace". Submissions relating to this theme are especially welcome. Submissions: The CSSSA program committee invites papers and posters concerning computational models of social phenomena. Models from all social science disciplines are welcomed. Preference will be given to submissions that present an implemented, functioning computer model or simulation. All submissions, including posters, will be subject to peer review. The Program Committee and conference organizers may request that submissions for papers be converted into posters, or vice versa, depending on scheduling and content. Papers and posters can be submitted at: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=csssa2013. Registration for the conference can be done online soon. (stay tuned for registration link in the meantime please e-mail us at csssa2013 at computationalsocialscience.org ) Papers: Papers should be submitted in Springer's "Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)" format. Papers should be no more than 12 pages including bibliography and all figures. Strong preference will be given to papers that include an attached ODD (Overview, Design Concepts, and Details) protocol (see http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/13/4/9.html). This should be included as an attached addendum to the submitted paper (merge with the paper into one single document, with a blank page separating the paper and the ODD addendum). The ODD is not counted toward the 12 page limit. Posters: Poster submissions require only an 800 word abstract. They should be clearly marked as poster submissions. Paper Publication: All accepted papers will be made publicly available on the CSSSA website. While this posting does indicate successful conference peer review, the CSSSA website is not a publication of record (no DOI or handle is assigned) and should not interfere with the submission of the same material to academic or professional journals. A selection of the strongest papers (as determined by the Program Committee) will be submitted (with the authors' consent) to the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) for consideration as a special issue of the journal. Best Paper: CSSSA offers a cash prize of $500 for the best paper. All full-paper submissions are eligible for this prize. The Program Committee will look most closely at papers with clearly documented computational models that shed new light on social science phenomena. Important Dates: Submissions Due: June 3, 2013 Author Notification: July 3, 2013 Revisions Due: August 1, 2013 Final Version Due: August 9, 2013 Conference Dates: August 22-25, 2013 Consortium for Biosocial Complex Systems | Arizona State University | Tempe, AZ 85281 [CoI disclosure: no relation] **************************************************************** 10. CFP: J. of Interaction Science http://www.journalofinteractionscience.com/ [this can be a home of modeling paper related to interation] Professor Susanne Bahr would like to tell you that our dynamic, new "high-impact" journal, the "Journal of Interaction Science" will be published by Springer next year. The Journal of Interaction Science (JoIS) has a unique focus to promote research based on: * Scientific approaches to interaction design, * The use of interaction paradigms for fundamental research in human and computer centred sciences * The use of computer science to support scientific research. On the one hand, our scope is narrowly focused specifically on promoting scientific HCI; on the other hand, it is broadly focused, being designed to attract a wide audience and research by the large number of human-centred scientists who do not consider current HCI journals to be sufficiently relevant to them. Interaction science and focuses on the integration of the study of people, with that of artifacts and the sciences involved. We are looking for significant, scientific papers that report empirical results, substantial new theories, methodological innovations and important meta-analyses. With best wishes Susanne Bahr Gisela Susanne Bahr, Associate Professor Florida Institute of Technology Editor in Chief Journal of Interaction Science http://circua.fit.edu/ School of Psychology Florida Institute of Technology gbahr at fit.edu (321) 674- 8104 [CoI disclosure: editorial board member] **************************************************************** 11. 25th APS Annual Convention, 23-26 May 13 Washington, DC http://www.psychologicalscience.org/convention The APS Convention is the premiere international meeting solely dedicated to psychological science, featuring special talks, symposia, and posters presenting the latest research across the entire field. The meeting is an excellent opportunity to meet distinguished scientists, learn about the latest research and methods, and network for tomorrow's collaborations. http://www.psychologicalscience.org/convention/registration.cfm Convention Program: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/convention [CoI: they posted ICCM on their web site and asked for an announcement] *************************************************************** 12. 1st International Summer School on Cog. Computation, 26-30 aug13 http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/events/COGCOMP2013, due 27 may 13 [from AISB] Please see below a Call for the 1st International Summer School on Cognitive Computation, being organized and hosted by the University of Scotland [Stirling] in Scotland, UK, from 25-30 Aug 2013. http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/events/COGCOMP2013 Limited places (some funding available for eligible students). Deadline: for second round of applications is May 27th, 2013. 3. To apply/or for more information: please email: cogcomp2013 at cs.stir.ac.uk Amir Hussain http://cs.stir.ac.uk/~ahu/ [CoI disclosure: no relation] **************************************************************** 13. Research area for applied models, NIDRR, due 8 july 13 http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2013-05-07/pdf/2013-10824.pdf [There may be some proposal calls in here. It is not itself a call, but a pointer to an area. I have a lot of time for Clayton, and while I don't know about this much, I know him and he points out that there is at least an audience for your work if not support.] Subject: NIDRR for Computer Scientists In 2011 I began working as a consultant to the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), helping to develop an initiative on cloud computing for people with disabilities (NIDRR provided early funding for the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure, gpii.net, of which you may have heard). In that role I've become aware that there are significant needs and opportunities for computer science research in support of NIDRR's goals, but not many computer scientists know about NIDRR and its programs. I'm writing to you to call your attention to these opportunities, including a brand new announcement on funding for research on inclusive cloud and web computing, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2013-05-07/pdf/2013-10824.pdf . I've attached a writeup, " NIDRR for Computer Scientists". [this is embedded] Please pass it along to any colleagues who may be interested. NIDRR for Computer Scientists. What is NIDRR? NIDRR (the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research) is an agency within the US Department of Education that funds about $110M of research per year (of course this amount varies) aimed at improving the lives of people with disabilities. Why am I writing this? I'm a long-time computer science faculty member at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2011 I began working as a consultant to NIDRR, helping to develop an initiative on cloud computing for people with disabilities (NIDRR provided early funding for the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure, gpii.net, of which you may have heard). In that role I've become aware that there are significant needs and opportunities for computer science research in support of NIDRR's goals, but not many computer scientists know about NIDRR and its programs. Why should computer scientists be interested in NIDRR? As information and communication technologies become important in more aspects of life, and as the ability of these technologies to provide useful assistance grows, there are more and more opportunities for computer science research to contribute to NIDRR's programs. Cloud computing, data integration and data analytics for service effectiveness improvement, recognition technology, social software, accessible and autonomous transportation systems, natural language processing, and configurable user interface technology all have a role in enabling people with disabilities to participate in society more fully and independently. In a typical year NIDRR funds a wide range of projects, from multi-year research and engineering centers, aimed at designated aspects of disability research, to smaller "field initiated" projects proposed by investigators. If you are not already active in disability research, your chances of success will likely be greater if you collaborate with other investigators who have knowledge of and experience in disability research, though you are free to apply on your own. Many of NIDRR's peer reviewers are disability researchers, and of course must judge that proposals are well conceived as contributions to that field. Proposals that represent excellent computer science, but are weak in connecting to the needs of people with disabilities, are unlikely to be competitive. Collaboration can solve this problem. You could develop such collaboration in more than one way. You could approach local colleagues who have the necessary experience, or you could reach out to investigators nationally who work on problems to which the computing technology on which you work could be relevant. For NIDRR-funded projects, current and completed, there is a convenient search facility at http://www.naric.com/?q=en/ProgramDatabase, where you can find projects whose descriptions mention your institution or your state, or particular topics of interest to you. Here are some professional associations that publish papers on technology and disability that you can explore to see who is doing what on the national and international scene: ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing (SIGACCESS), proceedings searchable at http://dl.acm.org/sig.cfm?id=SP1530&CFID=155317526&CFTOKEN=59939155SIGACCESS; IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society and IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, publications searchable in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org); The Rehabilitation and Assistive Technology Association of North America (RESNA), proceedings at http://www.resna.org/conference/proceedings/index.dot . Another good way to familiarize yourself with NIDRR and its programs is to serve as a reviewer. NIDRR is always looking for peer reviewers with a variety of specific subject-matter expertise. See http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/osers/nidrr/nidrrpeerreview.html for more information. FAQ How can I find out more about NIDRR funding programs? NIDRR has a nice Web resource for potential applicants at http://www2.ed.gov/programs/nidrr/applyingforanidrrgrant.html. This includes a summary of its programs, and suggestions about how to track new funding opportunities as they arise. What NIDRR programs are likely to be of most interest to computer scientists? Field Initiated Projects can address any of a wide range of issues relating to people with disabilities, including development of new technologies, employment, independent living, and medical rehabilitation, for any disability populations, with a wide range of research approaches. Disability and Rehabilitation Research Projects are invited to address particular topic areas, or "priorities", and an increasing number of these include topics in computer science. NIDRR also participates in the SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) program. How do I apply? The Web resource mentioned above, http://www2.ed.gov/programs/nidrr/applyingforanidrrgrant.html , has detailed information for applicants, including tips on writing a strong proposal. .... How does NIDRR evaluate proposals? NIDRR uses a peer review process. Unlike NSF, but like NIH, NIDRR evaluation is based on numeric scoring guided by a rubric, so it is very important that all proposal requirements are carefully addressed. Here, too, collaboration with an experienced disability researcher can be a big help. Being at NIDRR has made me a big fan of the agency and the contributions its grantees have made and are making. I hope you'll investigate the opportunities NIDRR offers for computer scientists to participate in this important and satisfying work. Please let me know if I can help. Sincerely, Clayton Lewis, NIDRR Consultant "Lewis, Clayton (Contractor)" Clayton Lewis [CoI disclosure: no relation] *************************************************************** 14. CSIRO Intelligent Sensing and Systems Laboratory (ISSL) positions due, 26 may 13, http://www.csiro.au The CSIRO Intelligent Sensing and Systems Laboratory (ISSL) is developing innovative systems to support decision making through its world-class ICT research capability in environmental sensor networks, mobile sensor integration, computational intelligence and semantic and knowledge engineering. Our projects have a strong focus on intelligent eScience systems in informatics fields such as environment and agriculture, psychophysiologyand human factors and molecular sciences. We are seeking two Principal Research Scientists / SeniorPrincipal Research Scientists to join our innovative team at our CSIRO ICT Centre located in Tasmania. Note that a Principle Research Scientist (CSOF 7) is equivalent to a European or Australian Associate Professor, while a Senior Principle Research Scientist (CSOF 8) is equivalent to a full professor. Salary: $123-$136K for CSOF7; $147K-$158K for CSOF8 (plus up to 15.4% superannuation) Tenure: Indefinite (full-time on-going) To be appointed at the higher level you will need to demonstrate extensive relevant scientific and/or industrial experience, together with high level management and leadership capability and experience. TAS13/01375 - PRINCIPAL RESEARCH SCIENTIST / SENIOR PRINCIPAL RESEARCH SCIENTIST IN COMPUTATION INTELLIGENCE Your role will beto lead a Computational Intelligence research team and lead/participate in research projects, and significantly contribute to shaping and defining the research direction of the science area within the ICT Centre. The projects have a strong focus on intelligent eScience systems in informatics fields such as environment and agriculture, psycho-physiology and human factors and molecular sciences. Overall, you will have the responsibility to shape and drive the research agenda of the Intelligent Sensing and SystemsLaboratory (ISSL) of the CSIRO ICT Centre in Tasmania in the field of computational intelligence, to develop and sustain the internationalrecognition of CSIRO in this area . TAS13/01376 - PRINCIPAL RESEARCH SCIENTIST / SENIOR PRINCIPAL RESEARCH SCIENTIST IN COGNITIVE ENGINEERING Cognitive engineering includes the use of theories and methods from cognitive science to inform engineering practice, and the use of engineering theories, methods and techniques to investigate, understand and augment human cognition. Cognitive engineering includes user-centred design of human-machine interaction, the design of information technology based upon human cognitive capacities and functionality, human factors, and knowledge elicitation, modelling and representation. Cognitive engineering within the ISSL includes the use and development of empirical methods including psychophysiology and eye tracking. The Principal Research Scientist/Senior Principal Research Scientist in cognitive engineering will provide research leadership for a research team and lead/participate inresearch projects, significantly contribute to shaping and defining the research direction of the science area within the ICT Centre. Funding for the projects is available and the projects are in their formative phases. As Principal ResearchScientist/Senior Principal Research Scientist you are also expected to work with external customers and partners, and to work with business development and research management colleagues and team members to establish collaborative work and define new externally funded projects in the longer term. About CSIRO: http://www.csiro.au and the CSIRO ICTCentre is available at http://www.csiro.au/ICT For further information and to apply visit our website at http://csiro.nga.net.au/cp/index.cfm?event=jobs.home CSIROCAREERS, choose "Jobs Search" and insert Ref. No.: TAS13/01375 or TAS13/01376 where indicated. Applications close: 11.30pm on 26 May 2012. [CoI disclosure: no relation] **************************************************************** 15. Associate Professors in Computer Science at Aarhus University http://www.cs.au.dk/, due 15 aug 13 [from chi] Associate Professors in Computer Science at Aarhus University One or more positions as associate professor are available at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University (http://www.cs.au.dk/) starting January 1, 2014. The department has research groups within "Algorithms and Data Structures", "Data-Intensive Systems", "Cryptography and Security", "Mathematical Computer Science", "Logics and Semantics", "Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction", "Computer-Mediated Activity", "Use, Design and Innovation", "Programming Languages", "Computer Graphics and Image Processing" and "Bioinformatics". In addition, we want to build competences within "Software Engineering / Multicore/ Systems", "Machine Learning / Data Mining" and "Quantum Informatics". Applicants are expected to have several years of experience at the assistant professor level. They must document a strong record of original research and have teaching experience at undergraduate/graduate level. The department has a staff of 140 people including 28 full and associate professors, 5 assistant professors, 25 PostDocs and 65 PhD students. The number of students is approximately 1,000. Further information can be obtained from head of department Kurt Jensen (kjensen at cs.au.dk) or vice head of research Mogens Nielsen (mn at cs.au.dk). Please apply online at http://www.au.dk/en/job/nat/academicpositions/ before August 15, 2013. [CoI disclosure: no relation] **************************************************************** 16. Call for bone marow donor http://www.nalinineedsyou.com [this came from Reg Adams via email, who did not request this distribution directly, but, seemed worthy and interesting, and more] Unfortunately our efforts last semester to find a match for Nalini Ambady were not fruitful. Recall that last December we ran a very successful drive, but it did not produce a match for her. Nalini, an Indian psychology professor at Stanford, has leukemia and urgently needs a bone marrow transplant. Her best chance is to find a match in the 8 weeks, from someone who most likely has to be Indian as well. Nalini is a mother of two, a beloved professor and mentor, and a wonderful person. We currently have drives going all over the country and in India, as well as emails, postings on facebook etc. for people to join the registry. Be the Match agreed to host another drive here at Penn State. So, this upcoming next Wed. May 1st in Psychology, Moore Building 127 from 11-3 p.m. we will be having another bone marrow drive for Nalini. I will be providing snacks and light refreshments. This time we are targeting exclusively South Asian registrants. This might be Nalini's last chance to find a match, and all efforts to build up the South Asian registry will undoubtedly save many other lives as well in the future. Thank you so much for helping with this effort! Please feel forward this message widely, so that it might reach any and all potential South Asian donors in the community. Even if you do know of anyone personally, there may be potential connections in your network of contacts. For anyone interested, more info about Nalini can be found at http://www.nalinineedsyou.com, and by watching this video that explains her current situation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj1aL8h3V3g. You might also want to check out http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-small-talk/201303/point-click-save-womans-life , Sam Sommers' post in Psychology Today. What would be most helpful to this effort if everyone who gets this email forwards it along to everyone they know, particularly any South Asian friends, family, etc. And, if you know of anyone with ties in India, we have bone marrow drives on the ground there too, so any additional contacts would be most helpful (you can contact me, Reg Adams, directly at radams at psu.edu Be well, Reginald B. Adams, Jr. Department of Psychology, PSU (814) 863-1725 [CoI disclosure: no relation] **************************************************************** -30- From shyam at amrita.edu Tue May 21 04:52:20 2013 From: shyam at amrita.edu (Shyam Diwakar) Date: Tue, 21 May 2013 14:22:20 +0530 (IST) Subject: Connectionists: =?utf-8?q?Neuroscience_workshop_=3A_=E2=80=9CFrom?= =?utf-8?q?_Cellular_to_Circuit_and_Brain_Functions=3A_Passing_through_Mat?= =?utf-8?q?hematical_Models=E2=80=9D?= In-Reply-To: <18061371.69614.1369031334559.JavaMail.root@mail.amrita.edu> Message-ID: <31794482.78253.1369126340437.JavaMail.root@mail.amrita.edu> Hello All, We are glad to bring this to your notice. Amrita Bio Quest 2013 Pre-Conference Neuroscience workshop >From Cellular to Circuit and Brain Functions: Passing through Mathematical Models 10th August 2013 at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi, Kerala, India. The technical program of the workshop will include neurophysiology, brain imaging, computational neuroscience of single neurons, and tools in neuroinformatics. Case studies in computational neuroscience (cerebellar microcircuits and reconstructing local field potentials) will target mixed groups of students and researchers with and without prior experience in this field. Novel techniques and approaches in computational modelling in neuroscience will be featured. Speakers include: Upinder Bhalla - Dean, NCBS, Bengaluru, India Egidio D'Angelo - Director, Brain Connectivity Center and Professor of Physiology, University of Pavia, Italy Gaute Einevoll - Professor, UMB, Norway and INCF-Norway coordinator Sergio Solinas - University of Pavia, Italy Claudia Wheeler Kingshott - University College London, UK Shyam Diwakar - Amrita University, India This workshop precedes the 4-day International conference on Biotechnology for Innovative Applications , to be held at Amrita University's Amritapuri campus at Kollam, Kerala. The topics of this Neuroscience workshop include lectures on: ? Brain functions from cellular elements: foundation of the issue ? Neurons and circuits of the cerebellum: an integrated view ? MRI ? Computational Neuroscience and mathematical biophysics of detailed models ? Modeling Local Field potential from Mathematical models ? Modeling Ionic behavior ? Brain Imaging Registration for Workshop and for the Conference is Now Open!!! Some funding for Indian students is also available. Participants may also register at the conference to meet other speakers http://www.amritabioquest.org/speakers.html including many from Neuroscience track. Workshop website : http://www.amritabioquest.org/workshop/neuroscience/index.html We will be happy to welcome you at our campuses in Cochin and Amritapuri (Kerala, India). -- Dr. Shyam Diwakar School of Biotechnology Amrita University Ph: +91-476-2803116 Fax: +91-476-2899722 http://biotech.amrita.edu/research/compneuro -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rogilmore at psu.edu Wed May 22 09:56:07 2013 From: rogilmore at psu.edu (Rick Gilmore) Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 09:56:07 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: Databrary.org -- Postdoctoral Fellowship in Open Science/Big Data/Informatics Message-ID: Postdoctoral Fellow in Open Science/Big Data/Informatics The Databrary (databrary.org) project, in coordination with the Department of Psychology and Digital Library Services at NYU, seeks a cross-disciplinary postdoctoral fellow who seeks expand knowledge of research methods and technology practices in science and industry. You will participate in design, development, and deployment of technology to support collaboration, exploration, and analysis of open research datasets. RESPONSIBILITIES ? Design new approaches for structuring, presenting, and sharing research data. ? Work with a small team of software developers to build web, mobile, and desktop software tools to manage, analyze, and visualize data. ? Engage with researchers within and beyond the fields of developmental psychology, library science, and computer vision to collect, organize, and repurpose data. ? Prepare and publish academic articles covering innovations, discoveries, or uses associated with the data library. QUALIFICATIONS ? Strong programming skills in at least two languages (such as Matlab, R, Python, Ruby, JavaScript) ? Experience working with and analyzing videos, physiological data, imaging data, or other large datasets ? Familiarity with standard development and collaboration tools such as git ? Willingness to learn and work with the latest web-based technologies PREFERRED ? Understanding of web technologies including HTML, JavaScript, and MVC frameworks ? Knowledge of SQL or other database technologies ? History of collaboration and cooperation on previous projects TO APPLY Send the following to jobs at databrary.org: ? One page cover letter (PDF) ? Academic transcript of your formal qualifications (PDF) ? Links to your open source contributions or other samples of your work ? Resume/CV (PDF) Databrary is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-1238599 and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under Cooperative Agreement 1-U01-HD-076595-01. From nicosia at dmi.unict.it Wed May 22 00:29:32 2013 From: nicosia at dmi.unict.it (Giuseppe Nicosia) Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 06:29:32 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Call for Late Breaking Papers/Abstracts/Posters: May 31, 2013 Message-ID: <5095AD72-B6BA-47C9-9FDD-D8464DE26067@dmi.unict.it> Call for Late Breaking Papers/Abstracts/Posters: May 31, 2013 ECAL 2013, European Conference on Artificial Life, an International Conference on the Designing, Programming, Evolving, Simulation and Synthesis of Natural and Artificial Living Systems 17 Tracks, 9 Keynote Speakers, 12 Workshops, 5 Tutorials 2-6 September 2013, Taormina, Italy - http://www.dmi.unict.it/ecal2013/ *Late Breaking Papers/Abstracts/Posters: May 31, 2013* https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecal2013 * 17 Tracks ECAL Manuscripts - General Track Track on Adaptive Hardware & Systems and Bioelectronics Track on Adaptive Living Material Technologies and Biomimetic Microsystems Track on Artificial Immune, Neural and Endocrine Systems Track on Artificial Organs and Tissues & Organ-on-a-Chip Track on Astrobiology Track on Bioinspired Learning and Optimization Track on Bioinspired Robotics Track on Biologically Inspired Engineering Track on Evolvable Hardware, Evolutionary Electronics & BioChips Track on Foundations of Complex Systems and Biological Complexity Track on Immunoinformatics, Systems and Synthetic Immunology Track on Music and the Origins and Evolution of Language Track on Mathematical Models for Life Sciences Track on Programmable Nanomaterials Track on Synthetic and Systems Biochemistry and Biological Control Track on The Sciences of the Artificial for Economics, Finance and Market Design * 9 Plenary Speakers Roberto Cingolani, IIT, Italy Roberto Cipolla, University of Cambridge, UK Dario Floreano, EPFL, Swiss Martin Hanczyc, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark Henrik Hautop, Lund, Denmark Didier Keymeulen, Caltech, USA Steve Oliver - University of Cambridge, UK Bernhard ?. Palsson, University of California, San Diego, USA Rolf Pfeifer, ETH, Swiss http://www.dmi.unict.it/ecal2013/keynote.php * 12 Workshops A TRUCE workshop on Unconventional Computing in 2070 Artificial Life Based Models of Higher Cognition Artificial Consciousness Artificial Life in Massive Data Flow Collective and Swarm Robotics Evolution and Development of Networks, from Systems Biology to Computational Neuroscience 2nd International Workshop on the Evolution of Physical Systems ERLARS 2013 - 6th International Workshop on Evolutionary and Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Robot Systems Fundamentals of Collective Adaptive Systems HSB - 2nd International Workshop on Hybrid Systems and Biology Protocells: Back to the Future What Synthetic Biology can offer to Artificial Intelligence? Perspectives in the Bio-Chem-ICT and other scenarios http://www.dmi.unict.it/ecal2013/workshops.php * 5 Tutorials Cell Pathway Design for Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology Exploring Prebiotic Chemistry Spaces Designing Adaptive Humanoid Robots Through the FARSA Open-Source Framework New Generation Sequencing Data Production, Analysis, and Archiving PyCX: A Python-Based Simulation Code Repository for Complex Systems Education http://www.dmi.unict.it/ecal2013/tutorials.php We look forward to seeing you in Sicily! W: http://www.dmi.unict.it/ecal2013/ E: ecal2013 at dmi.unict.it From grlmc at urv.cat Thu May 23 16:06:04 2013 From: grlmc at urv.cat (GRLMC - URV) Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 22:06:04 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: TPNC 2013: 2nd call for papers Message-ID: <001201ce57f1$03938f20$6400a8c0@GRLMC.local> *To be removed from our mailing list, please respond to this message with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line* ************************************************************************* 2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF NATURAL COMPUTING TPNC 2013 C?ceres, Spain December 3-5, 2013 Organized by: Computer Architecture and Logic Design Group (ARCO) University of Extremadura Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC) Rovira i Virgili University http://grammars.grlmc.com/tpnc2013/ ********************************************************************* AIMS: TPNC is a conference series intending to cover the wide spectrum of computational principles, models and techniques inspired by information processing in nature. TPNC 2013 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It aims at attracting contributions to nature-inspired models of computation, synthesizing nature by means of computation, nature-inspired materials, and information processing in nature. VENUE: TPNC 2013 will take place in C?ceres, in Western Spain, 300 kms. to the southwest of Madrid and 100 kms. to the Portuguese border. The old city is a UNESCO World Heritage site. SCOPE: Topics of either theoretical, experimental, or applied interest include, but are not limited to: * Nature-inspired models of computation: - amorphous computing - cellular automata - chaos and dynamical systems based computing - evolutionary computing - membrane computing - neural computing - optical computing - swarm intelligence * Synthesizing nature by means of computation: - artificial chemistry - artificial immune systems - artificial life * Nature-inspired materials: - computing with DNA - nanocomputing - physarum computing - quantum computing and quantum information - reaction-diffusion computing * Information processing in nature: - developmental systems - fractal geometry - gene assembly in unicellular organisms - rough/fuzzy computing in nature - synthetic biology - systems biology * Applications of natural computing to: algorithms, bioinformatics, control, cryptography, design, economics, graphics, hardware, learning, logistics, optimization, pattern recognition, programming, robotics, telecommunications etc. A flexible "theory to/from practice" approach would be the perfect focus for the expected contributions. STRUCTURE: TPNC 2013 will consist of: ? invited talks ? invited tutorials ? peer-reviewed contributions INVITED SPEAKERS: Risto Miikkulainen (Austin), Evolving Neural Networks (tutorial) Yew-Soon Ong (Singapore), Advances in Memetic Computation Xin Yao (Birmingham), Evolutionary Algorithm Portfolios for Numerical Optimisation PROGRAMME COMMITTEE: Selim G. Akl (Kingston, CA) Thomas B?ck (Leiden, NL) Peter J. Bentley (London, UK) Hans-Georg Beyer (Dornbirn, AT) Mauro Birattari (Brussels, BE) Jinde Cao (Nanjing, CN) Vladimir Cherkassky (Minneapolis, US) Sung-Bae Cho (Seoul, KR) John A. Clark (York, UK) Carlos A. Coello Coello (Mexico DF, MX) David W. Corne (Edinburgh, UK) Peter Dayan (London, UK) Bernard De Baets (Ghent, BE) Andries P. Engelbrecht (Pretoria, ZA) Enrique Herrera-Viedma (Granada, ES) Yaochu Jin (Guildford, UK) Nikola Kasabov (Auckland, NZ) Vladik Kreinovich (El Paso, US) Kwong-Sak Leung (Hong Kong, CN) Xiaohui Liu (London, UK) Manuel Lozano (Granada, ES) Carlos Mart?n-Vide (Tarragona, ES, chair) Julian F. Miller (York, UK) Frank Neumann (Adelaide, AU) Leandro Nunes de Castro (S?o Paulo, BR) Nikhil R. Pal (Kolkata, IN) G?nther Palm (Ulm, DE) Jos? Carlos Pr?ncipe (Gainesville, US) Helge Ritter (Bielefeld, DE) Conor Ryan (Limerick, IE) Hava Siegelmann (Amherst, US) Moshe Sipper (Beer-Sheva, IL) Thomas St?tzle (Brussels, BE) Ponnuthurai N. Suganthan (Singapore, SG) Johan Suykens (Leuven, BE) Kay Chen Tan (Singapore, SG) Dacheng Tao (Sydney, AU) Jon Timmis (York, UK) Marco Tomassini (Lausanne, CH) Michael D. Vose (Knoxville, US) Michael N. Vrahatis (Patras, GR) Harald Weinfurter (Munich, DE) Jun Zhang (Guangzhou, CN) ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona) Carlos Mart?n-Vide (Tarragona, co-chair) Bianca Truthe (Magdeburg) Miguel A. Vega-Rodr?guez (C?ceres, co-chair) Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona) LOCAL COMMITTEE: V?ctor Berrocal-Plaza Jos? M. Chaves-Gonz?lez Juan A. G?mez-Pulido David L. Gonz?lez-?lvarez Jos? M. Granado-Criado Alejandro Hidalgo-Paniagua Jos? M. Lanza-Guti?rrez ?lvaro Rubio-Largo Sergio Santander-Jim?nez Miguel A. Vega-Rodr?guez (chair) SUBMISSIONS: Authors are invited to submit non-anonymized papers in English presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages (including eventual appendices) and should be formatted according to the standards of the Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0). Submissions have to be uploaded to: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tpnc2013 PUBLICATIONS: A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference. A special issue of the journal Soft Computing (Springer, 2011 impact factor: 1.880) will be later published containing peer-reviewed extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation. REGISTRATION: The period for registration is open from April 17 to December 3, 2013. The registration form can be found at: http://grammars.grlmc.com/tpnc2013/Registration DEADLINES: Paper submission: July 16, 2013 (23:59h, CET) Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: August 27, 2013 Final version of the paper for the LNCS proceedings: September 3, 2013 Early registration: September 10, 2013 Late registration: November 19, 2013 Starting of the conference: December 3, 2013 End of the conference: December 5, 2013 Submission to the post-conference special issue: March 5, 2014 QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION: florentinalilica.voicu at urv.cat POSTAL ADDRESS: TPNC 2013 Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC) Rovira i Virgili University Av. Catalunya, 35 43002 Tarragona, Spain Phone: +34-977-559543 Fax: +34-977-558386 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Departament d?Economia i Coneixement, Generalitat de Catalunya Universidad de Extremadura Universitat Rovira i Virgili From juffi at ke.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de Fri May 24 09:39:31 2013 From: juffi at ke.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de (Johannes Fuernkranz) Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 15:39:31 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: ECML/PKDD 2015: Call for Proposals Message-ID: [ please distribute - apologies for multiple postings ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Call for Proposals for ECML/PKDD 2015 European Conference on Machine Learning and Principals and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The purpose of this call is to invite groups interested in hosting the ECML/PKDD conference in 2015. Selection Process All proposals submitted by the deadline below will be examined by the ECML PKDD Steering Committee and its Proposal Chairs, who may provide feedback in order to ensure that the quality of the proposal meets the standards of past ECML PKDD conferences. The proposals will then be made available in electronic form to the ECML PKDD community, at least one week prior to ECML PKDD 2013 . The final selection will be made at the public community meeting at this conference, where all proposals will be presented and discussed. The community will then decide upon the location and the chairs of the meeting in 2015 via a ballot vote among all participants of the meeting. Selection Criteria For the preparation of your proposal, please read the Guidelines for a Preparation of ECML PKDD proposals at . It contains a list of selection criteria that may influence the community decision, as well as some recommendations on desirable implementations. Relevant criteria include * proposed dates and schedule * program chairs and organisation * venue and lecture rooms * budget and estimate for conference fees * accomodation and infrastructure * conference format and new ideas However, your proposal may deviate from these recommendations. Feel free to include anything else that you believe might be relevant for assessing the quality of your proposal. Submission Procedure Please submit a document that addresses the above points to . The submission deadline is June 30th, 2013. Proposal Chairs * Johannes F?rnkranz (TU Darmstadt) * Joost N. Kok (Leiden University) From derry.fitzgerald at dit.ie Mon May 27 10:28:05 2013 From: derry.fitzgerald at dit.ie (Derry Fitzgerald) Date: Mon, 27 May 2013 15:28:05 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Final Call for Papers: Special Issue on Informed Acoustic Source Separation; EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing In-Reply-To: <518D064A.6030407@dit.ie> References: <518D064A.6030407@dit.ie> Message-ID: <51A36D75.4090905@dit.ie> We apologize for cross-distribution and multiple copies. *************************************************** FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS (**new deadline **) EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing *Special Issue on Informed Acoustic Source Separation* The complete call of papers is accessible at: http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/sites/10233/pdf/H9386_DF_CFP_EURASIP_JASP_A4_3.pdf DEADLINE: FULL PAPER SUBMISSION: **17th June 2013** but we ask the authors of each paper to send by email to the lead Editor Ga?l Richard, the title, authors list and abstract of their paper (changes will be possible) by **MAY31st 2013** ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Short Description The proposed topic of this special issue is informed acoustic source separation. As source separation has long become a field of interest in the signal processing community, recent works increasingly point out the fact that separation can only be reliably achieved in real-world use cases when accurate prior information can be successfully incorporated. Informed separation algorithms can be characterized by the fact that case-specific prior knowledge is made available to the algorithm for processing. In this respect, they contrast with blind methods for which no specific prior information is available. Following on the success of the special session on the same topic in EUSIPCO 2012 at Bucharest, we would like to present recent methods, discuss the trends and perspectives of this domain and to draw the attention of the signal processing community to this important problem and its potential applications. We are interested in both methodological advances and applications. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): ? Sparse decomposition methods ? Subspace learning methods for sparse decomposition ? Non-negative matrix / tensor factorization ? Robust principal component analysis ? Probabilistic latent component analysis ? Independent component analysis ? Multidimensional component analysis ? Multimodal source separation ? Video-assisted source separation ? Spatial audio object coding ? Reverberant models for source separation ? Score-informed source separation ? Language-informed speech separation ? User-guided source separation ? Source separation informed by cover version ? Informed source separation applied to speech, music or environmental signals ? ? ------------------- Guest Editors Taylan Cemgil, Bogazici University, Turkey, Tuomas Virtanen, Tampere University of Technology, Finland, Alexey Ozerov, Technicolor, France, Derry Fitzgerald, Dublin institute of Technology, Ireland, Lead Guest Editor: Ga?l Richard, Institut Mines-T?l?com, T?l?com ParisTech, CNRS-LTCI, France, T? an teachtaireacht seo scanta ? thaobh ?bhar agus v?reas ag Seirbh?s Scanta R?omhphost de chuid Seirbh?s? Faisn?ise, ITB?C agus meastar ? a bheith sl?n. http://www.dit.ie This message has been scanned for content and viruses by the DIT Information Services E-Mail Scanning Service, and is believed to be clean. http://www.dit.ie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From irodero at cac.rutgers.edu Fri May 24 01:01:00 2013 From: irodero at cac.rutgers.edu (Ivan Rodero) Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 01:01:00 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: IEEE TCSC Young Achievers in Scalable Computing In-Reply-To: References: <51EC7783-DCAD-4364-B1DC-576C726BAA31@rutgers.edu> <6F339279-23CD-4553-95DF-B1F906F948E3@rutgers.edu> Message-ID: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please accept our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this message ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ IEEE TCSC Young Achievers in Scalable Computing The IEEE TCSC annual young achievers in scalable computing award recognizes up to 5 individuals who have made outstanding, influential, and potentially long-lasting contributions in the field of scalable computing within 5 years of receiving their PhD degree as of January 01 of the year of the award. Nominations: A candidate may be nominated by members of the community. An individual may nominate at most one candidate for this award. Nomination must be submitted online via EasyChair athttps://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=yasc13. A nomination application (as a single PDF file) should contain the following details: ? Name/email of person making the nomination (self-nominations are not eligible). ? Name/email of candidate for whom the award is recommended. ? A statement by the nominator (maximum of 500 words) as to why the nominee is highly deserving of the award. Note that since the award is for outstanding contributions, the statement and supporting letters should address what the contributions are and why they are both outstanding and significant. The nomination should also list the names and email of up to 3 persons who will provide letters supporting the nomination. ? CV of the nominee. ? Up three support letters from persons other than the nominator ? these should be collected by the nominator and included in the nomination. Important Dates: ? Nomination Deadline: June 01, 2013 ? Results Notification: August 01, 2013 Award Selection Committee: The award selection committee will consists of: ? David Abramson, University of Queensland, Australia ? Satoshi Matsuoka, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan ? Manish Parashar, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA (Chair) Note that members of the selection committee cannot be nominators or provide support letters. Award & Presentation Note: Awardees will be presented a plaque and will be recognized by IEEE TCSC in its website, newsletter and archives. The awards will be presented at the SC13 conference that will be held in Denver, CO, USA during November 17-22 2013. Details of the conference can be found at http://sc13.supercomputing.org/. For more information, please send email to awards at tcsc.org. ============================================================= Ivan Rodero, Ph.D. Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute (RDI2) NSF Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing (CAC) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Office: CoRE Bldg, Rm 625 94 Brett Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8058 Phone: (732) 993-8837 Fax: (732) 445-0593 Email: irodero at rutgers dot edu WWW: http://nsfcac.rutgers.edu/people/irodero ============================================================= -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Dominique.Martinez at loria.fr Sun May 26 08:58:36 2013 From: Dominique.Martinez at loria.fr (Martinez Dominique) Date: Sun, 26 May 2013 14:58:36 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Engineer position in robotics at LORIA-CNRS in Nancy, France Message-ID: <51A206FC.1090207@loria.fr> Engineer position in robotics at LORIA-CNRS in Nancy, France Open position: Engineer Domain: Mechatronics, biorobotics Duration: 30 months Starting date: September 2013 Net salary: 2 000 euros or more per month depending on the candidate's experience Location: LORIA-CNRS in Nancy, France (1.5 hours from Paris by train): http://www.loria.fr/ Job description: The engineer will be in charge of developing a robotic device for tracking flying insects. More information on our activities: http://www.neuronal-engineering.com/dmartine/ Qualifications: The candidate should be proficient in one or several of the following areas: mechatronics, mechanical design, biorobotics, visual servoing Applications should be sent to Dominique.Martinez at loria.fr no later than June 28, 2013. -- Dominique Martinez LORIA CNRS Campus scientifique, BP 239 54506 Vandoeuvre-l?s-Nancy, France Tel: +33 383593072 http://www.neuronal-engineering.com/dmartine From neumann at ias.tu-darmstadt.de Mon May 27 11:03:17 2013 From: neumann at ias.tu-darmstadt.de (Gerhard Neumann) Date: Mon, 27 May 2013 17:03:17 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Reminder: CfP - RSS 2013 Workshop on "Hierarchical and Structured Learning for Robotics " Message-ID: <51A375B5.10403@ias.tu-darmstadt.de> REMINDER --- SECOND CALL FOR POSTERS RSS 2013 WORKSHOP ON "Hierarchical and Structured Learning for Robotics" ================================================================================================== Title: Hierarchical and Structured Learning for Robotics Organizers: Gerhard Neumann (neumann at ias.tu-darmstadt.de, TU Darmstadt) George Konidaris (gdk at csail.mit.edu, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) Freek Stulp (freek.stulp at ensta-paristech.fr, ENSTA - ParisTech) Jan Peters (peters at ias.tu-darmstadt.de, TU Darmstadt and MPI for Intelligent Systems) WWW: http://www.ias.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/Workshops/RSS2013 ABSTRACT: Learning robot control policies in complex real-world environments is a major challenge for machine learning due to the inherent high dimensionality, partial observability and the high costs of data generation. Treating robot learning as a monolithic machine problem and employing off-the-shelf approaches is unrealistic at best. However, the physical world can yield important insights into the inherent structure of control policies, state or action spaces and reward functions. For example, many robot motor tasks are also hierarchically structured decision tasks. For example, a tennis playing robot has to combine different striking movements sequentially. During locomotion there are at least three behaviors simultaneously active as a robot has to combine its gait generation with foot placement and balance control. First domain-driven skill learning approaches have already yielded impressive recent successes by incorporating such structural insights into the learning process. Hence, a promising route to more scalable policy learning approaches includes the automatic exploitation of the environment's structure, resulting in new structured learning approaches for robot control. Structured and hierarchical learning has been an important trend in machine learning in recent years. In robotics, researchers often ended up naturally at well-structured hierarchical policies based on discrete-continuous partitions (e.g., define local movement generators as well as a prioritized operational space control for combining them) with nested control loops at several different speeds (i.e., fast control loops for smooth and accurate movement achievement, slower loops for model-predictive planning). Furthermore, evidence from the fields cognitive sciences indicate that humans also heavily exploit such structures and hierarchies. Although such structures have been found in human motor control, are favored in robot control and exist in machine learning, the connections between these fields have not been well explored. Transferring insights from structured prediction methods, which make use of the inherent correlation in the data, to hierarchical robot skill learning may be a crucial step. General approaches for bringing structured policies, states, actions and rewards into robot reinforcement learning may well be the key to tackle many challenges of real-world robot environments and an important step to the vision of intelligent autonomous robots which can learn rich and versatile sets of motor skills. This workshop aims to reveal how complex motor skills typically exhibit structures that can be exploited for learning reward functions and to find structure in the state or action space. In order to make progress towards the goal of structured learning for robot control, this workshop aims at researchers from different machine learning areas (such as reinforcement learning, structured prediction), robotics and related disciplines (e.g., control engineering, and the cognitive sciences). We particularly want to focus on the following important topics for structured robot learning which have a big overlap from several of these fields: - Efficient representations and learning methods for hierarchical policies - Learning in several layers of hierarchy - Structured representations for motor control and planning - Skill extraction and skill transfer - Sequencing and composition of behaviors - Hierarchical Bayesian Models for decision making and efficient transfer learning - Low-dimensional manifolds as structured representations for decision making - Exploiting correlations in the decision making process - Prioritized control policies in a multi-task reinforcement learning setup These challenges are important steps to building intelligent autonomous robots and may potentially motivate new research topics in the related research fields. FORMAT: The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers which are interested in structured representations, reinforcement learning, hierarchical learning methods and control architectures. Among these general topics we will focus on the following questions: Structured representations: - How to efficiently use graphical models such as Markov random fields to exploit correlations in the decision making process? - How to extract the relevant structure (e.g. low dimensional manifolds, factorizations...) from the state and action space? - Can we efficiently model structure in the reward function or the system dynamics? - How to learn good features for the policy or the value function? - What can we learn from structured prediction? Representations of behavior: - What are good representations for motor skills? - How can we efficiently reuse skills in new situations? - How can we extract movement skills and elemental movements from demonstrations? - How can we compose skills to solve a combination of tasks? - How can we represent versatile motor skills? - How can we represent and exploit the correlations over time in the decision process? Structured Control: - How to efficiently use structured representations for planning and control? - Can we learn task-priorities and use similar policies as in task-prioritized control? - How to decompose optimal control laws into elemental movements ? - How to use low-dimensional manifolds to control high-dimensional, redundant systems? - Can we use chain or tree-like structures as policy representation to mimic the kinematic structure of the robot? Hierarchical Learning Methods: - How can we efficiently apply abstractions to the control problem? - How to efficiently learn at several layers of hierarchy? - Which policy search algorithms are appropriate for which hierarchical representation? - Can we use hierarchical inverse reinforcement learning to acquire skill reward functions, and priors over selecting those skills? - How can we decide when to create new skills or re-use known ones? - How can we discover and generalize important sub-goals in our movement plan? Skill Transfer: - How can we efficiently transfer skills to new situations? - Can we use hierarchical Bayesian models to learn in several layers of abstraction also in decision making? - How to transfer learned models or even value functions to new tasks? IMPORTANT DATES June 1st - Deadline of submission for Posters June 4th - Notification of Poster Acceptance SUBMISSIONS Extended abstracts (1 pages) will be reviewed by the program committee members on the basis of relevance, significance, and clarity. Accepted contributions will be presented as posters but particularly exciting work may be considered for talks. Submissions should be formatted according to the conference templates and submitted via email to neumann at ias.tu-darmstadt.de. ORGANIZERS Gerhard Neumann, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt George Konidaris, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Freek Stulp, ENSTA - ParisTech Jan Peters, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems LOCATION AND MORE INFORMATION The most up-to-date information about the workshop can be found on the RSS 2013 webpage. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jhuan at ittc.ku.edu Mon May 27 12:59:40 2013 From: jhuan at ittc.ku.edu (Jun (Luke) Huan) Date: Tue, 28 May 2013 00:59:40 +0800 Subject: Connectionists: Postdoctoral Positions Available for Big Data Analytics Message-ID: <000a01ce5afb$95daaaf0$c19000d0$@ittc.ku.edu> Multiple Postdoctoral Associate positions are available in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Kansas. With the fast evolving technology for data collection, data transmission, and data analysis, we observe that the scientific research community is undergoing a profound transformation where discoveries and innovations increasingly rely on massive amounts of data. New prediction techniques, including novel statistical, mathematical, and computational techniques are enabling a paradigm shift in scientific investigation. Deep analysis of large data sets has become a critical endeavor of science by offering complementary insights in addition to theory, experiment, and computer simulation. We seek highly motivated Postdoctoral Associates to join our efforts to advance machine learning and data mining for better modeling of large amounts of data from scientific domains. Our hypothesis is that much more information is embedded in big data than what can be processed by a few domain experts. We further argue that big data are often linked, and exploring the relationships among data sets enables us to build much better models for understanding structure in data. We are working on a number of highly interdisciplinary projects to test our hypothesis. Sample projects include: * Prediction of the role of small molecules in biological systems using chemical structure and biological activity information * Identification of drugs for new therapeutic strategies * Delineation of genetic relationships from high-throughput sequencing data Successful candidates should possess the following qualifications: (i) a Ph.D. degree in computer science, statistics, bioinformatics, or cheminformatics. (ii) familiarity with machine learning theory and algorithms (supervised learning, parametric and nonparametric approaches, MLE and/or Bayesian, model selection and model evaluation), (iii) strong communication skills, (iv) excellent programming skills. Knowledge of biological or pharmaceutical data is a plus but not required. Knowledge of computer systems (high performance computing and cloud computing) is a big plus but not required. The initial appointment is for one year, and the position may be renewed based on satisfactory progress. The University of Kansas is a major educational and research institution with about 30,000 students on five campuses, 2,600 faculty members, and service centers throughout the state. EECS is the largest department in the KU School of Engineering, with 36 faculty and annual research expenditures of over $10 million. The main campus of KU is in Lawrence, a vibrant, thriving community of more than 90,000 residents that is just 40 miles west of Greater Kansas City and 20 miles from the state capital. The University of Kansas is an EO/AA employer. To apply, please send your CV, including a list of publications, past and current research experience, and contact information for three references, to Dr. Jun (Luke) Huan. -- Jun (Luke) Huan, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Director, the Bioinformatics and Computational Life Sciences Laboratory University of Kansas Lawrence, KS, 66047-7621, USA Office: 2034 Eaton Hall, Tel: 1 (785) 864-5072 http://people.eecs.ku.edu/~jhuan, Email: jhuan at ittc.ku.edu From info at ssa.org.ua Wed May 22 16:22:37 2013 From: info at ssa.org.ua (Info SSA KPI) Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 23:22:37 +0300 Subject: Connectionists: AACIMP-2013 Neuroscience Stream Message-ID: Stream Neuroscience - * VIII Summer School ?Achievements and Applications of Contemporary Informatics, Mathematics and Physics? (AACIMP-2013) * The stream ?Neuroscience? includes a broad range of topics from subcellular level to cognition and social behaviour considered mainly from computational point of view. It provides all required information to understand the biological bases of modelled processes. *Preliminary topics of the stream are:* - Neurodynamic, types of excitability, bursting and bistability - Dynamic clamp or Neuron-Computer Interface - Spatial property of neurons, multicompartment models - Local and global neural networks, synchronization and oscillations - Brain networks, specific mediator systems and behavior - Molecular and cellular mechanisms of pain - Specific perceptions: Auditory, Visual, Somatosensory - Brain-Computer Interface *Prerequisites*: no prior knowledge in the field is expected. *Dr. Romain Brette*, Assistant Professor, hearing lab at Ecole Normale Sup?rieure, Paris, France; Member, Institut Universitaire de France. *(confirmation is expected)* *Dr. Anton Chizhov, *Senior Researcher, Ioffe Physical Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg, Russia. *Prof. Witali Dunin-Barkowski*, Department of Neuroinfomatics, Scientific Research Institute for System Analysis, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia. *Dr. Gennady S. Cymbalyuk*, Assistant Professor, Dynamical Neuroscience Laboratory, Neuroscience Institute, Georgia State University, Atlanta USA. *Dr. Ruben Tikidji-Hamburyan*, Senior Researcher, A.B.Kogan Research Institute for Neurocybernetics, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia; Visiting Researcher, Louisiana State University, Health Sciences Center, New Orleans, USA. *Dr. Sergiy Yakovenko*, Assistant Professor, Neural Engineering Laboratory, West Virginia University School of Medicine, WV, USA. *Ilya Kuzovkin*, MSc., researcher at the Department of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Estonia. *Dr. Pavel Belan*, Bogomolets Institute of Physiology of the NASU, Kyiv, Ukraine *(confirmation is expected)* *Dr. Evgenia Belova*, A.B. Kogan Research Institute for Neurocybernetics, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia * (confirmation is expected)* *Dr. Nana Voitenko*, Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, Physics and Technology Center of the NASU, Kyiv, Ukraine *(confirmation is expected)* *Dr. Carl van Vreeswijk*, Research Scientist, French National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris, France. *(confirmation is expected)* *Confirmation from a certain number of lecturers is expected.* The stream ?Neuroscience? is a part of the VIII Summer School ?AACIMP-2013? that will take place at the National Technical University of Ukraine ?Kyiv Polytechnic Institute? (Kyiv, Ukraine), August 1 ? 17, 2013. It will include lectures, seminars and workshops as well as social program. In order to apply for participation in the stream, applicants need to complete and submit the Summer School online application form - http://summerschool.ssa.org.ua/. Programme committee will make the decision on applicant?s admission within a month from the date of submitting the application form. *Registration deadline is June 1, 2013**.* Detailed information and application form are available on the AACIMP-2013 website at http://summerschool.ssa.org.ua *Organizing Committee:* Student Science Association 37, Peremohy avenue, building 1, room 299(15) 03056, Ukraine, Kyiv, Telephone/Fax: +38 044 454 9243 Web: http://ssa.org.ua E-mail: summerschool at ssa.org.ua -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From vtrianni at ulb.ac.be Mon May 27 09:11:06 2013 From: vtrianni at ulb.ac.be (Vito Trianni) Date: Mon, 27 May 2013 15:11:06 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Call for contributions: Workshop on Collective Behaviours and Social Dynamics @ECAL 2013, Taormina, Italy, September 2-6, 2013 References: <1DBB0E80-7AB4-41F7-8E2E-3C35D6E83E34@istc.cnr.it> Message-ID: <08E32EDE-1731-45F2-93A7-B89D2EAF5F00@ulb.ac.be> [apologies for multiple posting] Call for Contributions: Workshop on Collective Behaviours and Social Dynamics ECAL 2013, the 12th European Conference on Artificial Life Taormina, Italy, September 2-6, 2013 http://laral.istc.cnr.it/collective-and-swarm-robotics.html === About the Workshop === This workshop is at the intersection of several disciplines, from ethology to swarm intelligence, from collective robotics to evolutionary linguistics. Despite very heterogeneous, these disciplines share a common ground when they refer to the mechanisms and the dynamics of social interaction, both at the ontogenetic and the phylogenetic level (e.g., referring to developmental or evolutionary factors). Despite the similar scientific questions, the study of collective behaviour and social dynamics is characterised by very different approaches, and few places for discussion and comparison are available. Therefore, the workshop represents a unique occasion in which such a juxtaposition of diverse disciplines can take place. The goal of the workshop is to confront the current trends and advancements in the study of collective behaviour and social dynamics, and to promote cross-fertilisation and contamination between disciplines and approaches that rarely meet together. The workshop will feature two sessions, the first dedicated to collective behaviours in biological and artificial systems, the second dedicated to social dynamics, ranging from opinion sharing to language evolution. Each session will feature a keynote speech (to be announced soon), as well as presentations selected among the submitted proposals (see also the submission instructions below). We solicit presentation proposals about both published (e.g., to a top-ranking journal) and unpublished work. Selected presentations of unpublished work will be invited to submit a full-length paper to the Swarm Intelligence journal, and will benefit of a fast-track reviewing process. === Topics of Interest === Generally speaking, the workshop embraces all those studies that shed some light on the mechanisms and dynamics of social interaction leading to well-organised spatio-temporal patterns and shared understanding. Here is a non-exhaustive list: ? swarm intelligence ? population biology ? multi-agent systems ? collective and swarm robotics ? evolutionary dynamics ? cognitive ethology and sociobiology ? distributed computation ? cultural evolution ? opinion dynamics ? language evolution ? collective intelligence ? cognitive sociology === Submission Instructions === Applicants are asked to submit an abstract or short paper (up to 2 pages) of the planned presentation. Specify whether the work has been already published elsewhere. Important Dates: ? Submission due: June 30, 2013. ? Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2013 ? Conference: September 2-6, 2013 Applications should be submitted via e-mail to: Workshop.Collective.Robotics at gmail.com === Organizing Committee === ? Stefano Nolfi, CNR-ISTC, Italy. ? Vito Trianni, CNR-ISTC, Italy. ? Marco Dorigo, Universit? Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. ? Francesco Mondada, EPFL, Switzerland ? Tom Wenseleers, University of Leuven, Belgium. ? Luc Steels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. ? Michael Spranger , Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris, France. === Workshop Venue === The Workshop will be co-located with ECAL 2013, the 12th European Conference on Artificial Life, September 2-6 2013, Taormina, Italy. === Registration === The registration can be done via the ECAL 2013 web site (http://www.dmi.unict.it/ecal2013). Early registration deadline is June 15, 2013. Late registration: June 16 - September 6, 2013 ======================================================================== Vito Trianni, Ph.D. vito.trianni@(no_spam)istc.cnr.it ISTC-CNR http://www.istc.cnr.it - http://laral.istc.cnr.it/trianni currently visiting at: IRIDIA-CoDE, CP 194/6 vtrianni@(no_spam)ulb.ac.be Universit? Libre de Bruxelles Tel: +32 (0)2 650 2712 Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50 Fax: +32 (0)2 650 2715 1050 Bruxelles Belgium ======================================================================== From ASIM.ROY at asu.edu Mon May 27 16:19:37 2013 From: ASIM.ROY at asu.edu (Asim Roy) Date: Mon, 27 May 2013 20:19:37 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Grandmother cells are widely used in the brain - the brain is highly readable and transparent at higher levels Message-ID: <4AD8F84F0AA4E1448BD8131BA7E55EB40B0DD7C8@exmbt02.asurite.ad.asu.edu> The following article appeared in Frontiers of Cognitive Science on May 24: Roy A. (2013). ?An extension of the localist representation theory: grandmother cells are also widely used in the brain.? It?s a very short article, just 2000 words. Here?s the link to the article: http://www.frontiersin.org/Cognitive_Science/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00300/full Single cell recordings of the past decade have produced a substantial body of evidence for grandmother cells. Phys.org (MedicalXpress) reported the grandmother cell findings in a story titled: ?If you can't beat them, join them: Grandmother cells revisited.? Here?s the link to the story: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-grandmother-cells-revisited.html Jerzy Konorski (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Konorski ) and Jerry Lettvin of MIT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Lettvin) were the original proponents of the grandmother cell idea. Horace Barlow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Barlow) of Cambridge University, UK, remains to this day a firm believer in grandmother cells. His 2009 paper "Grandmother Cells, Symmetry, and Invariance: How the Term Arose and What the Facts Suggest" claims grandmother cells "exist" and ?can now be recorded from and studied reliably.? There is some misconception about grandmother cells. The concept of grandmother cells is not just about a single cell encoding (representing) a person or an object. It's much more than that. It's really about the brain's ability to abstract complex concepts (e.g. concepts of categories such as cats, dogs, animals, humans, trees, buildings, anger, laughter and so on) and encode (represent) each using a single cell. And that ability exists in other animals too, not just humans. The evidence for the brain's ability to abstract complex concepts is presented in this paper. With grandmother cells, mind reading becomes very simple. In fact, the brain is amazingly transparent at some level. Grandmother cells are a special type of localist cells. In localist representation, units (cells) simply have "meaning and interpretation." Grandmother cells represent complex concepts that are multimodal invariant. The localist representation theory article appeared in Frontiers of Cognitive Science on Dec. 4, 2012: Roy A. (2012). ?A theory of the brain: localist representation is used widely in the brain.? It?s also a very short article, just 2000 words. Here?s the link to the article: http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/FullText.aspx?s=196&name=cognitive_science&ART_DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00551 Phys.org (MedicalXpress) wrote a feature story on the localist theory titled: ?Do brain cells need to be connected to have meaning?? Here?s the link to the story: http://phys.org/news273783154.html James McClelland of Stanford University and David Plaut of Carnegie Mellon University presented arguments against the localist theory in that Phys.org story. I posted a separate response to their arguments on the Lifeboat site. Here?s the link to the response: http://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/12/response-to-plaut-and-mcclelland-on-the-phys-org-story With best regards, Asim Roy Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona www.lifeboat.com/ex/bios.asim.roy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jlam at bccn-tuebingen.de Wed May 29 05:10:41 2013 From: jlam at bccn-tuebingen.de (Judith Lam) Date: Wed, 29 May 2013 11:10:41 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: 3 days left for abstract submission - Bernstein Conference 2013 - Call for Abstracts Message-ID: <51A5C611.3030702@bccn-tuebingen.de> REMINDER: Call for Abstracts: Bernstein Conference 2013 Deadline of abstract submission: May 31, 2013 ************************************************************** Workshops September 24-25, 2013 Main Conference September 25-27, 2013 ************************************************************** The Bernstein Conference on Computational Neuroscience started out as the annual meeting of the Bernstein Network (www.nncn.de) and has become the largest European Conference in Computational Neuroscience in recent years. This year, the Conference is organized by the Bernstein Center Tuebingen and will take place September 25-27, 2013. In addition, there will be a series of pre-conference workshops on September 24-25, 2013. The Bernstein Conference is a single-track conference, covering all aspects of Computational Neuroscience and Neurotechnology, and sessions for poster presentations are an integral part of the conference. We now invite the *submission of abstracts for poster presentations* from all relevant areas. Due to space limitations we will accept 250 abstracts for posters which will be presented in two sessions on Wednesday and Thursday evening. Additionally, a small number of abstracts will be selected for contributed talks. Accepted abstracts will be published online and will be citable via Digital Object Identifiers (DOI). DETAILS FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION: For abstract submission visit: http://www.bernstein-conference.de/abstracts Deadline: May 31, 2013 CONFERENCE DATE AND VENUE: Workshops September 24-25, 2013, Brechtbau, Wilhelmstr. 50, Tuebingen, Germany Main Conference September 25-27, 2013, Neue Aula, Geschwister Scholl Platz, Tuebingen, Germany For more information on the conference, please visit the website: http://www.bernstein-conference.de PhD STUDENT SYMPOSIUM: September 28, 2013 PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Matthias Bethge, Michael Black, Michael Brecht, Jakob Macke, Anthony Movshon, Felix Wichmann, Fred Wolf ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Matthias Bethge (General Chair) Judith Lam, Jakob Macke, Felix Wichman We look forward to seeing you in Tuebingen in September! -- Dr. Judith Lam Executive Coordinator Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience T?bingen Eberhard Karls University of T?bingen Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics http://www.bccn-tuebingen.de/about-bccn/contact.html Otfried-M?ller-Str. 25, 72076 T?bingen Tel: +49 7071 29 89019 Fax: +49 7071 29 25015 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From marc.toussaint at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de Wed May 22 12:32:23 2013 From: marc.toussaint at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de (Marc Toussaint) Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 18:32:23 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Postdoc Position -- Working with PR2 -- University Stuttgart Message-ID: <519CF317.70405@informatik.uni-stuttgart.de> The Machine Learning & Robotics Lab, U Stuttgart, is inviting applications for a Postdoc position in a project involving the realization of (active) learning methods on the PR2 robot. The Postdoc will play a leading role in this project and our group as a whole. The general project is concerned with realizing active learning, exploration and curiosity on the level of mobile manipulation on the PR2. The project will also have branches involved with human-robot instruction and will be funded from various sources. The Postdoc should have fun in the challenges of 1) integrating real systems that perform complex sequential manipulation, 2) actually seeing Machine Learning concepts realized on real robots, 3) coordinating and defining sub-projects that contribute to these common goals of our MLR lab. In return, we provide an ideal, potentially long-term research opportunity, with excellent resources, in one of the most exiting fields of robotics. The candidate should be well experienced with robotic systems and have an excellent academic track record within the ICRA, IROS, RSS community. *Requirements* - PhD in Robotics or closely related field - Excellent academic track record in topics related to the project - Very good English skills, written and spoken - Above average Team & Communication skills - Excellent programming skills - Excellent analytical skills & Critical thinking - Persistence! *Position* - The position is open for immediate filling - The salary options range from a standard Postdoc position (E13) to a permanent assistant (Akademischer Rat) position (the latter only in special cases or after some time) - The initial contract will be 1 years but will be prolonged on agreement *Application* The application procedure is informal. If you are interested, please send an email to marc.toussaint at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de carola.stahl at ipvs.uni-stuttgart.de with subject [PostDoc Application] including 1) a brief statement on your current position, what your PhD topic and focus or recent research was, and when you plan to start a new job, 2) URL of your homepage 3) your Google Scholar search URL (e.g. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=marc+toussaint) After pre-selection we will contact you again and additionally ask for a full CV and contacts of three references. Evaluation of candidates starts on receipt of applications but will continue until the position is filled. -- Marc Toussaint, Prof. Dr. Uni Stuttgart Universit?tsstra?e 38 70569 Stuttgart, Germany +49 711 685 88376 http://ipvs.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/mlr/marc/index.html From sebastian.risi at cornell.edu Fri May 24 17:05:21 2013 From: sebastian.risi at cornell.edu (Sebastian Risi) Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 17:05:21 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: Submission Deadline Extended: AAAI 2013 Fall Symposium on How Should Intelligence be Abstracted in AI Research: MDPs, Symbolic Representations, Artificial Neural Networks, or _____? Message-ID: ** AAAI 2013 Fall Symposium: ?How Should Intelligence be Abstracted in AI Research: MDPs, Symbolic Representations, Artificial Neural Networks, or _____?? ** Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia (adjacent to Washington, DC). November 15-17, 2013 ** Schedule ** EXTENDED DEADLINE for Full Paper/Extended Abstract Submission: June 24, 2013 Noti?cation: July 7, 2013 Final Camera-ready Paper/Extended Abstract: September 12, 2013 ** Keynote Speakers ** Andrew Ng via Skype (Stanford University, USA) Georg Striedter (University of California, Irvine, USA) Randall O'Reilly (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA) Risto Miikkulainen (University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA) Gary Marcus (New York University, USA) More TBD Dear colleagues, Due to numerous requests, the submission deadline has been extended. We invite contributions to our AAAI 2013 Fall Symposium titled ?How Should Intelligence be Abstracted in AI Research: MDPs, Symbolic Representations, Artificial Neural Networks, or _____??. Each subfield of AI has a different perspective on intelligence and unspoken assumptions about what is critical to recreate it computationally. To better understand such differences, we aim to bring together a diverse group of AI researchers interested in discussing and comparing how intelligence and processes that might create it are abstracted in various subfields. For example, such discussion may include honest examination of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, and what features of biological intelligence are crucial or unnecessary to include in algorithms. We hope to encourage cross-pollination of ideas between researchers viewing intelligence in different ways (e.g. through the lens of MDPs or symbolic manipulation) and at different levels of abstraction (e.g. biologically-plausible neural simulations or restricted Boltzmann machines). One goal is to facilitate revising or creating new abstractions of intelligence and intelligence-generating processes. More information can be found here: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~risi/AAAISymposium2013/ Contributions related to how intelligence can or should be abstracted algorithmically in artificial intelligence research are invited. Extended abstracts that summarize the results of a research program along these lines are most welcome, as are personal position papers or contributions describing speculative work or work in progress. Works bridging traditionally separate AI paradigms are encouraged. Participants should be open to inspiration from work and ideas in other subfields, and be willing to step outside their intellectual comfort zones. Interested participants are encouraged to submit extended abstracts (no more than 2 pages), or full-length papers (up to 6 pages in AAAI format) in PDF format to sebastian.risi at cornell.edu. Accepted submissions will be published as citable, peer-reviewed papers in the AAAI technical report. Areas of interest include but are not limited to: - Different levels and types of knowledge representation and reasoning - Abstractions of the following: - Neural networks (e.g. deep learning networks, spiking ANNs, and plastic ANNs) - Learning (e.g. machine learning and reinforcement learning) - Biological development (e.g. generative and developmental systems, and developmental robotics) - Evolutionary search (e.g. digital evolution and evolutionary algorithms) - Biologically-inspired computation - Evolutionary robotics - Swarm intelligence - Artificial life - Philosophical arguments on characteristics of appropriate abstractions for AI The symposium will be held Friday - Sunday, November 15-17 at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia (adjacent to Washington, DC). We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you! -- Sebastian Risi, Joel Lehman, Jeff Clune -- Dr. Sebastian Risi Postdoctoral Fellow Creative Machines Laboratory Cornell University Email: sebastian.risi at cornell.edu Tel: (407) 929-5113 Web: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~risi/ From erik at tnb.ua.ac.be Thu May 23 22:42:54 2013 From: erik at tnb.ua.ac.be (Erik De Schutter) Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 11:42:54 +0900 Subject: Connectionists: Last day for early registration for CNS 2013 (non-members) Message-ID: Notice that today May 24 is the last day for early registration for non-members! Organization for Computational Neurosciences (OCNS) 22nd Annual Meeting University of Paris ?Ren? Descartes?, Paris, France July 2013 The main meeting (July 14 ? 16, 2013) will be preceded by a day of tutorials (July 13) and followed by two days of workshops (July 17 ?18). Conference banquet will be held in the Mus?e des Arts-Forains on July 15 With over 460 abstracts submitted this promises to be the biggest CNS meeting ever! Confirmed Invited Speakers: Sophie Den?ve (ENS-Paris) Simon Laughlin (University of Cambridge) Nikos Logothetis (Max Planck Institute T?bingen) Rafael Yuste (Columbia University) For up-to-date conference information, visit http://www.cnsorg.org/cns-2013-paris ---------------------------------------------------------------------- OCNS is the international member-based society for computational neuroscientists. Become a member to be eligible for travel awards and more. Visit our website for more information: http://www.cnsorg.org _______________________________________________ From rsalakhu at cs.toronto.edu Sun May 26 18:23:21 2013 From: rsalakhu at cs.toronto.edu (Ruslan Salakhutdinov) Date: Sun, 26 May 2013 18:23:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Connectionists: Call for Demonstrations, NIPS 2013 Message-ID: The Neural Information Processing Systems Conference 2013 http://nips.cc/Conferences/2013/ has a Demonstration Track running in parallel with the evening Poster Sessions, December 5-7, 2013, in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA. Demonstration Proposal Deadline: Monday September 16, 2013, 11pm Universal Time (4pm Pacific Daylight Time). http://nips.cc/Conferences/2013/CallForDemonstrations Demonstrations offer a unique opportunity to showcase: ? Hardware technology ? Software systems ? Neuromorphic and biologically-inspired systems ? Robotics or other systems, which are relevant to the technical areas covered by NIPS (see Call for Papers http://nips.cc/Conferences/2013/CallForPapers). Demonstrations must show novel technology and must be run live, preferably with some interactive parts. Unlike poster presentations or slide shows, live action and interaction with the audience are critical elements. Submissions: Submission of demo proposals at the following URL: https://nips.cc/Demonstrators/ You will be asked to fill a questionnaire and describe clearly: ? the technology demonstrated ? the elements of novelty ? the live action part ? the interactive part ? the equipment brought by the demonstrator ? the equipment required at the place of the demo Evaluation Criteria: Submissions will be refereed on the basis of technical quality, novelty, live action, and potential for interaction. Demonstration chair: Russ Salakhutdinov http://nips.cc/Conferences/2013/CallForDemonstrations From lindal at incf.org Tue May 28 14:13:48 2013 From: lindal at incf.org (Linda Lanyon) Date: Tue, 28 May 2013 20:13:48 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Neuroinformatics Scientist & Cloud Administrator positions at the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility Message-ID: The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility is recruiting a Neuroinformatics Scientist and Systems/Cloud Administrators to complement its Secretariat team, based at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Further details and online application are available via this link: http://www.incf.org/about/positions-available Best regards Linda Lanyon ------------------------------ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Linda Lanyon* *PhD CEng CITP MBCS* *Acting Deputy Director & Head of Programs International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility Secretariat Karolinska Institutet Nobels v?g 15A SE-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden Email: linda.lanyon at incf.org Phone: +46 8 524 86919 Fax: +46 8 524 87094 web: www.incf.org Personal Research Program: http://linda.incf.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From y.hayashi at reading.ac.uk Mon May 27 14:37:48 2013 From: y.hayashi at reading.ac.uk (Yoshikatsu Hayashi) Date: Mon, 27 May 2013 18:37:48 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Reminder of the deadline of application, 31st of May: Fully funded PhD Studentship In-Reply-To: <1E34BE02E76A394C8DA8EE9251795C8293C131@VIME-MBX2.rdg.ac.uk> Message-ID: <1E34BE02E76A394C8DA8EE9251795C8293CB59@VIME-MBX2.rdg.ac.uk> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From siccoverwer at gmail.com Tue May 28 04:14:06 2013 From: siccoverwer at gmail.com (Sicco Verwer) Date: Tue, 28 May 2013 10:14:06 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: BENELEARN final call for participation Message-ID: ====FINAL CALL FOR PARTICIPATION===== Benelearn 2013 22nd Belgian-Dutch Conference on Machine Learning http://benelearn2013.org Nijmegen, Netherlands, June 3, 2013 ================================== BENELEARN is the annual machine learning conference of Belgium and The Netherlands. It serves as a forum for researchers to exchange ideas, present recent work, and foster collaboration in the broad field of Machine Learning and its applications. The 22nd edition of the annual Belgian-Dutch Conference on Machine Learning (BENELEARN) will be organized in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, with cooperation of the SIKS research school (http://www.siks.nl). ======CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS====== Keynote by Dan Roth from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Title: Constrained Conditional Models: Towards Better Semantic Analysis of Text 12 oral presentations and 21 poster presentations See http://benelearn2013.org for details ============PROGRAM============== 09:00 Reception opens 09:45 Conference welcome 10:00 Keynote 11:00 ? 17:00 Conference program, see http://benelearn2013.org for details 17:00 Drinks 19:00 Dinner ============LOCATION============== The conference will be held in the Gymnasium of the Radboud University Nijmegen, Heyendaalseweg 141, 6525 AJ Nijmegen. The location is easy to reach by public transport from Nijmegen central station using the university shuttle bus 10 (get off at Heyendaalseweg), or by foot from Nijmegen Heyendaal station. The campus can also be reached by car, but when coming from the North there is a high chance of a traffic jam (about 15 mins) when crossing de Waal river. There is paid parking everywhere on the campus. The Gymnasion has an underground parking garage. ===========REGISTRATION============ The registration costs are ?50 for students and ?70 for non-students, on-site registration is ?10 extra. Attending the evening dinner program costs ?45 per ticket. Registration is possible until the day of the conference (June 3, 2013), the deadline for registration for the banquet has been extended to May 30 ( Thursday). Antal van den Bosch, David van Leeuwen and Tom Heskes on behalf of the BENELEARN 2013 team -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From i.bojak at reading.ac.uk Thu May 30 06:41:24 2013 From: i.bojak at reading.ac.uk (Ingo Bojak) Date: Thu, 30 May 2013 11:41:24 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: PhD Studentship (EU/UK) in Neural Field Models, University of Reading, UK Message-ID: Dendrites and layers: Neural field models in three dimensions Prof Ingo Bojak Cybernetics Research Group, School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading, UK Neural field models treat cortical tissue as continuous with emergent properties. While classical theories consider just a single 2D ?cortical sheet?, neurons are actually organized into six anatomical layers and their connectivity depends systematically on neuron type and depth, creating ?microcircuits? across layers. We will develop a 3D neural field theory that incorporates synaptic inputs arranged in realistic depth patterns and produce a software package for their rapid evaluation (possibly with GPU acceleration). We will fit laminar electrode and/or EEG data from schizophrenic patients, and explore (speculative) functional consequences of dendritic processing, like burst-suppression in anesthesia or acquired epilepsy. This is a computational neuroscience project, which requires skills and knowledge in neuroscience, applied mathematics and programming. Candidates with a good background in at least two of these fields are encouraged to apply, if enthusiastic about the third. The core of this project is formed by scientific computing and data analysis, but according to prior experience and preference of the candidate more emphasis could be put on mathematical development or biological experiment, respectively. Concerning the latter the student has the opportunity to engage with ongoing relevant electrophysiological and animal experiments of the Co-Supervisor, Dr Ben Whalley (School of Pharmacy), if they wish. Eligibility: Applicants should hold a minimum of a UK Honours Degree at 2:1 level or equivalent in a relevant subject. Please note that this studentship is for UK/EU applicants only. Funding Details: The studentship will cover Home/EU Fees and pay the Research Council minimum stipend (?13,590 for 2011/12) for up to 3 years. It will begin in October 2013. How to apply: Please submit an application for a PhD in Cybernetics (full time) to the University at http://www.reading.ac.uk/Study/apply/pg-applicationform.aspx. Please quote the reference GS13-07 in the ?Scholarships applied for? box which appears within the Funding Section of your online application. Once you have submitted your application, you should receive an email to confirm receipt. Please forward this email, along with a covering letter, to Prof Ingo Bojak (i.bojak at reading.ac.uk) by the application deadline. Application Deadline: Friday, 14th June 2013. Further Enquiries: Please contact Prof Ingo Bojak (i.bojak at reading.ac.uk). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available URL: From calendarsites at insticc.org Thu May 30 03:18:04 2013 From: calendarsites at insticc.org (calendarsites at insticc.org) Date: Thu, 30 May 2013 08:18:04 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: CFP International Conference on Physiological Computing Systems - PhyCS 2014 Message-ID: <023f01ce5d05$e4eb7960$aec26c20$@insticc.org> CALL FOR PAPERS International Conference on Physiological Computing Systems - PhyCS 2014 Website: http://www.phycs.org January 7-9, 2014 Lisbon, Portugal Regular Papers Paper Submission: July 30, 2013 Authors Notification: October 9, 2013 Camera Ready and Registration: October 22, 2013 Sponsored by: INSTICC-Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication Logistics Partner: SCITEVENTS ? Science and Technology Events Exhibitors: Anditec ? Tecnologias de Reabilita??o, lda PT ? Funda??o Portugal Telecom Plux Wireless Biosignals S.A. Physiological data in its different dimensions, either bioelectrical, biomechanical, biochemical or biophysical, and collected through specialized biomedical devices, video and image capture or other sources, is opening new boundaries in the field of human-computer interaction into what can be defined as Physiological Computing. PhyCS is the annual meeting of the physiological interaction and computing community, and serves as the main international forum for engineers, computer scientists and health professionals, interested in outstanding research and development that bridges the gap between physiological data handling and human-computer interaction. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Ant?nio C?mara, YDreams, Portugal Gernot M?ller-Putz, Graz University of Technology, Austria Sandro Carrara, EPFL, Switzerland Thomas Falck, Philips Research, Netherlands PUBLICATIONS All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings, under an ISBN reference, on paper and on CD-ROM support. All papers presented at the conference venue will be available at the SCITEPRESS Digital Library (http://www.scitepress.org/DigitalLibrary/). SCITEPRESS is member of CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/). All papers presented at the conference venue will be available at the SCITEPRESS Digital Library. The proceedings will be submitted for indexation by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index (ISI), INSPEC, DBLP and EI (Elsevier Index). AWARDS The awards will be announced and bestowed at the conference closing session. Please check the website for further information: http://www.phycs.org/BestPaperAward.aspx CONFERENCE CHAIR Hugo Pl?cido da Silva, IT- Institute of Telecommunications, Portugal PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS Andreas Holzinger, Medical University Graz, Austria Stephen Fairclough, Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom Dennis Majoe, ETH Zurich, Switzerland CONFERENCE AREAS: Each of these topic areas is expanded below but the sub-topics list is not exhaustive. Papers may address one or more of the listed sub-topics, although authors should not feel limited by them. Unlisted but related sub-topics are also acceptable, provided they fit in one of the following main topic areas: 1. DEVICES 2. METHODOLOGIES AND METHODS 3. HUMAN FACTORS 4. APPLICATIONS AREA 1: DEVICES ? Biomedical Devices for Computer Interaction ? Haptic Devices ? Brain-Computer Interfaces ? Health Monitoring Devices ? Physiology-driven Robotics ? Wearable Sensors and Systems ? Cybernetics and User Interface Technologies AREA 2: METHODOLOGIES AND METHODS ? Biosignal Acquisition, Analysis and Processing ? Pattern Recognition ? Neural Networks ? Processing of Multimodal Input ? Observation, Modeling and Prediction of User Behavior ? Computer Graphics and Visualization of Physiological Data ? Video and Image Analysis for Physiological Computing ? Motion and Tracking AREA 3: HUMAN FACTORS ? User Experience ? Usability ? Adaptive Interfaces ? Human Factors in Physiological Computing ? Learning and Adaptive Control of Action Patterns ? Speech and Voice Data Processing AREA 4: APPLICATIONS ? Physiology-driven Computer Interaction ? Biofeedback Technologies ? Affective Computing ? Pervasive Technologies ? Augmentative Communication ? Assistive Technologies ? Interactive Physiological Systems ? Physiological Computing in Mobile Devices PROGRAM COMMITTEE http://www.phycs.org/ProgramCommittee.aspx Please check further details at the conference website (http://www.phycs.org/) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brefeld at kma.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de Fri May 31 08:23:18 2013 From: brefeld at kma.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de (Ulf Brefeld) Date: Fri, 31 May 2013 12:23:18 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Doctoral scholarship in machine learning Message-ID: Doctoral scholarship in machine learning in Frankfurt (Main) In close co-operation with the German Institute for International Educational Research and Educational Information (DIPF) [1], the Technical University of Darmstadt (TUDA) [2] is offering a doctoral scholarship in machine learning within the newly established PhD program "Knowledge Discovery in Scientific Publications" [3] on Personalised Content Acquisition from Heterogeneous Sources in the joint Knowledge Mining & Assessment Group at TUDA/DIPF [4] headed by Prof. Dr. Ulf Brefeld. The group focuses on machine learning and information retrieval, such as information extraction and aggregation, recommender systems, and personalisation techniques. The joint PhD program offers an outstanding opportunity to address numerous highly relevant open questions for future search engines, see [5] for a detailed description of the project. Excellently qualified graduates in computer science, mathematics, statistics, or related studies are invited to apply. Successful candidates are expected to possess very good mathematical skills, to work independently and to demonstrate their personal commitment, team and communication skills as well as a readiness to cooperate with others. Solid programming skills (e.g., Python, Java, C/C++) are appreciated. The program will be located at DIPF in Frankfurt (Main). The scholarship is granted for 36 months for completing a doctoral thesis. Successful candidates will be granted 1,400 Euros per month (tax free). Women are explicitly invited to submit their application. According to the pursuant legal requirements, applicants with disabilities will be preferably treated in the appointment procedure. Candidates from abroad are encouraged to apply. The PhD program [3] brings together the disciplines of "Knowledge Engineering", "Algorithmics", "Language Technology", "Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing", "Knowledge Mining and Assessment", and "Information Management". The concept for supervision strongly relies on close contacts between postgraduate students and their supervisors, regular joint meetings, co-supervision by professors and senior researchers from the above disciplines and a lively exchange in the research and qualification program. The Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt [2] regularly ranks among the top in Germany. Among its distinguishing features are its research initiative "Knowledge Discovery on the Web" focusing on powerful language technology procedures, text mining, machine learning and scalable infrastructures for assessing and aggregating knowledge. As a scientific institute belonging to the Leibniz Association, the DIPF [1] targets top-class basic research as well as innovative scientific services. Education is addressed as an area with high visibility and significance. The DIPF is currently establishing a research priority domain for educational information science, by joining competencies with computer scientists at TU Darmstadt. In this context, the doctoral program will constitute a central element. Applications should include a letter of motivation related to the research program [3] and the corresponding project [5], CV and details regarding previous scientific work, certifications of studies and work, including the graduate thesis and possibly electronic publications. Please submit your application in a single PDF file by June 30, 2013. Applications and inquiries should be sent to Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych and Prof. Dr. Marc Rittberger, e-mail: phd-application at ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de. [1] http://www.dipf.de/ [2] http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/ [3] http://www.kdsl.tu-darmstadt.de/ [4] http://www.kma.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/ [5] http://www.kdsl.tu-darmstadt.de/de/home/research-program/personalized-content-acquisition-from-heterogeneous-sources/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From n.lepora at sheffield.ac.uk Wed May 29 12:58:28 2013 From: n.lepora at sheffield.ac.uk (Nathan F Lepora) Date: Wed, 29 May 2013 17:58:28 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Living Machines 2013: Call for Participation in Conference, Exhibition and Workshops Message-ID: ______________________________________________________________ *Call for Participation in Conference, Exhibition and Workshops* *Living Machines: The 2nd International Conference on Biomimetic Robotics and Biohybrid Systems* *.* *A **Convergent Science Network* * Event* *29th July to 2nd August 2013*** Natural History Museum, London http://csnetwork.eu/livingmachines/conf2013 Deadline for early registration, June 16th, 2013 ______________________________________________________________ *ABOUT LIVING MACHINES 2013* The development of future real-world technologies will depend strongly on our understanding and harnessing of the principles underlying living systems and the flow of communication signals between living and artificial systems. The development of either biomimetic or biohybrid systems requires a deep understanding of the operation of living systems, and the two fields are united under the theme of *?living machines?*?the idea that we can construct artefacts, such as robots, that not only mimic life but share the same fundamental principles; or build technologies that can be combined with a living body to restore or extend its functional capabilities. The 2nd International Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid systems comprises a week of events including 2.5 days of single-track oral presentations with five plenary speakers; an exhibition and poster display featuring a performance art event with a biomimetic humanoid robot; and five satellite workshops on themes ranging from artificial ?selves? to the societal impacts of living machines. *The conference registration site is now open.* Please register soon to take advantage of early registration?*deadline June 16th*?and conference accommodation at Imperial College London from 70 GBP per night. *Contributions to the exhibition are still being invited* from research groups and companies involved in the development of biomimetic and biohybrid systems. Deadline to complete and return the *short exhibitor proforma *(http://www.csnetwork.eu/livingmachines/conf2013/exhibition) *is June 16th*. Space is limited so please apply soon. There is a prize for the best non-commercial exhibit plus the opportunity to demonstrate your work in front of the scientific media and representatives of leading journals and grant funding agencies. *CONFERENCE PROGRAMME* The main conference will take the form of a *single-track oral presentation programme*, 30th July to midday 1st August 2013, that will include *five plenary lectures* from leading international researchers in biomimetic and biohybrid systems. Agreed speakers are: *Mark Cutkosky* , Stanford University (Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation); *Terrence Deacon* , University of California, Berkeley (Natural and Artificial Selves); *Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena*, Imperial College London (Biomimetics for medical devices); *Robert Full*, University of California, Berkeley (Locomotion); *Andrew Pickering*, University of Exeter (History of living machines). There will also be 20 regular talk, and a 3 hour poster session (afternoon of August 1st) featuring approximately 50 posters. Particular themes include: *Biomimetic robotics Biohybrid systems including biological-machine interfaces Neuromimetic systems **Soft robot system **Active sensing in vision and touch **Social robotics **Biomimetics of plants* A list of accepted papers and extended abstracts can be found on the living machines website. *WORKSHOPS* In addition to the main conference there are two further days of workshops, each with their own full program that can be found on the Living Machines website. Monday 29th July *Self and cognitive systems *(organizers Peter Ford Dominey and Paul Verschure) *Learning from the Plant Kingdom to Invent Smart Artificial Solutions *(organizers Barbara Mazzolai and Lucia Beccai) Friday 2nd August *Neuromorphic models, circuits, and emerging nano-technologies for real-time neural processing systems *(organizers Giacomo Indiveri and Themistoklis Prodromakis) *Emergent social behaviours in bio-hybrid systems *(organizers Jose Halloy, Thomas Schmickl and Stuart Wilson) *Societal impacts of Living Machines *(organizers Tony Prescott and Michael Szollosy) Attendance at satellite events will attract a small fee intended to cover the costs of the meeting. We have reserved meeting rooms at *Imperial College London* to host the satellites each with capacity for up to 40 people. Please book early. Separation registration for satellite events is possible. *ABOUT THE VENUE* The organisers are delighted to have secured the Flett Theatre at the* **Natural History Museum* * *in London as the main venue for our conference. The NHM is an international centre for the study of the natural world featuring many important biological collections. The exhibition and poster session on Thursday 1st will be hosted at the nearby *Science Museum* , and the satellite events at *Imperial College London* . All three venues are conveniently located within a short walking distance of each other in South Kensington, the Museum district of the UK capital, and close to many of London?s tourist sights. *CALL FOR EXHIBITORS AT LIVING MACHINES 2013* The Living Machines 2013 Exhibition is intended to feature working biomimetic or biohybrid systems and biomimetic/biohybrid art. It will take place in the London Science Museum Level 1 Galleries on Thursday 1st August 2013. The exhibition is expected to include intelligent artefacts such as biomimetic robotics; however, we are open to proposals for display of biomimetic or biohybrid systems of any kind. The exhibition will be in two sessions. In the afternoon session exhibits will be displayed alongside conference posters. This session will be open to conference delegates and sponsors only. The evening session will be alongside the LM2013 buffet dinner and reception. This session will be open to invited representatives of the press, VIPs, and conference delegates and members of the public who have registered for the evening event. For registered conference participants there is no additional charge to participate in the exhibition but you must register your exhibit using the proforma available through the LM2013 web-site. Note that, if you wish to continue to display your exhibit during the evening session, you must also register for the buffet dinner and reception in addition to the main conference which attracts a small charge to cover the cost of food and drink. We strongly encourage authors of accepted papers and extended abstracts to bring their working biomimetic or biohybrid artefacts to include in the exhibition. A prize will be awarded for the best exhibit. Deadline for proposed exhibits: 16th June 2013. Please contact the conference organizers about your exhibit. *ACCOMODATION* West London has many excellent hotels that are suitable for conference delegates. We have also organized the provision of reasonably priced accommodation for LM2013 events in the Imperial College Halls of Residence. Please see conference registration pages for further information. *KEY DATES* *June 16, 2013 Deadline for early registration.* *June 16, 2013 Deadline for proposals for exhibits.* *July 29-August 2nd 2013 Conference* *SPONSORSHIP* Living Machines 2013 is sponsored by the *Convergent Science Network (CSN) for Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems* which is an EU FP7 Future Emerging Technologies Co-ordination Activity. CSN also organises two highly successful workshop series: the *Barcelona Summer School on Brain, Technology and Cognition* and the *Capoccaccia Neuromorphic Cognitive Engineering Workshop* . Living Machines 2013 is supported by the IOP Physics Journal *Biomimetics & Bio-inspiration* , who this year will publish a special issue of articles based on last years? LM2012 best papers. A *review of the state of the art* in biomimetics, by the conference chairs, and reporting strong recent growth in the field, has just been published in the journal ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-3182/8/1/013001). Other organisations wishing to sponsor the conference in any way and gain the corresponding benefits by promoting themselves and their products through conference publications, the conference web-site, and conference publicity are encouraged to contact the conference organisers to discuss the terms of sponsorship and necessary arrangements. We offer a number of attractive and good-value packages to potential sponsors. We are looking forwards to seeing you in London. *Organising Committee:* Tony Prescott (co-chair) Paul Verschure (co-chair) Nathan Lepora (programme chair) Holger Krapp (workshops & symposia) Anna Mura (web-site) *Conference Secretariat:* living-machines at sheffield.ac.uk c/o Gill Ryder, Sheffield Centre for Robotics Department of Psychology University of Sheffield Western Bank Sheffield, S10 2TN United Kingdom -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: