From axel.hutt at inria.fr Fri Jan 2 08:19:13 2015 From: axel.hutt at inria.fr (Axel Hutt) Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2015 14:19:13 +0100 (CET) Subject: Connectionists: Permanent Research position (CR2) in Computational Neuroscience In-Reply-To: <188118815.2404243.1389818195926.JavaMail.root@inria.fr> Message-ID: <60111868.13255249.1420204753064.JavaMail.zimbra@inria.fr> The French Research Institute INRIA (http://www.inria.fr/en/) is launching a permanent position "Young Graduate Scientist" (CR2) in Nancy / France. The Inria-team Neurosys (http://neurosys.loria.fr/) is looking for a young scientist working in computational neuroscience with a deeper interest in multi-scale modeling and/or multivariate data analysis in medical science. Candidates are eligible if they finished their PhD more than one year ago. Inria strongly encourages female candidates to apply for the position. For more detailed information on the position, please take a look at http://www.inria.fr/en/institute/recruitment/join-us/working-as-a-researcher-at-inria#section0 or send an email to Axel Hutt (axel.hutt at inria.fr) until end of January 2015. From axel.hutt at inria.fr Fri Jan 2 08:22:03 2015 From: axel.hutt at inria.fr (Axel Hutt) Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2015 14:22:03 +0100 (CET) Subject: Connectionists: Permanent Research position (CR1) in Computational Neuroscience In-Reply-To: <60111868.13255249.1420204753064.JavaMail.zimbra@inria.fr> Message-ID: <1134278205.13255419.1420204923403.JavaMail.zimbra@inria.fr> The French Research Institute INRIA (http://www.inria.fr/en/) is launching a permanent position "Young Experienced Scientist" (CR1) in Nancy / France. The Inria-team Neurosys (http://neurosys.loria.fr/) is looking for a senior scientist working in computational neuroscience with a deeper interest in multi-scale modeling and/or multivariate data analysis in medical science. Candidates are eligible if they finished their PhD more than four years ago. Inria strongly encourages female candidates to apply for the position. For more detailed information on the position, please take a look at http://www.inria.fr/en/institute/recruitment/join-us/working-as-a-researcher-at-inria#section0 or send an email to Axel Hutt (axel.hutt at inria.fr) until end of January 2015. From axel.hutt at inria.fr Fri Jan 2 11:02:14 2015 From: axel.hutt at inria.fr (Axel Hutt) Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2015 17:02:14 +0100 (CET) Subject: Connectionists: Director of Research position (DR2) in Computational Neuroscience In-Reply-To: <497506998.13265859.1420214500372.JavaMail.zimbra@inria.fr> Message-ID: <766600730.13265891.1420214534310.JavaMail.zimbra@inria.fr> The French Research Institute INRIA (http://www.inria.fr/en/) is launching permanent positions "Director of Research" (DR2) in Nancy / France. The Inria-team Neurosys (http://neurosys.loria.fr/) is looking for a senior scientist working in computational neuroscience with a deeper interest in multi-scale modeling and/or multivariate data analysis in medical science. As a guideline, candidates who finished their PhD more than eight years ago, may apply. Inria strongly encourages female candidates to apply for the position. For more detailed information on the position, please take a look at http://www.inria.fr/en/institute/recruitment/join-us/working-as-a-researcher-at-inria#section0 or send an email to Axel Hutt (axel.hutt at inria.fr) until end of January 2015. From jkrichma at uci.edu Fri Jan 2 13:01:30 2015 From: jkrichma at uci.edu (Jeff Krichmar) Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2015 10:01:30 -0800 Subject: Connectionists: CFP: Special Issue on Neurobiologically Inspired Robotics: Enhanced Autonomy Through Neuromorphic Cognition References: Message-ID: Dear Connectionists, I hope some of you will consider submitting to this special issue of Neural Networks (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/neural-networks/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-neurobiologically-inspired-robotics-enhance/). Neurobiologically inspired robotics goes by many names: brain-based devices, cognitive robots, neurorobots, and neuromorphic robots, to name a few. The field has grown into an exciting area of research and engineering. The common goal is twofold: Firstly, developing a system that demonstrates some level of cognitive ability can lead to a better understanding of the neural machinery that realizes cognitive function. The often used phrase, ?understanding through building?, implies that one can get a deep understanding of a system by constructing physical artifacts that can operate in the real-world. In building and studying neurobiologically inspired robots, scientists must address theories of neuroscience that couple brain, body, and behavior. Secondly, the deep theoretical understanding of cognition, neurobiology and behavior obtained by constructing physical systems, could lead to a system that demonstrates capabilities commonly found in the animal kingdom, but rarely found in artificial systems, most notably their adaptive and flexible autonomous behavior. There have already been some successes that meet these goals. For example, navigation models based on the hippocampus are now deploy! ed on robots that autonomously explore their environment. Machine image processing systems based on visual cortex have been used in a number of unsupervised recognition and perception applications. Robots designed to address impairments due to disorders such as Alzheimer?s disease, autism spectrum disorder, and attentional deficit disorders, are being used as therapeutic and diagnostic tools without the need for constant caretaker supervision. Despite these successes, the field is still in its infancy and basic research is needed. In particular, we are interested in papers that describe: 1) How models of cognitive functions, such as attention, decision-making, learning and memory, perception, and social cognition can be constructed on physical robots. 2) How the neuromorphic devices, which are designed to run neural algorithms with low-power, can advance the construction of autonomous robotics. 3) How the theoretical and engineering lessons learned from constructing neurobiologically inspired robots can transfer to autonomous robots carrying out practical applications. This Special Issue invites papers that address the three broad topics described above. Topics of interest ? Adaptive behavior ? Active sensing ? Artificial empathy ? Cortical computing ? Developmental robotics ? Embodied Cognition ? Neuromorphic Engineering ? On-line learning and memory systems ? Prediction and planning ? Socially assistive robotics Guest Editors Jeffrey Krichmar, University of California, Irvine Minoru Asada, Osaka University Jorg Conradt, Technische Universitat M?nchen Important Dates Submission due: 1 Feb 2015 Acceptance notification: 1 Aug 2015 Expected publication: 1 Nov 2015 Submission instructions Each paper for submission should be formatted according to the style and length limit of Neural Networks. Please refer complete Author Guidelines at http://www.elsevier.com/journals/neural-networks/0893-6080/guide-for-authors. Note that published papers and those currently under review by other journals or conferences are prohibited. A separate cover letter should be submitted that includes the paper title, the list of all authors and their affiliations, and information of the contact author. Each paper will be reviewed rigorously, and possibly in two rounds, i.e., minor/major revisions will undergo another round of review. Prospective authors are invited to submit their papers directly via the online submission system at http://ees.elsevier.com/neunet/. To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly included into the special issue described, it is important that all authors select ?SI: Neurobiological Robotics? when they reach the "Article Type" step in the submission process. Jeff Krichmar Department of Cognitive Sciences 2328 Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-5100 jkrichma at uci.edu http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkrichma From dwang at cse.ohio-state.edu Sat Jan 3 10:03:14 2015 From: dwang at cse.ohio-state.edu (DeLiang Wang) Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2015 10:03:14 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: NEURAL NETWORKS, January 2015 Message-ID: <54A804B2.8030507@cse.ohio-state.edu> Neural Networks - Volume 61, January 2015 http://www.journals.elsevier.com/neural-networks Editorial: Exciting Time for Neural Networks Kenji Doya, DeLiang Wang Dynamic analysis of periodic solution for high-order discrete-time Cohen-Grossberg neural networks with time delays Kaiyun Sun, Ancai Zhang, Jianlong Qiu, Xiangyong Chen, Chengdong Yang, Xiao Chen Trends in extreme learning machines: A review Gao Huang, Guang-Bin Huang, Shiji Song, Keyou You Deep learning in neural networks: An overview Juergen Schmidhuber An efficient sampling algorithm with adaptations for Bayesian variable selection Takamitsu Araki, Kazushi Ikeda, Shotaro Akaho A complex-valued neural dynamical optimization approach and its stability analysis Songchuan Zhang, Youshen Xia, Weixing Zheng Max-min distance nonnegative matrix factorization Jim Jing-Yan Wang, Xin Gao New synchronization criteria for memristor-based networks: Adaptive control and feedback control schemes Ning Li, Jinde Cao A one-layer recurrent neural network for constrained nonconvex optimization Guocheng Li, Zheng Yan, Jun Wang Passivity analysis for memristor-based recurrent neural networks with discrete and distributed delays Guodong Zhang, Yi Shen, Quan Yin, Junwei Sun From Thomas_Serre at brown.edu Sat Jan 3 11:05:22 2015 From: Thomas_Serre at brown.edu (Thomas Serre) Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2015 11:05:22 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: =?utf-8?q?Postdoc_position_in_machine_vision_?= =?utf-8?q?=E2=80=93_Serre_lab=2C_Brown_University_=28Providence=2C?= =?utf-8?q?_RI=29?= Message-ID: The computational vision research group, headed by Dr. Thomas Serre at Brown University, has an opening for a postdoctoral fellow to work at the interface between computational neuroscience and computer vision. In particular, we are looking for computer scientists interested in the development of novel machine learning / computer vision algorithms derived from high-fidelity representations of cortical microcircuits to achieve human-like performance on complex information processing tasks. Candidates are expected to have a solid background in modern computer vision and machine learning methods and in particular, strong expertise in optimization techniques and deep learning architectures. An interest in biological vision and applications of computer vision to the biological sciences would also be a strong plus but this is not a requirement for the position. The initial appointment is for 12 months, renewable for another year, and potentially longer depending on funding. The start date is negotiable though an early start is strongly preferred. Salary is commensurate with experience and is competitive. Representative recent work related to the project: D. Reichert & T. Serre. Neuronal synchrony in complex-valued deep networks. International Conference on Learning Representations, 2014 T. Serre and T. Poggio. Reverse-engineering the brain. In: the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM), 53(10), pp. 54-61, Oct 2010 Research group: Our research group is located within the Department of Cognitive Linguistic & Psychological sciences at Brown University. We maintain strong ties with the computer science, engineering and applied math departments as part of the Brain Institute. Through Brown?s Center for Computation and Visualization (https://www.ccv.brown.edu), our group has access to a state-of-the-art computing facility with includes over 300K GPU cores and over 500 Teraflops of GPU computing power. Information about Dr. Serre and his research group can be found at http://serre-lab.clps.brown.edu. Requirements: Applicants are expected to have finished, or be about to finish their Ph.D. degrees. They must have a strong background in computer vision and/or machine learning, with a track record of relevant publications at top venues (such as NIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ICML or ECCV). Excellent programming skills are required (C/C++/Matlab/Python). Programming experience in CUDA and/or parallel computing would be a strong plus. Application: Please send your applications by email to serre-admin at correct_university_name.edu where correct_university_name should be replaced by ?brown'. Please include a brief statement of interests, a curriculum vita, a list of publications and contact details for 2-3 letters of reference (no letters required at this stage). There is no deadline for the application but applicants are encouraged to apply as soon as possible as the position will be filled as soon as a suitable applicant is found. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From erik at oist.jp Sun Jan 4 21:43:42 2015 From: erik at oist.jp (Erik De Schutter) Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2015 11:43:42 +0900 Subject: Connectionists: Okinawa/OIST Computational Neuroscience Course 2015: applications open Message-ID: OKINAWA/OIST COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE COURSE 2015 Methods, Neurons, Networks and Behaviors June 8 - June 25, 2015 Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Japan https://groups.oist.jp/ocnc The aim of the Okinawa/OIST Computational Neuroscience Course is to provide opportunities for young researchers with theoretical backgrounds to learn the latest advances in neuroscience, and for those with experimental backgrounds to have hands-on experience in computational modeling. We invite graduate students and postgraduate researchers to participate in the course, held from June 8th through June 25th, 2015 at an oceanfront seminar house of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University. Applications are through the course web page (https://groups.oist.jp/ocnc) only; they will close February 8th, 2015. Applicants will receive confirmation of acceptance in March. The course has a strong hands-on component based on student proposed modeling or data analysis projects, which are further refined with the help of a dedicated tutor. Applicants are required to propose their project at the time of application. Like in preceding years, OCNC will be a comprehensive three-week course covering single neurons, networks, and behaviors with ample time for student projects. The first week will focus exclusively on methods with hands-on tutorials during the afternoons, while the second and third weeks will have lectures by international experts. We invite those who are interested in integrating experimental and computational approaches at each level, as well as in bridging different levels of complexity. There is no tuition fee. The sponsor will provide lodging and meals during the course and may support travel for those without funding. We hope that this course will be a good opportunity for theoretical and experimental neuroscientists to meet each other and to explore the attractive nature and culture of Okinawa, the southernmost island prefecture of Japan. Invited faculty: ? Gordon Arbuthnott (OIST) ? Axel Borst (MPI, M?nich, Germany) ? Erik De Schutter (OIST) ? Kenji Doya (OIST) ? Eugene Izihikevich (Brain Corporation, USA) ? Bernd Kuhn (OIST) ? Peter Latham (Gatsby Unit, UCL, UK) ? Miguel Nicolelis (Duke University, USA) ? Steve Prescott (University of Toronto, Canada) ? John Rinzel (New York University, USA) ? Jackie Schiller (Technion, Israel) ? Greg Stephens (OIST) ? Jeff Wickens (OIST) ? Taro Toyoizumi (RIKEN BSI, Japan) ? Xiao-Jing Wang (New York University, USA) ? Wako Yoshida (ATR, Japan) From pierre-yves.oudeyer at inria.fr Mon Jan 5 10:59:05 2015 From: pierre-yves.oudeyer at inria.fr (Pierre-Yves Oudeyer) Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2015 16:59:05 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: [publication and call for dialog] IEEE CIS Newsletter on Autonomous Mental Development, Fall 2014 Message-ID: Dear colleagues, For this new year, I am happy to announce the release of the Fall 2014 issue of the IEEE CIS Newsletter on Autonomous Mental Development. This is the biannual newsletter of the computational developmental sciences and developmental robotics community, studying mechanisms of lifelong learning and development in machines and humans. It is available at: http://www.cse.msu.edu/amdtc/amdnl/AMDNL-V11-N2.pdf Featuring: === ?Trained on everything" === Dialog Initiated by Katharina Rohlfing, Britta Wrede and Gerhard Sagerer, with responses from Giulio Sandino and David Vernon, Franck Ramus and Th?r?se Collins, Maha Salem, Juyang Weng, Thomas Schultz, and Christina Bergmann: In the years to come, one very important challenge in developmental sciences is education. Taking an integrated and interdisciplinary approach requires to handle with dexterity concepts and methods from diverse scientific fields ranging from psychology, neuroscience, biology, robotics, computer science or mathematics. How can we grow a community of young researchers mastering the latest advances? How can we teach them to establish cross-disciplinary collaboration and impact? === "Will social robots need to be consciously aware?? === New dialog initiated by Janet Wiles A large research community is today working towards the objective of building robots capable of believable, relevant and useful social interaction with humans. We are far from understanding what ?consciousness? is, but intuition tells us that it would be very difficult for an ?unconscious? human to enter into a social interaction. So what about robots? At least can we identify levels of awareness (of the self, of others) which constitute a necessary basis on which to build social competence? Those of you interested in reacting to this dialog initiation are welcome to submit a response by March 30th, 2015. The length of each response must be between 600 and 800 words including references (contact pierre- yves.oudeyer at inria.fr). Let me remind you that previous issues of the newsletter are all open-access and available at: http://www.cse.msu.edu/amdtc/amdnl/ I wish you a stimulating reading! Best regards, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Editor of the IEEE CIS Newsletter on Autonomous Mental Development Research director, Inria Head of Flower project-team Inria and Ensta ParisTech, France http://www.pyoudeyer.com https://flowers.inria.fr -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From garrickorchard at gmail.com Mon Jan 5 04:02:03 2015 From: garrickorchard at gmail.com (Garrick Orchard) Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 09:02:03 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Post-doc and RA positions available at National University Singapore Message-ID: We have multiple post-doc and research assistant positions available at the National University of Singapore. The project focuses on embedded systems and artificial spiking neural networks for visual processing. Please see the link below for details and contact information. http://www.garrickorchard.com/hiring/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jms at isep.ipp.pt Tue Jan 6 05:44:58 2015 From: jms at isep.ipp.pt (Jorge M. Santos) Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2015 10:44:58 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Special Session on Transfer Learning - International Work Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, 10-12 June, 2015 Message-ID: <0dfe01d0299d$d2d875f0$788961d0$@isep.ipp.pt> Please consider to contribute to the Special Session on Transfer Learning International Work Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, 10-12 June, 2015 - http://iwann.ugr.es/2015 Transfer Learning (TL) aims to transfer knowledge acquired in one problem, the source problem, onto another problem, the target problem, dispensing with the bottom-up construction of the target model. The TL approach has gained significant interest in the Machine Learning (ML) community since it paves the way to devise intelligent learning models that can easily be tailored to many different domains of applicability. The following aspects have recently contributed to the emergence of TL: ? Generalization Theory: TL often produces algorithms with good generalization capability for different problems; ? Efficient TL algorithms: TL provides learning models that can be applied with far less computational effort than standard ML methods; ? Unlabeled data: TL can be advantageous since unlabeled data can have severe implications in some fields of research, such as in the biomedical field. Some examples of topics for this special session: ? Big Data with Deep Neural Networks; ? Generalization Bounds; ? Domain Adaptation or Covariate Shift; ? Algorithms for TL; ? New advancements in TL; ? Real-world applications. Deadline: 6 February 2015 Organizers Lu?s M. Silva, Dep. of Mathematics, University of Aveiro, Portugal - lmas at ua.pt Jorge M. Santos, Dep. of Mathematics, School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal - jms at isep.ipp.pt -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mpavone at dmi.unict.it Sat Jan 3 19:44:29 2015 From: mpavone at dmi.unict.it (Mario Pavone) Date: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 01:44:29 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: CFP AIS 2015 - International Workshop on Artificial Immune Systems, 17-18 July 2015, Taormina, Italy Message-ID: <20150104014429.Horde.fCciS_ph4B9UqIztBpkEDTA@mbox.dmi.unict.it> CALL FOR PAPERS, ABSTRACTS, ORAL/POSTER PRESENTATIONS ** Apologies for cross-posting ** ** Please forward to anybody who might be interested. ** International Workshop on Artificial Immune Systems - Systems & Synthetic Immunology, Computational Immunology & Immune-Inspired Engineering - July 17-18, 2015 - Taormina, Italy http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/ ais2015 at ieee-cis-ais.org -- **** PLENARY SPEAKERS: Alessandro SETTE & Hugues BERSINI. http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/plenary.html **** SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 18th February 2015 http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/dates.html **** PROCEEDINGS in IEEE Press, as post-proceedings http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/calls.html **** Special Issue in BMC BIOINFORMATICS (TBC) -- ** General Information ** The main aim of AIS 2015 is to foster the essential relations between immunologists and modelers that work into the research areas of systems immunology, synthetic immunology, computational immunology, cellular immunology, immune-inspired computation and immune-inspired engineering. In addition to peer-reviewed papers, the workshop will present a range of plenary lectures in order to inspire and facilitate all AIS researchers in their current and future work. The workshop is under the patronage of IEEE CIS Task Force on Artificial Immune Systems (http://ieee-cis-ais.org) and it is co-sponsored by IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (http://cis.ieee.org/) *** You are invited to submit papers to this exciting event! *** ** Important Dates ** - Abstract submission: 18th February 2015 - Regular Paper submission: 18th February 2015 - Abstract Notification: 26th March 2015 - Regular Paper notification: 26th March 2015 - Camera-ready submission: 16th April 2015 - Early Registration: 20th April 2015 ** Plenary Speakers ** - Hugues Bersini, IRIDIA, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium - Alessandro Sette, La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology, La Jolla, USA More speakers to be announced http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/plenary.html ** Paper Submission ** Authors are encouraged to submit novel contributions in one of the main topics of AIS 2015, and explain how their work sheds light on the fundamental properties of natural and artificial immune system, and makes progress on the important open questions of systems & synthetic immunology, computational immunology, and immune-inspired engineering. AIS 2015 includes three different types of submission: 1) *regular paper*: 8-pages maximum length, including figures, table & references. It should report on new and unpublished work; 2) *abstract*: max 2 pages length; 3) *Oral/Poster presentations*: no pages restriction. It should discuss works in progress; new research ideas; works previously published elsewhere (it is essential that a reference to the previous article is clearly cited); and all that may be relevant and fruitful for soliciting discussions at the workshop. All the submitted papers must be formatted using IEEE style (http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html). Note that the format is exactly the same for all options. All submissions will be subject to peer review by the program committee, and all accepted submissions are allocated either an oral presentation slot or a poster slot with no distinction being made between the submission options. ** Proceedings - IEEE press ** All accepted papers for the first two options will be published in a volume by IEEE Press, whilst all accepted papers relative to the last option will be published in an electronic book, and it will put online in the workshop website. The authors of the best papers will have the opportunity to publish a revised and expanded version of their conference paper in BMC Bioinformatics (TBC). ** Location ** The conference will be held in Taormina http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/location.html All information about venue and accommodation may be found at the following links: http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/venue.html http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/accommodation.html ----- http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/ ais2015 at ieee-cis-ais.org Looking forward to welcoming you to Taormina in July 2015. Carlos A. Coello Coello, Vincenzo Cutello, Doheon Lee, and Mario Pavone. -- Dr. Mario Pavone (PhD) Assistant Professor Department of Mathematics and Computer Science University of Catania V.le A. Doria 6 - 95125 Catania, Italy tel: 0039 095 7383038 fax: 0039 095 330094 Email: mpavone at dmi.unict.it http://www.dmi.unict.it/mpavone/ =========================================================================== International Synthetic & Systems Biology Summer School * Biology meets Engineering and Computer Science * July 5-9, 2015 - Taormina, Italy http://www.taosciences.it/ssbss2015/ =========================================================================== International Workshop on Artificial Immune Systems * Systems & Synthetic Immunology, Computational Immunology, Immune-Inspired Engineering * July 17-18, 2015 - Taormina, Italy http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/ =========================================================================== 12th European Conference on Artificial Life - ECAL 2013 September 2-6, 2013 - Taormina, Italy http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/advances-artificial-life-ecal-2013 =========================================================================== From mpavone at dmi.unict.it Tue Jan 6 10:59:50 2015 From: mpavone at dmi.unict.it (Mario Pavone) Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 16:59:50 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: International Workshop on Machine learning, Optimization & big Data - MOD 2015 Call for Papers - Deadline February 28, 2015 Message-ID: <20150106165950.Horde.rx9UQuph4B9UrAZ2cm0UetA@mbox.dmi.unict.it> International Workshop on Machine learning, Optimization & big Data - MOD 2015 Call for Papers - Deadline February 28, 2015 [Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement] [Please kindly help forward it to potentially interested attendees] International Workshop on Machine learning, Optimization and big Data - MOD 2015 An Interdisciplinary Workshop: Machine Learning, Optimization and Data Science without Borders Taormina - Sicily, Italy, from July 21 to 24, 2015 http://www.taosciences.it/mod-2015/ modworkshop2015 at gmail.com Paper submission deadline: February 28, 2015 http://www.taosciences.it/mod-2015/call-for-papers/ The MOD 2015 workshop will consist of one day of tutorials, followed by three days of main workshop sessions. We invite submissions of papers, abstracts and demos on all topics related to Machine learning, Optimization and Big Data including real-world applications for the workshop proceedings (http://www.taosciences.it/mod-2015/call-for-papers/) and proposals for tutorials (http://www.taosciences.it/mod-2015/call-for-tutorials/). MOD 2015 Paper Format Please prepare your paper in English using the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) template, which is available http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0 Papers must be submitted in PDF. MOD 2015 Types of Submissions When submitting a paper to MOD 2015, authors are required to select one of the following four types of papers: * Long paper: original novel and unpublished work (max. 12 pages in Springer LNCS format); * Short paper: an extended abstract of novel work (max. 4 pages); * Work for oral presentation only?(no page restriction; any format). For example, work already published elsewhere, which is relevant and which may solicit fruitful discussion at the workshop; * Work for poster presentation only. The poster format for the presentation is A0 (118.9 cm high and 84.1 cm wide, respectively 46.8 x 33.1 inch). For research work which is relevant and which may solicit fruitful discussion at the workshop. MOD 2015 Proceedings All accepted long papers will be published in a volume of the series 'Lecture Notes in Computer Science' from Springer after the Workshop. Instructions for preparing and submitting the final versions (camera-ready papers) of all accepted papers will be available later on. All the other papers (short papers, abstract of the oral presentations, poster presentations) will be published on the MOD 2015 web site. MOD 2015 Submission System All papers must be submitted using EasyChair. The link to submit papers is the following: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mod2015 The deadline for ALL the types of submissions is February 28, 2015. MOD 2015 Important Dates Paper Submission Deadline: February 28, 2015 Decision Notification to Authors: April 30, 2015 Late Breaking Papers/Abstracts Deadline: April 15, 2015 Author Notification: April 30, 2015 Late Breaking Posters/Demos Deadline: May 15, 2015 Author Notification: May 30, 2015 Camera Ready Submission Deadline: May 15, 2015 Deadline for early Registration as Presenting Author: May 15, 2015 Late registration: May 16 ? July 24, 2015 On-Site registration: July 21-24, 2015 Workshop: July 21-24, 2015 MOD 2015 Program Committee The current MOD 2015 Program Committee includes more than 175 confirmed members: http://www.taosciences.it/mod-2015/program-committee/ Any questions regarding the submission process can be sent to workshop organizers: modworkshop2015 at gmail.com We look forward to seeing you in Sicily! MOD 2015 Organizing Committee. http://www.taosciences.it/mod-2015/ modworkshop2015 at gmail.com -- Dr. Mario Pavone (PhD) Assistant Professor Department of Mathematics and Computer Science University of Catania V.le A. Doria 6 - 95125 Catania, Italy tel: 0039 095 7383038 fax: 0039 095 330094 Email: mpavone at dmi.unict.it http://www.dmi.unict.it/mpavone/ =========================================================================== International Synthetic & Systems Biology Summer School * Biology meets Engineering and Computer Science * July 5-9, 2015 - Taormina, Italy http://www.taosciences.it/ssbss2015/ =========================================================================== International Workshop on Artificial Immune Systems * Systems & Synthetic Immunology, Computational Immunology, Immune-Inspired Engineering * July 17-18, 2015 - Taormina, Italy http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/ =========================================================================== 12th European Conference on Artificial Life - ECAL 2013 September 2-6, 2013 - Taormina, Italy http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/advances-artificial-life-ecal-2013 =========================================================================== From mhb0 at lehigh.edu Tue Jan 6 14:43:27 2015 From: mhb0 at lehigh.edu (Mark H. Bickhard) Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2015 14:43:27 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: Invitation to ISI 2015 Message-ID: GENERAL INFORMATION Interactivist Summer Institute 2015 June 20 - 23, 2015 Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey The Interactivist Summer Institute is dedicated to exploring the frontiers of understanding of life, mind, and cognition. There is a growing recognition - across many disciplines - that phenomena of life and mind, including cognition and representation, are emergents of far-from-equilibrium, interactive, autonomous systems. In such a view, mind and biology, mind and agent, are re-united. The classical treatment of cognition and representation within a formalist framework of encodingist assumptions is increasingly recognized as a fruitless maze of blind alleys. From neurobiology to robotics, from cognitive science to philosophy of mind and language, dynamic and interactive alternatives are being explored. Dynamic systems approaches, enactivist and autonomous agent research join in the effort. The interactivist model offers a theoretical approach to matters of life and mind, ranging from evolutionary- and neuro-biology (including the emergence of biological function) through representation, perception, motivation, memory, learning and development, emotions, consciousness, language, action theory, rationality, sociality, personality and psychopathology, and ethics. This work has developed interfaces with studies of central nervous system functioning, the ontology of process, autonomous agents, philosophy of science, and all areas of psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science that address the person. The conference will involve both tutorials addressing central parts and aspects of the interactive model, and papers addressing current work of relevance to this general approach. This will be our eighth Summer Institute: Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 2001 IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark 2003 Clemson University, South Carolina 2005 The American University in Paris, Paris 2007 Simon Fraser University, Vancouver 2009 University of the Aegean, Syros, Greece 2011 University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, Fl 2013 The Summer Institute is a biennial meeting where those sharing the core interests and ideas of interactivism will meet and discuss their work, try to reconstruct its historical roots, put forward current research in different fields that fits the interactivist framework, and define research topics for prospective graduate students. People working in philosophy of mind, linguistics, social sciences, artificial intelligence, cognitive robotics, theoretical biology, and other fields related to the sciences of mind are invited to send their paper submission or statement of interest for participation to the organizers. http://www.lehigh.edu/~interact/isi2015/index.htm Mark Mark H. Bickhard Lehigh University 17 Memorial Drive East Bethlehem, PA 18015 mark at bickhard.name http://bickhard.ws/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From c.clopath at imperial.ac.uk Tue Jan 6 15:16:53 2015 From: c.clopath at imperial.ac.uk (Claudia Clopath) Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2015 20:16:53 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: PhD open position, Clopath lab, Imperial College London Message-ID: There is a PhD open position for the following project: Neural network mechanisms of inhibitory and attentional control. Co-supervised by: Adam Hampshire & Claudia Clopath, Imperial College London Many aspects of human cognition, such as response inhibition, working memory and attentional control, have been attributed to the same network of frontal and parietal brain regions. Furthermore, the role of this network in cognition is not static as instead, activities and connectivities diminish as the task at hand transitions from novel to familiar. The successful candidate will examine how frontoparietal networks support such diverse cognitive demands and how local neural plasticity mechanisms (i.e. changes in connections between neurons) underlie the shifting involvement of frontoparietal networks in cognition. This will be achieved by combining cutting-edge functional neuroimaging and computational modelling methodologies. More details and how to apply below: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/neurotechnology/cdt/projects/hampshire_2015 The deadline is Jan 30th 2015 and candidates should be EU nationals. The perfect candidate has a strong mathematical, physical or engineering background (or equivalent), and a keen interest in biological and neural systems. Demonstrated programming skills are a plus. Best, Dr. Claudia Clopath ---- Computational Neuroscience Laboratory Department of Bioengineering Imperial College London http://www.bg.ic.ac.uk/research/c.clopath/ The Computational Neuroscience Laboratory is very young and dynamic, and publishes in prestigious journals, such as Nature and Science. It is part of the Department of Bioengineering, which conducts state-of-the-art multidisciplinary research in biomechanics, neuroscience and neurotechnology. The lab is at Imperial College London, the 2nd ranked university in Europe, is in the top 10 worldwide, and is located in the city centre of London. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jesus.m.cortes at gmail.com Wed Jan 7 06:37:14 2015 From: jesus.m.cortes at gmail.com (Jesus Cortes) Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2015 12:37:14 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: BCAM Workshop: Quantitative Biomedicine in Health and Disease [DEADLINE ABSTRACT SUBMISSION: 15th JAN, 2015] Message-ID: Dear scientist We are organizing the BCAM-Severo Ochoa Workshop: Quantitative Biomedicine in Health and Disease, that will be held in Bilbao on Feb 17-18, 2015 More information at : http://www.bcamath.org/en/workshops/quantitative-biomedicine-2015 Confirmed speakers are: Adam Barrett (Sussex Univ.) Cesar Caballero (BCBL) Pierrick Coup? (CNRS) Mathieu Desroches (INRIA) Luca Faes (Trento Univ.) Andrea Fuster (TU Eindhoven) Estibaliz Garrote (Tecnalia) Albert Granados (INRIA) Bert Kappen (Radboud Univ. Nijmegen) Pablo Lamata (King?s College) Daniele Marinazzo (Gent Univ.) Ernesto Sanz-Arigita (Umc, Amsterdam) Jordi Soriano (Barcelona Univ.) Ruedi Stoop (ETH Zurich) Joanna Tyrcha (Stockholm Univ.) Ed Vigmond (Bordeaux 1 Univ., LiRYC) Michael Wibral (Goethe Univ. ) Abstract submission: one single pdf-page (free format) including authors, Institutions and abstract Deadline for Abstract Submission: Jan 15, 2015 Send to: qbio2015 at bcamath.org Max 50 people Best Regards. Luca Gerardo-Giorda, Sebastiano Stramaglia and Jesus M Cortes -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From B.M.terhaarRomeny at tue.nl Wed Jan 7 11:23:04 2015 From: B.M.terhaarRomeny at tue.nl (Haar Romenij, B.M. ter) Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2015 16:23:04 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: PhD Course: Front-End Vision and Multi-Scale Image Analysis, Feb 2015, Eindhoven, the Netherlands Message-ID: Announcement: PhD Course: Front-End Vision and Multi-Scale Image Analysis 2015, Eindhoven, the Netherlands Tutors: prof. Bart ter Haar Romeny (TU/e), prof. Nicolay Petkov (RUG) Dates: 9-13 February 2015, and 23-26 February 2015. Website: http://bmia.bmt.tue.nl/Education/Courses/FEV/course/index.html. Registration: see website. Content: In this course we give a modern mathematical (and brain-inspired) approach to geometric reasoning, exploiting multi-scale differential geometry for (medical) image analysis as a branch of computer vision. We try to keep the analogy with stages in the human visual system as close as possible. We design image analysis algorithms by carefully studying the requirements, physical analogies, and from first principles. Modern brain imaging and connectivity methods at cellular and macroscopic level will be discussed and recent discoveries of functional brain mechanisms in visual perception. Among the topics covered are: robust high-order derivative operators for 2D and 3D images, detecting invariant features (such as ridges, corners, T-junctions etc.), multi-scale analysis of 2D and 3D shape, motion from image sequences, depth from stereo, multi-orientation analysis for contextual operations, and the use of contemporary, well-understood mathematical tools from differential geometry and tensor analysis. The majority of the examples discussed are from 2D, 3D and 4D (3D-time) medical imaging, in particular computer-aided diagnosis (mammography, MRI cardiac analysis, retinal imaging, etc.). We devote time to the efficient numerical implementation of the different techniques. Hands-on experience is acquired in a computer lab. We use Mathematica 10 as this environment is eminently suited for this -design- process, and we experiment with virtually all topics discussed in the course. The tutors are well known for their excellent teaching capabilities. Eindhoven has many options for economic accommodation and is connected with many of Europe's low cost flights. Best wishes, Prof. Bart M. ter Haar Romeny, PhD Department of Biomedical Engineering Biomedical Image Analysis De Rondom 70, NL-5612 AP Eindhoven, the Netherlands B.M.terHaarRomeny at tue.nl, http://bmia.bmt.tue.nl -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From marcus.hutter at gmx.net Wed Jan 7 20:53:05 2015 From: marcus.hutter at gmx.net (Marcus Hutter) Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 12:53:05 +1100 Subject: Connectionists: First CFP: 8th Conference on Artificial General Intelligence: AGI-15 Message-ID: <54ADE301.4030206@gmx.net> Another year has passed; another AGI conference is due! ... It's a pleasure to invite you to attend, and submit a paper to the eighth annual conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-15), which will take place in Berlin, July 22-25, 2015. Berlin in the summer is a beautiful place, and this is a dramatic time for the AI field, so this is sure to be the most interesting and enjoyable AGI conference yet. See the conference website for details: http://agi-conf.org/2015 The paper submission deadline is March 15, 2015 The inimitable Juergen Schmidhuber will give a keynote on "The Deep Learning RNNaissance"; and AGI-15 will include a Workshop on Distributed Agency and General Intelligence, co-organized with researchers from the Global Brain Institute in Brussels. Alexey Potapov will give a tutorial on Probabilistic Programming. Additional keynotes, workshops and tutorials will be determined during the coming months. We look forward to seeing you in Berlin Yours, Conference Chair: Ben Goertzel, Aidyia Limited & Hong Kong Poly U Program Committee Chairs: Alexey Potapov, National Research University of Information Technology, Mechanics and Optics, St.Petersburg Jordi Bieger, Reykjavik University Organizing Committee: Joscha Bach, MIT/Harvard Matthew Ikle, Adams State College, OpenCog Foundation Jan Klauck, AGI Society ************** From matthias at ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp Wed Jan 7 23:55:54 2015 From: matthias at ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp (Matthias Rolf) Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 13:55:54 +0900 Subject: Connectionists: IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2015 Message-ID: <54AE0DDA.208@ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp> ======================================================== Call for Papers, Tutorials and Thematic Workshops New Conference Feature: BABYBOT CHALLENGE IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2015 The Fifth Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA August 13-16, 2015 http://www.icdl-epirob.org/ == Conference description The past decade has seen the emergence of a new scientific field that studies how intelligent biological and artificial systems develop sensorimotor, cognitive, emotional and social abilities, over extended periods of time, through dynamic interactions with their physical and social environments. This field lies at the intersection of a number of scientific and engineering disciplines including Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology, Developmental Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Computational Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Robotics. Various terms have been associated with this new field such as Autonomous Mental Development, Epigenetic Robotics, Developmental Robotics, etc., and several scientific meetings have been established. The two most prominent conference series of this field, the International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) and the International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics (EpiRob), are now joining forces for the fifth time and invite submissions for a joint conference in 2015, to explore and extend the interdisciplinary boundaries of this field. == BABYBOT CHALLENGE -- CASH PRIZES FOR THE TOP SUBMISSIONS We are excited to announce a new ICDL-EpiRob conference feature: the BABYBOT CHALLENGE. The goal of the challenge is to use the tools of developmental robotics to replicate and extend the key findings from one of three selected human-infant studies. Please visit www.icdl-epirob.org in the coming weeks for the full announcement, including the three target studies, details on the submission process, and a description of how the winning submissions will be judged and selected. == Keynote speakers (confirmed) Prof. Dare Baldwin, Dept. of Psychology, University of Oregon, USA Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn, School of Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire, UK == Call for Submissions We invite submissions for this exciting window into the future of developmental sciences. Submissions which establish novel links between brain, behavior and computation are particularly encouraged. == Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): * the development of perceptual, motor, cognitive, emotional, social, and communication skills in biological systems and robots; * embodiment; * general principles of development and learning; * interaction of nature and nurture; * sensitive/critical periods; * developmental stages; * grounding of knowledge and development of representations; * architectures for cognitive development and open-ended learning; * neural plasticity; * statistical learning; * reward and value systems; * intrinsic motivations, exploration and play; * interaction of development and evolution; * use of robots in applied settings such as autism therapy; * epistemological foundations and philosophical issues. Any of the topics above can be simultaneously studied from the neuroscience, psychology or modeling/robotic point of view. == Submissions will be accepted in several formats: 1. Full six-page paper submissions: Accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings and will be selected for either an oral presentation or a featured poster presentation. Featured posters will have a 1 minute "teaser" presentation as part of the main conference session and will be showcased in the poster sessions. Maximum two-extra pages can be acceptable for a publication fee of $100 per page. 2. Two-page poster abstract submissions: To encourage discussion of late-breaking results or for work that is not sufficiently mature for a full paper, we will accept 2-page abstracts. These submissions will NOT be included in the conference proceedings. Accepted abstracts will be presented during poster sessions. 3. Tutorials and workshops: We invite experts in different areas to organize either a tutorial or a workshop to be held on the first day of the conference. Tutorials are meant to provide insights into specific topics as well as overviews that will inform the interdisciplinary audience about the state-of-the-art in child development, neuroscience, robotics, or any of the other disciplines represented at the conference. A workshop is an opportunity to present a topic cumulatively. Workshops can be half- or full-day in duration including oral presentations as well as posters. Submission format: two pages including title, list of speakers, concept and target audience. All submissions will be peer reviewed. Submission website through paperplaza at: http://ras.papercept.net == Important dates March 9, 2015, paper submission deadline May 15, 2015, author notification July 1, 2015, final version (camera ready) due August 13th-16th, 2015, conference == Program committee General Chairs: Matthew Schlesinger (Southern Illinois Univ.) Dima Amso (Brown Univ.) Bridge Chairs: Jeffrey Krichmar (UC Irvine) Bertram Malle (Brown University) Program Chairs: Anne Warlaumount (UC Merced) Clem?nt Moulin-Frier (INRIA) Publications Chairs: Lisa Meeden (Swarthmore College) Publicity Chairs: Lola Ca?amero (Univ. of Hertfordshire) Matthias Rolf (Osaka University) Benjamin Rosman (Univ. of the Witwatersrand) Local chairs: David Sobel (Brown University) Thomas Serre (Brown University) Finance chairs: Clayton Morrison (University of Arizona) From dst at cs.cmu.edu Sat Jan 10 02:53:43 2015 From: dst at cs.cmu.edu (Dave Touretzky) Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 02:53:43 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: summer undergrad program in computational neuroscience Message-ID: <16348.1420876423@cs.cmu.edu> Carnegie Mellon - University of Pittsburgh Joint Summer Undergraduate Program in Computational Neuroscience Undergraduates interested in receiving research training in computational neuroscience are encouraged to apply to an NIH-sponsored summer program at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition in Pittsburgh. The Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition is a joint interdisciplinary program of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. The 2015 program will most likely run from May 26 through July 31, 2015 (pending confirmation on dormitory availability). The final deadline for application is Feb 16, 2015. All participants must be United States citizens or permanent residents, must be enrolled at a 4-year accredited institution, and must be in their sophomore or junior year at the time of application. Any undergraduate may apply, but we are especially interested in attracting students with strong quantitative backgrounds with some experience in calculus, statistics and/or computer programming. Experience in neuroscience is not required. Students from groups underrepresented in the sciences are encouraged to apply. The core of the program is the opportunity to carry out an individual mentored research project working closely with a faculty mentor. Other aspects of the scientific program include: 12 faculty lectures on computational neuroscience at the beginning, followed by student presentations and discussion of articles from the scientific literature, presentations on career options and scientific ethics, and a concluding symposium in which students present their research. Application form is available at: http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/summercompneuro Application can be returned via email or regular mail (see addresses below). In addition to the application, the following items are required for evaluation: * A brief (one page) essay about your interest and experience in neural computation. * Official transcript from the institution you are attending * Two letters from professional references. You should contact your recommenders and ask them to mail or email a letter directly to us. * SAT/ACT scores (do NOT have to be official; photocopies are acceptable) Documents should be mailed to: Computational Neuroscience Summer Program Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition Carnegie Mellon University 4400 Fifth Avenue Suite 115 Pittsburgh, PA 15213-2617 CNBC-summer-UG at andrew.cmu.edu Brief list of CMU-Pitt CNBC faculty working in computational neuroscience: John Anderson (Carnegie Mellon, Psychology) Aaron Batista (University of Pittsburgh, Bioengineering) Marlene Behrmann (Carnegie Mellon, Psychology) Marlene Cohen (University of Pittsburgh, Neuroscience) Carol Colby (University of Pittsburgh, Neuroscience) Steve Chase (Carnegie Mellon, ECE/Biomedical Engineering) Brent Doiron (University of Pittsburgh, Mathematics) William Eddy (Carnegie Mellon, Statistics) Bard Ermentrout (University of Pittsburgh, Mathematics) Julie Fiez (University of Pittsburgh, Psychology) Raj Gandhi (University of Pittsburgh, Department of Bioengineering) John Horn (University of Pittsburgh, Neurobiology) Robert Kass (Carnegie Mellon, Statistics) Charles Kemp (Carnegie Mellon, Psychology) Sandra Kuhlman (Carnegie Mellon, Biology) Tai Sing Lee (Carnegie Mellon, Computer Science) Tom Mitchell (Carnegie Mellon, Machine Learning) Carl Olson (Carnegie Mellon, Neural Basis of Cognition) Anne-Marie Oswald (University of Pittsburgh, Neuroscience) Monica Perez (University of Pittsburgh, Neurobiology & Rehabilitation) David Plaut (Carnegie Mellon, Psychology) Lynne Reder (Carnegie Mellon, Psychology) Erik Reichle (University of Pittsburgh, Psychology) Johnathan Rubin (University of Pittsburgh, Mathematics) Walt Schneider (University of Pittsburgh, Psychology) Andrew Schwartz (University of Pittsburgh, Bioengineering) Daniel Simons (University of Pittsburgh, Neurobiology) Matthew Smith (University of Pittsburgh, Ophthalmology) Peter Strick (University of Pittsburgh, Psychiatry) Michael Tarr (Carnegie Mellon, Psychology) Dave Touretzky (Carnegie Mellon, Computer Science) Robert Turner (University of Pittsburgh, Neurobiology) Nathan Urban (Carnegie Mellon, Biology) Valerie Ventura (Carnegie Mellon, Statistics) Timothy Verstynen (Carnegie Mellon, Psychology) Douglas Weber (University of Pittsburgh, Physical medicine and Rehabilitation) Byron Yu (Carnegie Mellon, ECE/Biomedical Engineering) A full list can be found at: http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/ From cie.conference.series at gmail.com Sat Jan 10 15:48:54 2015 From: cie.conference.series at gmail.com (CiE Conference Series) Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 20:48:54 +0000 (GMT) Subject: Connectionists: CiE 2015: FINAL CfP and EXTENDED DEADLINE Message-ID: We apologise for multiple postings: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CiE 2015: 3rd CfP - EXTENDED DEADLINE and BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS (incl. deadline extension due to popular demand) 3rd CALL FOR PAPERS: COMPUTABILITY IN EUROPE 2015: Evolving Computability Bucharest, Romania June 29 - July 3 http://fmi.unibuc.ro/CiE2015/ IMPORTANT DATES: EXTENDED Submission Deadline for LNCS: 21 January 2015 Notification of authors: 9 March 2015 Deadline for final revisions: 6 April 2015 CiE 2015 is the 11-th conference organized by CiE (Computability in Europe), a European association of mathematicians, logicians, computer scientists, philosophers, physicists and others interested in new developments in computability and their underlying significance for the real world. Previous meetings have taken place in Amsterdam (2005), Swansea (2006), Siena (2007), Athens (2008), Heidelberg (2009), Ponta Delgada (2010), Sofia (2011), Cambridge (2012), Milan (2013) and Budapest (2014) Evolution of the universe, and us within it, invite a parallel evolution in understanding. The CiE agenda - fundamental and engaged - targets the extracting and developing of computational models basic to current challenges. From the origins of life, to the understanding of human mentality, to the characterising of quantum randomness - computability theoretic questions arise in many guises. The CiE community, this coming year meeting for the first time in Bucharest, carries forward the search for coherence, depth and new thinking across this rich and vital field of research. In all cases we are looking for fundamental and theoretical submissions. In line with other conferences in this series, CiE 2015 has a broad scope and provides a forum for the discussion of theoretical and practical issues in Computability with an emphasis on new paradigms of computation and the development of their mathematical theory. We particularly invite papers that build bridges between different parts of the research community. For topics covered by the conference, please visit http://fmi.unibuc.ro/CiE2015/topics.html AWARDS: The best student paper award is presented to the author(s) of the best paper, as selected by the PC, written solely by student author(s). This award is sponsored by Springer. FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES: CiE 2015 has received funding from ASL (Association for Symbolic Logic) and EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science) that allows students who are members of ASL or EATCS and want to attend CiE 2015 to apply for travel funds or a reduction of the early registration fee. Preference will be given to presenters of accepted papers. Applications for ASL travel grants have to be addressed directly to ASL, with a strict deadline of March 28, 2015. Applications for EATCS travel grants have to be sent to cie2015 at fmi.unibuc.ro prior to the early registration deadline. TUTORIAL SPEAKERS * John Reif (Duke Unversity) * Steve Simpson (Pennsylvania State University) PLENARY SPEAKERS * Ann Copestake (University of Cambridge) * Mircea Dumitru (University of Bucharest, Public Lecture) * Pawel Gawrychowski (Max-Planck-Institut fuer Informatik) * Julia Knight (University of Notre Dame) * Anca Muscholl (Universite Bordeaux) * Gheorghe Paun (Romanian Academy) * Alexander Razborov (University of Chicago and Steklov Mathematical Institute) * Vlatko Vedral (University of Oxford) SPECIAL SESSIONS on * Representing streams (Organizers: Joerg Endrullis and Dimtri Hendriks) * Automata, logic and infinite games (Organizers: Dietmar Berwanger and Ioana Leustean) * Reverse mathematics (Organizers: Damir Dzhafarov and Alberto Marcone) * Classical computability theory (Organizers: Marat Arslanov and Steffen Lempp) * Bio-inspired computation (Organizers: Andrei Paun and Petr Sosik) * History and philosophy of computing (Organizers: Christine Proust and Marco Benini) The speakers of the special sessions may be find at http://fmi.unibuc.ro/CiE2015/sessions.html The PROGRAMME COMMITTEE consists of: * Marat Arslanov (Kazan) * Jeremy Avigad (Pittsburgh) * Veronica Becher (Buenos Aires) * Arnold Beckmann (Swansea) * Laurent Bienvenu (Paris) * Alessandra Carbone (Paris) * Gabriel Ciobanu (Iasi) * S Barry Cooper (Leeds) * Laura Crosilla (Leeds) * Liesbeth De Mol (Ghent) * Walter Dean (Warwick) * Volker Diekert (Stuttgart) * Damir Dzhafarov (Storrs, Connecticut) * Peter van Emde Boas (Amsterdam) * Rachel Epstein (Harvard) * Johanna Franklin (Hempstead, NY) * Neil Ghani (Glasgow) * Joel David Hamkins (New York) * Rosalie Iemhoff (Utrecht) * Emmanuel Jeandel (LORIA) * Natasha Jonoska (Tampa, FL) * Antonina Kolokolova (St.John's, NL) * Antonin Kucera (Prague) * Oliver Kutz (Magdeburg) * Benedikt Loewe (Hamburg & Amsterdam) * Jack Lutz (Ames, IA) * Florin Manea (Kiel) * Alberto Marcone (Udine) * Radu Mardare (Aalborg) * Joe Miller (Madison, WI) * Russell Miller (Flushing, NY) * Mia Minnes (La Jolla, CA) * Victor Mitrana (Bucharest, co-chair) * Ian Pratt-Hartmann (Manchester) * Dag Normann (Oslo) * Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh (London) * Anne Smith (St Andrews) * Mariya Soskova (Sofia, co-chair) * Susan Stepney (York) * Paul Spirakis (Patras & Liverpool) * Jacobo Toran (Ulm) * Marius Zimand (Towson, MD) The PROGRAMME COMMITTEE cordially invites all researchers (European and non-European) in computability related areas to submit their papers (in PDF format, maximum 10 pages using the LNCS style) for presentation at CiE 2015. The submission site https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cie2015 is open. For submission instructions consult http://fmi.unibuc.ro/CiE2015/submission.html The CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS will be published by LNCS, Springer Verlag. The CONFERENCE POSTER can be downloaded from http://fmi.unibuc.ro/CiE2015/images/CiE_Poster.jpg ___________________________________________________________________ CiE 2015 http://fmi.unibuc.ro/CiE2015/ ASSOCIATION COMPUTABILITY IN EUROPE http://www.computability.org.uk CiE Conference Series http://www.illc.uva.nl/CiE CiE Membership Application Form http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/CIE Computability (Journal of CiE) http://www.computability.de/journal/ CiE on FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/AssnCiE Association CiE on Twitter https://twitter.com/AssociationCiE From pblouw at uwaterloo.ca Sun Jan 11 15:06:12 2015 From: pblouw at uwaterloo.ca (Peter Blouw) Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 15:06:12 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: Feb. 15 Application Deadline - 2015 Summer School on Large-Scale Brain Modelling Message-ID: [All details about this school can be found online at http://www.nengo .ca/summerschool] The Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo is inviting applications for our 2nd annual summer school on large-scale brain modelling. This two-week school will teach participants how to use the Nengo simulation package to build state-of-the-art cognitive and neural models. Nengo has been used to build what is currently the world's largest functional brain model, Spaun [1], and provides users with a versatile and powerful environment for simulating cognitive and neural systems. We welcome applications from all interested graduate students, research associates, postdocs, professors, and industry professionals. No specific training in the use of modelling software is required, but we encourage applications from active researchers with a relevant background in psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, engineering, computer science, or a related field. For a look at last year's summer school, please see this short video: http://goo.gl/BXJ3x5 [1] Eliasmith, C., Stewart T. C., Choo X., Bekolay T., DeWolf T., Tang Y., Rasmussen, D. (2012). A large-scale model of the functioning brain. Science. Vol. 338 no. 6111 pp. 1202-1205. DOI: 10.1126/science.1225266. [ http://nengo.ca/publications/spaunsciencepaper] ***Application Deadline: February 15, 2015*** Format Participants are encouraged to bring their own ideas for projects, which may focus on testing hypotheses, modelling neural or cognitive data, implementing specific behavioural functions with neurons, expanding past models, or provide a proof-of-concept of various neural mechanisms. More generally, participants will have the opportunity to: - build perceptual, motor, and cognitive models with spiking neurons - model anatomical, electrophysiological, cognitive, and behavioural data - use a variety of single cell models within a large-scale model - integrate machine learning methods into biologically oriented models - use Nengo with your favorite simulator, e.g. Brian, NEST, Neuron, etc. - interface Nengo with various kinds of neuromorphic hardware - interface Nengo with cameras and robotic systems - implement modern nonlinear control methods in neural models - and much more? Hands-on tutorials, work on individual or group projects, and talks from invited faculty members will make up the bulk of day-to-day activities. There will be a weekend break on June 13-14, and fun activities scheduled for evenings throughout. A project demonstration event will be held on the last day of the school, with prizes for strong projects! Date and Location: June 7th to June 19th, 2015 at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Applications: Please visit http://www.nengo.ca/summerschool, where you can find more information regarding costs, travel, lodging, along with an application form listing required materials. If you have any questions about the school or the application process, please contact Peter Blouw (pblouw at uwaterloo.ca) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From compsens at medizin.uni-tuebingen.de Tue Jan 13 03:54:15 2015 From: compsens at medizin.uni-tuebingen.de (Compsens) Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 09:54:15 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: POSTDOC / PHD POSITION: LEARNING OF COGNITIVE REPRESENTATIONS FOR HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION (University of Tuebingen, Germany) Message-ID: <20150113095415.79295cszrlsybtpz@webmail.uni-tuebingen.de> POSTDOC / PHD POSITION: LEARNING OF COGNITIVE REPRESENTATIONS FOR HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION (University of Tuebingen, Germany) ============================================================ The Section for Computational Sensomotorics at the Center for Integrative Neurosciences and the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research at the University of Tuebingen invites applications for a Postdoc or a PhD student, preferably with a good mathematical background for a maximum duration of 4 years. The position is funded within the EC research project COGIMON that includes multiple other European partners. This highly interdisciplinary project aims at the development of control algorithms and strategies for the interaction between humans and humanoid robots, ultimately leading also to biomedical applications. The available project focuses on the development of machine learning algorithms for the representation and control of interactive full-body movements, in close interaction with experiments with human subjects. This includes work with human motion capture data and marker-less tracking, techniques from computer animation, and related problems in control, exploiting appropriate techniques from machine learning. Our group has long expertise with the modeling and perception of complex human body motion. We are part of the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Science (HIH), one of the leading European institutions in Clinical Neuroscience and of the Excellence Center for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) that hosts a large spectrum of experimental and theoretical groups in neuroscience at the University and the Max Planck Institutes. Ideal candidates should have the following qualifications: * Masters (PhD) degree in Computer Science, Electrical / Mechanical / Biomedical Engineering, Physics, or related fields with good mathematical training * programming experience (Matlab, C/C++, ...) * Knowledge about control theory or machine learning * English speaking and writing skills. Committed to Equal Opportunities. Please send applications preferentially electronically (including CV, marks and 2 letters of reference) as soon as possible to Prof. Dr. Martin Giese, Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research & Center for Integrative Neuroscience, Otfried-M?ller. 25, 72076 Tuebingen, Germany; email: martin.giese at uni-tuebingen.de ================================================== Section for Theoretical Sensomotorics Dept. for Cognitive Neurology Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research & Center for Integrative Neuroscience University of Tuebingen Otfried-M?ller Str. 25 D-72076 Tuebingen GERMANY Tel.: +49 7071 2989124 Fax: +49 7071 294790 Email: martin.giese at uni-tuebingen.de Web: http://www.compsens.uni-tuebingen.de/ ============================================== From michael.hirsch at tuebingen.mpg.de Mon Jan 12 14:04:16 2015 From: michael.hirsch at tuebingen.mpg.de (Michael Hirsch) Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 20:04:16 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: =?iso-8859-1?q?Machine_Learning_Summer_School_201?= =?iso-8859-1?q?5_in_T=FCbingen=2C_Germany?= In-Reply-To: <543EAD0A.1000306@tuebingen.mpg.de> References: <543E9414.9080505@tuebingen.mpg.de> <543EAD0A.1000306@tuebingen.mpg.de> Message-ID: <54B41AB0.5040303@tuebingen.mpg.de> ************************************************************************** *** APPLICATIONS NOW OPEN *** *** http://mlss.tuebingen.mpg.de/2015/application.html *** ************************************************************************** Dear Colleagues, as previously announced applications are now welcome for the upcoming -------------------------------------------------------------------------- MACHINE LEARNING SUMMER SCHOOL at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in T?bingen, Germany 13 to 24 July 2015 http://mlss.tuebingen.mpg.de/2015/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Overview -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The machine learning summer school provides graduate students and industry professionals with an intense learning experience on the theory and applications of modern machine learning. Over the course of two weeks, a panel of internationally renowned experts of the field will offer tutorials covering basic as well as advanced topics. Confirmed Speakers and Topics -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Black (MPI for Intelligent Systems) will speak on Learning Human Body Shape Olivier Bousquet (Google) will speak on Machine Learning in Industry Stephen Boyd (Stanford) will speak on Optimization Tamara Broderick (MIT, ex Berkeley) will speak on Bayesian Nonparametrics Rob Fergus (Facebook / NYU) will speak on Neural Networks Zoubin Ghahramani (Cambridge) will speak on Bayesian Inference Arthur Gretton (UCL) will speak on Kernels Ralf Herbrich (Amazon) will speak on Machine Learning in Industry Neil Lawrence (Sheffield) will speak on Gaussian Processes Ulrike von Luxburg (University of Hamburg) will speak on Learning Theory Jonas Peters (ETH Z?rich, MPI for Intelligent Systems) will speak on Causality Stefan Schaal (MPI for Intelligent Systems) will speak on Learning Robots Chris Watkins (Royal Holloway) will speak on Reinforcement Learning Bernhard Sch?lkopf (MPI for Intelligent Systems) will speak on Causality Philipp Hennig (MPI for Intelligent Systems) will speak on Probabilistic Numerical Methods Michael Hirsch (MPI for Intelligent Systems) will speak on Computational Imaging Application process -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Applications are invited from graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and industry professionals looking to use, or already using machine learning methods in their work. This includes researchers in applied fields as well as students of machine learning itself. Prior experience is not strictly required, but helpful. A small number of travel stipends will be available. Applicants will be asked to submit a CV, a cover letter of up to 2000 characters, and a short letter of recommendation from one referee of their choice. We are also seeking to give participants a chance to discuss their own work with their peers and the speakers. Each applicant is thus invited to provide the title of a poster they would like to present at the school. For more information visit http://mlss.tuebingen.mpg.de/2015/application.html Important Dates -------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Monday 12 Jaunary 2015 application system opens * Thursday 12 February 2015 DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS * Thursday 12 March 2015 notification of acceptance The school takes place from Monday 13 July to Friday 24 July 2015 Organizers -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Hirsch Philipp Hennig Bernhard Sch?lkopf inquiries should be directed to michael.hirsch at tuebingen.mpg.de ========================================================================== From J.deGreeff at tudelft.nl Tue Jan 13 08:40:24 2015 From: J.deGreeff at tudelft.nl (Joachim de Greeff) Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 14:40:24 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: CFP: HRI 2015 Workshop on Human-Robot Teaming Message-ID: <54B52048.2020600@tudelft.nl> Call for participation: HRI 2015 Workshop on Human-Robot Teaming http://www.collaborativerobotics.net/hri15/ March 2, 2015, Portland, Oregon, USA Held in conjunction with the 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2015 ===================================================== Developing collaborative robots that can productively and safely operate out of isolation in uninstrumented, human-populated environments is an important goal for the field of robotics. The development of such agents, those that handle the dynamics of human environments and the complexities of interpreting human interaction, is a strong focus within Human-Robot Interaction and involves underlying research questions deeply relevant to the broader robotics community. "Human-Robot Teaming" is a full-day workshop bringing together peer-reviewed technical and position paper contributions spanning a multitude of topics within the domain of human-robot teaming. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers from a wide array of human-robot interaction research topics with the focus of enabling humans and robots to better work together towards common goals. The morning session will be devoted to gaining insight from invited speakers and contributed papers, while the afternoon session will heavily emphasize participant interaction via poster presentations, breakout sessions, and an expert panel discussion. For more information, please visit http://www.collaborativerobotics.net/hri15/ ===================================================== Topics of interest: - Task planning under uncertainty - Empirical methods for evaluation within human-robot teamwork - Motion planning in multi-agent or dynamic environments - Collaborator action and preference modeling - Interpreting social signals for intention recognition, including verbal and non-verbal communication - Sliding autonomy, enabling robots to enhance capabilities of human interaction partners - Leveraging human-robot interaction to request assistance or to recover from failure - Understanding, modeling, and shaping team dynamics in mixed human-robot teams - Ethical concerns in human-robot teaming and decision making ==================================================== Speakers: - Elizabeth Croft, University of British Columbia - Ross A. Knepper, Cornell University - Bilge Mutlu, University of Wisconsin-Madison ==================================================== Submission details: We will accept contributed papers as either extended abstracts/short papers (2-4 pages), industry white papers (2 pages), position papers (up to 8 pages), or technical papers (up to 8 pages). Each paper will be assigned two reviewers that will evaluate the submission based on significance, technical quality, and relevance. Contributors are encouraged to also provide supplementary video material alongside their written submission that will be made available alongside the proceedings on the workshop website. Details are available on the workshop?s website:http://www.collaborativerobotics.net/hri15/. ===================================================== Important dates: 26 Jan 2015 ? Paper submission deadline 12 Feb 2015 ? Notification of Acceptance 02 Mar 2015 ? Workshop (Portland, OR) ===================================================== Organizing Committee: Bradley Hayes, Yale University, USA Matthew Gombolay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Malte Jung, Cornell University, USA Koen Hindriks, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands Joachim de Greeff, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), Pensacola, FL USA Catholijn Jonker, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands Mark Neerincx, Delft University of Technology and TNO, the Netherlands Maarten Sierhuis, Nissan Research Center Silicon Valley, USA Matthew Johnson, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), Pensacola, FL USA Julie Shah, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Brian Scassellati, Yale University, USA From tbesold at uni-osnabrueck.de Tue Jan 13 12:30:48 2015 From: tbesold at uni-osnabrueck.de (Tarek R. Besold) Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 18:30:48 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: EXTENDED DEADLINE: IJCNN 2015 Special Session on Neural-Symbolic Networks and Cognitive Capacities Message-ID: <02C66946-6EEA-4438-A275-06F0405714FD@uni-osnabrueck.de> Call for Papers for the == IJCNN 2015 Special Session on Neural-Symbolic Networks and Cognitive Capacities == *********************************** EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 05, 2015 *********************************** = WEBPAGE = https://sites.google.com/site/ijcnn2015nsncc/ = SCOPE = Researchers in artificial intelligence and cognitive systems modelling continue to face foundational challenges in their quest to develop plausible models and implementations of cognitive capacities and intelligence in artificial systems. One of the methodological core issues is the question of the integration between sub-symbolic and symbolic approaches to knowledge representation, learning and reasoning in cognitively-inspired models. Network-based approaches very often enable flexible tools which can discover and process the internal structure of (possibly large) data sets. They promise to give rise to efficient signal-processing models which are biologically plausible and optimally suited for a wide range of applications, whilst possibly also offering an explanation of cognitive phenomena of the human brain. Still, the extraction of high-level explicit (i.e. symbolic) knowledge from distributed low-level representations thus far has to be considered a mostly unsolved problem. In recent years, network-based models have seen significant advancement in the wake of the development of the new "deep learning" family of approaches to machine learning. Due to the hierarchically structured nature of the underlying models, these developments have also reinvigorated efforts in overcoming the neural-symbolic divide. The aim of the special session is to bring together recent work developed in the field of network-based information processing in a cognition-related context, which bridges the gap between different levels of description and paradigms and which sheds light onto canonical solutions or principled approaches occurring in the context of neural-symbolic integration to modelling or implementing cognitively-inspired capacities in artificial systems. Besides classical research work applying computational modelling methods to problems from cognitive psychology, computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science, this session also explicitly addresses cognitively-inspired neural-symbolic approaches in more application-driven research as, e.g., technical cognitive systems, cognitive robotics, large knowledge bases and big data, etc. = TOPICS = We particularly encourage submissions related to the following non-exhaustive list of topics: - new learning paradigms of network-based models addressing different knowledge levels - biologically plausible methods and models - integration of network models and symbolic reasoning - cognitive systems using neural-symbolic paradigms - extraction of symbolic knowledge from network-based representations - applications and implementations of cognitively-inspired neural-symbolic approaches in technical systems and industry - cognitively-inspired neural-symbolic techniques for large knowledge bases and big data - challenging applications which have the potential to become benchmark problems - visionary papers concerning the future of network approaches to cognitive modelling or the future role of neural-symbolic systems in applications = DATES & SUBMISSIONS = The deadlines for submissions, author feedback, etc. are bound to the normal IJCNN 2015 deadlines (and, thus, are also subject to the same changes and extensions). The current schedule is: - Paper submission due: February 05, 2015 - Paper review feedback: March 25, 2015 - Final papers due: April 25, 2015 For details on the submission process, formats, etc., please refer to the IJCNN 2015 Call for Papers ( http://www.ijcnn.org/call-for-papers ) and the IJCNN 2015 submission guidelines ( http://www.ijcnn.org/paper-submission ). When submitting to the special session, please make sure to select the corresponding session topic during the submission process. = SESSION CO-CHAIRS = - Tarek R. Besold, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabr?ck, Germany - Artur D'Avila Garcez, Department of Computer Science, City University London, UK - Kai-Uwe K?hnberger, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabr?ck, Germany - Terrence C. Stewart, Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of Waterloo, Canada ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tarek R. Besold Institute of Cognitive Science University of Osnabr?ck (Germany) tbesold at uni-osnabrueck.de -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giacomo.cabri at unimore.it Mon Jan 12 04:43:13 2015 From: giacomo.cabri at unimore.it (Giacomo Cabri) Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 10:43:13 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: LAST CfP: COORDINATION 2015 Abstract Submission: Jan. 16, 2015 Message-ID: <54B39731.4010101@unimore.it> ======================================================================== IMPORTANT NOTE: High-quality Coordination-2015 papers will be invited to submit an extended version for a 'fast-track' to the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (ACM-TAAS). ======================================================================== ========================= Call for Papers ============================= COORDINATION 2015 17th IFIP International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages A DisCoTec Member Conference http://discotec2015.inria.fr/ June 2-4, 2015, Grenoble, France ======================================================================= ---------------- Important dates: Abstract Submission: January 16, 2015 (24:00 UTC-11) Paper Submission: January 23, 2015 (24:00 UTC-11) Author Notification: March 6, 2015 Camera ready copy: March 27, 2015 Early registration: May 5, 2015 Conferences and workshops: June 2-5, 2015 The time of all deadlines is 24:00 SST (UTC-11, Samoa Standard Time). The submission deadlines are **strict**, there will be no extension. ------ Scope: COORDINATION 2015 is the premier forum for publishing research results and experience reports on software technologies for collaboration and coordination in concurrent, distributed, and complex systems. The key focus of the conference is the quest for high-level abstractions that can capture interaction patterns and mechanisms occurring at all levels of the software architecture, up to the end-user domain. COORDINATION 2015 seeks high-quality contributions on the usage, study, formal analysis, design, and implementation of languages, models, and techniques for coordination in distributed, concurrent, pervasive, and multicore software systems. This edition also additionally seeks to adapt and integrate traditional COORDINATION techniques in the realm of multi-agent systems (MAS), which typically involve more corse-grained (cognitive, intelligent, goal-oriented) components. ------------------------ Main topics of interest: * Programming abstractions and languages * Coordination models and paradigms * Specification and verification * Foundations and types * Distributed middleware architectures * Multicore programming * Coordinated distributed applications * Bio-inspired computing models * Coordination mechanisms for self-adaptation and self-organisation * Teamwork and distributed problem solving * Collective intelligence * Auction and Negotiation * Argumentation, trust, norms and reputation * Coordination mechanisms for rational agents * Coordination middleware for mobile agents * Coordination of federated MASs --------------------------- Submission and publication: Contributions must be written in English and report on original, unpublished work not submitted for publication elsewhere (cf. IFIP's codes of conduct). The submissions must not exceed the page number limit (see below), including figures and references, prepared using Springer's LNCS style. Submissions not adhering to the above specified constraints may be rejected without review. Papers should be submitted as PDF or PS via EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=coordination2015. We solicit three kinds of submissions: *Full papers* (up to 16 pages): Describing thorough and complete research results and experience reports. *Short papers* (up to 8 pages): Describing research results that are not fully developed, or even manifestos, calls to action, personal views on the past of Coordination research, on the current state of the art, or on prospects for the years to come. *Posters* (up to 3 pages): Summarising research projects worth being advertised and discussed in a lively fashion at the conference. The conference proceedings, formed by accepted submissions of all three kinds above, will be published by Springer in the LNCS Series. Post-proceedings publication: Relevant, high-quality Coordination-2015 papers will be invited for 'fast-track submissions' to the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (ACM-TAAS). --------------- Invited Speaker Alois Ferscha (Johannes Kepler Universit?t Linz, Austria) ----------- Oranization Program Chairs Tom Holvoet (KU Leuven, Belgium) Mirko Viroli (University of Bologna, Italy) Publicity Chair Giacomo Cabri (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy) Programme Committee Gul Agha (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) Farhad Arbab (CWI and Leiden University, The Netherlands) Jacob Beal (Raytheon BBN Technologies, USA) Olivier Boissier (Ecole Nationale Sup?rieure des Mines of Saint-Etienne, France) Ferruccio Damiani (Uniersit? di Torino, Italy) Wolfgang De Meuter (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Rocco De Nicola (IMT - Institute for Advanced Studies, Italy) Ed Durfee (University of Michigan, USA) Schahram Dustdar (Vienna University of Technology, Austria) Gianluigi Ferrari (University of Pisa, Italy) Jos? Luiz Fiadeiro (Royal Holloway University of London, UK) Val?rie Issarny (Inria, France) Christine Julien (The University of Texas at Austin, USA) Sarit Kraus (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) Eva Kuhn (TU Wien, Austria) Marino Miculan (Universit? di Udine, Italy) Hanne Riis Nielson (Technical University of Denmark, Denmark) Andrea Omicini (University of Bologna, Italy) Sascha Ossowski (University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain) Paolo Petta (OFAI - Austria Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Austria) Rosario Pugliese (Universit? degli Studi di Firenze, Italy) Alessandro Ricci (Uniervsit? di Bologna, Italy) Juan Antonio Rodriguez Aguilar (IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona) Carles Sierra (IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona) Marjan Sirjani (Reykjavik University, Iceland) Carolyn Talcott (SRI International, California, USA) Emilio Tuosto (University of Leicester, UK) Herbert Wiklicky (Imperial College London, UK) Martin Wirsing (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit?t M?nchen, Germany) Franco Zambonelli (Universit? di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy) Steering Committee Gul Agha (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA) Farhad Arbab (CWI and Leiden University, The Netherlands) (Chair) Dave Clarke (Uppsala University, Sweden) Tom Holvoet (KU Leuven, Belgium) Jean-Marie Jacquet (University of Namur, Belgium) Christine Julien (The University of Texas at Austin, USA) Eva K?hn (Vienna University of Technology, Austria) Wolfgang De Meuter (Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium) Rocco De Nicola (IMT - Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy) Rosario Pugliese (Universit? di Firenze, Italy) Marjan Sirjani (Reykjavik University, Iceland) Carolyn Talcott (SRI International, California, USA) Vasco T. Vasconcelos (University of Lisbon, Portugal) Gianluigi Zavattaro (University of Bologna, Italy) Mirko Viroli (University of Bologna, Italy) -- |----------------------------------------------------| | Prof. Giacomo Cabri - Ph.D., Associate Professor | Dip. di Scienze Fisiche, Informatiche e Matematiche | Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia - Italia | e-mail giacomo.cabri at unimore.it | tel. +39-059-2058320 fax +39-059-2055216 |----------------------------------------------------| From giacomo.cabri at unimore.it Mon Jan 12 06:59:46 2015 From: giacomo.cabri at unimore.it (Giacomo Cabri) Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 12:59:46 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: CfP: CONTEXT-AWARE APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES Special issue of the The Scientific World Journal Message-ID: <54B3B732.7030903@unimore.it> ********************************************************** CONTEXT-AWARE APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES Special issue of the The Scientific World Journal http://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/si/157274/cfp/ Call For Papers Deadline: Friday, 17 April 2015 ********************************************************** The development of ubiquitous applications and services tailored to the needs and expectations of a very large number of potential users (especially mobile users) requires future systems to be aware of the service fruition contexts and possibly of accurate user profiles. Indeed, the availability of many raw and often unrelated services can be all but useful to the user, who is typically flooded with so many pieces of information (advices, advertisements, sales opportunities, etc.) that picking up what she/he really needs turns out like finding a needle in a haystack. Context-aware applications may be able to exploit the knowledge of the logical and physical surroundings where the user?s client is operating and possibly also a profile of the users themselves, in order to deliver controlled amounts of high quality information. Clearly, this poses a number of challenging research problems: gathering context data, often under real-time constraints; organizing such data in memory efficient information structures (say relational or graph-based structures); retrieving, filtering, and delivering to users small amounts of information appropriate to their current needs, again under time pressure. The overall goal of the special issue is to solicit and publish high-quality papers that present innovative methodologies and techniques to efficiently and effectively support the dependent services and applications. We welcome both theoretical and applied papers in the field. Priority will be given to innovative proposals that push the boundaries of context exploitation towards a broader idea of context, including (among others) the modeling of the external environment, the users? profile, and the history of the actions performed by them. Moreover, survey-like papers presenting studies of relevant state-of-the-art will also be considered. Original papers are invited from academic and industrial researchers active in the communities of database and information systems, information retrieval, semantic web, algorithms and protocols for mobile devices, mobile software development, distributed services, and mobile computing. Topics ------ Potential topics include, but are not limited to: * Models and techniques for the representation of contexts * Storage solutions, data structures, and algorithms suitable for the efficient handling of contexts (access, dynamic update, learning, etc.) * Data management techniques enabling context exploitation and content personalization * Semantic analysis techniques for context information understanding and exploitation * Semantic techniques for context-aware services * Software and platforms supporting (mobile) context-dependent applications * Middleware for context-aware applications and services * User profiling techniques * Application and evaluation of context-aware techniques toward significant test scenarios, including context-aware advertising, proactive applications and ebooks, smart help-desk solutions, ambient intelligence, assisted living, and pervasive/ubiquitous applications Submissions and Important dates ------------------------------- Authors can submit their manuscripts via the Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/tswj/computer.science/caas/. Guidelines for preparing your submission can be found at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/guidelines/. Manuscript Due Friday, 17 April 2015 First Round of Reviews Friday, 10 July 2015 Expected Publication Date Friday, 4 September 2015 The articles of The Scientific World Journal are indexed in more than 60 databases/resources; please refer to http://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/ai/ for a full list. Lead Guest Editor ----------------- Riccardo Martoglia, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy Guest Editors ------------- Giacomo Cabri, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy Sergio Ilarri, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain Ichiro Satoh, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan -- |----------------------------------------------------| | Prof. Giacomo Cabri - Ph.D., Associate Professor | Dip. di Scienze Fisiche, Informatiche e Matematiche | Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia - Italia | e-mail giacomo.cabri at unimore.it | tel. +39-059-2058320 fax +39-059-2055216 |----------------------------------------------------| From boracchi at elet.polimi.it Tue Jan 13 13:02:20 2015 From: boracchi at elet.polimi.it (Giacomo Boracchi) Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 19:02:20 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: IJCNN 2015 Killarney, Ireland: Deadline Extended Message-ID: IJCNN 2015 - International Joint Conference on Neural Networks July 12-17, 2015, Killarney Convention Center, Killarney, Ireland http://www.ijcnn.org * IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: Please note that the PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED to Thursday, February 5th, 2015, and that the dates have been revised for the paper decision notifications and camera-ready submissions. Please do not expect further extensions as our timetables are already compressed. IJCNN is the premier international conference in the area of neural network theory, analysis, and applications. Co-sponsored by the International Neural Network Society and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, over the last three decades this conference and its predecessors has hosted [past, present, and future] leaders of neural network research. In an era when neural networks are widely used and reported in many areas, scientists, engineers, educators, and students from all over the world can get the best overall view of neural networks, from neuroscience to advanced control systems to cognition, at the IJCNN. * PLENARY SPEAKERS - Steve Furber, The ICL Professor of Computer Engineering at the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester "The SpiNNaker Project" - Vincenzo Piuri, Professor in Computer Engineering at the University of Milan, Italy "Computational Intelligence Technologies for 3D Surface Reconstruction" - Lee Giles, The David Reese Professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University "Machine Learning and Data Mining for Scholarly Big Data" - Marios M. Polycarpou, Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Cyprus, Cyprus "Fault Detection and Isolation in Uncertain Big-Data Environments" - Barak Pearlmutter, Professor, Department of Computer Science, National University of Ireland, Ireland "Critical Dynamics and Pathological Phenomena in the Brain" - Giacomo Rizzolati, Professor of Human Physiology at the University of Parma, Italy "The double life of the motor system: Action production and action understanding" * Deadlines for Submission: - Paper submission deadline: February 05, 2015 (EXTENDED) - Paper Decision notification: March 25, 2015 - Camera-ready submission: April 25, 2015 - Conference: July 12-17, 2015 * Hotel Reservations: The Killarney region is an extremely popular tourist destination, and rooms that have been reserved for IJCNN 2015 will likely disappear as soon as the contracted booking date has passed. For that reason we strongly recommend that you book your hotel room by 01May2015! (see the IJCNN2015 home page for our accommodations at the Gleneagle Hotel, the Brehon Hotel and the River Apartments). * IJCNN Killarney site video: Marianne van Wagner, Executive Co-ordinator of the International Neural Network Society (INNS), commissioned this delightful promotional video for IJCNN2015, based on her own photographs : Killarney tour. It's well worth looking at for the local Irish scenery, and for background information about the conference. (You may have to download it if your internet connection is slow.) Keep working on your paper submissions, and submit your proposals for Tutorials and Workshops SOON! Email any of the Chairs if you wish to discuss your ideas for proposals. IJCNN General Chair De-Shuang Huang, Tongji University, China, Director - Machine Learning and Systems Biology Laboratory IJCNN Program Chair Yoonsuck Choe, Texas A&M University Director, Brain Networks Laboratory Many thanks to our Sponsors and Contributors: - International Neural Network Society - IEEE Computational Intelligence Society - Failte Ireland, National Tourism Development Authority. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From boracchi at elet.polimi.it Tue Jan 13 13:06:06 2015 From: boracchi at elet.polimi.it (Giacomo Boracchi) Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 19:06:06 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: "Concept Drift, Domain Adaptation & Learning in Dynamic Environments" SS @IJCNN Deadline Extended Message-ID: CALL FOR PAPERS INNS/IEEE IJCNN 2015 Special Session on "Concept Drift, Domain Adaptation & Learning in Dynamic Environments" July 12 - 17, 2015, Killarney, Ireland. http://home.deib.polimi.it/boracchi/events/ijcnn2015_SS/index.html ********************************************************** Important Announcement ********************************************************** The paper submission deadline of our special session is extended, like IJCNN, till February 5th, 2015. ********************************************************** IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission: February 5, 2015 (Extended) Paper Decision notification: March 25, 2015 Camera-ready submission: April 25, 2015 Conference Dates: July 12 - 17, 2015 *********************************************************** One of the fundamental goals in computational intelligence is to achieve brain-like intelligence, a remarkable property of which is the ability to incrementally learn from noisy and incomplete data and to adapt to changing environments. The special session aims at presenting novel approaches to incremental learning and adaptation to dynamic environments both from the theoretical perspective of machine learning and from the application-oriented view of computational intelligence techniques. *Topics* Papers must present original work or review the state-of-the-art in the following non-exhaustive list of topics: * Architectures, techniques and algorithms for learning in non-stationary/dynamic environments * Domain adaptation, dataset shift, covariance shift * Incremental learning, lifelong learning, cumulative learning * Change-detection tests and anomaly-detection algorithms * Mining from streams of data * Applications that call for incremental learning or learning in non-stationary/dynamic environments, such as: o Adaptive classifiers for concept drift and recurring concepts o Intelligent systems operating in non-stationary/dynamic environments o Intelligent embedded and cyber-physical systems * Applications that call for change and anomaly detection, such as: o fault detection o fraud detection o network intrusion and security o intelligent sensor networks * Cognitive-inspired approaches to adaptation and learning * Development of test-sets benchmarks for evaluating algorithms learning in non-stationary/dynamic environments * Issues relevant to above mentioned or related fields *Keywords* Concept drift, nonstationary environment, change/anomaly detection, domain adaptation, incremental learning, data streams. *Webpage* Further information can be found on the Special Session webpage http://home.deib.polimi.it/boracchi/events/ijcnn2015_SS/index.html *Paper Submission* THE DEADLINE FOR THE PAPER SUBMISSION TO THE SPECIAL SESSION IS THE SAME OF IJCNN 2015, February 5th 2015. All the submissions will be peer-reviewed with the same criteria used for other contributed papers. Perspective authors will submit their papers through the IJCNN2015 conference submission system at http://www.ijcnn.org/ Please make sure to select the Special Session "Concept Drift, Domain Adaptation & Learning in Dynamic Environments" from the "S. SPECIAL SESSION TOPICS" name in the "Main Research topic" dropdown list; Templates and instruction for authors will be provided on the INNS/IEEE IJCNN webpage http://www.ijcnn.org/ All papers submitted to the special sessions will be subject to the same peer-review procedure as regular papers, accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Further information about IJCNN 2015 can be found at http://www.ijcnn.org/ For any question you may have about the Special Session or paper submission, feel free to contact Giacomo Boracchi, giacomo.boracchi at polimi.it *********************************************************** Special Session on "Concept Drift, Domain Adaptation & Learning in Dynamic Environments" @ IJCNN 2015 *Organizes* . Giacomo Boracchi (Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Italy) giacomo.boracchi at polimi.it . Robi Polikar (Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ) polikar at rowan.edu . Manuel Roveri (Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Italy) manuel.roveri at polimi.it *Technical Program Committee* . Cesare Alippi, Politecnico Milano, Italy . Alfred Bifet, University of Waikato, New Zealand . Gianluca Bontempi, Universit? Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium . Gregory Ditzler, Drexel University, PA, USA . Yaochu Jin, University of Surrey, England, UK . Georg Krempl, University Magdeburg, Germany . Ludmilla Kuncheva, University of Bangor, Wales, UK . Leandro L. Minku, University of Birmingham, UK . Harris Papadopoulos, Frederick University, Cyprus . Leszek Rutkowski, Czestochowa University of Technology, Poland . Marley Vellasco, Pontif?cia Universidade Cat?lica do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil . Shiliang Sun, East China Normal University . Shengxiang Yang, Brunel University, England, UK *********************************************************** Giacomo Boracchi, PhD DEIB - Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria Politecnico di Milano Via Ponzio, 34/5 20133 Milano, Italy. Tel. +39 02 2399 3467 http://home.dei.polimi.it/boracchi/ -- Giacomo Boracchi, PhD DEIB - Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria Politecnico di Milano Via Ponzio, 34/5 20133 Milano, Italy. Tel. +39 02 2399 3467 http://home.dei.polimi.it/boracchi/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From publicity at ecmlpkdd2015.org Mon Jan 12 14:23:02 2015 From: publicity at ecmlpkdd2015.org (ECMLPKDD 2015) Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 19:23:02 -0000 Subject: Connectionists: ECMLPKDD 2015: Call for Papers, Tutorials and Workshops Message-ID: <01c101d02e9d$33b24a50$9b16def0$@ecmlpkdd2015.org> The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD) will take place in Porto, Portugal, from September 7th to 11th, 2015 (http://www.ecmlpkdd2015.org). This event is the leading European scientific event on machine learning and data mining and builds upon a very successful series of 25 ECML and 18 PKDD conferences, which have been jointly organized for the past 14 years. ECMLPKDD 2015 will host three tracks, tutorials and a set of workshops. Therefore, we invite all researchers and practitioners from different communities to submit papers and/or present tutorial and workshop proposals. ************************* CALL FOR PAPERS ************************* JOURNAL TRACK ********************* Articles for this track are submitted all year long directly to either Machine Learning or Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and are reviewed like regular journal articles. Accepted articles appear in full in the journal and the authors are given a presentation slot at the conference. Articles deemed insufficiently mature for journal publication may be accepted for inclusion in the proceedings. Submissions to the journal track will be managed by the Guest Editorial Board. Paper Submission: Cut-off dates for the bi-weekly batches are 18 Jan, 1 Feb, 15 Fev, 1 Mar, 15 Mar, 29 Mar, 12 Apr, 26 Apr of 2015 Web Page: http://www.ecmlpkdd2015.org/submission/journal-track RESEARCH PROCEEDINGS TRACK ******************************************* The research proceedings track, which is organized in the traditional way. Accepted papers will be published in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNCS/LNAI) of Springer, after reviewing by the programme committee. Abstract Submission Deadline: March 26, 2015 Paper Submission Deadline: April 2, 2015 Paper Acceptance Notification: June 1, 2015 Paper Camera Ready Submission: June 15, 2015 Web Page: http://www.ecmlpkdd2015.org/submission/research-proceedings-track INDUSTRIAL, GOVERNMENTAL & NON-GOVERNMENTAL PROCEEDINGS TRACK **************************************************************************** ************************** The NEW industrial, governmental & non-governmental (NGO) proceedings track is independent and distinct from the Research Track. Submissions to this track should solve real-world problems and focus on engineering systems, applications, and challenges. Accepted papers will be published in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNCS/LNAI) of Springer, after reviewing by the programme committee. Abstract Submission Deadline: March 26, 2015 Paper Submission Deadline: April 2, 2015 Paper Acceptance Notification: June 1, 2015 Paper Camera Ready Submission: June 15, 2015 Web Page: http://www.ecmlpkdd2015.org/submission/industrial-proceedings-track ***************************************************************** CALL FOR TUTORIAL AND WORKSHOP PROPOSALS ***************************************************************** TUTORIALS ************** The tutorials are intended to provide a comprehensive introduction to established or emerging research topics of interest for the machine learning and the data mining community. These topics include related research fields or applications. The ideal tutorial should attract a wide audience. It should be broad enough to provide a basic introduction to the chosen research area, but it should also cover the most important topics in depth. We welcome half day workshop proposals. Proposal Deadline: March 2, 2015 Proposal Acceptance Notification: March 23, 2015 Web Page: http://www.ecmlpkdd2015.org/submission/call-for-tutorials WORKSHOPS **************** The workshops will be on relevant and current topics in Machine Learning and Data Mining. The scope of the proposal should be consistent with the conference themes as described in the ECMLPKDD 2015 Call for Papers (http://www.ecmlpkdd2015.org/submission). Interdisciplinary workshops that bring together researchers and practitioners from different communities are especially welcome. We encourage workshops that bridge the gap between theoretical advances and important and/or innovative applications of machine learning and data mining. We welcome both full and half day workshop proposals. Proposal Deadline: March 2, 2015 Proposal Acceptance Notification: March 23, 2015 Workshop Websites and Call for Papers Online: March 27, 2015 Workshop Proceedings (Camera-ready): August 3, 2015 Web Page: http://www.ecmlpkdd2015.org/submission/call-for-workshop-proposals Hope to see you all soon in Porto, Portugal!!! The publicity chairs of the ECMLPKDD 2015, Carlos Abreu Ferreira Ricardo Campos --- Este e-mail foi verificado em termos de v?rus pelo software antiv?rus Avast. http://www.avast.com From daan.bloembergen at gmail.com Wed Jan 14 06:18:44 2015 From: daan.bloembergen at gmail.com (Daan Bloembergen) Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 11:18:44 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: First Call For Papers: Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop 2015 (Istanbul, Turkey) Message-ID: We apologize if you receive more than one copy. Please share with colleagues and students. Paper deadline: FEBRUARY 11, 2015 ******************************************************* * AAMAS workshop with a long and successful history, now in its seventh edition. * ACM proceedings format with up to 8 pages. * Best paper award sponsored by the European coordination action FoCAS - Fundamentals of Collective Adaptive Systems (www.focas.eu). * Accepted papers are eligible for inclusion in a special issue journal. ******************************************************* 1st Call for Papers ALA 2015: Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop held at AAMAS 2015 (Istanbul, Turkey). The ALA workshop has a long and successful history and is now in its seventh edition. The workshop is a merger of European ALAMAS and the American ALAg series, which is usually held at AAMAS. Details may be found on the workshop web site: http://ala2015.csc.liv.ac.uk ******************************************************* * Submission Deadline: February 11, 2015 * Notification of acceptance: March 6, 2015 * Camera-ready copies: March 19, 2015 * Workshop: May 4-5, 2015 ******************************************************* Adaptive and Learning Agents, particularly those in a multi-agent setting are becoming more and more prominent as the sheer size and complexity of many real world systems grows. How to adaptively control, coordinate and optimize such systems is an emerging multi-disciplinary research area at the intersection of Computer Science, Control theory, Economics, and Biology. The ALA workshop will focus on agent and multi-agent systems which employ learning or adaptation. The goal of this workshop is to increase awareness and interest in adaptive agent research, encourage collaboration and give a representative overview of current research in the area of adaptive and learning agents and multi-agent systems. It aims at bringing together not only scientists from different areas of computer science but also from different fields studying similar concepts (e.g., game theory, bio-inspired control, mechanism design). This workshop will focus on all aspects of adaptive and learning agents and multi-agent systems with a particular emphasis on how to modify established learning techniques and/or create new learning paradigms to address the many challenges presented by complex real-world problems. The topics of interest include but are not limited to: * Novel combinations of reinforcement and supervised learning approaches * Integrated learning approaches that work with other agent reasoning modules like negotiation, trust models, coordination, etc. * Supervised multi-agent learning * Reinforcement learning (single and multi-agent) * Planning (single and multi-agent) * Reasoning (single and multi-agent) * Distributed learning * Adaptation and learning in dynamic environments * Evolution of agents in complex environments * Co-evolution of agents in a multi-agent setting * Cooperative exploration and learning to cooperate and collaborate * Learning to cooperate and collaborate * Learning trust and reputation * Communication restrictions and their impact on multi-agent coordination * Design of reward structure and fitness measures for coordination * Scaling learning techniques to large systems of learning and adaptive agents * Emergent behaviour in adaptive multi-agent systems * Game theoretical analysis of adaptive multi-agent systems * Neuro-control in multi-agent systems * Bio-inspired multi-agent systems * Applications of adaptive and learning agents and multi-agent systems to real world complex systems ******************************************************* SUBMISSION DETAILS Papers can be submitted through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ala2015 Submissions may be up to 8 pages in the ACM proceedings format (i.e., the same as AAMAS papers in the main conference track). Accepted work will be allocated time for oral presentation during the one day workshop. Papers accepted at the workshop will also be eligible for inclusion in a special issue published after the workshop. A best workshop paper certificate will be presented to the paper selected based on feedback from the reviewers and finally determined by the co-chairs. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From yael at Princeton.EDU Tue Jan 13 19:21:42 2015 From: yael at Princeton.EDU (Yael Niv) Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:21:42 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: RLDM2015: Abstract submissions deadline in one month! Message-ID: The 2nd Multidisciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM2015) www.rldm.org June 7-10, The University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada ====================================================== Submissions to RLDM2015 are now being accepted at https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/RLDM2015 Deadline: 13 February 2015, midnight EST We invite extended abstracts for contributed poster presentations and oral 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 or animat 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 http://rldm.org/rldm2015/submission-procedure/ Note: Only the summary will be made available in the (electronic) abstract booklets. The extended abstract will be used for reviewing, and will be available online only pending on authors? separate explicit permission. Online availability will have no bearing on the review process and authors are encouraged to include new, unpublished, findings which they do not want to make publicly available. To submit your abstract please go to https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/RLDM2015 Submissions will be reviewed for relevance to the topic and for quality. Exceptional abstracts will be selected for oral presentations and for poster spotlight presentations. IMPORTANT DATES: Submissions open: 13 Dec 2015 Submissions close: 13 Feb 2015, 11:59pm EST Notification of acceptance: by March 28, 2015 (expedited reviewing for those needing an international visa can be requested) Early registration: 21 April 2015 Meeting: 7-10 June 2015, Edmonton, Alberta (*NEW* this year: Tutorials on the 7th) RLDM2015 Invited speakers: http://rldm.org/rldm2015/invited-speakers2015/ RLDM2015 Tutorials: http://rldm.org/rldm2015/tutorials/ RLDM2015 Programme Committee: http://rldm.org/rldm2015/committees/rldm2015-program-committee/ To ensure that you receive future announcements about RLDM2015 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 email? from the options at the bottom). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ASIM.ROY at asu.edu Tue Jan 13 21:09:45 2015 From: ASIM.ROY at asu.edu (Asim Roy) Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 02:09:45 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: INNS BigData 2015 San Francisco - New Conference! Calls for Papers, Special Sessions, Tutorials and Workshops! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4AD8F84F0AA4E1448BD8131BA7E55EB41E322E83@exmbw02.asurite.ad.asu.edu> Apologies for cross-posting. Note the plenary talk by Juergen Schmidhuber (Prof. J?rgen Schmidhuber) on Deep Learning. There will also be a tutorial and a workshop on Deep Learning by Juergen Schmidhuber and Dong Yu of Microsoft Research (Dong Yu, Microsoft Research). Note the deadlines for submission of proposals for special sessions, tutorials and workshops. See you in San Francisco. [http://innsbigdata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/banner.jpg] INNS Conference on Big Data 2015 New approaches to solving hard Big Data problems! 8 - 10 August 2015, San Francisco www.innsbigdata.org The aim of the INNS BigData conference is to promote new advances and research directions in efficient and innovative algorithmic approaches to analyzing big data (e.g. deep networks, nature-inspired and brain-inspired algorithms), implementations on different computing platforms (e.g. neuromorphic, GPUs, clouds, clusters) and applications of Big Data Analytics to solve real-world problems (e.g. weather prediction, transportation, energy management). Please refer to our website for a more detailed list of topics. Being INNS' inaugural conference on the theme of big data, we are especially motivated to synthesize ideas, promote activities and generate broad interest in areas where neural networks have many unique advantages. We also have Twitter, Facebook and Google+ pages! ________________________________ [http://innsbigdata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/new.gif]PLENARY TALK [http://innsbigdata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/juergen.jpg] DEEP LEARNING Prof. J?rgen Schmidhuber, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Lugano, and the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA. Since age 15 or so, Prof. J?rgen Schmidhuber?s main scientific ambition has been to build an optimal scientist through self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI), then retire. He has pioneered self-improving general problem solvers since 1987, and Deep Learning Neural Networks (NNs) since 1991. The Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent NNs (RNNs), developed by his research groups at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA & USI & SUPSI & TU Munich, were the first RNNs to win official international contests. LSTM recently helped to improve connected handwriting recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, optical character recognition, image caption generation, and are now in use at Google, Microsoft, IBM, and many other companies. IDSIA?s Deep Learners were also the first to win object detection and image segmentation contests, and achieved the world?s first superhuman visual classification results, winning nine international competitions in machine learning & pattern recognition (more than any other team). Since 2009 he has been member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers, earned seven best paper/best video awards, and is recipient of the 2013 Helmholtz Award of the International Neural Networks Society. ________________________________ Important Dates: * Paper submission: March 22, 2015. * Paper Decision Notification: May 22, 2015. * Camera Ready Submission of papers: June 8, 2015. Call for Special Sessions: * Deadline: January 22, 2015 * Any proposal can be sent by e-mail to: INNSBigData2015SpecialSessions at gmail.com Call for Tutorials and Workshops: * Deadline: January 22, 2015 * Any questions can be sent to the Tutorials & Workshops Chairs: Marley Vellasco (PUC-Rio. Rio de Janeiro. Brazil) and Trevor Martin (Univ. of Bristol, UK). ________________________________ [http://innsbigdata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/new.gif]The Elsevier USD 2000 Big Data Best Paper Award: This award recognizes the best paper presented at the INNS Big Data conference. Both application and theoretical papers will be considered. It will be awarded by the Big Data Analytics Section of the International Neural Network Society and is sponsored by Elsevier. The Award consists of a plaque and a $2000 honorarium. ________________________________ Dr. Fen Zhao Talk Dr. Fen Zhao, a Staff Associate at the Office of the Assistant Director (OAD) for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation, will give a talk on national big data R&D initiative and on building public-private partnerships around CISE's Big Data, next generation internet, and cybersecurity R&D portfolios. ________________________________ PLENARY SPEAKERS: [http://innsbigdata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Bin-Yu.jpg] Prof. Bin Yu, Chancellor?s Professor, University of California, Berkeley. Bin Yu is Chancellor?s Professor in the Departments of Statistics and of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. She held faculty positions at UW-Madison and Yale University and was a Member of Technical Staff at Lucent Bell Labs. She was Chair of Department of Statistics at Berkeley from 2009 to 2012, and is a founding co-director of the Microsoft Joint Lab on Statistics and Information Technology at Peking University where she is also Chair of the scientific advisory committee of the Center for Statistical Sciences. She has published over 80 scientific papers in premier journals in statistics, machine learning, information theory, signal processing, remote sensing, neuroscience, network analysis, and bioinformatics. She is a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [http://innsbigdata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Raghu.jpg] Prof. Raghu Ramakrishnan, Head of Cloud and Information Services Lab (CISL) and big data team, Microsoft Raghu Ramakrishnan heads the Cloud and Information Services Lab (CISL) in the Data Platforms Group at Microsoft, and leads development for the Big Data team. From 1987 to 2006, he was a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he wrote the widely-used text ?Database Management Systems? and led a wide range of research projects in database systems (e.g., the CORAL deductive database, the DEVise data visualization tool, SQL extensions to handle sequence data) and data mining (scalable clustering, mining over data streams). In 1999, he founded QUIQ, a company that introduced a cloud-based question-answering service. He joined Yahoo! in 2006 as a Yahoo! Fellow, and over the next six years served as Chief Scientist for the Audience (portal), Cloud and Search divisions, driving content recommendation algorithms (CORE), cloud data stores (PNUTS), and semantic search (?Web of Things?). Ramakrishnan has received several awards, including the ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, the SIGMOD 10-year Test-of-Time Award, the IIT Madras Distinguished Alumnus Award, and the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering. [http://innsbigdata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/brenda.jpg] Prof. Brenda Dietrich, IBM Fellow and VP, Leads the Emerging Technologies Team for IBM Watson, IBM Brenda Dietrich is an IBM Fellow and Vice President. She joined IBM in 1984 and has worked in the area now called analytics for her entire career, applying data and computation to business decision processes throughout IBM. For over a decade she led the Mathematical Sciences function in the IBM Research division where she was responsible for both basic research on computational mathematics and for the development of novel applications of mathematics for both IBM and its clients. She has been the president of INFORMS, has served on the Board of Trustees of SIAM, and is a member of several university advisory boards. She holds more than a dozen patents, has co-authored numerous publications, and frequently speaks on analytics at conferences. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2014. She holds a BS in Mathematics from UNC and an MS and Ph.D. in OR/IE from Cornell. Her personal research includes manufacturing scheduling, services resource management, transportation logistics, integer programming, and combinatorial duality. She currently leads the emerging technologies team for IBM Watson, extending and applying IBM?s cognitive computing technology. ________________________________ [http://innsbigdata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/new.gif]TUTORIALS & WORKSHOPS: TUTORIALS * Deep Learning - Profs. Juergen Schmidhuber (University of Lugano, and the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA) and Dong Yu (Microsoft Research) * Introduction to How Brain Deals with Big Data - Juyang Weng (Michigan State University) * Platforms and Algorithms for Big Data Analytics - Prof. Chandan K. Reddy (Wayne State University) * Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning Cognitive Algorithms and the Mind - Prof. Leonid I. Perlovsky (Northeastern University) * Spiking Neural Networks and Neuromorphic Spatio-Temporal Data Machines - Prof. Nikola Kasabov (Auckland University of Technology) * Online Learning for Big Data Analytics - Prof. Irwin King (Chinese University of Hong Kong) WORKSHOPS * Deep Learning - Profs. Juergen Schmidhuber and Dong Yu * Neuromorphic Spatio-Temporal Big Data Machines - Prof. Nikola Kasabov * Neural networks and wearable devices - Prof. Danilo Mandic * Big Data and Power Systems - Profs. Dejan Sobajic and Kumar Venayagamoorthy * Crowd Behaviour and Big Data - Profs. Chrisina Jayne and Mehmed Kantardzic ________________________________ Neural Networks Special Issue: Neural Network Learning in Big Data For this special issue of Neural Networks, we invite papers that address many of the challenges of learning from big data. In particular, we are interested in papers on efficient and innovative algorithmic approaches to analyzing big data (e.g. deep networks, nature-inspired and brain-inspired algorithms), implementations on different computing platforms (e.g. neuromorphic, GPUs, clouds, clusters) and applications of online learning to solve real-world big data problems (e.g. health care, transportation, and electric power and energy management). Manuscript submission due: January 15, 2015 Big Data Analytics Section @ INNS Considering the growing interest to process and analyse big data, the International Neural Network Society (INNS) has a new Section on Big Data Analytics (BDA) to help the neural network field position itself as a leading technology contributor to big data analytics. Anyone who is interested to know more is encouraged to visit the homepage of the INNS-BDA Section. ________________________________ We have an enthusiastic team working hard on the conference program and events. Start thinking about your paper submissions. Our Chairs for the [Special Sessions, Tutorials, and Workshops] are expecting your proposals soon - email them to discuss your ideas. Come to San Francisco next summer to take part in the future of BigData, and to have fun!! ________________________________ GENERAL CHAIRS: Asim Roy (email) INNS BigData General Co-Chair Arizona State University, USA INNS Board of Governors Plamen Angelov (email) INNS BigData General Co-Chair Lancaster University, UK Chair in Intelligent Systems ________________________________ Many thanks to our Sponsors: [http://www.inns.org/assets/site/neural.png] [http://innsbigdata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/elsevier-logo-300x300-150x150.jpg] To unsubscribe from this list, send an email to Jose Antonio Iglesias, INNS BigData 2015 Publicity Co-Chair, Carlos III Univ, Madrid, Spain with the phrase "Remove my email" in the Subject line. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From navlakha at salk.edu Wed Jan 14 02:23:51 2015 From: navlakha at salk.edu (Saket Navlakha) Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 07:23:51 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Post-doc opening at The Salk Institute Message-ID: A post-doc position in the Center for Integrative Biology at The Salk Institute is available. We are looking for computational scientists/post-docs broadly interested in: 1. Molecular and neural network analysis (robustness, evolution, development, etc.); and 2. Algorithms in nature (information processing and computation in biological systems). Working at The Salk Institute provides a unique opportunity to integrate theory and experiment to bear on important scientific questions. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Salk offers a warm, collegial, and collaborative work environment, with UCSD adjacently located. Education: PhD in computer science or related field. Experience: Strong algorithmic and programming skills; experience in computational systems biology. Instructions: Email CV and contact information for two references to navlakha at salk.edu. Thanks- Saket Navlakha http://www.snl.salk.edu/~navlakha/ From jacob.vogelstein at iarpa.gov Wed Jan 14 11:34:05 2015 From: jacob.vogelstein at iarpa.gov (R. Jacob Vogelstein) Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 11:34:05 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: New funding opportunity: Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) Program Message-ID: I am pleased to announce the release of the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). MICrONS seeks to revolutionize machine learning by reverse-engineering the algorithms of the brain. The program is expressly designed as a dialogue between data science and neuroscience, in which participants will have the unique opportunity to pose biological questions with the greatest potential to advance theories of neural computation and obtain answers through carefully planned experimentation and data analysis. Over the course of the program, participants will use their improving understanding of the representations, transformations, and learning rules employed by the brain to create ever more capable neurally-derived machine learning algorithms. Ultimate computational goals for MICrONS include the ability to perform complex information processing tasks such as one-shot learning, unsupervised clustering, and scene parsing, aiming towards human-like proficiency. The program overview is copied below; the full text of the announcement (and any future versions) is available from the BAA link at http://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/microns/microns-baa. For your convenience, a PDF of the announcement is also attached to this email. All questions about the program and/or BAA must be submitted to dni-iarpa-baa-14-06 at iarpa.gov by February 9, 2015. Full proposals must be submitted through the IARPA IDEAS system by March 13, 2015. *Do not *send any questions or proposal submissions to me directly. Please disseminate this information widely. Offerors need not be U.S. citizens or residents to apply or receive funding. Thank you, Jacob R. Jacob Vogelstein, Ph.D. Program Manager ODNI/IARPA http://go.usa.gov/FPPJ -------------------------------------------------------- Introduction Despite significant progress in machine learning over the past few years, today?s state of the art algorithms are brittle and do not generalize well. In contrast, the brain is able to robustly separate and categorize signals in the presence of significant noise and non-linear transformations, and can extrapolate from single examples to entire classes of stimuli. This performance gap between software and wetware persists despite some correspondence between the architecture of the leading machine learning algorithms and their biological counterparts in the brain, presumably because the two still differ significantly in the details of operation. The MICrONS program is predicated on the notion that it will be possible to achieve major breakthroughs in machine learning if we can construct synthetic systems that not only resemble the high-level blueprints of the brain, but also employ lower-level computing modules derived from the specific computations performed by cortical circuits. Background Many contemporary theories of cortical computing suggest that the brain performs common sensory information processing tasks?such as detection and recognition of visual objects, sounds, and odors?with algorithms that progressively transform data through a series of operations, or ?stages.? Each stage of processing is further theorized to occur within a discrete region of cortex. Although different theories suggest different mathematical bases for computation, it is commonly believed that neural algorithms employ data representations, transformations, and learning rules that are conserved across stages. <#14ae94551cb4b667_14ae942f2d046d85_14acb3be21100ccb__ftn1> It should therefore be possible to apprehend the neural computations underlying information processing (at least within a given sensory modality <#14ae94551cb4b667_14ae942f2d046d85_14acb3be21100ccb__ftn2>) by interrogating a small fraction of the entire cortex, so long as that fraction is judiciously selected to contain sufficient evidence of the representations, transformations, and learning rules of the algorithm(s) to which it contributes. Neuroscience has a long history of inspiring innovation in machine learning, starting with the seminal work of McCulloch and Pitts in 1943. This influence is evident even in today?s state of the art ?deep learning? systems, which are loosely modeled on hierarchical visual processing systems in the primate brain. However, the rate of effective knowledge transfer between neuroscience and machine learning has been slow because of divergent scientific priorities, funding sources, knowledge repositories, and lexicons. As a result, very few of the ideas about neural computing that have emerged over the past few decades have been incorporated into modern machine learning algorithms. Previous attempts to foster collaboration between neuroscience and machine learning have been stymied in part by gaps in our knowledge about the brain. The majority of what is known about the brain today regards its operation at the ?micro? scale (one or a few neurons) and the ?macro? scale (hundreds of thousands or millions of neurons), and some of this information is indeed reflected in the design of leading artificial neural networks. In contrast, much less is known about the ?mesoscale? cortical circuits (hundreds to tens of thousands of neurons) that implement the specific data representations, transformations, and learning rules of cortical information processing algorithms, and these are therefore absent from (or speculative in) existing machine learning solutions. It is likely that explicit knowledge and use of these computations is required to move beyond the current generation of ?neurally-inspired? machine learning algorithms. Program Synopsis The MICrONS program aims to create novel machine learning algorithms that use neurally-inspired architectures *and* mathematical abstractions of the representations, transformations, and learning rules employed by the brain to achieve brain-like performance. To guide the construction of these algorithms, performers will conduct targeted neuroscience experiments that interrogate the operation of mesoscale cortical computing circuits, taking advantage of emerging tools for high-resolution structural and functional brain mapping. The program is designed to facilitate iterative refinement of algorithms based on a combination of practical, theoretical, and experimental outcomes: performers will use their experiences with the algorithms? design and performance to reveal gaps in their understanding of cortical computation, and will collect specific neuroscience data to inform new algorithmic implementations that address these limitations. Ultimately, as performers incorporate these insights into successive versions of the machine learning algorithms, they will devise solutions that can perform complex information processing tasks aiming towards human-like proficiency. Program Structure MICrONS is organized in three phases, totaling five years in duration. During each phase, performers conduct targeted neuroanatomical and neurophysiological studies to inform their understanding of the cortical computations underlying sensory information processing and, concurrently, create neurally-derived machine learning algorithms that perform similar functions. Performers motivate their experimental and algorithmic designs by formulating and updating a conceptual model or ?theoretical framework? for neural information processing in a given sensory modality. They use computational neural models (i.e., executable mathematic or algorithmic simulations of neurons and neural circuits) to establish a correspondence between the computations performed by biological wetware and the computations employed by their machine learning software. Each phase ends with an information processing challenge that assesses how well the new algorithms perform on increasingly challenging machine learning tasks: similarity discrimination in Phase 1, generalization and classification in Phase 2, and invariant recognition in Phase 3. Performers use the results of their experiments in each phase to guide their development of improved algorithms in the subsequent phase (in Phase 1, performers base their algorithms on the existing neuroscience literature). Technical Areas The MICrONS program comprises three Technical Areas (TAs). Although IARPA anticipates receiving a number of holistic proposals responding to all three TAs, it recognizes that some prospective offerors may have capabilities in only a subset of the overall program scope, and wishes to maximize its opportunity to leverage these capabilities. Therefore, offerors may choose to propose to one, two, or all three TAs. Because achieving MICrONS program goals will require significant collaboration across all three TAs, offerors who propose to only one or two TAs should be prepared to work closely with performers in the remaining TAs. The TAs in MICrONS are defined as follows: ? TA1 ? experimental design, theoretical neuroscience, computational neural modeling, machine learning, neurophysiological data collection, and data analysis; ? TA2 ? neuroanatomical data collection; and ? TA3 ? reconstruction of cortical circuits from neuroanatomical data and development of information technology systems to store, align, and access neural circuit reconstructions with the associated neurophysiological and neuroanatomical data. Success in the MICrONS program will require extensive communication and cooperation between performers in all three TAs within or across teams. For example, in TA2, performers must collect neuroanatomical data about the same brain regions *in the same brain specimens* that are used in TA1 for neurophysiological studies; in TA3, performers must reconstruct neural circuits from the data collected in TA2; and in TA1, performers must analyze the neural circuits generated in TA3 and use the resulting insights in formulating their machine learning algorithms and theoretical frameworks. All offerors are therefore required to include in their proposal a detailed management plan and a detailed description of how their proposed technical approach in one or more TAs is likely to impact the other TAs. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: IARPA-BAA-14-06_MICrONS_BAA.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 359882 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Hugo.Larochelle at USherbrooke.ca Wed Jan 14 11:54:07 2015 From: Hugo.Larochelle at USherbrooke.ca (Hugo Larochelle) Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 16:54:07 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: 1st CfP: ACL Workshop on Continuous Vector Space Models and their Compositionality (CVSC), 3rd edition Message-ID: <39E6E099-C8F7-45CE-B0DD-86E49AE0A45C@usherbrooke.ca> **************************************************************************************************** Workshop on Continuous Vector Space Models and their Compositionality (3rd edition) Co-located with ACL 2015, Beijing, China July 31, 2015 Submission deadline: May 14, 2015 https://sites.google.com/site/cvscworkshop2015 **************************************************************************************************** First Call for Papers (Apologies for multiple postings) In recent years, there has been a growing interest in algorithms that learn and use continuous representations for words, phrases, or documents in many natural language processing applications. Among many others, influential proposals that illustrate this trend include latent Dirichlet allocation, neural network based language models and spectral methods. These approaches are motivated by improving the generalization power of the discrete standard models, by dealing with the data sparsity issue and by efficiently handling a wide context. Despite the success of single word vector space models, they are limited since they do not capture compositionality. This prevents them from gaining a deeper understanding of the semantics of longer phrases, sentences and documents. Regarding this issue, some pertinent questions arise: should word/phrase/sentence representations be of the same sort? Could different linguistic levels require different modelling approaches ? Is compositionality determined by syntax, and if so, how do we learn/define it? Should word representations be fixed and obtained distributionally, or should the encoding be variable? Should word representations be task-specific, or should they be general? In this workshop, we invite submissions of papers on continuous vector space models for natural language processing. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Neural networks * Spectral methods * Distributional semantic models * Language modeling for automatic speech recognition, statistical machine translation, and information retrieval * Automatic annotation of texts * Phrase and sentence-level distributional representations * The role of syntax in compositional models * Formal and distributional semantic models * Language modeling for logical and natural reasoning * Integration of distributional representations with other models * Multi-modal learning for distributional representations * Knowledge base embedding INVITED SPEAKERS The workshop will showcase presentations from 4 to 6 keynote speakers. The confirmed speakers are: ? Yoav Goldberg (Bar Ilan University) ? Jason Weston (Facebook AI Research) ? Kyunghyun Cho (Universit? de Montr?al) SUBMISSION INFORMATION Authors should submit a full paper of up to 8 pages in electronic, PDF format, with up to 2 additional pages for references. The reported research should be substantially original. The papers will be presented orally or as posters. All submissions must be in PDF format and must follow the ACL 2015 formatting requirements (see the ACL 2015 Call For Papers http://acl2015.org/call_for_papers.html). Reviewing will be double-blind, and thus no author information should be included in the papers; self-reference should be avoided as well. Submissions must be made through the Softconf website set up for this workshop: https://www.softconf.com/acl2015/CVSC/ Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings, where no distinction will be made between papers presented orally or as posters. IMPORTANT DATES 14 May 2015 : Submission deadline 4 June 2015 : Notification of acceptance 21 June 2015 : Camera-ready deadline 31 July 2015 : Workshop ORGANIZERS Alexandre Allauzen (LIMSI-CNRS/Universit? Paris-Sud, France) Edward Grefenstette (University of Oxford, UK) Karl Moritz Hermann (University of Oxford, UK) Hugo Larochelle (Universit? de de Sherbrooke, Canada) Scott Wen-tau Yih (Microsoft Research, USA) PROGRAM COMMITTEE Marco Baroni, University of Trento Yoshua Bengio, Universit? de Montreal Phil Blunsom, University of Oxford Antoine Bordes, Facebook Leon Bottou, Microsoft Stephen Clark, University of Cambridge Shay Cohen, University of Edinburgh Georgiana Dinu, University of Trento Kevin Duh, Nara Institute of Science and Technology Yoav Goldberg, Bar Ilan University Andriy Mnih, University College London Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, University of London Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh Peter Turney, NRC Jason Weston, Facebook Guillaume Wisniewski, LIMSI-CNRS From simone.seeger at zi-mannheim.de Thu Jan 15 04:25:50 2015 From: simone.seeger at zi-mannheim.de (Seeger, Simone) Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 09:25:50 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Bernstein Conference 2015: Call for Workshops Message-ID: <68B5BBF569FEF84891D3AAB4D3141E453DA96B37@ZIMAIL2.Zi.local> The National Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience invites proposals for Satellite Workshops directly preceding the Bernstein Conference 2015 in Heidelberg ********************************************************************************** Call for Workshop proposals: Workshops: September 14, 2015 (Main Bernstein Conference: September 15-17, 2015) Deadline of proposal submission: March 15, 2015 Notification of acceptance: April 20, 2015 Conference Registration starts: April 27, 2015 Early Registration Deadline: July 21, 2015 ********************************************************************************** The Bernstein Conference started out as the annual meeting of the National Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience and has become the largest single-track Computational Neuroscience conference in Europe in recent years. Since 2013, the Bernstein Conference hosts pre-conference workshops, which have developed swiftly into a well-attended event. They supply a stage to debate topical research questions and challenges in Computational Neuroscience and related fields, different points of view and scientific approaches in an informal setting. Workshops addressing controversial issues, open problems, and comparisons of competing approaches are encouraged. SCHEDULE: September 14, 2015, 9:00 ? 18:30. You may apply for either half-day or full-day workshops. Workshop costs: The Bernstein Conference does not provide financial support, but workshop organizers and speakers are offered free workshop registration and reduced fees for the main conference. For further information about the conference, please visit the conference website. DETAILS FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS: Please find attached the Workshop Proposal form. Deadline for submission of Workshop Proposals: March 15, 2015 We are looking forward to meeting you in Heidelberg! THE WORKSHOP PROGRAM COMMITTEE -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Workshop Proposal.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 148145 bytes Desc: Workshop Proposal.pdf URL: From ahu at cs.stir.ac.uk Thu Jan 15 17:50:59 2015 From: ahu at cs.stir.ac.uk (Dr Amir Hussain) Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 22:50:59 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Call for Papers (Extended Deadline to 5 Feb 2015): IEEE IJCNN'2015 Special Session on: "Emerging Methodologies for Big Data Integration" Message-ID: CALL FOR PAPERS IEEE IJCNN 2015 Special Session on *"*Emerging Methodologies for Big Data Integration*"* July 12 - 17, 2015, Killarney, Ireland ( http://www.ijcnn.org/ ) ************************************************************************************** Important Announcement *************************************************************************************** Due to numerous requests, the IJCNN has kindly agreed to extend all paper submission deadlines to February 5th, 2015. ************************************************************************************* NEW: IMPORTANT DATES (REVISED) EXTENDED DEADLINE for Paper submission: February 5th, 2015 Paper Decision notification: March 25th, 2015 Camera-ready submission: April 25th, 2015 Conference Dates: July 12 - 17th, 2015 *********************************************************** Over the years, huge quantities of data have been generated by large-scale scientific experiments (biomedical, ?omic?, imaging, astronomical, etc.), big industrial companies and on the web. One of the main characteristics of such Big Data is that they are multi-view, i.e. there are multiple sources (in the ?omics? sciences, experiments related to mRNA, miRNA etc.), relate the same patterns (in this case patients) or multi-domain (in biomedical applications for examples, ?omics, imaging and clinical data). As a consequence, new methodologies based on neural networks, machine and statistical learning, computation Intelligence and others, have been proposed to integrate these kinds of big data and to elicit relevant information to infer novel models and correlations. The aim of the special session is to solicit new approaches to real world scientific and industrial big data integration, as well as applications of above mentioned Big Data methodologies. *Topics** Papers must present original work or review the state-of-the-art in the following non-exhaustive list of topics: Multi-view learning Multi-view clustering data fusion data integration multi-view data applications multi domain data applications THE DEADLINE FOR THE PAPER SUBMISSION TO THE SPECIAL SESSION IS THE SAME OF IJCNN 2015, January 15th 2015. All the submissions will be peer-reviewed with the same criteria used for other contributed papers. Perspective authors will submit their papers through the IJCNN2015 conference submission system at http://www.ijcnn.org/ Please make sure to select the Special Session "Emerging Methodologies for Big Data Integration " from the "S. SPECIAL SESSION TOPICS" name in the "Main Research topic" dropdown list; Templates and instructions for authors will be provided on the IJCNN webpage http://www.ijcnn.org/ All papers submitted to the special sessions will be subject to the same peer-review procedure as regular papers, accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Further information about IJCNN 2015 can be fond at http://www.ijcnn.org/ and about the special session at http://neuronelab.unisa.it/emerging-methodologies-for-big-data-integration/ We look forward to seeing you soon in Kilarney! *********************************************************** **Organizers** - Amir Hussain Professor of Computing Science and founding Director of the Cognitive Signal-Image Processing and Control Systems Research (COSIPRA) Laboratory, University of Stirling, UK (E-mail: ahu at cs.stir.ac.uk http://cs.stir.ac.uk/~ahu) - Giovanni Montana Professor and Chair in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Biomedical Engineering Department, King?s College, London, UK (E-mail: giovanni.montana at kcl.ac.uk) - Francesco Carlo Morabito Professor and Chair of the Neurolab, Dipartimento DICEAM, Universit? Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria, Italy (E-mail: morabito at unirc.it) - Roberto TAGLIAFERRI Professor and Chair of the Neuronelab, Dipartimento di Informatica, Universit? di Salerno, Italy (E-mail: robtag at unisa.it) **Technical Program Committee (being continuously updated)** Elia Mario Biganzoli, Universit? di Milano, Italy Erik Cambria, NTU, Singapore Ciro Donalek, Caltech, CA, USA Anna Esposito, Seconda Universit? di Napoli, Italy Marcos Faundez-Zanuy, Escola Universitaria Politecnica de Mataro (Tecnocampus), Spain Alexander Gelbukh, National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico Dario Greco, FIOH, Finland Newton Howard, MIT Media Lab, USA Pietro Li?, University of Cambridge, UK Bin Luo, Anhui University, China Mufti Mahmud, Antwerp University, Belgium Riccardo Rizzo, CNR, Italy Jingpeng Li, University of Stirling, UK Domenico Ursino, Universit? Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria, Italy Alfredo Vellido, Universidad Polit?cnica de Catalu?a, Spain Pierangelo Veltri, Universit? "Magna Graecia" di Catanzaro, Italy Jonathan Wu, University of Windsor, Canada Yunqing Xia, Tsinghua University, China Kang Li, Queen's University, Belfast, UK Dongbing Gu, Essex University, UK Vincent C. M?ller, Anatolia College/ACT, Greece & Oxford University, UK Dongbin Zhao, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China Paulo Lisboa, Liverpool John Moores University, UK ************************************************************************************** -- The University of Stirling has been ranked in the top 12 of UK universities for graduate employment*. 94% of our 2012 graduates were in work and/or further study within six months of graduation. *The Telegraph The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gunnar.blohm at gmail.com Fri Jan 16 11:57:51 2015 From: gunnar.blohm at gmail.com (Gunnar Blohm) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 11:57:51 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: CoSMo 2015 summer school announcement Message-ID: <54B9430F.7070501@queensu.ca> *Fifth Annual Computational Sensory-Motor Neuroscience Summer School (CoSMo 2015)* Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands June 28 - July 11, 2015 We would like to invite you to join us for the fifth annual Computational Sensory-Motor Neuroscience Summer School. The course is about experimental, computational and medical aspects of sensory-motor neuroscience with a focus on active learning. Covered topics include multi-sensory integration, motor learning & control, computational methods, sensory-motor transformations and neural coding / decoding. An important focus is on doing research as opposed to just hearing about it. Each teaching module will take up two days with morning lecture sessions. Afternoon sessions involve hands-on Matlab programming, simulation and data-analysis. Newly acquired computational tools can also be applied in 2-week evening group research projects. The course is aimed at students and post-doctoral fellows from diverse backgrounds including Life Sciences, Psychology, Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics and Engineering. Basic knowledge in calculus, linear algebra and Matlab is expected. Enrollment will be limited to 40 trainees. *Application deadline: Mar 15, 2015* For more information and to apply, please go to http://www.compneurosci.com/CoSMo/ The school is co-organized by Drs Gunnar Blohm, Paul Schrater, John van Opstal, Pieter Medendorp and Konrad K?rding. This year, it receives funding from the EU FP7 Marie-Curie IDP Training Network /HealthPAC/, and the Perception, Action and Control research network of the Donders Institute at Radboud University Nijmegen. -- ------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Gunnar BLOHM Associate Professor in Computational Neuroscience Association for Canadian Neuroinformatics and Computational Neuroscience (CNCN) Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Departments of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences, Mathematics & Statistics, and Psychology, School of Computing, and Canadian Action and Perception Network (CAPnet) Queen?s University 18, Stuart Street Kingston, Ontario, Canada, K7L 3N6 Tel: (613) 533-3385 Fax: (613) 533-6840 Email: Gunnar.Blohm at QueensU.ca Web: http://www.compneurosci.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From grlmc at urv.cat Sat Jan 17 09:55:33 2015 From: grlmc at urv.cat (GRLMC) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 15:55:33 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: BigDat 2015: early registration deadline 23 January Message-ID: *To be removed from our mailing list, please respond to this message with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line* ***************************************************** INTERNATIONAL WINTER SCHOOL ON BIG DATA BigDat 2015 Tarragona, Spain January 26-30, 2015 Organized by Rovira i Virgili University http://grammars.grlmc.com/bigdat2015/ ***************************************************** --- Early registration deadline: January 23, 2015 --- ***************************************************** AIM: BigDat 2015 is a research training event for graduates and postgraduates in the first steps of their academic career. It aims at updating them about the most recent developments in the fast developing area of big data, which covers a large spectrum of current exciting research, development and innovation with an extraordinary potential for a huge impact on scientific discoveries, medicine, engineering, business models, and society itself. Renowned academics and industry pioneers will lecture and share their views with the audience. All big data subareas will be displayed, namely: foundations, infrastructure, management, search and mining, security and privacy, and applications. Main challenges of analytics, management and storage of big data will be identified through 4 keynote lectures, 22 six-hour courses, and 1 round table, which will tackle the most lively and promising topics. The organizers believe outstanding speakers will attract the brightest and most motivated students. Interaction will be a main component of the event. ADDRESSED TO: Graduate and postgraduates from around the world. There are no formal pre-requisites in terms of academic degrees. However, since there will be differences in the course levels, specific knowledge background may be required for some of them. BigDat 2015 is also appropriate for more senior people who want to keep themselves updated on recent developments and future trends. They will surely find it fruitful to listen and discuss with major researchers, industry leaders and innovators. REGIME: In addition to keynotes, 3 courses will run in parallel 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: BigDat 2015 will take place in Tarragona, located 90 kms. to the south of Barcelona. The venue will be: Campus Catalunya Universitat Rovira i Virgili Av. Catalunya, 35 43002 Tarragona KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Ian Foster (Argonne National Laboratory), Taming Big Data: Accelerating Discovery via Outsourcing and Automation Geoffrey C. Fox (Indiana University, Bloomington), Mapping Big Data Applications to Clouds and HPC C. Lee Giles (Pennsylvania State University, University Park), Scholarly Big Data: Information Extraction and Data Mining William D. Gropp (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Using MPI I/O for Big Data COURSES AND PROFESSORS: Hendrik Blockeel (KU Leuven), [intermediate] Decision Trees for Big Data Analytics Diego Calvanese (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano), [introductory/intermediate] End-User Access to Big Data Using Ontologies Jiannong Cao (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), [introductory/intermediate] Programming with Big Data Edward Y. Chang (HTC Corporation, New Taipei City), [introductory/advanced] Big Data Analytics: Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications Ernesto Damiani (University of Milan), [introductory/intermediate] Process Discovery and Predictive Decision Making from Big Data Sets and Streams Gautam Das (University of Texas, Arlington), [intermediate/advanced] Mining Deep Web Repositories Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam), tba Geoffrey C. Fox (Indiana University, Bloomington), [intermediate] Using Software Defined Systems to Address Big Data Problems Minos Garofalakis (Technical University of Crete, Chania) [intermediate/advanced], Querying Continuous Data Streams Vasant G. Honavar (Pennsylvania State University, University Park) [introductory/intermediate], Learning Predictive Models from Big Data Tao Li (Florida International University, Miami), [introductory/intermediate] Data Mining Techniques to Understand Textual Data Kwan-Liu Ma (University of California, Davis), [intermediate] Big Data Visualization Christoph Meinel (Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam), [introductory/intermediate] New Computing Power by In-Memory and Multicore to Tackle Big Data Manish Parashar (Rutgers University, Piscataway), [intermediate] Big Data Challenges in Simulation-based Science Srinivasan Parthasarathy (Ohio State University, Columbus), [intermediate] Scalable Data Analysis Evaggelia Pitoura (University of Ioannina), [introductory/intermediate] Online Social Networks Vijay V. Raghavan (University of Louisiana, Lafayette), [introductory/intermediate] Visual Analytics of Time-evolving Large-scale Graphs Pierangela Samarati (University of Milan), [intermediate], Data Security and Privacy in the Cloud Peter Sanders (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), [introductory/intermediate] Algorithm Engineering for Large Data Sets Johan Suykens (KU Leuven), [introductory/intermediate] Fixed-size Kernel Models for Big Data Domenico Talia (University of Calabria, Rende), [intermediate] Scalable Data Mining on Parallel, Distributed and Cloud Computing Systems Jieping Ye (Arizona State University, Tempe), [introductory/advanced] Large-Scale Sparse Learning and Low Rank Modeling ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona) Carlos Mart?n-Vide (Tarragona, chair) Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona) REGISTRATION: It has to be done at http://grammars.grlmc.com/bigdat2015/registration.php The selection of up to 8 courses requested in the registration template is only tentative and non-binding. For the sake of organization, it will be helpful to have an approximation of the respective demand for each course. 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 and the on-line registration facility disabled when the capacity of the venue will be complete. It is much recommended to register prior to the event. FEES: As far as possible, participants are expected to stay full-time. Fees are a flat rate covering the attendance to all courses during the week. There are several early registration deadlines. Fees depend on the registration deadline. ACCOMMODATION: Suggestions of accommodation are available on the webpage. CERTIFICATE: Participants will be delivered a certificate of attendance. QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION: florentinalilica.voicu at urv.cat POSTAL ADDRESS: BigDat 2015 Lilica Voicu Rovira i Virgili University Av. Catalunya, 35 43002 Tarragona, Spain Phone: +34 977 559 543 Fax: +34 977 558 386 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Universitat Rovira i Virgili --- Este mensaje no contiene virus ni malware porque la protecci?n de avast! Antivirus est? activa. http://www.avast.com From k.wong-lin at ulster.ac.uk Sat Jan 17 20:08:52 2015 From: k.wong-lin at ulster.ac.uk (Wong-Lin, Kongfatt) Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 01:08:52 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Opportunities for Ph.D. Studentships in Computational Neuroscience Message-ID: The Intelligent Systems Research Centre (ISRC) at the University of Ulster, UK, invites applications for 3-year Ph.D. studentships. A list of studentships offered for the academic year 2015-2016 and the projects? details can be found at: http://www.compeng.ulster.ac.uk/rgs/showPhDProposals.php?ri=3. In particular, I have the following computational neuroscience projects available: 1. Computational modelling and analysis of spatiotemporal brain dynamics in decision making. 2. A neuro-inspired multisensory decision-making model with self-awareness for autonomous mobile robots. 3. Computational neuromodulation: neural circuit modelling. The computational neuroscience research at the ISRC focuses on both fundamental brain and behavioural sciences, and their applications, including clinical neuroscience and neuroengineering. The application process for the Ph.D. studentship is opened with a closing date for applications on the 27th February 2015. All studentships, which are highly competitive, are expected to start in September 2015, and include tuition fees and an annual maintenance allowance for EU and non-EU students. All applicants should hold a first or upper second class honours degree (or equivalent) in an appropriate subject, such as computer science, engineering, physics, mathematics or neuroscience. Applicants must be highly motivated and willing to pursue research and develop skills across disciplines. If you wish to apply for a studentship, please follow the instructions at: http://www.compeng.ulster.ac.uk/rgs/guideForApplicants.php. Unless indicated, successful students will be based primarily at the ISRC with opportunities to interact with other related ISRC research teams, research groups from the Biomedical Sciences Research Institute, the Centre for Stratified Medicine, and there may also be opportunities for spin-outs. A functional brain mapping facility has recently been established at the ISRC. The ISRC is situated in the city of Derry~Londonderry, which has received the City of Culture 2013 award. Please note that some studentships (DEL Awards) have restrictions on residence eligibility ? see guidance notes for details. For further information, please contact me (k.wong-lin at ulster.ac.uk). ---- Dr. KongFatt Wong-Lin Computational Neuroscience Research Team Intelligent Systems Research Centre University of Ulster ________________________________ This email and any attachments are confidential and intended solely for the use of the addressee and may contain information which is covered by legal, professional or other privilege. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager at postmaster at ulster.ac.uk and delete this email immediately. Any views or opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Ulster University. The University's computer systems may be monitored and communications carried out on them may be recorded to secure the effective operation of the system and for other lawful purposes. Ulster University does not guarantee that this email or any attachments are free from viruses or 100% secure. Unless expressly stated in the body of a separate attachment, the text of email is not intended to form a binding contract. Correspondence to and from the University may be subject to requests for disclosure by 3rd parties under relevant legislation. The University of Ulster was founded by Royal Charter in 1984 and is registered with company number RC000726 and VAT registered number GB672390524.The primary contact address for Ulster University in Northern Ireland is Cromore Road, Coleraine, Co. Londonderry BT52 1SA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alessandro at idsia.ch Fri Jan 16 04:34:42 2015 From: alessandro at idsia.ch (Alessandro Antonucci) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 10:34:42 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: =?utf-8?q?CfP_-_IJCAI=E2=80=9915_Workshop_on_Sens?= =?utf-8?q?itivity_Analysis_and_Robustness_in_Probabilistic_Graphic?= =?utf-8?q?al_Models?= Message-ID: IJCAI?15 Workshop on Sensitivity Analysis and Robustness in Probabilistic Graphical Models Buenos Aires, July 25-27, 2015 - http://ipg.idsia.ch/wijcai15/ FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS Probabilistic graphical models are important tools in machine learning and artificial intelligence for reasoning with uncertainty. They provide means to represent large multivariate domains compactly and to perform sophisticated learning and reasoning efficiently. Examples of probabilistic graphical models are Bayesian networks, Markov Random fields, chain and factor graphs, Gaussian graphical models, to name but a few. The quantification of these models usually requires sharp (i.e., precise) assessments of the model local potentials and might be subject to robustness issues. For instance, perturbations of some parameter values may lead to different decisions from those which would be achieved by the unperturbed model, suggesting that decisions are not reliable. Reliability might also be in question because of missing data and assumptions behind the process. The workshop invites submissions of papers on all aspects of sensitivity analysis and robustness in probabilistic graphical models. Contributions may have a theoretical focus and/or an applied focus. A non-exhaustive list of topics follows. - Local and/or global sensitivity analysis. - Parameter-based and/or decision-based sensitivity analysis. - Design of robust learning, inference and/or decision making approaches. - Robust analysis and design of robustness measurements. - Extensions of probabilistic graphical models. - Reliable qualitative learning and reasoning. - Robust treatment of missing data. - Imprecise probability and other theories related to sensitivity analysis. - Computational complexity, exact and approximate algorithms. Each submission will be reviewed by peers using a double-blind process (please use the third person in self citations and take all necessary care not to identify yourselves). Accepted papers will be published electronically in a volume of the JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings series. There will be no rebuttal phase, but contributions considered worth publishing and needing substantial revision might be subject to a second round of reviewing/evaluation. All accepted papers will be presented at the workshop. At least one of the paper's authors should register and attend the workshop to present the work. Submissions must be formatted according to style and template files available for the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) Workshop and Conference Proceedings - two-column version. The files are available at http://ipg.idsia.ch/wijcai15/sarpgm15.tar.gz Papers (including figures, tables, references, etc) are expected to have between 6 and 10 pages. IMPORTANT DATES Apr 27, 2015 - Deadline for submissions of contributions May 20, 2015 - Workshop paper acceptance notification May 30, 2015 - Deadline for workshop camera-ready copy (in case of minor revision; contributions needing major revision might need additional time - this will be arranged case by case) PC MEMBERS Alessandro Antonucci*, IDSIA, Switzerland. Alessio Benavoli, IDSIA, Switzerland. Cassio P. de Campos*, Queen's University Belfast, UK. Arthur Choi, University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Giorgio Corani*, IDSIA, Switzerland. Fabio Cozman, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Adnan Darwiche, University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Sebastien Destercke, Univ. de Technologie de Compiegne, France. Marek Druzdzel, University of Pittsburgh, USA. Johan Kwisthout, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Agnieszka Onisko, Bialystok University of Technology, Poland. Denis Maua, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Serafin Moral, Universidad de Granada, Spain. Silja Renooij, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands. Matthias Troffaes, University of Durham, UK. (*: Workshop organizers.) More details about the submission procedure are available online. http://ipg.idsia.ch/wijcai15/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ (We apologize in case you receive multiple copies of this announcement, but yet we hope to reach the greatest possible number of people. Finding a trade-off is not an easy task.) -- _________________________________ Alessandro Antonucci IDSIA Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Via Cantonale (Galleria 2) CH-6928, Manno-Lugano, CH mail: alessandro at idsia.ch skype: alessandro.antonucci tel: +41 916108515 web: www.idsia.ch/~alessandro _________________________________ From mpavone at dmi.unict.it Sat Jan 17 10:09:01 2015 From: mpavone at dmi.unict.it (Mario Pavone) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 16:09:01 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: AIS 2015 special issues in BMC Immunology & EAAI; 2 Keynote Speakers - 17-18 July 2015 Taormina, Italy Message-ID: <20150117160901.Horde.trAGaeph4B9UunsNF1jimJA@mbox.dmi.unict.it> CALL FOR PAPERS, ABSTRACTS, ORAL/POSTER PRESENTATIONS ** Apologies for cross-posting ** ** Please forward to anybody who might be interested. ** International Workshop on Artificial Immune Systems - Systems & Synthetic Immunology, Computational Immunology & Immune-Inspired Engineering - July 17-18, 2015 - Taormina, Italy http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/ ais2015 at ieee-cis-ais.org *** The submission system with IEEE proceeding is now open: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ais2015 *** You are invited to submit papers to this exciting event! *** *** The future seen together by Immunologists & Modelers! *** -- **** PLENARY SPEAKERS: http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/plenary.html Alessandro SETTE, La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology, La Jolla, USA Hugues BERSINI, IRIDIA, Universit? Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium **** SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 18th February 2015 http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/dates.html **** POST-PROCEEDINGS in IEEE Press, http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/calls.html **** Special issue in: BMC IMMUNOLOGY & ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ** Paper Submission ** AIS 2015 includes three different types of submission: 1) *regular paper*: 8-pages maximum length, including figures, table & references. It should report on new and unpublished work; 2) *abstract*: no more than 2 pages length; 3) *Oral/Poster presentations* without IEEE Proceeding: no pages restriction. It should discuss works in progress; new research ideas; works previously published elsewhere (it is essential that a reference to the previous article is clearly cited); and all that may be relevant and fruitful for soliciting discussions at the workshop. All the submitted papers must be formatted using IEEE style (http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html). Note that the format is exactly the same for all options. ** Venue & Accommodation ** The conference will be held in Taormina http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/location.html All information may be found at the following links: http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/venue.html http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/accommodation.html ----- http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/ ais2015 at ieee-cis-ais.org Submission System with Proceedings https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ais2015 Looking forward to welcoming you to Taormina in July 2015. Carlos A. Coello Coello, Vincenzo Cutello, Doheon Lee, and Mario Pavone. -- Dr. Mario Pavone (PhD) Assistant Professor Department of Mathematics and Computer Science University of Catania V.le A. Doria 6 - 95125 Catania, Italy tel: 0039 095 7383038 fax: 0039 095 330094 Email: mpavone at dmi.unict.it http://www.dmi.unict.it/mpavone/ =========================================================================== SSBSS 2015 - International Synthetic & Systems Biology Summer School * Biology meets Engineering and Computer Science * July 5-9, 2015 - Taormina, Italy http://www.taosciences.it/ssbss2015/ =========================================================================== AIS 2015 - International Workshop on Artificial Immune Systems * Systems & Synthetic Immunology, Computational Immunology, Immune-Inspired Engineering * July 17-18, 2015 - Taormina, Italy http://www.dmi.unict.it/ais2015/ =========================================================================== MOD 2015 - International Workshop on Machine Learning, Optimization & big Data July 21-24, 2015 - Taormina, Italy http://www.taosciences.it/mod-2015/ =========================================================================== 12th European Conference on Artificial Life - ECAL 2013 September 2-6, 2013 - Taormina, Italy http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/advances-artificial-life-ecal-2013 =========================================================================== From giacomo.cabri at unimore.it Fri Jan 16 16:31:48 2015 From: giacomo.cabri at unimore.it (Giacomo Cabri) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 22:31:48 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Extended deadline: COORDINATION 2015 Abstract Submission: Jan. 23, 2015 Message-ID: <54B98344.8030800@unimore.it> ======================================================================== IMPORTANT NOTE: High-quality Coordination-2015 papers will be invited to submit an extended version for a 'fast-track' to the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (ACM-TAAS). ======================================================================== ========================= Call for Papers ============================= COORDINATION 2015 17th IFIP International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages A DisCoTec Member Conference http://discotec2015.inria.fr/ June 2-4, 2015, Grenoble, France ======================================================================= ---------------- Important dates: Abstract Submission: January 23, 2015 (24:00 UTC-11) OPTIONAL Paper Submission: January 23, 2015 (24:00 UTC-11) Author Notification: March 6, 2015 Camera ready copy: March 27, 2015 Early registration: May 5, 2015 Conferences and workshops: June 2-5, 2015 The time of all deadlines is 24:00 SST (UTC-11, Samoa Standard Time). ------ Scope: COORDINATION 2015 is the premier forum for publishing research results and experience reports on software technologies for collaboration and coordination in concurrent, distributed, and complex systems. The key focus of the conference is the quest for high-level abstractions that can capture interaction patterns and mechanisms occurring at all levels of the software architecture, up to the end-user domain. COORDINATION 2015 seeks high-quality contributions on the usage, study, formal analysis, design, and implementation of languages, models, and techniques for coordination in distributed, concurrent, pervasive, and multicore software systems. This edition also additionally seeks to adapt and integrate traditional COORDINATION techniques in the realm of multi-agent systems (MAS), which typically involve more corse-grained (cognitive, intelligent, goal-oriented) components. ------------------------ Main topics of interest: * Programming abstractions and languages * Coordination models and paradigms * Specification and verification * Foundations and types * Distributed middleware architectures * Multicore programming * Coordinated distributed applications * Bio-inspired computing models * Coordination mechanisms for self-adaptation and self-organisation * Teamwork and distributed problem solving * Collective intelligence * Auction and Negotiation * Argumentation, trust, norms and reputation * Coordination mechanisms for rational agents * Coordination middleware for mobile agents * Coordination of federated MASs --------------------------- Submission and publication: Contributions must be written in English and report on original, unpublished work not submitted for publication elsewhere (cf. IFIP's codes of conduct). The submissions must not exceed the page number limit (see below), including figures and references, prepared using Springer's LNCS style. Submissions not adhering to the above specified constraints may be rejected without review. Papers should be submitted as PDF or PS via EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=coordination2015. We solicit three kinds of submissions: *Full papers* (up to 16 pages): Describing thorough and complete research results and experience reports. *Short papers* (up to 8 pages): Describing research results that are not fully developed, or even manifestos, calls to action, personal views on the past of Coordination research, on the current state of the art, or on prospects for the years to come. *Posters* (up to 3 pages): Summarising research projects worth being advertised and discussed in a lively fashion at the conference. The conference proceedings, formed by accepted submissions of all three kinds above, will be published by Springer in the LNCS Series. Post-proceedings publication: Relevant, high-quality Coordination-2015 papers will be invited for 'fast-track submissions' to the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (ACM-TAAS). --------------- Invited Speaker Alois Ferscha (Johannes Kepler Universit?t Linz, Austria) ----------- Oranization Program Chairs Tom Holvoet (KU Leuven, Belgium) Mirko Viroli (University of Bologna, Italy) Publicity Chair Giacomo Cabri (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy) Programme Committee Gul Agha (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) Farhad Arbab (CWI and Leiden University, The Netherlands) Jacob Beal (Raytheon BBN Technologies, USA) Olivier Boissier (Ecole Nationale Sup?rieure des Mines of Saint-Etienne, France) Ferruccio Damiani (Uniersit? di Torino, Italy) Wolfgang De Meuter (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Rocco De Nicola (IMT - Institute for Advanced Studies, Italy) Ed Durfee (University of Michigan, USA) Schahram Dustdar (Vienna University of Technology, Austria) Gianluigi Ferrari (University of Pisa, Italy) Jos? Luiz Fiadeiro (Royal Holloway University of London, UK) Val?rie Issarny (Inria, France) Christine Julien (The University of Texas at Austin, USA) Sarit Kraus (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) Eva Kuhn (TU Wien, Austria) Marino Miculan (Universit? di Udine, Italy) Hanne Riis Nielson (Technical University of Denmark, Denmark) Andrea Omicini (University of Bologna, Italy) Sascha Ossowski (University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain) Paolo Petta (OFAI - Austria Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Austria) Rosario Pugliese (Universit? degli Studi di Firenze, Italy) Alessandro Ricci (Uniervsit? di Bologna, Italy) Juan Antonio Rodriguez Aguilar (IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona) Carles Sierra (IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona) Marjan Sirjani (Reykjavik University, Iceland) Carolyn Talcott (SRI International, California, USA) Emilio Tuosto (University of Leicester, UK) Herbert Wiklicky (Imperial College London, UK) Martin Wirsing (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit?t M?nchen, Germany) Franco Zambonelli (Universit? di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy) Steering Committee Gul Agha (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA) Farhad Arbab (CWI and Leiden University, The Netherlands) (Chair) Dave Clarke (Uppsala University, Sweden) Tom Holvoet (KU Leuven, Belgium) Jean-Marie Jacquet (University of Namur, Belgium) Christine Julien (The University of Texas at Austin, USA) Eva K?hn (Vienna University of Technology, Austria) Wolfgang De Meuter (Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium) Rocco De Nicola (IMT - Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy) Rosario Pugliese (Universit? di Firenze, Italy) Marjan Sirjani (Reykjavik University, Iceland) Carolyn Talcott (SRI International, California, USA) Vasco T. Vasconcelos (University of Lisbon, Portugal) Gianluigi Zavattaro (University of Bologna, Italy) Mirko Viroli (University of Bologna, Italy) -- |----------------------------------------------------| | Prof. Giacomo Cabri - Ph.D., Associate Professor | Dip. di Scienze Fisiche, Informatiche e Matematiche | Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia - Italia | e-mail giacomo.cabri at unimore.it | tel. +39-059-2058320 fax +39-059-2055216 |----------------------------------------------------| From dlessin at cs.utexas.edu Sat Jan 17 13:04:42 2015 From: dlessin at cs.utexas.edu (Dan Lessin) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 12:04:42 -0600 (CST) Subject: Connectionists: relevant dissertation on evolved virtual creatures Message-ID: Hi, everyone. I'm writing to let you know that my dissertation (along with my doctorate!) is complete, since it contains some material that may be relevant to group members' interests. The title is "Evolved Virtual Creatures as Content: Increasing Behavioral and Morphological Complexity" (abstract below), and it can be found online at http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?lessin:phd14 . Of course, I would welcome any comments or questions that you might have. Best wishes for the new year, Dan Lessin dles at itu.dk Abstract: Throughout history, creature-based content has been a highly valued source of entertainment. With the introduction of evolved virtual creatures (or EVCs) by Karl Sims in 1994, a new source of creature content became available. Despite their immediate appeal, however, EVCs still lag far behind their natural counterparts: Neither their morphology nor their behavior is sufficiently complex. This dissertation presents three contributions to address this problem. First, the ESP system, which combines a human-designed syllabus with encapsulation and conflict-resolution mechanisms, is used to approximately double the state of the art in behavioral complexity for evolved virtual creatures. Second, an extension to ESP is presented that allows full morphological adaptation to continue beyond the initial skill. It produces both a greater variety of solutions and solutions with higher fitness. Third, a muscle-drive system is demonstrated to embody a significant degree of physical intelligence. It increases morphological complexity and reduces demands on the brain, thus freeing resources for more complex behaviors. Together, these contributions bring evolved virtual creatures, in both action and form, a significant step closer to matching the entertainment value of creatures from the real world. From chen at cse.wustl.edu Sun Jan 18 01:13:17 2015 From: chen at cse.wustl.edu (Yixin Chen) Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 00:13:17 -0600 Subject: Connectionists: [meetings][CFP] AAAI-15 Open House Message-ID: The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) will be holding a public open house as part of their annual research conference. The public is invited to come and see a small sample of the latest work in Artificial Intelligence, including robotics, game-playing programs, and much more. Admission to the open house is free but please register here:movingai.com/AAAI15/register.html. Please contact William Yeoh (wyeoh at cs.nmsu.edu) or Nathan Sturtevant (sturtevant at cs.du.edu) for inquiries, or if you would like to bring a group of participants to attend this event. ________________________________ Speeches The Future of (Artificial) Intelligence Speaker: Stuart Russell, University of California, Berkeley Time: 1:00pm Location: Zilker 3 Ballroom Abstract: The news media in recent months have been full of dire warnings about the risk that AI poses to the human race, coming from well-known figures such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. Should we be concerned? If so, what can we do about it? If Machines Are Capable of Doing Almost Any Work Humans Can Do, What Will Humans Do? Speaker: Moshe Vardi, Rice University Time: 4:30pm Location: Zilker 3 Ballroom Abstract: Over the past 15 years Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made remarkable progress. While AI has been proven to be much more difficult than believed by its early pioneers, its inexorable progress over the past 50 years suggests that H. Simon was probably right when he wrote in 1956 "machines will be capable ... of doing any work a man can do." I do not expect this to happen in the very near future, but I do believe that by 2045 machines will be able to do a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do. The following question, therefore, seems to be of paramount importance. If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? -- Yixin Chen, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Computer Science Washington University in St. Louis http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~chen/ Phone: (314) 935-7528 From jamesk at cse.ust.hk Sat Jan 17 02:58:44 2015 From: jamesk at cse.ust.hk (jamesk) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 15:58:44 +0800 Subject: Connectionists: Call for Papers: IEEE 2015 International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics Message-ID: <54BA1634.9090703@cse.ust.hk> ***** Call for Papers ****** IEEE 2015 International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2015) 19-21 October, 2015, Paris, France Website: http://dsaa2015.lip6.fr/ Important Dates =============== Paper Submission deadline: 18 May, 2015 Notification of acceptance: 6 July, 2015 Final Camera-ready papers due: 28 August, 2015 Publications ============ All accepted papers will be published by IEEE and included in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. The conference proceedings will be submitted for EI indexing through INSPEC by IEEE. Top quality papers accepted and presented at the conference will be selected for extension and publication in the special issues of some international journals, including IEEE Intelligent Systems and WWWJ. Introduction ============ Data driven scientific discovery is an important emerging paradigm for computing in areas including social, service, Internet of Things, sensor networks, telecommunications, biology, health-care and cloud. Under this paradigm, Data Science is the core that drives new researches in many areas, from environmental to social. There are many associated scientific challenges, ranging from data capture, creation, storage, search, sharing, modeling, analysis, and visualization. Among the complex aspects to be addressed we mention here the integration across heterogeneous, interdependent complex data resources for real-time decision making, streaming data, collaboration, and ultimately value co-creation. Data science encompasses the areas of data analytics, machine learning, statistics, optimization and managing big data, and has become essential to glean understanding from large data sets and convert data into actionable intelligence, be it data available to enterprises, Government or on the Web. Following the first successful edition held in 2014 in Shanghai, the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2015) aims to provide a premier forum that brings together researchers, industry practitioners, as well as potential users of big data, for discussion and exchange of ideas on the latest theoretical developments in Data Science as well as on the best practices for a wide range of applications. DSAA is also technically sponsored by ACM through SIGKDD. DSAA'2015 will consist of two main Tracks: Research and Application; the Research Track is aimed at collecting contributions related to theoretical foundations of Data Science and Data Analytics. The Application Track is aimed at collecting contributions related to applications of Data Science and Data Analytics in real life scenarios. DSAA solicits then both theoretical and practical works on data science and advanced analytics. Topics of Interest ================== General areas of interest to DSAA'2015 include but are not limited to: 1. Foundations - New mathematical, probabilistic and statistical models and theories - New machine learning theories, models and systems - New knowledge discovery theories, models and systems - Manifold and metric learning, deep learning - Scalable analysis and learning - Non-iidness learning - Heterogeneous data/information integration - Data pre-processing, sampling and reduction - High dimensional data, feature selection and feature transformation - Large scale optimization - High performance computing for data analytics - Architecture, management and process for data science 2. Data analytics, machine learning and knowledge discovery - Learning for streaming data - Learning for structured and relational data - Intent and insight learning - Mining multi-source and mixed-source information - Mixed-type and structure data analytics - Cross-media data analytics - Big data visualization, modeling and analytics - Multimedia/stream/text/visual analytics - Relation, coupling, link and graph mining - Personalization analytics and learning - Web/online/social/network mining and learning - Structure/group/community/network mining - Cloud computing and service data analysis 3. Storage, retrieval and search - Data warehouses, cloud architectures - Large-scale databases - Information and knowledge retrieval - Web/social/databases query and search - Personalized search and recommendation - Human-machine interaction and interfaces - Crowdsourcing and collective intelligence 4. Privacy and security - Security, trust and risk in big data - Data integrity, matching and sharing - Privacy and protection standards and policies - Privacy preserving big data access/analytics - Social impact 5. Applications, practices, tools and evaluation - Best practices and lessons - Data-intensive organizations, business and economy - Domain-specific applications - Business/government analytics - Online/social/living/environment data analysis - Mobile analytics for hand-held devices - Quality assessment and interestingness metrics - Complexity, efficiency and scalability - Anomaly/fraud/exception/change/event/crisis analysis - Large-scale recommender and search systems - Big data representation and visualization - Large scale application case studies Organizing Committee ==================== Honorary Chair - Usama Fayyad, Barclays Bank, UK General Chairs - Longbing Cao, University of Technology Sydney, Australia - Eric Gaussier, University Joseph Fourier, France Conference Chairs - Olivier Capp?, Telecom Paristech, CNRS, France - Wei Wang, University of California at Los Angeles, USA Research Track Chairs - Patrick Gallinari, University Pierre & Marie Curie, France - James Kwok, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China Application Track Chairs - Gabriella Pasi, Universita degli Studi di Milano Biccoca, Italy - Osmar Zaiane, University of Alberta, Canada From lpulina at uniss.it Thu Jan 15 12:51:07 2015 From: lpulina at uniss.it (Luca Pulina) Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 18:51:07 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: CALL FOR PAPERS -- The 9th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR 2015) Message-ID: <54B7FE0B.2040509@uniss.it> [apologies for any cross-posting] ****************************************************************** CALL FOR PAPERS The 9th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR 2015) Berlin, Germany, August 4-6, 2015 http://www.csw.inf.fu-berlin.de/RR2015/ ****************************************************************** The International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR) is a major forum for discussion and dissemination of new results concerning Web Reasoning and Rule Systems. RR 2015 is colocated with the following events: - 11th Reasoning Web Summer School (RW 2015) Berlin, Germany, July 31 - August 4, 2015. http://www.csw.inf.fu-berlin.de/rw2015/ - The 25th International Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE 2015). Berlin, Germany, August 1 - August 7, 2015. http://conference.mi.fu-berlin.de/cade-25/home - The 9th International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML 2015). Berlin, Germany, August 3-5, 2015 http://2015.ruleml.org RR 2015 also hosts a doctoral consortium, which will provide PhD students with an opportunity to present and discuss their research directions, to be involved in discussions on the state-of-the-art research, and to establish fruitful collaborations. In particular, the doctoral consortium will include a mentoring lunch and a poster session, organized jointly with the 9th International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML 2015). Further details on the RR doctoral consortium will be communicated by means of a separate Call for Papers, as well as on the RR 2015 website. == TOPICS AND SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS == The scale and the heterogenous nature of web data poses many challenges, and turns basic tasks such as query answering and data transformations into complex reasoning problems. Rule-based systems have found many applications in this area. The RR conference welcomes original research from all areas of Web Reasoning and Rule Systems. Topics of particular interest are: - Rule-based languages for intelligent information access and for the semantic web - Ontology-based data access - Data management, and data interoperability for web data - Distributed agent-based systems for the web - Scalability and expressive power of logics for the semantic web - Reasoning with incomplete, inconsistenct and uncertain data - Non-monotonic, commonsense, and closed-world reasoning for web data - Constraint programming, inductive logic programming for web data - Streaming data and complex event processing - Rule-based approaches to machine learning, knowledge extraction and information retrieval - Rule-based approaches to natural language processing - System descriptions, applications and experiences There are two submission formats: - Full papers (up to 15 pages in LNCS style) - Technical Communications (up to 6 pages in LNCS style) Submitted full papers should present original and significant research results. They must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference/workshop with formal proceedings. Double submission to a workshop with informal proceedings is allowed, like for instance the DL 2014 workshop. Technical communications are intended for promising but possibly preliminary work, position papers, system descriptions, and applications descriptions (which may be accompanied by a demo). The conference proceedings will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (LNCS), and all submissions must be prepared in Springer's LaTeX style llncs (http://www.springer.com/comp/lncs/Authors.html). Submissions are made via EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rr2015 == IMPORTANT DATES == - Title and Abstract submission: March 3, 2015 - Full papers submission: March 10, 2015 - Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2015 - Camera-ready submission: May 15, 2015 For each of these deadlines, a cut-off point of 23:59 AOE (anywhere on earth) applies. == BEST PAPER AND BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARDS == Awards for Best Paper and Best Student Paper will be presented to the corresponding author(s) at the conference. The best student paper will be selected among the ones mainly only by students (i.e., authors a PhD as of the paper submission deadline). To qualify for the Best Student Paper award, the authors must indicate their eligibility upon submission at easychair. The program committee reserves the right to not give out a Best Student Paper award, or to split the award among multiple submissions. == INVITED SPEAKERS == - Michael Genesereth (Stanford University) - Benny Kimelfeld (Technion & LogicBlox) - Lora Aroyo (Free University of Amsterdam) == ORGANIZATION == General Chair: - Wolfgang Faber (University of Huddersfield) Doctoral Consortium Chair: - Marco Montali (Free Universiy of Bozen-Bolzano) Local Organization Chair: - Adrian Paschke (Free University of Berlin) Sponsorship Chair: - Marco Maratea (University of Genova) Publicity Chair: - Luca Pulina (University of Sassari) Web Chair: - Ralph Schaefermeier (Free University of Berlin) Program Committee: - Balder ten Cate (LogicBlox, USA) - co-chair - Alessandra Mileo (DERI, Ireland) - co-chair - Darko Anicic (Siemens AG, Germany) - Marcelo Arenas (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Chile) - Marcello Balduccini (Drexel University, USA) - Leopoldo Bertossi (Carleton University, Canada) - Meghyn Bienvenu (Universite Paris Sud, France) - Fernando Bobillo (University of Zaragoza, Spain) - Daniel Deutsch (Tel Aviv, Israel) - Agostino Dovier (Universit? degli Studi di Udine, Italy) - Thomas Eiter (TU Vienna, Austria) - Sergio Flesca (University of Calabria, Italy) - Paul Fodor (Stony Brook University, USA) - Andres Freitas (INSIGHT NUI Galway, Ireland) - Andre Hernich (Liverpool, UK) - Stijn Heymans (SRI, USA) - Aidan Hogan (National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland) - Benny Kimelfeld (Technion, Israel & LogicBlox, Inc) - Roman Kontchakov (Birkbeck College, UK) - Markus Kr?tzsch (University of Oxford, UK) - Georg Lausen (Universitaet Freiburg, Germany) - Joohyung Lee (Arizona State University, USA) - Domenico Lembo (Sapienza Universita di Roma, Italy) - Carsten Lutz (Universit?t Bremen, Germany) - Thomas Meyer (CSIR Meraka Institute, South Africa) - Boris Motik (Oxford University, UK) - Marco Montali (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy) - Marie-Laure Mugnier (LIRMM/INRIA, Montpellier, France) - Matthias Nickels (NUI Galway, Ireland) - Magdalena Ortiz (TU Vienna, Austria) - Giorgio Orsi (University of Oxford, UK) - Jeff Z. Pan (University of Aberdeen) - Adrian Paschke (Freie Universit?t Berlin, Germany) - Axel Polleres (WU-Vienna, Austria) - Lucian Popa (IBM Almaden, USA) - Francesco Ricca (University of Calabria, Italy) - Riccardo Rosati (Sapienza Universita di Roma, Italy) - Sebastian Rudolph (TU Dresden, Germany) - Luciano Serafini (FBK Trento, Italy) - Evgeny Sherkhonov (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) - Steffen Staab (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany) - Umberto Straccia (ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy) -- Luca Pulina, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Computer Science POLCOMING - Department of Political Science, Communication, Engineering and Information Technologies University of Sassari e-mail lpulina at uniss.it http://sites.google.com/site/lpulina From rjgsousa at gmail.com Fri Jan 16 04:23:18 2015 From: rjgsousa at gmail.com (Ricardo Gamelas Sousa) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 09:23:18 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: [visum2015] Summer School :: Call for participation! Message-ID: <54B8D886.1070601@gmail.com> (apologies for cross-posting) 3rd VISion Understanding and Machine intelligence summer school, Porto, Portugal 2-9 July, 2015 http://www.fe.up.pt/visum/ | Facebook: http://goo.gl/FbVNtq We invite everyone with interests in computer vision to attend the 3rd VISion Understanding and Machine intelligence summer school, at ATMOSFERA M in Porto, Portugal. At visum you can find an expert multicultural environment, aiming to foster junior researchers? awareness of computer vision topics, as well as to enhance all attendees? knowledge regarding the state of the art, provided by leading international experts on the field. Being an area of great potential in industrial applications with a strong increase in the number of researchers in these last years, visum summer school will be an incredible opportunity. Important Dates Application Deadline, March 1, 2015 Decision, March 8, 2015 Early Registration, April 10, 2015 Late Registration, May 8, 2015 Topics Machine Learning*, Tae-Kyun Kim, Imperial College London, UK Local Features Extraction and Description, Jiri Matas, Czech Technical University, CZ Document Image Analysis, Alicia Fornes, Universitat Aut?noma de Barcelona, ES Scene Understanding, Martial Hebert, CMU, USA Automatic Facial Expression Recognition, Michel Valstar, University of Nottingham, UK RGB-D Cameras, Thomas Whelan, Imperial College London, UK Point Clouds 3D*, Jo?o P. Costeira, IST, PT * Tentative titles Industry Track ASAP54 , Daniel Heesch Enermeter, Manuel Jo?o Ferreira Philips, Jacek Kustra http://www.fe.up.pt/feup visum at fe.up.pt -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: flyer_visum.png Type: image/png Size: 1081691 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Nicoladie.Tam at unt.edu Fri Jan 16 22:58:34 2015 From: Nicoladie.Tam at unt.edu (Tam, Nicoladie) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 03:58:34 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: CNS 2015: Abstract Submission and Registration opens Message-ID: <9D024148-234C-4483-B0E0-81E0D4D19D7F@unt.edu> Organization for Computational Neurosciences (OCNS) 24th Annual Meeting Prague, Czech Republic July 18-23, 2015 The main meeting (July 19-21) will be preceded by a day of tutorials (July 18) and followed by two days of workshops (July 22-23). Invited Keynote Speakers: Jack Cowan, University of Chicago, USA Gustavo Deco, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain Adrienne Fairhall, University of Washington, USA Wulfram Gerstner, EPFL, Switzerland Registration will open on January 14, 2015. Abstract submission will open on January 15, 2015 and close on February 22. Workshop proposals are now being accepted. Note that one of the authors has to register as sponsoring author for the main meeting before abstract submission is possible. In case the abstract is not accepted for presentation, the registration fee will be refunded. For up-to-date conference information, please visit http://www.cnsorg.org/cns-2015-prague ---------------------------------------- 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 friedhelm.schwenker at uni-ulm.de Sun Jan 18 16:12:20 2015 From: friedhelm.schwenker at uni-ulm.de (Dr. Schwenker) Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 22:12:20 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: MCS 2015: Call for Papers Message-ID: <54BC21B4.6000803@uni-ulm.de> Apologies for multiple copies. ****** MCS 2015 Call for Papers ******** ********************************************************************** TWELFTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIPLE CLASSIFIER SYSTEMS Reisensburg Castle (G?nzburg, Germany), Ulm University, June 29 - July 1, 2015http://mcs.diee.unica.it ********************************************************************** Paper Submission: JANUARY 30, 2015 MCS 2015 is the twelfth edition of the well-established series of meetings providing the leading international forum for the discussion of issues in multiple classifier systems and ensemble methods. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers from diverse communities concerned with this topic, including pattern recognition, machine learning, neural networks, data mining and statistics. MCS 2015 will be held on June 29-July 1, 2015, at Reisensburg Castle (G?nzburg, Germany) research center of the Ulm University. For up-to-date conference information, please visit:http://mcs.diee.unica.it Organizing Committee ==================== Friedhelm Schwenker, Ulm University, Germany Josef Kittler, University of Surrey, UK Fabio Roli, University of Cagliari, Italy -- Dr. Friedhelm Schwenker University of Ulm Institute of Neural Information Processing D-89069 Ulm, Germany phone: +49-731-50-24159 fax: +49-731-50-24156 email: friedhelm.schwenker at uni-ulm.de www: http://www.uni-ulm.de/in/neuroinformatik/mitarbeiter/f-schwenker.html From jkrichma at uci.edu Sun Jan 18 21:10:51 2015 From: jkrichma at uci.edu (Jeff Krichmar) Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 18:10:51 -0800 Subject: Connectionists: New Submission Deadline for Special Issue on Neurobiologically Inspired Robotics: Enhanced Autonomy Through Neuromorphic Cognition Message-ID: Dear Connectionists, I hope some of you will consider submitting to this special issue of Neural Networks (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/neural-networks/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-neurobiologically-inspired-robotics-enhance/). The deadline is now February 15, 2015. No further extensions will be considered. Neurobiologically inspired robotics goes by many names: brain-based devices, cognitive robots, neurorobots, and neuromorphic robots, to name a few. The field has grown into an exciting area of research and engineering. The common goal is twofold: Firstly, developing a system that demonstrates some level of cognitive ability can lead to a better understanding of the neural machinery that realizes cognitive function. The often used phrase, ?understanding through building?, implies that one can get a deep understanding of a system by constructing physical artifacts that can operate in the real-world. In building and studying neurobiologically inspired robots, scientists must address theories of neuroscience that couple brain, body, and behavior. Secondly, the deep theoretical understanding of cognition, neurobiology and behavior obtained by constructing physical systems, could lead to a system that demonstrates capabilities commonly found in the animal kingdom, but rarely found in artificial systems, most notably their adaptive and flexible autonomous behavior. There have already been some successes that meet these goals. For example, navigation models based on the hippocampus are now deploy! ed on robots that autonomously explore their environment. Machine image processing systems based on visual cortex have been used in a number of unsupervised recognition and perception applications. Robots designed to address impairments due to disorders such as Alzheimer?s disease, autism spectrum disorder, and attentional deficit disorders, are being used as therapeutic and diagnostic tools without the need for constant caretaker supervision. Despite these successes, the field is still in its infancy and basic research is needed. In particular, we are interested in papers that describe: 1) How models of cognitive functions, such as attention, decision-making, learning and memory, perception, and social cognition can be constructed on physical robots. 2) How the neuromorphic devices, which are designed to run neural algorithms with low-power, can advance the construction of autonomous robotics. 3) How the theoretical and engineering lessons learned from constructing neurobiologically inspired robots can transfer to autonomous robots carrying out practical applications. This Special Issue invites papers that address the three broad topics described above. Topics of interest ? Adaptive behavior ? Active sensing ? Artificial empathy ? Cortical computing ? Developmental robotics ? Embodied Cognition ? Neuromorphic Engineering ? On-line learning and memory systems ? Prediction and planning ? Socially assistive robotics Guest Editors Jeffrey Krichmar, University of California, Irvine Minoru Asada, Osaka University Jorg Conradt, Technische Universitat M?nchen Important Dates Submission due: 15 Feb 2015 Acceptance notification: 1 Aug 2015 Expected publication: 1 Nov 2015 Submission instructions Each paper for submission should be formatted according to the style and length limit of Neural Networks. Please refer complete Author Guidelines athttp://www.elsevier.com/journals/neural-networks/0893-6080/guide-for-authors. Note that published papers and those currently under review by other journals or conferences are prohibited. A separate cover letter should be submitted that includes the paper title, the list of all authors and their affiliations, and information of the contact author. Each paper will be reviewed rigorously, and possibly in two rounds, i.e., minor/major revisions will undergo another round of review. Prospective authors are invited to submit their papers directly via the online submission system athttp://ees.elsevier.com/neunet/. To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly included into the special issue described, it is important that all authors select ?SI: Neurobiological Robotics? when they reach the "Article Type" step in the submission process. Jeff Krichmar Department of Cognitive Sciences 2328 Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-5100 jkrichma at uci.edu http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkrichma -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From A.K.Seth at sussex.ac.uk Mon Jan 19 05:28:49 2015 From: A.K.Seth at sussex.ac.uk (Anil Seth) Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 10:28:49 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: postdoctoral position available Message-ID: <3F56DA22-2E48-40DC-92AD-41935D870C33@sussex.ac.uk> POSTDOC POSITION IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF TIME PERCEPTION AT SUSSEX UNIVERSITY Corresponding author: Anil Seth (A.K.Seth at sussex.ac.uk) Deadline: January 30th, 2015 Further information: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/aboutus/jobs/950 3 year full time postdoctoral position at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex. Applications are invited from highly motivated post-doctoral research scientists to join a newly funded multi-partner European project. TIMESTORM promotes time perception as a fundamental capacity of autonomous living biological and computational systems, that plays a key role in the development of intelligence. The project aims to explore the coupling of time and mind and implement for the first time artificial systems that consider the temporal aspects of cognition. The available position, within the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, will involve cognitive neuroscience research on the brain basis of time perception. ------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------- Anil K. Seth, D.Phil. University of Sussex, UK Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience Co-Director, Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science Editor-in-Chief, Neuroscience of Consciousness www.anilseth.com www.neurobanter.com http://nc.oxfordjournals.org/ www.sussex.ac.uk/sackler/ a.k.seth at sussex.ac.uk @anilkseth -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mark.humphries at manchester.ac.uk Tue Jan 20 09:45:11 2015 From: mark.humphries at manchester.ac.uk (Mark Humphries) Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 14:45:11 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Second call for abstracts: Integrated Systems Neuroscience Workshop, March 23-24th, Manchester, UK Message-ID: <7E954275ED82B9468C2C731FB72522F5B923E6C7@MBXP09.ds.man.ac.uk> We announce a 2-day workshop on "Integrated Systems Neuroscience", at the University of Manchester (UK), March 23-24th 2015. Poster abstract submission deadline: 30th January 2015. Registration deadline: February 27th 2015 Systems neuroscience has been thrust centre-stage by the extraordinary advances in technology for recording and manipulating neural circuits at single-cell resolution. Yet with this rapid increase in data yield has come formidable challenges in analysing and understanding experimental results. Consequently, a tight integration between experimental and computational neuroscience approaches is increasingly necessary for tackling these challenges. The goal of this workshop is to present the state-of-the-art in integrated systems and computational approaches to key neural circuits, to demonstrate their power and potential. Each session of the programme will comprise a pair of talks presenting complementary experimental and computational work on the same circuit theme. A poster session with wine reception will be held on the first evening. Speakers include: Rafal Bogacz (Oxford) Matteo Carandini (UCL) Peter Dayan (Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL) Ken Harris (UCL) Peter Magill (MRC Brain Network Dynamics Unit, Oxford) Daniel O'Connor (John Hopkins University) Michael Orger (Champalimaud Institute, Lisbon) Srdjan Ostojic (Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris) Alex Thiele (University of Newcastle) Gasper Tkacik (IST Austria) For more information, including the current programme, please visit the website: http://www.isn2015.ls.manchester.ac.uk/ Posters: We are accepting submission of abstracts for posters. A maximum of 30 posters will be accepted; the top 20 will have their registration fee waived. For details on submission see: http://www.isn2015.ls.manchester.ac.uk/abstracts/ Abstract submission deadline: January 30th 2015 Registration: http://www.isn2015.ls.manchester.ac.uk/registration/ Registration deadline: February 27th 2015 Organisers: Mark Humphries & Rasmus Petersen (University of Manchester) Sponsors: we gratefully acknowledge the support of the Medical Research Council and Company of Biologists. Dr Mark Humphries MRC Senior non-Clinical Research Fellow AV Hill Building Faculty of Life Sciences University of Manchester http://www.systemsneurophysiologylab.ls.manchester.ac.uk/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From terry at salk.edu Tue Jan 20 10:50:18 2015 From: terry at salk.edu (Terry Sejnowski) Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 07:50:18 -0800 Subject: Connectionists: NEURAL COMPUTATION - February 1, 2015 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Neural Computation - Volume 27, Number 2 - February 1, 2015 Available online for download now: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/neco/27/2 ----- Letters Subdiffusive Dynamics of Bump Attractors: Mechanisms and Functional Roles Yang Qi, Pulin Gong, and Michael Breakspear Reliability of Information-Based Integration of EEG and FMRI Data: A Simulation Study Sara Assecondi, Dirk Ostwald, and Andrew Philip Bagshaw Active Inference, Evidence Accumulation and the Urn Task Thomas FitzGerald, Philipp Schwartenbeck, Michael Moutoussis, Raymond J. Dolan, and Karl Friston A Neural Mass Model With Direct and Indirect Excitatory Feedback Loops: Identification of Bifurcations and Temporal Dynamics Miss Aurelie Garnier, Alexandre Vidal, Clement Huneau, and Habib Benali Mismatched Training and Test Distributions Can Outperform Matched Ones Carlos Roberto Gonzalez, Yaser Said Abu-Mostafa Foundations of Support Constraint Machines Giorgio Gnecco, Marco Gori, Stefano Melacci, and Marcello Sanguineti Natural Gradient Learning Algorithms for RBF Networks Junsheng Zhao, Haikun Wei, Chi Zhang, Weiling Li, Weili Guo, and Kanjian Zhang ------------ ON-LINE -- http://www.mitpressjournals.org/neuralcomp SUBSCRIPTIONS - 2015 - VOLUME 27 - 12 ISSUES Student/Retired $75 Individual $134 Institution $1,075 MIT Press Journals, One Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1209 Tel: (617) 253-2889 FAX: (617) 577-1545 journals-cs at mit.edu ------------ From alessandra.sciutti at gmail.com Sun Jan 18 20:03:31 2015 From: alessandra.sciutti at gmail.com (Alessandra Sciutti) Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 10:03:31 +0900 Subject: Connectionists: =?iso-8859-1?q?EXTENDED_DEADLINE=3A_CfP_HRI_2015_?= =?iso-8859-1?q?Workshop_=22Cognition=3A_A_Bridge_between_Robotics_?= =?iso-8859-1?q?and_Interaction=22?= Message-ID: <009101d03383$c0894ba0$419be2e0$@gmail.com> ========================================================================= EXTENDED DEADLINE: Workshop ?Cognition: A Bridge between Robotics and Interaction?, at HRI 2015, Portland (OR) USA ========================================================================= March 2, 2015 Submission deadline: *****January 25, 2015***** (EXTENDED) Notification of acceptance: January 30, 2015 website: http://http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~kl360/HRI2015W/ ========================================================================= INVITED SPEAKERS: - Prof. David Vernon, Sk?vde University - Prof. Andrew Meltzoff, University of Washington INVITED PANELISTS: - Prof. Giulio Sandini, Italian Institute of Technology - Prof. Minoru Asada, Osaka University A key feature of humans is the ability to anticipate what other agents are going to do and to plan accordingly a collaborative action. This skill, derived from being able to entertain models of other agents, allows for the compensation for intrinsic delays of human motor control and is a primary support to allow for efficient and fluid interaction. Moreover, the awareness that other humans are cognitive agents who combine sensory perception with internal models of the environment and others, enables easier mutual understanding and coordination. Cognition represents therefore an ideal link between different disciplines, as the field of Robotics and that of Interaction studies, performed by neuroscientists and psychologists. From a robotics perspective, the study of cognition is aimed at implementing cognitive architectures leading to efficient interaction with the environment and other agents. From the perspective of the human disciplines, robots could represent an ideal stimulus to study which are the fundamental robot properties necessary to make it perceived as a cognitive agent, enabling natural human-robot interaction. Ideally, the implementation of cognitive architectures may raise new interesting questions for psychologists, and the behavioral and neuroscientific results of the human-robot interaction studies could validate or give new inputs for robotics engineers. The aim of this workshop will be to provide a venue for researchers of different disciplines to discuss the possible points of contact and to highlight the issues and the advantages of bridging different fields for the study of cognition for interaction. This workshop will represent an ideal continuation of the discussion began at HRI 2014, in the workshop ?HRI: a bridge between Robotics and Neuroscience? (http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~kl360/HRI2014W/index.html ). LIST OF TOPICS ----------------- - Cognitive Architecture - Development of Social Cognition - Interaction - Prediction - Embodiment - Self and Other FORMAT AND SUBMISSIONS --------------------- The workshop will consist of invited keynotes, time for discussions and will also feature a poster session. Prospective participants are invited to submit full papers (up to 8 pages) or short papers (2 pages). Submissions will be accepted in PDF format only, using the HRI formatting guidelines (http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~kl360/HRI2015W/papers.html) and including author names. Authors should send their papers to hri2015workshop at gmail.com . All submissions will be peer-reviewed. Upon available time, selected contributions may have the opportunity to be presented in the oral session. The other selected contributions will be presented as posters during a dedicated session. The submission must include 1 answer to one of the following questions: - How should cognitive research be structured to yield results useful for robotics and HRI? - How can robotics have a direct influence on neuroscience and cognitive psychology aimed at interaction studies? - ?Which is the minimal level of cognition needed in a robot to be able to interact with a human? - Does a robot really need cognition to be perceived as a cognitive agent by a human? - Does inserting a cognitive agent into an interaction pose a risk to the human partners? - How important is the embodiment of a robot for the development of its cognitive architecture and its social cognition? Upon available time, those questions/answers will be used to "drive" a final discussion. IMPORTANT DATES ------------- Submission deadline: *****January 25, 2014***** (EXTENDED) Notification of acceptance: January 30, 2014 March 2, 2014, Workshop at HRI 2015 ORGANIZERS ---------- - Alessandra Sciutti ? Italian Institute of Technology - Katrin Solveig Lohan ? Heriot-Watt University - Yukie Nagai ? Osaka University ?? From martaruizcostajussa at gmail.com Tue Jan 20 11:20:07 2015 From: martaruizcostajussa at gmail.com (Marta Ruiz) Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 10:20:07 -0600 Subject: Connectionists: 2nd CFP: JAIR Special Track on Cross-language Algorithms and Applications Message-ID: JAIR Special Track on Cross-language Algorithms and Applications Track Editor Llu?s M?rquez, Qatar Computing Research Institute Associate Track Editors Marta R. Costa?juss?, Instituto Polit?cnico Nacional Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Labs-Research Patrik Lambert, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Elena Montiel-Ponsoda, Universidad Polit?cnica de Madrid The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) is pleased to announce the launch of the Special Track on Cross-language Algorithms and Applications. The core Artificial Intelligence technologies of speech and natural language processing need to address the challenges of processing multiple languages. While the first challenge of multilingualism is to bridge the nomenclature gap for the same concepts, the next significant challenge is to develop algorithms and applications that not only scale to multiple languages but also leverage cross-lingual similarities for improved natural language processing. The goal of this special track is to serve as a home for the publication of leading research on Cross-language Algorithms and Applications, focusing on developing unified themes leading to the development of the science of multi- and cross-lingualism. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: efforts in the direction of multilingual transliteration; multilingual document summarization; rapid prototyping of cross language tools for low resource languages; and machine translation. Articles published in the Cross-language Algorithms and Applications track must meet the highest quality standards as measured by originality and significance of the contribution and clarity of presentation. Papers will be coordinated by the track editor and associate editors, and reviewed by peer reviewers drawn from the JAIR Editorial Board and the larger community. All articles should be submitted using the normal JAIR submission process. Please indicate that the submission is intended for the Special Track in the section "Special Information for editors". For more information and submission instructions, please see: http://www.jair.org/specialtrack-claa.html Timetable 1st March 2015 Deadline for Submissions 1st June 2015 Notification of Acceptance/Revision/Rejection 15th July 2015 Deadline for Re-submission of papers requiring revision 15th September 2015 Notification of Final Acceptance 1st November 2015 Final manuscript due Contact: martaruizcostajussa at gmail.com Submission Instructions: Use JAIR conventional submissions instructions available at http://www.jair.org/submission_info.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sinankalkan at gmail.com Tue Jan 20 09:35:46 2015 From: sinankalkan at gmail.com (Sinan KALKAN) Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 16:35:46 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Deadline Approaching - 3rd CfP - ICAR 2015 - 17th International Conference on Advanced Robotics Message-ID: Dear all, We would like to note that the deadline for ICAR 2015 paper submission and workshop/tutorial proposals (February 1, 2015) is approaching. We would like to remind again that accepted papers will be published in IEEE Xplore conference proceedings. Best * Please accept our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this call * 17th International Conference on Advanced Robotics, ICAR 2015 27-31 July, 2015, Istanbul, Turkey http://www.icar2015.org/ *Call for Papers* The 17th International Conference on Advanced Robotics, ICAR 2015 is organized by Middle East Technical University in collaboration with Kadir Has University. The conference will take place in Kadir Has University campus in Istanbul, Turkey, on July 27-31, 2015. Keeping up with the same spirit of innovation, ICAR wants to bring high quality papers, workshops and tutorials to the geographical areas where the larger robotics conferences have not been organized yet. After the successful conference last year in Montevideo, Uruguay (www.icar2013.org), next year, the 17th ICAR will be held in Istanbul, Turkey where ?the east meets the west?. The conference is organized by Middle East Technical University (METU) in collaboration with Kadir Has University. The venue is Kadir Has Campus situated on the historic peninsula along Halic bay ( www.icar2015.org). ICAR 2015 will be technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. The technical program of ICAR 2015 will consist of plenary talks, workshops and oral presentations. Submitted papers should describe original work in the form of theoretical modelling, design, experimental validation, or case studies from all areas of robotics, focusing on emerging paradigms and application areas including but not limited to: Robotics Vision Adversarial Planning Cognitive Robotics Robot Operating Systems Robotics Architectures Simulation and Visualization Mobile Robots Robot Swarms Humanoid Robots Biologically-Inspired Robots Self-Localization and Navigation Embedded and Mobile Hardware Spatial Cognition Robotic Entertainment Human-Robot Interaction Robot Competitions Multi-Robot Systems Unmanned Aerial Robots Search and Rescue Robots Underwater Robotic Systems Learning and Adaptation Educational Robotics Cooperation and Competition Rehabilitation Robotics Dynamics and Control Immersive Robotics *Keynote speakers* Danica Kragic Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden http://www.csc.kth.se/~danik/ Oussama Khatib Stanford University, USA http://cs.stanford.edu/groups/manips/ok.html Todd P. Coleman University of California, San Diego, USA http://coleman.ucsd.edu/ Noah J. Cowan Johns Hopkins University, USA http://limbs.lcsr.jhu.edu/people/cowan/ *Important Dates* Paper submission February 1, 2015 Workshop and tutorial proposals February 1, 2015 Notification of paper acceptance April 15, 2015 Camera-ready papers May 15, 2015 ICAR 2015 Conference July 27-31, 2015 *Paper Submission* Original technical paper contributions are solicited for presentation at ICAR 2015. Accepted papers will be published in IEEE Xplore conference proceedings. Submissions should be 6-8 pages following the IEEE Xplore format available at: http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html Papers will be submitted online via EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icar2015 *For more information* http://www.icar2015.org/ https://www.facebook.com/ICAR2015 Sinan Kalkan, Erol Sahin Publicity and Publication Co-chairs -- Sinan KALKAN, Asst. Prof. Dept. of Computer Engineering Middle East Technical University Ankara TURKEY Web: http://kovan.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~sinan Tel: + 90 - 312 - 210 5547 / 210 7372 Fax: +90 - 312 - 210 5544 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giacomo.cabri at unimore.it Mon Jan 19 16:42:30 2015 From: giacomo.cabri at unimore.it (Giacomo Cabri) Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 22:42:30 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: CfP: ACEC at WETICE 2015 Message-ID: <54BD7A46.6010200@unimore.it> *Call for Papers * *13th Adaptive Computing (and Agents) for Enhanced Collaboration (ACEC) @ IEEE WETICE2015 June 15 - 18, 2015 Larnaca, Cyprus. *http://acec.portals.mbs.ac.uk/ *** Overview *** The autonomy and intelligence of software agents have greatly enhanced automation in many operational domains. A major benefit of using agents is the ability to assist in the collaboration among humans and software mechanisms, alike. Agent-enacted collaboration can be extremely helpful in areas such as Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Workflow and Supply Chain Management, Automation in Virtual Enterprises, and Automated Distributed Component Composition. The forthcoming 13th episode of the Agent-based Computing for Enterprise Collaboration (ACEC) will concentrate on two main themes: # Adaptive and Agent-based Services # Agent-based Techniques for Organizational/Enterprise Use of Emerging Web Paradigms (Cloud, Crowd-Sourcing, Mobile Apps) These two themes represent important areas where software agents can leverage their distributed nature along with their proactive and autonomous characteristics to provide solutions for complex problems which are difficult to address using traditional/existing technologies. With the popularity and pervasiveness of services in the emerging digital world, enterprises must carefully evaluate how to make their services openly accessible. Furthermore, it is important for enterprises to learn how to exploit the services of others while taking into account the unexpected circumstances and changing scenarios, which frequently occur in business ecosystems. In both of these (above given) contexts, software agents can play an important role. In this respect, ACEC 2015 intends to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the key issues, approaches, open problems, innovative applications, and trends in this research area. We enthusiastically solicit papers that address agent mediation and management of services and/or products of on-line businesses. *** Topics *** Topics of interests include but are not limited to: ?Adaptive and/or agent-mediated workflow, supply chain, or virtual enterprises ?Methodologies, languages and tools to support agent collaboration ?Agent architectures and infrastructures for dynamic collaboration ?Adaptive and/or Agent-based service architectures and infrastructures ?Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on agents ?Services for dynamic agent collaboration ?Agent-to-Human service interactions ?Autonomous, Adaptive and/or Agent-mediated service integration ?Organizational and enterprise systems that leverage Web 2.0 ?Adaptive and Agent-mediated cloud environments *** Important Dates *** Deadline for paper submission: 13 Feb 2015 Decision to paper authors: 27 March 2015 Camera Ready papers due to IEEE: 10 April 2015 23th IEEE WETICE-2011 conference: 15 - 18 June 2015 *** Paper Submission *** https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wetice2015 Accepted papers will be published in IEEE proceedings. -- |----------------------------------------------------| | Prof. Giacomo Cabri - Ph.D., Associate Professor | Dip. di Scienze Fisiche, Informatiche e Matematiche | Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia - Italia | e-mail giacomo.cabri at unimore.it | tel. +39-059-2058320 fax +39-059-2055216 |----------------------------------------------------| From sebastian.risi at gmail.com Tue Jan 20 13:52:23 2015 From: sebastian.risi at gmail.com (Sebastian Risi) Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 19:52:23 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Final CFP: Generative and Developmental Systems (GDS) track at GECCO 2015 Message-ID: ************************************************************************** *** CALL FOR PAPERS *** 2015 GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION CONFERENCE (GECCO-2015) *** Generative and Developmental Systems (GDS) Track *** July 11-15, 2015, Madrid, Spain *** Organized by ACM SIGEVO *** http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2015/organizers-tracks.html ************************************************************************* As artificial systems continue to grow in size and complexity, the engineering traditions of rigid top-down design are reaching the limits of their applicability. In contrast, biological evolution is responsible for an apparently unbounded complexity and diversity of living organisms. The Generative and Developmental Systems (GDS) track seeks to unlock the full potential of in silico evolution as a design methodology that can scale up to systems of great complexity and meet our specifications with minimal manual programming effort. Major themes are genotype-phenotype maps, interactions between developmental processes and evolution, alternatives to the classic fitness function to drive the selection process, and success metrics that go beyond task-based benchmarks (e.g., generating/measuring complexity, evolvability, regularity, etc.). GECCO is the main conference in evolutionary computation. With a selection rate of about 35%, it is the premier place for high-quality contributions about artificial evolution. The GDS track at GECCO invites all papers addressing the challenges of scaling up evolution to life-like complexity, including, but not limited to the areas of: - artificial development, artificial embryogeny - neural development, neuroevolution - evo-devo robotics, morphogenetic robotics - evolution of evolvability - gene regulatory networks - grammar-based systems, generative systems, rewriting systems - indirect mappings, compact encodings, novel representations - morphogenetic engineering - diversity preservation, novelty search - competitive co-evolution (arms races) - measures of evolved complexity (theoretical or practical) - open-ended evolution IMPORTANT DATES: January 21, 2015 Abstract submission February 4, 2015 Full paper submission March 20, 2015 Notification of paper acceptance April 14, 2015 Camera ready submission July 11-15, 2015 GECCO 2015 Conference in Madrid, Spain Join the GDS Google Group, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gds-gecco, to see the latest updates. TRACK CHAIRS: JB Mouret, University Pierre and Marie Curie (France), mouret at isir.upmc.fr Sebastian Risi, IT University of Copenhagen (Denmark), sebr at itu.dk -- Dr. Sebastian Risi Assistant Professor IT University of Copenhagen, Room 5D10 Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark email: sebastian.risi at gmail.com, web: www.sebastianrisi.com mobile: +45-50250355, office: +45-7218-5000 From chicoisne.guillaume at uqam.ca Wed Jan 21 13:05:29 2015 From: chicoisne.guillaume at uqam.ca (Chicoisne, Guillaume) Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 18:05:29 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: =?iso-8859-1?q?=2E=3A=3A_Cognitio_2015_=3A_Atypic?= =?iso-8859-1?q?al_Minds_=40_UQAM_-_Call_for_papers_/_Appel_=E0_communicat?= =?iso-8859-1?q?ions?= Message-ID: [version fran?aise ci-apr?s] Cognitio 2015 - Atypical Minds: the Cognitive Science of Difference and Potentialities Montreal, Canada June 8th, 9th and 10th 2015 http://cognitio.uqam.ca/2015 cognitio at uqam.ca Keynote speakers: * Berit Brogaard - University of Miami, Professor in Philosophy. -> https://sites.google.com/site/brogaardb/ * Ian Gold - McGill University, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy and Psychiatry. -> http://www.mcgill.ca/philosophy/people/faculty/gold Deadline for submission: February 16th, 2015 Cognitio is a young researchers' conference held every other year at the Universit? du Qu?bec ? Montr?al, under the auspices of its Cognitive Science Institute. Over the past several years at Cognitio, many facets of the human mind were explored: decision making (2005); situated minds (2006); social cognition (2007); the evolution of minds and cultures (2009); nonhuman minds, including animal, artificial and group minds (2011) and creativity in art and discovery (2013). This year's Cognitio conference will revolve around the cognitive aspects of mental states that display the differences and potentialities of the human mind. We will question the possibility of establishing limits between the functions and dysfunctions of the cognitive system. Every presentation that addresses mental troubles as atypical cognitive status from interdisciplinary interactions including psychiatry will be more than welcome, provided that there is a clear link with cognitive science. This topic can be approached from various angles. These include, but are not limited to: neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, cognitive informatics, anthropology, etc. Suggested topics include: ? Is there such thing as a typical or an atypical mind? Does or should such a taxonomy address synaesthesia, trance or genius? Autism spectrum disorders? Giftedness? ? Can mental illnesses be reduced to neurological problems or do they have irreducible mental elements, such as intentionality, consciousness or rationality? Is the distinction between mental disease and physical disease the last bastion of mind-body dualism? Can we eliminate dualism without reducing mental troubles to neurological disorders? What's the role of neuropsychiatry? ? What is a mental disease? How have mental troubles been defined through history? Is every cognitive dysfunction a mental illness? Are the notions of handicap or mental illness useful besides working as classification systems? Do they allow us to identify natural kinds? How do different societies interpret these classifications? Do they integrate the differences or highlight the potentialities that these classification reveal? ? Is psychiatry explanatory? If psychiatry is not explanatory, is it still a science? ? What recent technological and scientific advances have led to a better understanding of mechanisms of mental disease? ? How can we integrate the findings from different levels (molecular, cellular, networks) in computer simulations of different types of diseases (schizophrenia, Parkinson, epilepsy, etc.)? Is there a possible therapeutic role for these simulations? ? What are the main philosophical arguments against psychiatry? Is it possible to build a psychiatric science that moves away from the stigmatisation and alienation of those who are different? Or is a change of paradigm needed to study mental conditions? What options do we have? Submission of proposals for the conference is done through the EasyChair system. We are asking for 600 word abstracts. https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cognitio2015 Deadline for submission is February 16th 2015 [french version] COGNITIO 2015 Esprits atypiques: les sciences cognitives de la diff?rence et des potentialit?s Montr?al, Canada 8, 9, et 10 juin 2015 http://cognitio.uqam.ca/2015 cognitio at uqam.ca Conf?renci?re et conf?rencier invit?s : * Berit Brogaard - University of Miami, Professor in Philosophy. -> https://sites.google.com/site/brogaardb/ * Ian Gold - Universit? McGill, Chaire de recherche du Canada en philosophie et psychiatrie. -> http://www.mcgill.ca/philosophy/people/faculty/gold Cognitio est un colloque pour jeunes chercheures, chercheurs en sciences cognitives, tenu une ann?e sur deux ? l'Universit? du Qu?bec ? Montr?al sous les auspices de l'Institut des Sciences Cognitives. Au cours des derni?res ann?es, plusieurs facettes de l'esprit humain ont ?t? explor?es ? Cognitio. Nous avons examin? la prise de d?cision (2005), les esprits situ?s (2006), la cognition sociale (2007), l'?volution des esprits et des cultures (2009), les esprits non humains, incluant les cognitions animales, artificielles et autres (2011) ainsi que l'origine et l'?volution de la cr?ativit? (2013). Pour cette ?dition, nous mettons l'accent sur les esprits atypiques et les aspects cognitifs des ?tats qui t?moignent des diff?rences et des potentialit?s de l'esprit humain. Notre objectif est de discuter du concept de trouble mental, ainsi que de la pertinence et de la nature du domaine qui lui est consacr?, la psychiatrie. Nous nous demanderons notamment s'il est possible d'?tablir des limites entre les fonctions et dysfonctions du syst?me cognitif. Toute proposition de communication ayant un lien direct avec les sciences cognitives et traitant des troubles mentaux, des interactions disciplinaires concernant les ?tats cognitifs atypiques ou encore du statut de la psychiatrie est bienvenue. Cette th?matique peut ?tre trait?e ? partir de plusieurs perspectives. Celles-ci incluent, entre autres: les neurosciences, la psychologie, la philosophie, l'informatique cognitive, la linguistique, l'anthropologie, etc. Les questions de la liste suivante, qui n'est pas exhaustive, pourraient b?n?ficier d'une combinaison de ces approches : ? Peut-on vraiment parler d'esprits typiques ou atypiques? Quelle place une telle cat?gorisation laisse ? la synesth?sie, ? la transe ou au g?nie? Au troubles du spectre autistique? ? la douance? ? Les troubles mentaux se r?duisent-ils ? des troubles neurologiques ou poss?dent-ils des ?l?ments irr?ductiblement mentaux, li?s par exemple ? l'intentionnalit?, la conscience ou la rationalit?? La distinction entre trouble ou maladie mentale et trouble ou maladie neurologique est-elle le dernier bastion du dualisme dans notre conception de l'esprit? Est-il envisageable de l'?liminer sans r?duire les troubles mentaux ? des d?sordres neurologiques? Quel est le r?le de la neuropsychiatrie? ? Qu'est-ce qu'un trouble mental? Comment cette d?finition a-t-elle ?volu? historiquement? Les notions de trouble, de maladie mentale ou de handicap sont-elles utiles au-del? des syst?mes de classification? Permettent-elles d'identifier des esp?ces naturelles (natural kinds)? Comment les soci?t?s interpr?tent-elles cette classification? Sont-elles ? m?me d'int?grer les diff?rences ou de souligner les potentialit?s r?v?l?es par cette classification? ? La psychiatrie, est-elle explicative? Si la psychiatrie n'est pas explicative, est-elle tout de m?me une science? ? Quelles avanc?es technologiques et scientifiques r?centes permettent de mieux comprendre les m?canismes des troubles mentaux? ? Comment int?grer les nouveaux r?sultats ? diff?rents niveaux (mol?culaires, cellulaires et r?seaux) dans des simulations informatiques de plusieurs ?tats du cerveau (typique et atypique) de diff?rents types de pathologies (schizophr?nie, Parkinson, ?pilepsie, etc.)? Quelle peut ?tre l'utilisation de ces simulations? Ont-elles un possible r?le th?rapeutique? ? Est-il possible de construire une science psychiatrique qui s'?loigne de la stigmatisation et l'ali?nation de ceux qui sont diff?rents? Un changement de paradigme serait-il n?cessaire pour l'?tude des troubles de l'esprit? Quelles sont les options? La soumission de propositions de communication se fait ? l'aide du syst?me EasyChair. Un r?sum? de 600 mots EN ANGLAIS doit ?tre joint ? la demande. https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cognitio2015 La date limite pour l'envoi des propositions est le 16 f?vrier 2015. http://cognitio.uqam.ca/2015 cognitio at uqam.ca (apologies for cross-postings / nos excuses pour les envois multiples) -- Guillaume Chicoisne, PhD. Institut des Sciences Cognitives - www.isc.uqam.ca (+1) 514-987-3000 #4374 https://www.linkedin.com/pub/guillaume-chicoisne/0/641/175 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From n.lepora at sheffield.ac.uk Thu Jan 22 04:10:22 2015 From: n.lepora at sheffield.ac.uk (Nathan F Lepora) Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 09:10:22 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: [meetings] Living Machines IV: Second Call for Papers, Satellite Events and Sponsors Message-ID: ______________________________________________________________ Second Call for Papers, Satellite Events and Sponsors Living Machines IV: The 4th International Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems 27th to 31st July 2015 http://csnetwork.eu/livingmachines To be hosted at the La Pedrera Barcelona, Spain In association with the Universitat Pompeu Fabra Accepted papers will be published in Springer Lecturer Notes in Artificial Intelligence Submission deadline March 16th, 2015 ______________________________________________________________ ABOUT LIVING MACHINES 2015 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. Biomimetics is the development of novel technologies through the distillation of principles from the study of biological systems. The investigation of biomimetic systems can serve two complementary goals. First, a suitably designed and configured biomimetic artefact can be used to test theories about the natural system of interest. Second, biomimetic technologies can provide useful, elegant and efficient solutions to unsolved challenges in science and engineering. Biohybrid systems are formed by combining at least one biological component?an existing living system?and at least one artificial, newly-engineered component. By passing information in one or both directions, such a system forms a new hybrid bio-artificial entity. The following are some examples: ? Biomimetic robots and their component technologies (sensors, actuators, processors) that can intelligently interact with their environments. ? Active biomimetic materials and structures that self-organize and self-repair. ? Biomimetic computers?neuromimetic emulations of the physiological basis for intelligent behaviour. ? Biohybrid brain-machine interfaces and neural implants. ? Artificial organs and body-parts including sensory organ-chip hybrids and intelligent prostheses. ? Organism-level biohybrids such as robot-animal or robot-human systems. ACTIVITIES The main conference will take the form of a three-day single-track oral and poster presentation programme, 29th to 31st July 2015, hosted at the La Pedrera, Barcelona, Spain. The conference programme will include five plenary lectures from leading international researchers in biomimetic and biohybrid systems, and the demonstrations of state-of-the-art living machine technologies The full conference will be preceded by up to two days of Satellite Events hosted by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. SUBMITTING TO LIVING MACHINES 2015 We invite both full papers and extended abstracts in areas related to the conference themes. All contributions will be refereed and accepted papers will appear in the Living Machines 2015 proceedings which we expect to be published in the Springer-Verlag LNAI Series. Full papers (up to12 pages) are invited from researchers at any stage in their career but should present significant findings and advances in biomimetic or biohybid research; more preliminary work would be better suited to extended abstract submission (minimum 4 pages). Further details of submission formats will be circulated in an updated CfP and will be posted on the conference web-site. Full papers will be accepted for either oral presentation (single track) or poster presentation. Extended abstracts will be accepted for poster presentation only. Authors of the best full papers will be invited to submitted extended versions of their paper for publication in a special issue of Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. Satellite events Active researchers in biomimetic and biohybrid systems are invited to propose topics for 1-day or 2-day tutorials, symposia or workshops on related themes to be held 27-28th July at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Events can be scheduled on either the 27th or the 28th or across both days. Attendance at satellite events will attract a small fee intended to cover the costs of the meeting. There is a lot of flexibility about the content, organisation, and budgeting for these events. Please contact us if you are interested in organising a satellite event! EXPECTED DEADLINES March 16th, 2015 Paper submission deadline May 1st, 2015 Notification of acceptance May 22nd, 2015 Camera ready copy July 27-31 2015 Conference SPONSORSHIP Living Machines 2015 is sponsored by the Convergent Science Network (CSN) for Biomimetics and Neurotechnology. CSN is an EU FP7 Future Emerging Technologies Co-ordination Activity that also organises two highly successful workshop series: the Barcelona Summer School on Brain, Technology and Cognition (http://bcbt.upf.edu/bcbt12/) and the Capocaccia Neuromorphic Cognitive Engineering Workshop. The 2015 Living Machines conference will also be hosted and sponsored by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Call for Sponsors. Other organisations wishing to sponsor the conference in any way and gain the corresponding benefits by promoting themselves and their products to 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. ABOUT THE VENUE Living Machines 2015 returns to the venue of our first conference at the beautiful biomimetic building La Pedrera (Casa Mila) (https://www.lapedrera.com/en/home) designed by renown modernist architect Antoni Gaudi. Attendees at the conference will get a free ticket to visit this historic building in the centre the Barcelona. Workshops will be held at the Poblenou Campus of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, close to hotel and restaurant area of the Diagonal and Ramblas de Poblenou and a short walk from Barcelona?s famous beaches. Organising Committee: Paul Verschure, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Co-chair) Tony Prescott, University of Sheffield (Co-chair) Stuart Wilson, University of Sheffield (Program Chair) Anna Mura, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Communications, Local Organiser) Nathan Lepora, University of Bristol (Communications) Carme Buisan University Pompeu Fabra (Treasurer)[AM1] From mcuturi at i.kyoto-u.ac.jp Thu Jan 22 02:39:59 2015 From: mcuturi at i.kyoto-u.ac.jp (marco cuturi) Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 16:39:59 +0900 Subject: Connectionists: [MLSS'15 Kyoto] Applications website now open for the 29th Machine Learning Summer School. Message-ID: ========================================== APPLICATIONS NOW OPEN FOR ========================================== the 29th MACHINE LEARNING SUMMER SCHOOL in Kyoto University, Japan, 23 August to 4 September 2015. *** http://www.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/mlss15 *** ========================================== Dear Colleagues, Building upon the great success of the MLSS'12 in Kyoto (~300 participants from 50 countries, ~20 lecturers, ~75 hours of lectures), we are organizing another Machine Learning Summer School this summer, to be held again in Kyoto University, Japan, from August 23 to September 4. This edition will be the 29th in the now longstanding MLSS series. ( http://mlss.cc) Please share with your colleagues and students this fantastic opportunity to: - learn from world-renowned machine learning specialists, - network with a diverse and formidable audience, - discover and enjoy Kyoto, one of the most beautiful cities in the world! ( http://kyoto.travel/en) We provide below an overview of the MLSS program and application process. More detailed information is available on our website: http://www.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/mlss15 We hope to see you in Kyoto this summer! With regards The organizers, M. Cuturi (Kyoto U.), A. Yamamoto (Kyoto U.), M. Sugiyama (U. of Tokyo) ============================================ Scope ============================================ The machine learning summer school provides advanced-undergraduate and graduate students, industry professionals and academics of all levels with an intense learning experience on the theory and applications of modern machine learning. Over the course of two weeks, a panel of internationally renowned lecturers will offer tutorials covering basic as well as advanced topics. The summer school will allow the participants to get in touch with international experts in this field. Joint publications, new research projects and exciting opportunities will arise from these interactions. ============================================ Confirmed Speakers and Topics ============================================ Stephen P. Boyd, Stanford Convex Optimization Emmanuel Cand?s, Stanford Topics in High-Dimensional Statistics Zaid Harchaoui, NYU/INRIA Machine Learning for Computer Vision Stefanie Jegelka, MIT Submodular Functions in Machine Learning G?bor Lugosi, Pompeu Fabra Concentration Inequalities for Machine Learning Luc de Raedt, KU Leuven Probabilistic Programming Philippe Rigollet, MIT Statistical and Computational Aspects of High-Dimensional Learning Lorenzo Rosasco, MIT / Genoa Learning Representations Alexander J. Smola, CMU Scalable Machine Learning Taiji Suzuki, Tokyo Tech Stochastic Optimization Csaba Szepesv?ri, U. of Alberta Reinforcement Learning Ryota Tomioka, TTI Chicago Tensor Decompositions in Machine Learning Vincent Vanhoucke, Google Large Scale Deep Learning Martin Wainwright, Berkeley Statistical Guarantees in Optimization ============================================ Who Can Apply? ============================================ Anyone can apply from January 22 to April 10: the summer school is targeted for students (specially at a master/PhD level), academics (faculty, researchers and postdoctoral researchers) and professionals looking to use, or already using machine learning methods in their work. This school is suitable for all levels, both for people without previous knowledge in Machine Learning, and those wishing to broaden their expertise in this area. Student applicants (and students only) can apply for financial support to cover their trip expenses. Financial support will be given in priority to students who would not be able to attend the summer school without financial help or a registration fee waiver, despite having an excellent academic background and a previously demonstrated interest in machine learning or any related discipline. The limited support funds we have will be allocated on a competitive basis, upon reviewing application documents. ============================================ Application Process ============================================ Applicants will be asked to submit a CV, a cover letter, and, for student applicants only, a short letter of recommendation (to be submitted electronically) from one referee of their choice. Participants are encouraged to discuss their own work with their peers and the speakers. Applicants are thus invited to provide the title/abstract of a poster they would like to present at the school. Please apply here: http://www.iip.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/mlss15/doku.php?id=application ============================================ Important Dates ============================================ Application Opens: January 22 (NOW!) Application Deadline: April 10. Acceptance notification: April 24. Registration Fees Payment Deadline: May 12. Summer School Dates: August 23 (Sun.) - September 4 (Fri.) ============================================ For inquiries, please contact: mlss.kyoto.2015 at gmail.com ============================================ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mail at mkaiser.de Thu Jan 22 09:52:13 2015 From: mail at mkaiser.de (Marcus Kaiser) Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 14:52:13 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Master program in Computational Neuroscience and Neuroinformatics@Newcastle University Message-ID: Dear all, our one-year master degree program in Computational Neuroscience and Neuroinformatics at Newcastle University is now accepting student applications. The course focuses on handling brain connectivity datasets, analyzing electrophysiological recordings, and simulating neural activity and development. Neuroinformatics is one of the strategic areas of neuroscience research within Newcastle University (see overview at http://neuroinformatics.ncl.ac.uk/ ). Close interactions with experimental and clinical researchers are a key component of the course and the dissertation research project. Ongoing research areas in Newcastle include neuroimaging, psychophysics, systems neuroscience (visual, auditory, and motor system), aging, neurorehabilitation, brain rhythms, brain-machine interfaces, neurochips, and connectomics (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ion ). Newcastle University hosts around 100 principal investigators in the neurosciences. You can find out more about the program and how to apply at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/study/postgrad/taught/5199/ *COURSE OUTLINE* The MSc in Computational Neuroscience and Neuroinformatics is a full-time, one-year advanced masters course designed for students who have a good degree in the biological sciences or the physical sciences (computer science, mathematics, physics, engineering). It provides the specialist skills in core Neuroinformatics courses (such as computing and biology) with a significant focus on the development of research skills. The program aims to equip its graduates with the necessary skills to contribute to biologically realistic simulations of neural activity and development that are rapidly becoming the key focus of Neuroinformatics research. Prior experience with computers or computer programming is not required. The program is ideal for students aiming for careers in industry or academia. The course is based in the School of Computing Science and taught jointly by the Schools of Computing Science, Mathematics and Statistics, Biology, Cell and Molecular Biosciences and The Institute of Human Genetics. In addition, there are strong links with the Institute of Neuroscience and graduates of this master program might either apply for PhD studies at the School of Computing Science or for the Wellcome Trust 4-year PhD program in Systems Neuroscience (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ion/study/wellcome/ ). *WHY STUDY AT NEWCASTLE?* The MSc in Neuroinformatics is a truly interdisciplinary degree and provides the dual skills necessary to establish a rewarding career in this research area. The Newcastle program has a research focus on data management, network analysis (e.g. Kaiser, Neuroimage, 2011), and simulation, whilst delivering sound training and an introduction to research in computation and statistics, including exciting new areas such as e-science and cloud computing. Newcastle is among the pioneers of the field in the UK and hosted the ?4m EPSRC-funded CARMEN project for managing and processing electrophysiology data. It also leads the development of simulations of optogenetic stimulation effects on human brain tissue as part of the ?10m EPSRC/Wellcome Trust-funded CANDO project (http://www.cando.ac.uk/). Newcastle has strong links with the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF). Currently, members of the faculty lead the data-sharing special interest group and the UK special interest groups in image-based Neuroinformatics and brain connectivity as well as in neurally-inspired engineering. *COURSE CONTENT* Semester 1 contains modules to build the basic grounding in, and understanding of, Neuroinformatics theory and applications, together with necessary computational and numeric understanding to undertake more specialist modules next semester. Training in mathematics and statistics is also provided. Semester 2 introduces modules that focus heavily on introducing subject-specific research skills and includes three option slots for choosing modules. A major part of the Newcastle MSc in Computational Neuroscience and Neuroinformatics is a research project that will occupy approximately six months. This project may be associated with staff in any of the Schools mentioned above, thus providing a wide range of exciting areas in which the newly learnt Neuroinformatics skills can be deployed. *HOW TO APPLY* Applications for this program are now being accepted. You can apply online using the electronic application system with the degree identifier 5199F. Please check http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/study/postgrad/taught/5199/ for more information. Best, Marcus -- Marcus Kaiser, Ph.D. Associate Professor (Reader) in Neuroinformatics Interdisciplinary Computing and Complex Biosystems (ICOS) Research Group School of Computing Science Newcastle University Claremont Tower Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK Lab website: http://www.dynamic-connectome.org/ Neuroinformatics at Newcastle: http://neuroinformatics.ncl.ac.uk/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pfeiffer at ini.phys.ethz.ch Thu Jan 22 10:00:58 2015 From: pfeiffer at ini.phys.ethz.ch (Michael Pfeiffer) Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 16:00:58 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: MSc program in Neural Systems and Computation - University of Zurich and ETH Zurich Message-ID: <54C110AA.3030301@ini.phys.ethz.ch> We are inviting applications for the MSc program in Neural Systems and Computation, an interdisciplinary program offered as a Joint Master Program by the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. The program offers a theoretical and laboratory training in neural computation and systems neuroscience. It offers hands-on knowledge of data gathering, analysis and scientific presentation. Students join an international and interdisciplinary research community with expertise in neuroinformatics, advanced experimental techniques and neuromorphic engineering. Further information can be found on our homepage http://www.nsc.uzh.ch. We offer a specialized full-time Masters program open to students with a Bachelor?s degree in the following disciplines: neurosciences, information technology, electrical engineering, biology, physics, computer sciences, chemistry, mathematics, and mechanical/chemical/control engineering. The core courses (all offered in English) provide a common foundation for students with different educational backgrounds, and cover the following: 1. Systems Neurosciences 2. Neural Computation and Theoretical Neuroscience 3. Neurotechnologies and Neuromorphic Engineering The application deadline for students starting in Fall Semester 2015 is *February 15th 2015*. Details about the application process and required documents can be found here: http://www.nsc.uzh.ch/?page_id=10 The program is affiliated with the Mathematics and Natural Sciences Faculty (MNF) at the University of Zurich (UZH) and the Information Technology and Electrical Engineering Department (D-ITET) of the ETH Zurich. All applications are handled by the University of Zurich. Application documents should be sent by email to nsc at ini.uzh.ch. Michael Pfeiffer -- ========================================= Dr. Michael Pfeiffer Postdoc, Program coordinator NSC Institute of Neuroinformatics University of Zurich and ETH Zurich Winterthurerstrasse 190 CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland Tel. +41 44 635 30 45 Fax +41 44 635 30 53 pfeiffer (at) ini.phys.ethz.ch http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~pfeiffer/ ========================================= -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From yonvisell at gmail.com Thu Jan 22 09:55:50 2015 From: yonvisell at gmail.com (yon) Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 09:55:50 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: [journals] CFP: IEEE ToH Issue on Active Touch Sensing Message-ID: <1F412F3A-F39F-4A7E-A1CE-0264EB58A80E@gmail.com> The other guest editors and I are very excited to present this special issue. We hope you will consider contributing. Best, Yon Visell Call for Papers IEEE Transactions on Haptics Special Issue on Active Touch Sensing in Robots, Humans, and Other Animals Submission deadline: April 1 2015 First decision to authors: June 1 2015 Complete Details: http://re-touch-lab.com/ieee-toh-issue Guest Editors: Yon Visell, Drexel University Vincent Hayward, Universit? Pierre et Marie Curie Mitra Hartmann, Northwestern University Nathan Lepora, University of Bristol Topical Summary: This special issue addresses the challenges posed by actively sensing and interacting with the world through the sense of touch, whether the latter is implemented through a technological or biological system. Active touch sensing is recovering information about the world by ?touching? rather than ?being touched? ? by interpreting signals from sensors whose motion is deliberately controlled to facilitate information gain. The scope of this issue includes both biological and technological systems for active touch sensing, and implications for haptics. This issue will consider electronic systems for active touch sensing that are biologically inspired systems, in addition to other inherently active approaches to touch sensing. Biological systems for active touch sensing are highly capable, and, by comparison, the field of robotic touch sensing is in its infancy. The former demonstrate many valuable concepts for active touch sensing that are being intensively investigated. They have also illustrated ways that active touch sensing is enabled through specialized sensory transduction channels, biomechanics, structural morphology, behavioral, and control strategies that are implemented by biological systems, and through other advantages that they achieve, including robustness, adaptability, and power efficiency. Similar challenges must be overcome if technological systems are to one day achieve comparable levels of sensorimotor performance to biological systems. Specific topics of interest include: - The design of electronic or biological systems for active touch sensing, their principles of operation (electronic, biological, mechanical) and performance. - Biomechanical aspects of active touch sensing. - Relations between active touch sensing and behavior, especially motor activity. - Sensory information processing and sensorimotor control strategies in humans, animals, or robots related to active touch sensing, including behavioral, physiological or neuroscience investigations, and neural control. - Learning by active touch. - Applications to the design of haptic interfaces. Authors should specifically include a discussion of how their results shed light on fundamental aspects of active touch sensing rather than assuming that this can be inferred from context. Submission process: Visit http://www.computer.org/toh to view formatting requirements, and submit your paper at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/th-cs. When uploading your paper please select the appropriate special issue title under the category ?Manuscript Type.? _________________________________________________________ Yon Visell, PhD Assistant Professor Drexel University | Electrical and Computer Engineering Philadelphia, USA www.re-touch-lab.com Office: +1 215 571 4507 Mobile: +1 267 800 8960 _________________________________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gershman at fas.harvard.edu Thu Jan 22 12:21:31 2015 From: gershman at fas.harvard.edu (Sam Gershman) Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 12:21:31 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: Postdoctoral position in reinforcement learning at Harvard University Message-ID: Postdoctoral position in reinforcement learning at Harvard University The Gershman lab at Harvard University (Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science) is recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to work in the area of reinforcement learning and decision making. The focus of this research is on structure learning: How does the brain discover the underlying structure of its environment, and use this structure to guide learning and decision making? To answer this question, we combine computational theory with behavioral and brain imaging experiments. We work primarily with human subjects, but the postdoc will have the opportunity to collaborate with several animal labs at Harvard. For more information about the lab's research, please visit: http://web.mit.edu/sjgershm/www/ Start date: On or after July 1st, 2015. Qualifications: Strong candidates will have experience with computational neuroscience, probability theory, and model-based analysis of brain imaging and behavioral data. To apply: Candidates should send a CV and a research statement (not exceeding 2 pages) to Sam Gershman (gershman at fas.harvard.edu). Please arrange for 2 letters of reference to be sent to the same address. Harvard is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pel at gatsby.ucl.ac.uk Fri Jan 23 00:56:26 2015 From: pel at gatsby.ucl.ac.uk (Peter Latham) Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 05:56:26 +0000 (GMT) Subject: Connectionists: postdoc positions - Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit Message-ID: The Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit invites applications for one or more postdoctoral training fellowships in theoretical neuroscience, including population coding, learning, neural neural dynamics, the interpretation of neural data, perceptual processing, and neuromodulation. The position is available for an initial period of two years, and may be renewed to a maximum of three years. The closing date for applications is 15 March, 2015. Interviews will be held in May 2015. To find out more about the job, and to apply, see http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/vacancies/TN%20Postdoc2015.html For further details of our research, see http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/research.html From Hugo.Larochelle at USherbrooke.ca Fri Jan 23 14:03:37 2015 From: Hugo.Larochelle at USherbrooke.ca (Hugo Larochelle) Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 19:03:37 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: CfP: Special Issue on Deep Learning for Multimedia Computing Message-ID: <35A2E7D0-622C-49D2-B4FA-5ACAA86477A8@usherbrooke.ca> Call For Papers IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Special Issue on Deep Learning for Multimedia Computing Summary: Conventional multimedia computing is often built on top of handcrafted features, which are often much restrictive in capturing complex multimedia content such as images, audios, text and user-generated data with domain-specific knowledge. Recent progress on deep learning opens an exciting new era, placing multimedia computing on a more rigorous foundation with automatically learned representations to model the multimodal data and the cross-media interactions. Existing studies have revealed promising results that have greatly advanced the state-of-the-art performance in a series of multimedia research areas, from the multimedia content analysis, to modeling the interactions between multimodal data, to multimedia content recommendation systems, to name a few here. This special issue aims at providing a forum to present recent advancements in deep learning research that directly concerns the multimedia community. Specifically, deep learning has successfully designed algorithms that can build deep nonlinear representations to mimic how the brain perceives and understands multimodal information, ranging from low-level signals like images and audios, to high-level semantic data like natural language. For multimedia research, it is especially important to develop deep networks to capture the dependencies between different genres of data, building joint deep representation for diverse modalities. Scope: The topics of interest include but are not limited to 1. Novel deep network architectures for multimodal data 2. Efficient training and inference methods for multimedia deep networks 3. Emerging applications of deep learning in multimedia search, retrieval and management 4. Deep learning for multimedia content analysis and recommendation 5. Deep learning for cross-media analysis, knowledge transfer and information sharing 6. Distributed computing, GPUs and new hardware for deep learning in multimedia research 7. Other deep learning topics for multimedia computing, involving at least two modalities Submission guideline: Prospective authors should submit original manuscripts that have not appeared, nor are under consideration, in any other journals. Prospective authors are required to strictly follow the Author?s Guide for manuscript submission to the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM) at http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/tmm/tmm-author-info/, and manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the online IEEE manuscript submission portal at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tmm-ieee. Important Dates Paper submission due: March 15, 2015 First-round review completed: June 1, 2015 Revision Due: July 1, 2015 Second-round review completed: August 1, 2015 Final manuscript due: September 1, 2015 Publication date: November/December 2015 Guest Editors (in alphabetic order of last name) Dr. Benoit Huet, Eurecom, France Dr. Hugo Larochelle, University de Sherbrooke, Canada Dr. Jiebo Luo, University of Rochester, USA Dr. Guo-Jun Qi, University of Central Florida, USA Dr. Kai Yu, Baidu Inc., China Senior adviser: Prof. Thomas Huang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA From Toomas.Kirt at mail.ee Fri Jan 23 08:17:45 2015 From: Toomas.Kirt at mail.ee (Toomas Kirt) Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 15:17:45 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: 3rd Baltic-Nordic Summer School on Neuroinformatics (BNNI 2015) Message-ID: <54C249F9.7234.B91E6A4@Toomas.Kirt.mail.ee> 3rd Baltic-Nordic Summer School on Neuroinformatics (BNNI 2015) Multiscale computational neuroscience: Neurons, networks and systems Place: University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia Time: June 15-18, 2015 More information and registration at http://neuro.cs.ut.ee/bnni2015/ Important dates: 21 February 2015 Application deadline 13 March 2015 Acceptance notification 15-18 June 2015 Summer School The BNNI 2015 is focused on computational multiscale modelling of brain functions at the cellular, network and systems levels. The course will also cover data sources, measurements and analysis of neural activity. Target audience Advanced master students, doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers, both theoreticians and experimentalists, who would like to get an introduction to neuroinformatics and computational neuroscience. Faculty includes Gaute Einevoll, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Aas, Norway Bruce Graham, University of Stirling, United Kingdom Sean Hill, the ?cole Polytechnique F?d?rale de Lausanne, Switzerland Henrik Lind?n, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Marja-Leena Linne, Tampere University of Technology, Finland, Claudio Mirasso, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Palma de Mallorca, Spain Arnd Roth, University College London, UK Ausra Saudargiene, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania Raul Vicente, University of Tartu, Estonia Michael Wibral, Brain Imaging Center, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany Daniel W?jcik, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Warsaw, Poland and others to be named. Venue The course will be held in the University of Tartu, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science - Juhan Liivi 2, Tartu 50409, Estonia. Practical arrangements There is a small tuition fee of 100 euros. The sponsor will provide teaching, meals and coffee during the course. The participants are expected to cover their travel and health insurance expenses (small financial support is available for those without funding). The course is supported by International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility and University of Tartu. We are looking forward to welcome you at the BNNI 2015 in Tartu, Estonia! From grlmc at urv.cat Sat Jan 24 12:47:33 2015 From: grlmc at urv.cat (GRLMC) Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 18:47:33 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: InfoSec 2015: registration deadline 3 February Message-ID: <1C37D1D0EF1E48AB86B9B5F1365317FF@Carlos1> *To be removed from our mailing list, please respond to this message with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line* ********************************************************************** INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL ON INFORMATION SECURITY InfoSec 2015 Tarragona, Spain July 6-10, 2015 Organized by Rovira i Virgili University http://grammars.grlmc.com/InfoSec2015/ ********************************************************************** --- 2nd registration deadline: February 3, 2015 --- ********************************************************************** AIM: InfoSec 2015 will be a major research training event addressed to graduates and postgraduates in the first steps of their academic career. With a global scope, it aims at updating them about the most recent advances in the critical and fast developing area of information security, which covers a large spectrum of current exciting academic research and industrial innovation. It refers to procedures to defend information from unauthorized access, use, modification, recording or destruction, with a critical role to play in order to avoid or minimize risks in the digital world. Renowned academics and industry pioneers will lecture and share their views with the audience. Most information security subareas will be displayed, namely: computer security, cryptography, privacy, cyber security, mobile security, network security, world wide web security, fraud prevention, data protection, etc. Main challenges of information security will be identified through 4 keynote lectures, 33 six-hour courses, and 1 round table, which will tackle the most active and promising topics. The organizers believe outstanding speakers will attract the brightest and most motivated students. Interaction will be a main component of the event. ADDRESSED TO: Graduates and postgraduates from around the world. There are no formal pre-requisites in terms of academic degrees. However, since there will be differences in the course levels, specific background knowledge may be required for some of them. InfoSec 2015 is also appropriate for more senior people who want to keep themselves updated on recent developments and future trends. They will surely find it fruitful to listen and discuss with major researchers, industry leaders and innovators. REGIME: In addition to keynotes, 4 courses will run in parallel 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: InfoSec 2015 will take place in Tarragona, located 90 kms. to the south of Barcelona. The venue will be: Campus Catalunya Universitat Rovira i Virgili Av. Catalunya, 35 43002 Tarragona KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Jan Camenisch (IBM Research, Zurich), Privacy in a Digital World: a Lost Cause? Hao Chen (University of California, Davis), (In)security of Mobile Apps in Untrusted Networks Jennifer Seberry (University of Wollongong), The Global Village: the Beginning of the Need for Computer Security [via videoconference] Gene Tsudik (University of California, Irvine), Off-line Proximity-based Social Networking PROFESSORS AND COURSES: N. Asokan (Aalto University), [intermediate] Mobile Security: Overview of Hardware Platform Security and Considerations of Usability Jan Camenisch (IBM Research, Zurich), [introductory/intermediate] Technologies to Protect Online Privacy Hao Chen (University of California, Davis), [intermediate/advanced] Security of the Mobile App Ecosystem Nicolas T. Courtois (University College London), [introductory/intermediate] Security of ECDSA in Bitcoin and Crypto Currency Claude Cr?peau (McGill University, Montr?al), [introductory/intermediate] Quantum Computation, Cryptography and Cryptanalysis Joan Daemen (ST Microelectronics Belgium, Diegem), [introductory/intermediate] Sponge Functions, Keccak and SHA-3 Sajal K. Das (Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla), [intermediate/advanced] Securing Cyber-Physical Systems: Challenges and Opportunities Sabrina De Capitani di Vimercati (University of Milan), [introductory/intermediate] Security and Privacy in the Cloud Herv? Debar (T?l?com SudParis), [introductory/intermediate] Detection and Reaction to Attacks: from Intrusion Detection to Cyber-Defense David Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), [introductory/intermediate] Secure Multiparty Computation: Techniques, Theory, and Tools for Building Privacy-Preserving Applications Rosario Gennaro (City University of New York), [intermediate/advanced] A Survey of Verifiable Delegation of Computation Trent Jaeger (Pennsylvania State University, University Park), [intermediate/advanced] How to Add Security Enforcement to Legacy Programs Markus Jakobsson (Qualcomm, Santa Clara), [introductory/intermediate] Frontiers in Fraud Prevention Antoine Joux (Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris), [introductory/intermediate] Discrete Logarithms in Finite Fields Marc Joye (Technicolor R&I, Los Altos), [introductory/intermediate] Secure Public-Key Cryptosystems Somesh Jha (University of Wisconsin, Madison), [intermediate/advanced] Analysis Techniques in Information Security Lars R. Knudsen (Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby), [introductory/intermediate] Block Ciphers: the Workhorses in Cryptography Songwu Lu (University of California, Los Angeles), [introductory/intermediate] Cellular Network Security: Issues and Defenses Catherine Meadows (Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC), [introductory/intermediate] Formal Analysis of Cryptographic Protocols Nasir Memon (New York University), [introductory/intermediate] User Authentication Ethan L. Miller (University of California, Santa Cruz), [intermediate/advanced] Securing Stored Data in a Connected World Stefano Paraboschi (University of Bergamo), [introductory/intermediate] Data Protection in Network-enabled Systems Bart Preneel (KU Leuven), [introductory/intermediate] Cryptology: State of the Art and Research Challenges Jean-Jacques Quisquater (Catholic University of Louvain), [introductory/intermediate] The History of RSA: from Babylon to Smart Cards Shantanu Rane (Palo Alto Research Center), [introductory/intermediate] Privacy-preserving Data Analytics: Problems, Solutions and Challenges Mark Ryan (University of Birmingham), [introductory/intermediate] Designing Security Protocols: Electronic Voting, and Electronic Mail Rei Safavi-Naini (University of Calgary), [introductory/intermediate] Information-theoretically Secure Communication Stefan Saroiu (Microsoft Research, Redmond), [advanced] Dealing with Loss: Protecting Data on a Lost Mobile Device Milind Tambe (University of Southern California, Los Angeles), [introductory/intermediate] Introduction to the Emerging Science of Security Games Gene Tsudik (University of California, Irvine), [intermediate/advanced] Security and Privacy in Candidate Future Internet Architectures Yang Xiao (University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa), [introductory/advanced] Security in Smart Grids Wenyuan Xu (University of South Carolina, Columbia), [intermediate] Security and Privacy Analysis of Embedded Systems Yuliang Zheng (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), [introductory] Cryptography and the Future of Money ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona) Carlos Mart?n-Vide (Tarragona, chair) Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona) REGISTRATION: The registration form can be found at: http://grammars.grlmc.com/InfoSec2015/registration.php The selection of up to 8 courses requested in the registration template is only tentative and non-binding. For the sake of organization, it will be helpful to have an approximation of the respective demand for each course. 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 and the on-line registration facility disabled when the capacity of the venue will be complete. It is much recommended to register prior to the event. FEES: Fees are a flat rate covering the attendance to all courses during the week. There are several early registration deadlines. Fees depend on the registration deadline. ACCOMMODATION: Suggestions of accommodation will be provided in due time. CERTIFICATE: Participants will be delivered a certificate of attendance. QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION: florentinalilica.voicu at urv.cat POSTAL ADDRESS: InfoSec 2015 Lilica Voicu Rovira i Virgili University Av. Catalunya, 35 43002 Tarragona, Spain Phone: +34 977 559 543 Fax: +34 977 558 386 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Universitat Rovira i Virgili From ahu at cs.stir.ac.uk Sun Jan 25 14:06:55 2015 From: ahu at cs.stir.ac.uk (Dr Amir Hussain) Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 19:06:55 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: =?utf-8?q?Final_CFP_=28Deadline=2C_1_Feb_2015=29?= =?utf-8?q?=3A_IEEE_Computational_Intelligence_Magazine_=28CIM=29_S?= =?utf-8?q?pecial_Issue=3A_=E2=80=9CComputational_Intelligence_for_?= =?utf-8?q?Changing_Environments=22?= Message-ID: FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS (Deadline: 1 Feb 2015) - With advance apologies for any cross postings! IEEE COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE MAGAZINE (CIM) (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=10207) SPECIAL ISSUE (Nov 2015) ON "Computational Intelligence for Changing Environments" (http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~ahu/IEEE-CIM-CICE2015.pdf) AIMS AND SCOPE: Over the past decade or so, computational intelligence techniques have been highly successful for solving big data challenges in changing environments. In particular, there has been growing interest in so called biologically inspired learning (BIL), which refers to a wide range of learning techniques, motivated by biology, that try to mimic specific biological functions or behaviors. Examples include the hierarchy of the brain neocortex and neural circuits, which have resulted in biologically-inspired features for encoding, deep neural networks for classification, and spiking neural networks for general modelling. To ensure that these models are generalizable to unseen data, it is common to assume that the training and test data are independently sampled from an identical distribution, known as the sample i.i.d. assumption. In dynamic and non- stationary environments, the distribution of data changes over time, resulting in the phenomenon of ?concept drift? (also known as population drift or concept shift), which is a generalization of covariance shift in statistics. Over the last five years, transfer learning and multitask learning have been used to tackle this problem. Fundamental analyses using probably approximately correct (PAC) and Rademacher complexity frameworks have explained why appropriate incorporation of context and concept drift can improve generalizability in changing environments. It is possible to use human-level processing power to tackle concept drift in changing environments. Concept drift is a real-world problem, usually associated with online and concept learning, where the relationships between input data and target variables dynamically change over time. Traditional learning schemes do not adequately address this issue, either because they are offline or because they avoid dynamic learning. However, BIL seems to possess properties that would be helpful for solving concept drift problems in changing environments. Intuitively, the human capacity to deal with concept drift is innate to cognitive processes, and the learning problems susceptible to concept drift seem to share some of the dynamic demands placed on plastic neural areas in the brain. Using improved biological models in neural networks can provide insight into cognitive computational phenomena. However, a main outstanding issue in using computational intelligence for changing environments and domain adaptation is how to build complex networks, or how networks should be connected to the features, samples, and distribution drifts. Manual design and building of these networks are beyond current human capabilities. Recently, computational intelligence methods has been used to address concept drift in changing environments, with promising results. A Hebbian learning model has been used to handle random, as well as correlated, concept drift. Neural networks have been used for concept drift detection, and the influence of latent variables on concept drift in a neural network has been studied. In another study, a timing-dependent synapse model has been applied to concept drift. These works mainly apply biologically-plausible computational models to concept drift problems. Although these results are still in their infancy, they open up new possibilities to achieve brain-like intelligence for solving concept drift problems in changing environments. Taking the current state of research in computational intelligence for changing environments into account, the objective of this special issue is to collate this research to help unify the concepts and terminology of computational intelligence in changing environments, and to survey state-of-the-art computational intelligence methodologies and the key techniques investigated to date. Therefore, this special issue invites submissions on the most recent developments in computational intelligence for changing environments, algorithms and architectures, theoretical foundations, and representations, & their application to real-world problems. We also welcome timely surveys & review papers. TOPICS OF INTEREST include (but are not limited to): ? Computational intelligence methodologies and implementation for changing environments ?Transfer learning, Multitask learning, Domain adaption ?Incremental Learning architectures, Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning architectures ?Incremental Knowledge augmentation, Representation learning and disentangling ?Incremental Adaptive Neuro-fuzzy systems ?Incremental and single-pass data mining ?Incremental Neural Clustering & Regression ?Incremental Adaptive decision systems ?Incremental Feature selection and reduction ?Incremental Constructive Learning ?Novelty detection in Incremental learning SUBMISSION PROCESS The maximum length for the manuscript is typically 25 pages in single column format with double-spacing, including figures and references. Authors should specify in the first page of their manuscripts the corresponding author?s contact and up to 5 keywords. Submission should be made via: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ieeecimcdbil2015 IMPORTANT (REVISED) DATES (for November 2015 Issue) 1st Feb, 2015: Submission of Manuscripts 15th April, 2015: Notification of Review Results 15th May, 2015: Submission of Revised Manuscripts 15th June, 2015: Submission of Final Manuscripts GUEST EDITORS Professor Amir Hussain, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland, UK Email: ahu at cs.stir.ac.uk http://cs.stir.ac.uk/~ahu/ Professor Dacheng Tao, University of Technology, Sydney, 235 Jones Street, Ultimo, NSW 2007, Australia Email: dacheng.tao at uts.edu.au Professor Jonathan Wu University of Windsor, 401 Sunset Avenue, Windsor, ON, Canada Email: jwu at uwindsor.ca Professor Dongbin Zhao Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China E-mail: dongbin.zhao at gmail.com ----- A PDF copy of the CFP is attached with this email for forwarding to interested colleagues. It is also available for download from: http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~ahu/IEEE-CIM-CICE2015.pdf For more information on the IEEE CIM, see: http://cis.ieee.org/ieee-computational-intelligence-magazine.html -- The University of Stirling has been ranked in the top 12 of UK universities for graduate employment*. 94% of our 2012 graduates were in work and/or further study within six months of graduation. *The Telegraph The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From zhong at maebashi-it.ac.jp Sun Jan 25 21:36:13 2015 From: zhong at maebashi-it.ac.jp (Ning Zhong) Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 11:36:13 +0900 Subject: Connectionists: Brain Informatics and Health (BIH'15) - Call for Papers Message-ID: <54C5A81D.5060608@maebashi-it.ac.jp> [Apologies if you receive this more than once] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The 2015 International Conference on Brain Informatics and Health (BIH'15) August 30 - September 2, 2015, London, UK CALL FOR PAPERS Homepage: http://braininformatics.london (FULL PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE: April 5, 2015) *** KEYNOTE SPEAKERS (Confirmed) *** Allan Jones (Allen Institute for Brain Science, USA) Henry Markram (EPFL, Switzerland) David Van Essen (Washington University School of Medicine, USA) *** FEATURE SPEAKERS (Confirmed) *** Giorgio A. Ascoli (George Mason University, USA) Henry Kennedy (Stem-cell and Brain Research Institute, France) Barbara Sahakian (University of Cambridge, UK) Nelson Spruston (The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), USA) Paul Verschure (Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Spain) *** Panel Discussion Moderator *** Sarah Caddick (The Gatsby Charitable Foundation) ***************** Brain research is rapidly advancing with the application of big data technology to neuroscience as can be seen in major international initiatives in the US, Europe and Asia. BIH'15 reflects that brain informatics has emerged as a distinct field and crosses the disciplines of neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, signal processing, and neuroimaging technologies as well as data science. Following the success of past conferences in this series, BIH'15 will take place at Imperial College London, in UK, gathers the researchers from major international brain research projects, and plans an industrial exhibition. BIH'15 draws special attention to informatics for brain science, human behavior and brain health. BIH'15 will address big data approaches to both the brain and behaviour, with a strong emphasis on emerging trends of big data analysis and management technology for BI, active media technology in behavior learning, and real-world applications for brain and mental health. BIH'15 welcomes paper submissions (full paper and abstract submissions). Both research and application papers are solicited. All submitted papers will be reviewed on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance and clarity. Accepted full papers will be included in the proceedings by Springer LNCS/LNAI. Tutorial, Satellite symposium (workshop) and Special-Session proposals and Industry/Demo-Track papers are also welcome. IMPORTANT DATES: ================ Satellite symposium proposal submission: March 10, 2015 Notification of satellite symposium acceptance: March 30, 2015 Submission of full papers: April 5, 2015 Submission of abstracts: May 20, 2015 Submission of satellite symposium papers: May 20, 2015 Notification of full paper acceptance: May 25, 2015 Notification of abstract acceptance: June 10, 2015 Notification of satellite symposium paper acceptance: June 10, 2015 Tutorial proposal submission: May 15, 2015 Satellite symposiums: August 30, 2015 Main conference: August 31-September 2, 2015 PAPER SUBMISSIONS & PUBLICATIONS: ================================= TYPE-I (Full Paper Submissions; Submission Deadline: April 5, 2015): Papers need to have up to 10 pages in LNCS format: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0. All full length papers accepted (and all special sessions' full length papers) will be published by Springer as a volume of the series of LNCS/LNAI. TYPE-II (Abstract Submissions; Submission Deadline: May 20, 2015): Abstracts have a word limit of 500 words. Experimental research is particularly welcome. Accepted abstract submissions will be included in the conference program, and will be published as a single, collective proceedings volume. Title: Include in the title of the abstract all words critical for a subject index. Write your title in sentence case (first letter is capitalized; remaining letters are lower case). Do not bold or italicize your full title. Author: List all authors who contributed to the work discussed in the abstract. The presenting author must be listed in the first author slot of the list. Be prepared to submit contact information as well as conflict of interest information for each author listed. Abstract: Enter the body of the abstract and attach any applicable graphic files or tables here. Do not re-enter the title, author, support, or other information that is collected in other steps of the submission form. Presentation Preference: Authors may select from three presentation formats when submitting an abstract: "poster only,?, ?talk preferred" or "no preference." The ?talk preferred" selection indicates that you would like to give a talk, but will accept a poster format if necessary. Marking "poster only" indicates that you would not like to be considered for an oral-presentation session. Selecting "no preference" indicates the author's willingness to be placed in the best format for the program. Each paper or abstract requires one sponsoring attendee (i.e. someone who registered and is attending the conference). A single attendee can not sponsor more than two abstracts or papers. Oral presentations will be selected from both full length papers and abstracts. *** Post-Conference Journal Publication *** The BIH conferences have the formal ties with Brain Informatics journal (Springer, http://www.springer.com/40708). Accepted papers from the conference, including their Best Paper Award papers, will be expended and revised for possible inclusion in the Brain Informatics journal each year. It is fully sponsored and no any article-processing fee charged for BIH authors. Selected submissions will be considered for publication in special issues of international journals after their papers are extended to a full-length paper and pass a review process. More information can be found at http://www.bih-amt.com/publications/ *** Topics and Areas *** Please find the topics and areas of interest of the 2015 International Conference on Brain Informatics and Health (BIH'15) at http://www.bih-amt.com/call-for-papers/topics/ *** AMT'15 Session *** The advance of wearable sensor technology makes the monitoring of human behavior and life style becomes feasible. This development gives the active media technology a new dimension which is more closely related to the healthcare and cognitive studies. Following the success of past conferences in this series, AMT'15 will be jointly held with BIH?15 as a special session. ORGANIZERS ========== General Chairs: Karl Friston, University College London, UK Yike Guo, Imperial College London, UK Program Chairs: Aldo Faisal, Imperial College London, UK Sean Hill, EPFL, Switzerland Hanchuan Peng, Allen Institute for Brain Science, US Workshop/Special-Session Chairs: Andreas Holzinger, Medical University Graz, Austria Zhisheng Huang, Vrije University of Amsterdam, Netherlands David Powers, Flinders University of South Australia, Australia Publicity Chairs: Jessica Turner, Georgia State University, US Juan D. Velasquez, University of Chile, Chile Yi Zeng, Institute of Automation, CAS, China Local Organizing Chairs: Thomas Henis, Imperial College London, UK Kai Sun, Imperial College London, UK Chao Wu, Imperial College London, UK Exhibition/Sponsorship Chair: Caroline Li, University of Kent, UK Steering Committee Co-Chairs: Ning Zhong, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan Jiming Liu, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong *** Contact Information *** Chao Wu, Imperial College London, UK Aldo Faisal, Imperial College London, UK ------------------------ From Vittorio.Murino at iit.it Mon Jan 26 07:17:16 2015 From: Vittorio.Murino at iit.it (Vittorio Murino) Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 13:17:16 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: CFP - 18th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing ICIAP 2015 Message-ID: <54C6304C.4020304@iit.it> ============================================================= 18th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing ICIAP 2015 ============================================================= Genova, Italy 7-11 September, 2015 http://www.iciap2015.eu Main Conference: 9-11 September, 2015 Workshop and Tutorials: 7-8 September, 2015 ======================================================= IMPORTANT DATES Full paper submission: March 16, 2015 Full paper evaluation notification: May 15, 2015 Camera ready submission: June 15, 2015 Author registration: June 22, 2015 Workshop, Tutorial and Special Session proposals: February 9, 2015 ======================================================= CALL FOR PAPERS ICIAP 2015 is the 18th edition of a series of conferences organized biennially by the Italian Member Society (GIRPR) of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The conference covers both classic and most recent trends in computer vision, pattern recognition and image processing, addressing both theoretical and applicative aspects. Specific topic areas have been selected, each one overseen by scientists, among the main experts in their respective areas. The conference foresees the invited lectures of six distinguished speakers. Satellite workshops and tutorials are also organized. TOPIC AREAS AND CHAIRS We are soliciting papers on both classic and most recent trends in computer vision, pattern recognition and image processing, addressing both theoretical and applicative aspects, with particular emphasis (but not limited) to the following topic areas, each one directly managed by the experts below indicated: - Video Analysis & Understanding: R. Cucchiara (U. of Modena - Reggio Emilia), J. Gonzalez (U. Autonoma de Barcelona) - Multiview Geometry and 3D Computer Vision: A. Fusiello (U. of Udine), M. Goesele (TU Darmstadt) - Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning: M. Pelillo (U. of Venezia), T. Caetano (NICTA) - Image Analysis, Detection and Recognition: R. Schettini (U. of Milano-Bicocca), T. Gevers (U. of Amsterdam) - Shape Analysis and Modeling: L. De Floriani (U. of Genova), G. Borgefors (Uppsala U.) - Multimedia: N. Sebe (U. of Trento), C. Snoek (U. of Amsterdam) - Biomedical Applications: S. Dellepiane (U. of Genova), D. Van De Ville (EPFL & U. of Geneve) Papers should be submitted following the SPRINGER LNCS format for a maximum of 10 pages. INVITED SPEAKERS * Samy Bengio, Google * Kristen Grauman, University of Texas at Austin * Michal Irani, Weizmann Institute of Science * Bernt Schiele, Max Planck Institute for Informatics * Arnold Smeulders, University of Amsterdam * Xiaogang Wang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong ORGANIZATION - General Chair: V. Murino (IIT and U. of Verona) - Program Chairs: E. Puppo (U. of Genova), G. Vernazza (U. of Genova) - Workshop Chairs: M. Cristani (U. of Verona), C. Sansone (U. of Napoli Federico II) - Tutorial Chair: A. Del Bue (IIT) - Special Sessions Chairs: G. Boccignone (U. of Milano), G. Giacinto (U. of Cagliari) - US Liason Chair: S. Savarese (Stanford U.) - Asia Liaison Chair: H. Saito (Keio U.) Web: http://www.iciap2015.eu Contacts: iciap2015 at iit.it ------------------------------------------------------------ -- 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 Secretary: Sara Curreli email: sara.curreli at iit.it Phone: +39 010 71781 917 http://www.iit.it/pavis ******************************************** From volker.roth at unibas.ch Mon Jan 26 10:11:10 2015 From: volker.roth at unibas.ch (Volker Roth) Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 16:11:10 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: University of Basel (Switzerland): open PhD position in "Machine Learning methods for Analyzing DNA Sequencing Data" Message-ID: <54C6590E.9070405@unibas.ch> Applications are invited for a PhD position in the interdisciplinary research project "The interplay of host and viral factors in the hurdle to cure HIV-1", which is a SystemX.ch project run by the University Hospital Zurich (Division of Infectious Diseases), ETH Zurich (Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering), IBM Research Zurich, EPFL Lausanne and the University of Basel (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science). The main focus of the Basel group will concern Machine Learning models for reconstructing dependency models that encode the statistical relations between host and virus and for detecting causal relations between several longitudinal descriptors. The position will be associated with the PhD program "Image Understanding and Intelligent Data Analysis" at our department:\\ http://www.cs.unibas.ch/education/phd-program-image-understanding-and-intelligent-data-analysis/ Candidates will have a Masters degree with background and experience in computer science, applied mathematics, physics or bioinformatics, interest to work in an interdisciplinary research environment and good communication skills (English). For further inquiries, please contact Volker Roth: volker.roth at unibas.ch Successful candidates will be awarded a fellowship with a competitive salary (approx. 47000 CHF/year). Applications with a full CV, short statement of research interests and names of at least one referee should be submitted to volker.roth at unibas.ch Submission deadline: March 31, 2015 -- ======================================================================== Prof. Dr. Volker Roth Department of Mathematics and Computer Science University of Basel Tel.: +41-(0)61-2670549 Spiegelgasse. 1, email: volker.roth at unibas.ch CH-4051 Basel, Switzerland http://bmda.cs.unibas.ch/ ======================================================================== From christopher.pack at mcgill.ca Mon Jan 26 09:19:53 2015 From: christopher.pack at mcgill.ca (Christopher Pack, Dr.) Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 14:19:53 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: faculty positions in neuroscience Message-ID: The Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) at McGill University invites applications for four Assistant Professors who will focus on one or more of our priority areas. - Brain Tumors - Cognitive Neuroscience - Epilepsy - Neural Circuits - Neurodegenerative Disorders - MS and Neuroimmunology - Rare Neurological Diseases Information about research in these areas can be found at http://www.mcgill.ca/neuro/research/groups. Successful candidates will be expected to develop innovative, externally funded independent research programs that augment existing priorities, to supervise graduate students, and to contribute to undergraduate teaching. We offer attractive salary and start-up packages and a supportive environment designed to allow starting faculty to develop robust research programs. The MNI is integrated with the Montreal Neurological Hospital, a large clinical unit specialized in neurosurgery and the treatment of neurological disorders. We provide a unique environment for studying fundamental and applied neuroscience. McGill University has been Canada's top-ranked biomedical university for each of the last 10 years, and the neuroscience community in greater Montreal is one of the largest and most diverse in North America. Montreal is a multicultural and lively city that offers a high quality of life. Applicants should have a Ph.D. or M.D. and at least three years of postdoctoral research training. Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience. Applications (consisting of a cover letter, curriculum vitae, statement of research interests, and names and contact information of three references) must be submitted via our recruitment web portal (http://mnirecruitment.com/). The review of applications will begin February 15, 2015 and will continue until positions are filled. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Vittorio.Murino at iit.it Tue Jan 27 05:00:09 2015 From: Vittorio.Murino at iit.it (Vittorio Murino) Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 11:00:09 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: [GROW 2015 @ CVPR 2015] Call for Papers - Submission: March 10, 2015 Message-ID: <54C761A9.9010208@iit.it> We apologize if you receive multiple copies of this message. ************************************************************************ GROW 2015 First International Workshop on GRoup and crOWd behavior analysis and understanding http://qil.uh.edu/grow2015/ June 11, 2015, Boston, MA, United States in association with CVPR 2015 ************************************************************************ >> PAPER submission: March 10, 2015 << ************************************************************************ CALL FOR PAPERS After years of research on the analysis of individuals by automatic methods, the computer vision community has transferred its attention on the new issue of modeling gatherings of people, commonly referred as groups or crowds, depending on the number of people involved. The aim of GROW 2015 is to bring together a wide range of researchers in computer vision and machine learning from one side, and applied social sciences on the other, to share innovative ideas and solutions for exploiting the potential synergies emerging from the integration of the two domains, for a range of different applications. For this reason, the invited speakers of the workshop will come from the computer science and from the social science domains, promoting an intriguing cross-fertilization among the two areas. This will serve to get an answer to many unresolved issues in the computer vision community, like: what is a group and what is a crowd? Is it true that the difference among them is a matter of number of people involved? Are there cues other than the spatial proximity and oriented velocity which could be used to detect them? Are there different typologies of groups and crowds? For example, in the sociological literature, social studies defined different kinds of crowd (spectator crowd, casual crowd, protest crowds and some other) and it could be interesting to understand whether these definitions could have some computational counterpart. Are there issues for sociologists which could be faced using computational methods (like annotations, massive observations by ecological camera networks)? The aim of the workshop will be that of explicitly managing these issues, having also a panel discussion at the end of the event. SCOPE To address these challenges, contributions are particularly welcome in the following areas: * Group/crowd detection * Group/crowd tracking * Tracking in the crowd * Group/crowd modeling from a drone * Egovision for group/crowd modeling * Group/crowd behavior understanding and activity recognition * Crowd counting * Group profiling * Information fusion for crowd modeling * F-formation/free conversational groups recognition * Jointly focused/commonly focused gathering recognition * Causal, spectator, protest crowd recognition and modeling * Abnormality detection in a group/crowd * Group detection in a crowd * Crowd forecasting * Metrics for group and crowd modeling * Video surveillance and sensor networks * groups) * (Collective) Head orientation, gesture recognition in groups and crowd * Groups and crowds datasets IMPORTANT DATES: Full Paper submission: Tuesday, 10th March 2015 Notification to authors: Friday, 17th April 2015 Submission Camera Ready: Monday, 27th April 2015 Workshop: Thursday, 11th June 2015 INVITED SPEAKERS Chiara Bassetti, University of Trento, Italy Shaogang Gong, Queen Mary University, UK (to be confirmed) Greg Mori, Simon Fraser University, USA Clark McPhail, University of Illinois, USA (to be confirmed) WORKSHOP CHAIRS: Vittorio Murino, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, IT Marco Cristani, University of Verona, IT Shishir Shah, University of Houston, USA Silvio Savarese, Stanford University, USA PROGRAM COMMITTEE (to be finalized): Loris Bazzani - The Dartmouth College, US Francois Bremond ? Inria, FR Andrea Cavallaro - Queen Mary University of London, UK Rama Chellappa - University of Maryland, College Park, US Rita Cucchiara - Universit? di Modena e Reggio Emilia, US Gianfranco Doretto - West Virginia University, US Frederic Jurie - Universit? de Caen, FR Xuelong Li - Chinese Academy of Sciences, CN Federico Pernici - University of Florence, IT Neil Robertson - Heriot-Watt University, UK Nicu Sebe - University of Trento, IT Lauro Snidaro - University of Udine, IT Stefano Tubaro - Politecnico di Milano, IT Sergio Velastin - Universidad de Santiago de Chile, CL Ramesh Visvanathan - Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies, DE Xiaogang Wang - The Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK Tony Xiang - Queen Mary University of London, UK Wei-Shi Zheng - Sun Yat-sen University, CN Hayley Hung - Technical University of Delft, NL Wolfram Burgard - University of Freiburg, DE Jean-Marc Odobez ? IDIAP, CH Amit K. Roy Chowdhury - University of California, Riverside, US Ming-Hsuan Yang - University of California at Merced, US SPECIAL ISSUE: A special issue on a top journal on computer vision is going to be organized Further Details: Please see the GROW 2015 website: http://qil.uh.edu/grow2015/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ -- 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 Secretary: Sara Curreli email: sara.curreli at iit.it Phone: +39 010 71781 917 http://www.iit.it/pavis ******************************************** From ghio.alessandro at gmail.com Tue Jan 27 09:42:47 2015 From: ghio.alessandro at gmail.com (Alessandro Ghio) Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 15:42:47 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: "Advances and perspectives of Big Data Analytics in Transportation" - INNS Big Data Conference 2015 - CFP Message-ID: *** Apologies for cross posting *** INNS Conference on Big Data 2015 - Special Session ? ?Advances and perspectives of Big Data Analytics in Transportation? - CALL FOR PAPERS INNS Conference on Big Data 2015, 8-10 August 2015, San Francisco, CA, USA ? http://innsbigdata.org Submissions are invited for the INNS Conference on Big Data 2015 Special Session "Advances and perspectives of Big Data Analytics in Transportation". Organizers: Alessandro Ghio, Davide Anguita - University of Genoa, Genoa (Italy) Diego Galar - Lule? University of Technology, Lule? (Sweden) Big Data Analytics in Transportation (BDAT) Special Session webpage: http://bdat.smartlab.ws ABSTRACT Transport asset management is a strategic process and/or service all over the world. The effective monitoring of the assets is a key task in order to guarantee efficient and safe exploitation. Current assets, with plenty of sensors' already installed and pervasive computing on them generate a huge of data along their day. In this scenario, asset managers host a large number of diverse systems where data, regarding different aspects of their activity, are stored. In most cases, these data are captured, stored and processed by different ? often incompatible ? systems, and further managed by independent departments and not shared at all. In the transportation domain, avionics paved the way towards the introduction of advanced analytics solutions in everyday operations: for example, the use of analytics approaches in capacity and pricing optimisation allows minimising vacant rooms, idle fleet, and unoccupied seats, which represent lost revenue. These results go remarkably beyond ?pure? statistics, as they conceive real-time correlation of thousands of measures, extraction of non-trivial information from data, and decision supporting/planning. In this framework, Data Analytics and, in particular, Computational Intelligence and Neural Networks based approaches play a central role, both in a descriptive (e.g. clustering, segmentation, analysis of status of an asset) and predictive (e.g. asset status forecast, condition based maintenance, demand forecast) context and application. In this sense, the exploitation of such approaches in other heterogeneous transport domains are on the way, as new insights to dealing with many transport challenges will emerge from combining and exploiting these vast datasets: for example, targets include ? but are not limited to ? offering better service to final users (e.g. customers, travellers, etc.) and improving transport systems sustainability, from the human, social, economic and environmental point of view. They are all included under a new term: Big Data. It refers to systems, algorithms, and procedures suitable to process data sets, which largely overcome the capacity of current single computers. Big Data is one-term drawing attention of many companies and institutions all over the world. Most organizations are speeding up their data processing strategies towards Big Data. This means a clear recognition by industry, agencies and public institutions. TOPICS This Special Session proposes as an international showcase for researchers working in the field of Big Data Analytics in the framework of transport systems to share information on their latest investigations. The context of the special session comprehends (but is not limited to) Neural Networks, and more broadly Computational Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Analytics approaches to transport-related problems, targeting the realization of smarter decision support systems for extracting knowledge from amounts of disparate heterogeneous data. Advances, perspectives, and applications both in academic research areas and industrial sectors are of interest within special session. All types of (freight, private, and public) transport means are concerned, including: Automotive (including local public transport systems) Avionics Maritime Railways (including light and urban/suburban rails). In particular, in this special session, we encourage submissions related (though not limited) to novel approaches and applications of Machine Learning, Computational Intelligence, Neural Networks Big Data oriented approaches to: Intelligent Transportation Systems in different domains, including multi-modal integration Data management, including approaches to enhance security and safety of data Data fusion, data integration, and data quality (including metrics) in different transport domains Real-time and on-time monitoring and prediction of current and future status of transport assets Condition-Based Maintenance of transportation assets Assessing sustainability impact of transport systems, with respect to human, social, economic, and environmental sustainability Increasing robustness and resilience of transport systems. Advances and application both in academic research areas and industrial sectors are of interest. SUBMISSION & IMPORTANT DATES We kindly invite you to submit a paper to this special session. Each paper will undergo to a peer reviewing process for its acceptance. Manuscripts should be submitted to special sessions through the paper submission website of INNS BigData 2015 as regular submissions, selecting the special session the paper has to belong to, and following the instructions provided in: http://innsbigdata.org/paper-submission/ Papers will be peer-reviewed with the same criteria used for the regular sessions. Paper submission deadline : 22 March 2015 Notification of acceptance : 22 May 2015 INNS Conference on Big Data 2015: 8-10 August 2015 NOTES You can find details about the special session at http://bdat.smartlab.ws . If you have any questions concerning the special session, please do not hesitate to contact us via email through the dedicated address: bdat at smartlab.ws More information about the Conference Program, accommodation facilities and registration fees is available on the INNS Conference on Big Data 2015 website http://innsbigdata.org --- Dr. Alessandro Ghio, Ph.D. Research Assistant Smartlab - Polytechnic School ? University of Genoa Via Opera Pia 11a I-16145 Genoa (Italy) T. +39-(0)10-3532192 F. +39-(0)10-3532897 M. +39-3404659908 @ Alessandro.Ghio at unige.it W http://ghio.it Twitter @alexghio ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From heidi at stat.cmu.edu Tue Jan 27 10:03:29 2015 From: heidi at stat.cmu.edu (Heidi Rhodes Sestrich) Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 15:03:29 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: SAND 7 Workshop Announcment Message-ID: The seventh international workshop on Statistical Analysis of Neural Data (SAND7) will take place May 27-29, 2015, in Pittsburgh, PA. Partial travel support is available. Requests for financial support should be made by MARCH 15. There will be talks by senior investigators and junior investigators. The talks by young investigators (graduate student or postdoc/faculty within 5 years of Ph.D.) will be selected on a competitive basis. Any young investigator interested in presenting their work as a talk should submit an abstract by MARCH 1. Please see our website: http://sand.stat.cmu.edu There will also be a poster session, to which all participants are invited to contribute. Talks and posters may involve new methodology, investigation of existing methods, or application of state-of-the-art analytical techniques. Here are the confirmed keynote speakers: Gyorgy Buzsaki (NYU) Marlene Cohen (University of Pittsburgh) Adrienne Fairhall (University of Washington) Bruce Rosen (Harvard, MGH) Mark Schnitzer (Stanford) Sebastian Seung (Princeton) This workshop series is concerned with analysis of neural signals from various sources, including EEG, fMRI, MEG, 2-Photon, and extracellular recordings. It aims to define important problems in neuronal data analysis and useful strategies for attacking them; foster communication between experimental neuroscientists and those trained in statisti- cal and computational methods encourage young researchers, including graduate students, to present their work; and expose young researchers to important challenges and oppor- tunities in this interdisciplinary domain, while providing a small meeting atmosphere to facilitate the interaction of young researchers with senior colleagues. The organizers are Emery Brown, Elizabeth Buffalo, Rob Kass, Liam Paninski, Sri Sarma and Jonathan Victor. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ogergo at brandeis.edu Tue Jan 27 17:26:43 2015 From: ogergo at brandeis.edu (Gergo Orban) Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 23:26:43 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: postdoctoral position in statistical analysis of population activity Message-ID: <712D220F-28DE-48D1-BFEF-C39C2F88B2C8@brandeis.edu> The MTA Wigner Research Centre for Physics (Budapest, Hungary) in partnership with the the MTA Institute for Experimental Medicine (Budapest, Hungary) invites applications for a postdoctoral or for a PhD position in characterising neural population activity. The applicant will join the newly formed Population Activity Research Unit, which is sponsored by a prestigious National Brain Research Program grant and will be co-supervised by Gerg? Orb?n and Andr?s Telcs. The primary focus of the research group is the characterization of activity patterns of large-scale neural populations in the hippocampus and the understanding of the computational principles underlying its dynamically changing states. The unparalleled performance of the nervous system is due to the fast and parallel processing of information that is achieved by the coherent activity of networks of neurons. Recent advancements in recording techniques provides access to high temporal resolution data from hundreds of identified neurons during task performance of animals. Understanding the organizational principles underlying the high-dimensional activity patterns has become a fundamental challenge of neurobiology. We are seeking highly motivated candidates with strong analytical background to take part of this challenge and to work on a project that is based on a strong collaboration between neurophysiology and theoretical neuroscience. The ideal candidate has a strong mathematical background, preferably with a PhD in physics, computer science, or mathematics or other quantitative disciplines. Besides mathematical skills, the position requires competence in programming (e.g. matlab, R, python, or C++). Candidates with training or research experience in statistics, machine learning, computational modelling, dynamical systems are especially encouraged to apply. Training in neuroscience is not required but the applicant has to demonstrate his/her willingness to acquire the necessary background for the project. High dimensional neuronal data is recorded by the experimental part of the group (Attila Gulyas, Institute for Experimental Medicine) but the candidate will have the opportunity get experience with cutting-edge neuronal recording techniques to design of novel experiments based on the analysis of the recorded data. The official starting date of the project is 1 February 2015 but the start date of the position is negotiable. Initial appointment is made for one year but can be extended to three years upon successful evaluation. The work is based in the PATTERN lab at the MTA Wigner Institute (Budapest, Hungary) but requires regular interactions with the experimental partners at the Institute for Experimental Medicine (Budapest). For further information please visit the project website, http://pattern.wigner.mta.hu. For informal inquiries please contact Gergo Orban (orban.gergo at wigner.mta.hu) or Andras Telcs (telcs.szit.bme at gmail.com). Please send applications, including CV, a research statement and contact information of two references by email to Andr?s Telcs before 20 February. From kai.x.wang at nyu.edu Mon Jan 26 14:13:40 2015 From: kai.x.wang at nyu.edu (Echo Wang) Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 14:13:40 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: *DEADLINE APPROACH*: 2015 NYU-Duke Neuroeconomics Summer School Message-ID: ? ** APPLICATION DEADLINE IN 3 WEEKS** *2015 NYU-Duke Neuroeconomics Summer Institute* *July 12-July 25, 2015* *Location: NYU Shanghai Pudong Campus * http://www.shanghai-neuroeconomics.org/summer-school-about/ **Call for applications: Deadline February 14 2015** New York University, Duke University and the Shanghai Neuroec ?? onomics Collective are delighted to present the first biennial Duke-NYU Cooperative International Summer Institute for Neuroeconomics, directed by Nathaniel Daw (NYU), Paul Glimcher (NYU), Ben Hayden (University of Rochester), Agnieszka Tymula (University of Sydney), Michael Platt (Duke University) and Xiao-Jing Wang (NYU and NYU-Shanghai). The goal of the Neuroeconomics Summer Institute is to bring together post-docs and advanced graduate students in neuroscience, psychology, economics and related disciplines for intensive and advanced study of the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of Neuroeconomics. The course will feature daily lectures, morning and afternoon, by leading international faculty in Neuroeconomics. Workshops and experimental projects will take place in the evenings. Modeled after the Cold Spring Harbor Banbury meetings and the International Behavioral Economics Summer School, the course aims to be the preeminent training venue for young neuroeconomists. The courses will be taught by a faculty of internationally prominent experts in neuroeconomics, including Xinying Cai (NYU Shanghai), Molly Crockett (Oxford), Michael Dorris (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Jeff Erlich (NYU Shanghai), Ernst Fehr (University of Zurich), Eric Johnson (Columbia), Uma Karmarkar (Harvard Business School), Liz Phelps (NYU), Drazan Prelec (MIT), Antonio Rangel (Caltech), Matthew Rushworth (Oxford), Naoshige Uchida (Harvard), Jeff Stevens (University of Nebraska), Daphna Shohamy (Columbia), Elke Weber (Columbia), and Shihwei Wu (National Yang-Ming University). Interested in applying? For details, please visit our website at ?? ? *http://www.shanghai-neuroeconomics.org/summer-school-about/ * Application deadline is* February 14, 2015.* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: Duke logo.JPG Type: image/jpeg Size: 27063 bytes Desc: not available URL: From zhong at maebashi-it.ac.jp Tue Jan 27 21:03:46 2015 From: zhong at maebashi-it.ac.jp (Ning Zhong) Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 11:03:46 +0900 Subject: Connectionists: BIH'15: Call for Symposium/Special-session Proposals Message-ID: <54C84382.2070805@maebashi-it.ac.jp> [Apologies if you receive this more than once] ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ BIH'15 CALL FOR SATELLITE SYMPOSIUM/SPECIAL SESSION PROPOSALS 2015 International Conference on Brain Informatics and Health (BIH'15) August 30 - September 2, 2015, London, UK Homepage: http://braininformatics.london Proposal submission due: March 10, 2015 Notification of proposal acceptance: March 30, 2015 --------------------------------------------------- Brain research is rapidly advancing with the application of big data technology to neuroscience as can be seen in major international initiatives in the US, Europe and Asia. BIH'15 reflects that brain informatics has emerged as a distinct field and crosses the disciplines of neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, signal processing, and neuroimaging technologies as well as data science. Following the success of past conferences in this series, BIH'15 will take place at Imperial College London, in UK, gathers the researchers from major international brain research projects, and plans an industrial exhibition. BIH'15 draws special attention to informatics for brain science, human behavior and brain health. BIH'15 will address big data approaches to both the brain and behaviour, with a strong emphasis on emerging trends of big data analysis and management technology for BI, active media technology in behavior learning, and real-world applications for brain and mental health. BIH'15 welcomes proposals to organize satellite symposiums (workshops) and high-end special sessions on related topics. *** Topics and Areas *** Please find the topics and areas of interest of the 2015 International Conference on Brain Informatics and Health (BIH'15) at http://www.bih-amt.com/call-for-papers/topics/ *** AMT'15 Session *** The advance of wearable sensor technology makes the monitoring of human behavior and life style becomes feasible. This development gives the active media technology a new dimension which is more closely related to the healthcare and cognitive studies. Following the success of past conferences in this series, AMT'15 will be jointly held with BIH?15 as a special session. ++++++++++++++++++ Submission Process ++++++++++++++++++ Symposium/Special-Session organizers should submit their proposals (PDF) directly to one of the Workshop Chairs via e-mail (see email addresses below). Symposium/Special-Session proposals should include the following elements: - Title of the symposium/special-session - Names of the symposium/special-session organizers, affiliation, mailing address, e-mail - A description of the topics of the symposium/special-session (approx. 250 words) - Type of the symposium/special-session (to accept full-papers or abstracts) - A description of how the symposium/special-session will contribute to the field - A short description on how the symposium/special-session will be advertised so as to ensure a sufficiently wide range of authors and high quality papers - A list of reviewers for the symposium/special-session contributions, and a short outline of how the review process will be conducted. +++++++++++ Publication +++++++++++ The organizers of approved symposiums/special sessions are required to announce the call for papers, assign papers to PC members for reviewing and decide upon the final program. As for the main conference, there are 2 types of Paper Submissions and Publication, which you can choose one of them: TYPE-I (Full Paper Submissions): Papers need to have up to 10 pages in LNCS format: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0. All full length papers accepted (and all special sessions' full length papers) will be published by Springer as a volume of the series of LNCS/LNAI. TYPE-II (Abstract Submissions): Abstracts have a word limit of 500 words. Experimental research is particularly welcome. Accepted abstract submissions will be included in the conference program, and will be published as a single, collective proceedings volume. Title: Include in the title of the abstract all words critical for a subject index. Write your title in sentence case (first letter is capitalized; remaining letters are lower case). Do not bold or italicize your full title. Author: List all authors who contributed to the work discussed in the abstract. The presenting author must be listed in the first author slot of the list. Be prepared to submit contact information as well as conflict of interest information for each author listed. Abstract: Enter the body of the abstract and attach any applicable graphic files or tables here. Do not re-enter the title, author, support, or other information that is collected in other steps of the submission form. ** Post-Conference Journal Publication *** The BIH conferences have the formal ties with Brain Informatics journal (Springer, http://www.springer.com/40708). Accepted papers from the conference, including their Best Paper Award papers, will be expended and revised for possible inclusion in the Brain Informatics journal each year. It is fully sponsored and no any article-processing fee charged for BIH authors. Selected submissions will be considered for publication in special issues of international journals after their papers are extended to a full-length paper and pass a review process. More information can be found at http://www.bih-amt.com/publications/ +++++++++++++++ Important Dates +++++++++++++++ Proposal submission due: March 10, 2015 Notification of proposal acceptance: March 30, 2015 Submission of symposium/special-session papers: May 20, 2015 Notification of symposium/special-session paper acceptance: June 10, 2015 Satellite symposiums: August 30, 2015 Main conference (including special sessions): August 31-September 2, 2015 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Workshop Chairs & Contact Information +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Please send the proposal via email to one of the workshop chairs, and don't hesitate to contact in case of questions. Andreas Holzinger, Medical University Graz, Austria Zhisheng Huang, Vrije University of Amsterdam, Netherlands David Powers, Flinders University of South Australia, Australia ---------------------------- From info.cognition at plymouth.ac.uk Wed Jan 28 05:55:02 2015 From: info.cognition at plymouth.ac.uk (Info Cognition (General Enquiries)) Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 10:55:02 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: =?utf-8?q?Conference_and_workshops_=28call_for_su?= =?utf-8?q?bmissions=29_-_Transdisciplinary_Approaches_to_Cognitive_Innova?= =?utf-8?b?dGlvbiDigJMgQ29nTm92bzog4oCYT2ZmIHRoZSBMaXDigJkg4oCTIFNlcHRl?= =?utf-8?q?mber_7-11_2015=2E?= Message-ID: APOLOGIES IN ADVANCE FOR ANY CROSS-POSTING! Short papers, posters and workshop proposals are invited for a conference to be held at Plymouth University, UK (7th-11th September 2015). Full details of the CogNovo Conference ?Off the Lip? (Transdisciplinary Approaches to Cognitive Innovation) can be found both below and in the attached document. Please forward to anyone else you think may be interested. Best wishes, Zo?. Zo? Foster-Smith Cognition Institute with Plymouth University http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/cognition [cid:image001.jpg at 01D03AE6.FDAAC260] OFF THE LIP: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Cognitive Innovation Workshop and Conference: Preliminary notice and call for participation 7-11 September 2015 Workshops: 7-8 September, Conference: 9-11September University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK Short papers, posters and workshop proposals are invited for a conference to be held at the University of Plymouth, UK between 7-11 September 2015. Confirmed Plenary Speakers: Amy Ione, Director of the Diatrope Institute, Berkeley, California, USA Roger Malina, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Technology, Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Dallas, USA Sundar Sarukkai, Professor and Director of the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, Manipal, India The promise of cognitive innovation as a collaborative project in the sciences, arts and humanities is that we can approach creativity as a bootstrapping cognitive process in which the energies that shape the poem are necessarily indistinguishable from those that shape the poet. For the purposes of this conference the exploration of the idea of cognitive innovation concerns an understanding of creativity that is not exclusively concerned with conscious human thought and action but also as intrinsic to our cognitive development. As a consequence, we see the possibility for cognitive innovation to provide a theoretical and practical platform from which to address disciplinary differences in ways that offer new topics and concerns for research in the sciences and the humanities. Papers should consider cognitive aspects of creativity, including but are not confined to: - Poetics, language and cognition - The dynamics and performativity of imagination - Affect and named emotions - Affective artefacts (artefacts as scaffolding device for mind) - Creativity as a ?self corrective process? - Cognition as creativity - Memory, metaphor, and media literacy - Archives, identity and emotionality - Art, mental health and consciousness - Networking and Network Studies - Creativity and mental imagery - Creativity and innovation in development - Social creativity - Neuroscience of creativity - Creativity as an iterative process - Simulating and modelling creativity Workshops The workshops will engage participants in the contributions made by past and current research in the Humanities in the understanding of cognition as a creative interaction with daily life. We are especially interested in case-studies and examples that will suggest how to build bridges between current trends in the cognitive sciences and established bodies of knowledge. We are inviting proposals for workshops of 90-120 minutes comprising small panels, structured discussions and practical explorations. Small grants are available to support workshop logistics. Conference papers Proposals are invited for papers dealing with responses to the research challenge of cognitive innovation from the sciences and humanities. We are particularly interested in offering opportunities for reporting on recent and emerging work in all disciplines and will give special attention to speculative approaches that involve more than one discipline. Papers (20 minutes) will be delivered in 30 minute slots to allow good time for discussion. Papers may also be presented as posters in the interactive poster+ session. Poster+ We encourage non-traditional forms of research presentations in the context of the familiar conference poster event. CogSlam Propose 6-minute cognition-related artworks including screenings, mini-lectures and performances to be interleaved with spontaneous contributions from delegates reflecting on the day?s discussions and exchanges. To submit a paper,poster or CogSlam please send a title and abstract of no more than 300 words together with a brief bio to Dr. Martha Blassnigg: martha.blassnigg at plymouth.ac.uk (Deadline 15th May 2015) If you would like to propose a workshop, please send a workshop title and brief abstract of 300-500 words and an outline of expected costs to Prof. Michael Punt: michael.punt at plymouth.ac.uk (Deadline 28th February 2015) There are no conference registration fees for students and a nominal fee of ? 50 for all other participants to cover lunches and coffee, with an additional ? 30 for those delegates wishing to attend the conference dinner. The conference administrator can assist with bookings for accommodation. _____________ Off the Lip is a collaboration between CogNovo (cognovo.eu) and Transtechnology Research (trans-techresearch.net), at the Cognition Institute, University of Plymouth. CogNovo is funded by the Marie Curie Initial Training Network FP7-PEOPLE-2013-ITN, grant number 604764. ________________________________ [http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/images/email_footer.gif] This email and any files with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the recipient to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient then copying, distribution or other use of the information contained is strictly prohibited and you should not rely on it. If you have received this email in error please let the sender know immediately and delete it from your system(s). Internet emails are not necessarily secure. While we take every care, Plymouth University accepts no responsibility for viruses and it is your responsibility to scan emails and their attachments. Plymouth University does not accept responsibility for any changes made after it was sent. Nothing in this email or its attachments constitutes an order for goods or services unless accompanied by an official order form. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 5126 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OFF THE LIP.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 205200 bytes Desc: OFF THE LIP.pdf URL: From mtista at gmail.com Thu Jan 29 06:32:35 2015 From: mtista at gmail.com (Massimo Tistarelli) Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2015 12:32:35 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Call for Applications: 12th Int.l Summer School on Biometrics 2015 Message-ID: <54CA1A53.7040106@gmail.com> *12th IAPR/IEEE Int.l Summer School for Advanced Studies on* *Biometrics for Secure Authentication:* *BIOMETRICS IN FORENSIC, SECURITY AND MOBILE APPLICATIONS* (Endorsed by IAPR TC-4 on Biometrics) Alghero, Italy - June, 22-26 2015 Contact: tista at uniss.it http://biometrics.uniss.it *APPLICATION DEADLINE:* February 15th 2015 /download the //*application form*/: http://biometrics.uniss.it /*preliminary schedule*//available/: /Summer%20School%20on%20Biometrics%20-%20Preliminary%20Schedule%202015.pdf In the last decade, research on the automated recognition of people has evolved to cover a large number of applications. From the early days, when security was the driving force behind biometric research, today?s challenges go far beyond security. Machine learning, Image understanding, Signal analysis, Neuroscience, Forensic science, and other disciplines, converged in a truly multidisciplinary effort to devise and build advanced systems to facilitate the interpretation of signals recorded from individuals acting in a given environment. This is what we simply call today ?Biometrics?. For the last twelve years, the International Summer School on Biometrics has been closely following the developments in science and technology to offer a cutting edge, intensive training course, always in-line with the current state-of-the-art. What are the most up-to-date core biometric technologies developed in the field? What is the potential impact of biometrics in forensic investigation and crime prevention? How can biometrics cope with mobile applications? What are the most relevant issues in biometric standardization? What can we learn from human perception? What does it involve to integrate a biometric recognition system? This school follows the successful track of the International Summer Schools on Biometrics held since 2003. In this 12th edition, the courses will mainly focus on new and emerging issues: ? How Biometrics will cope with the demand for mobile applications; ? How to exploit new biometric technologies in forensic and security applications; ? Standardization, evaluation and assessment of biometric applications. ? Biometrics technologies and advanced research: What is next? The courses will provide a clear and in-depth picture on the state-of-the-art in biometric verification/identification technology, both under the theoretical and scientific point of view as well as in diverse application domains. The lectures will be given by 18 outstanding experts in the field, from both academia and industry. An advanced feature of this summer school will be some practical sessions to better understand, ?hands on?, the real potential of today?s biometric technologies. *Participant application* The school will be open to about 50 highly qualified, motivated and pre-selected applicants. Phd students, post-docs, researchers, police officers and professionals are encouraged to apply. The lectures will be given by 18 outstanding experts in the field, from both academia and industry. The expected school fees will be in the order of 1,500 ? for Phd students and 2,000 ? for others (subject to change). The fees will include full board accommodation, all courses and handling material. A limited number of scholarships, covering a portion of the fees, will be awarded to Phd students, selected on the basis of their scientific background and on-going research work. Precedence will be given to members of the COST Action IC1106, and active members of IAPR and IEEE. The scholarship request form can be downloaded from the school web site http://biometrics.uniss.it. Phd students, researchers and post-docs are encouraged to submit a short paper (6 pages maximum) on their recent research activity. Selected, unpublished papers may be published, either in an edited book, or in a journal special issue. Poster boards will be also available to all participants to display their current research topics. Send a filled application form (download from http://biometrics.uniss.it) together with a short curriculum vitae to: Prof. Massimo Tistarelli ? e-mail: biometricsummerschool at gmail.com *Advance pre-registration is strictly required by all applicants by February 15th 2015.* *School location* The school will be hosted by Hotel El Faro (http://www.elfarohotel.it/) in the Capo Caccia bay near Alghero, Sardinia, one of the most beautiful resorts in the Mediterranean sea. The hotel El Faro has a recently renovated conference center, fully equipped for scientific events. The structure is beautifully immersed into the Capo Caccia bay. The entire structure, as well as the surroundings, proved to be a perfect environment for the school activities. *School Committee* *School director:* Massimo Tistarelli Computer Vision Laboratory University of Sassari ? Italy *Co-directors:* Josef Bigun Department of Computer Science Halmstad University ? Sweden Enrico Grosso Computer Vision Laboratory University of Sassari ? Italy Anil K. Jain Biometrics laboratory Michigan State University ? USA *Preliminary list of lecturers:* Thirimachos Bourlai West Virginia University ? USA Deepak Chandra Google inc. ? USA Farzin Deravi University of Kent ? UK Andrzej Drygajlo EPFL ? Switzerland Ida Gobbini Dartmouth College ? USA Anil K. Jain Michigan State University ? USA Davide Maltoni Universit? di Bologna ? Italy John Mason Swansea University ? UK Aldo Mattei Arma dei Carabinieri ? Italy Nasir Memon New York University, USA David Meuwly Netherlands Forensic Institute ? NL Emilio Mordini MD Center for Science, Society and Citizenship ? Italy Mark Nixon University of Southampton ? UK Alice O?Toole University of Texas ? USA Jonhaton Phillips NIST ? USA Bo Pi Goodix - China Arun Ross Michigan State University ? USA Tieniu Tan CASIA-NLPR ? China Massimo Tistarelli Universit? di Sassari ? Italy Alessandro Verri Universit? di Genova ? Italy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eros.pasero at polito.it Wed Jan 28 17:36:09 2015 From: eros.pasero at polito.it (PASERO EROS GIAN ALESSANDRO) Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 23:36:09 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: WIRN 2015 Message-ID: We apologize if you receive multiple copies of this message. ************************************************************************ WIRN 201WIRN5 - First Call for Papers 25th Italian Workshop on Neural Networks May 21-22, Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy WIRN 2015 - CALL FOR PAPERS The Italian Workshop on Neural Networks (WIRN) is the annual conference of the Italian Society of Neural Networks (SIREN). The conference is organized, since 1989, in co-operation with the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (IIASS) located in Vietri S/M (Italy), and is a traditional event devoted to the discussion of novelties and innovations related to field of Artificial Neural Networks. In recent years, it also became a multidisciplinary forum on psychological and cognitive theories for modelling human behaviours. The 25th Edition of the Italian Workshop on Neural Networks (WIRN 2015) will be held at the IIASS in Vietri sul Mare, near Salerno, Italy. CALL FOR PAPERS, SPECIAL SESSIONS PROPOSALS: Prospective authors are invited to contribute high quality papers in the topic areas listed below and proposals for special sessions. Special sessions aim to bring together researchers in special focused topics. Each special session should include at least 3 contributing papers. A proposal for a special session should include a summary statement (1 page long) describing the motivation and relevance of the proposed special session, together with the article titles and author names of the papers that will be included in the track. Contributions should be high quality, original and not published elsewhere or submitted for publication during the review period. Please visit the web site for details on the required paper format. Papers will be reviewed by the Program Committee, and may be accepted for oral or poster presentation. All contributions will be published in the Springer volume series Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies (http://www.springer.com/series/8767) and indexed by SCOPUS. Authors will be limited to one paper per registration. Manuscripts should not exceed the limits of 8 pages. The description of the submission procedure will appears soon on the WIRN 2015 Website www.wirn2015.polito.it Confirmed key note speakers - Cesare Alippi, Politecnico of Milan - Nikolas Kasabov, Auckland University of Technology - Marios M. Polycarpou, University of Cyprus The WIRN 2015 will host the Special Session "Computational Intelligence Methods for Biomedical ICT in Neurological Diseases" co-funded by the EU program CONNECT2SEA; with guest speakers: - Vo Van Toi, Ho Chi Min International University, Vietnam Lipo Wang, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore TOPIC AREAS: Suggested topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following research and application areas: General Topics of Interest about Computational Intelligence: Neural Networks, Fuzzy Systems, Evolutionary Computation and Swarm Intelligence, Support Vector Machines, Complex Networks, Bayesian and Kernel Networks, Consciousness and Models of Emotion Cognitive and Psychological Models of Human Behavior Algorithms & Architectures: Among others: Opportunist Networks, Metabolic Networks, ICA and BSS, Deep Neural Networks, Bio-inspired Neural Networks, Wavelet Neural Networks, Intelligent Algorithms for Signal (Speech, Faces, Gestures, Gaze, etc) Processing and Recognition Implementations: Among others: Hardware Implementations and Embedded Systems, Neuromorphic Circuits and Hardware, Spike-based VLSI NNs, Intelligent Interactive Dialogue Systems, Embodied Conversational Agents Applications: Among others: Finance and Economics, Big Data Analysis, Neuroinformatics and Bioinformatics, Brain-Computer Interface and Systems, Data Fusion, Time Series Modelling and Prediction, Intelligent Infrastructure and Transportation Systems, Sensors and Network of Sensors, Smart Grid, Process Monitoring and Diagnosis, Intelligent and Adaptive Systems for Human-Machine Interaction. PAPER SUBMISSION: Important Dates Special Session/Workshop proposals: February 15, 2015 Paper Submission deadline: March 15, 2015 Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2015 Camera-ready copy: May 15, 2015 Conference Dates: May 21-22, 2015 More detailed instructions will follow soon on www.wirn2015.polito.it Prof. Eros Pasero SIREN President Laboratorio di Neuronica Dip. Elettronica e Telecomunicazioni - Politecnico di Torino c.so Duca d. Abruzzi 24 10129 Torino - Italy ______________________________________ ' Tel +39 011 0904043, +393316796014 6 Fax 0+39 011 0904216 *e-mail eros.pasero at polito.it WEB: www.neuronica.polito.it P THINK BEFORE YOU PRINT: before printing this e-mail think whether it is really necessary ______________________________________________ "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility" ______________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 2950 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.gif Type: image/gif Size: 201 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.png Type: image/png Size: 10833 bytes Desc: not available URL: From sinankalkan at gmail.com Thu Jan 29 12:08:00 2015 From: sinankalkan at gmail.com (Sinan KALKAN) Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2015 19:08:00 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Deadline Extension - ICAR 2015 - 17th International Conference on Advanced Robotics Message-ID: Dear all, Due to many requests, the deadline for ICAR 2015 has been extended to February 15, 2015 (UTC-8:00). Please find the updated CFP for the conference below for your information. Best * Please accept our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this call * 17th International Conference on Advanced Robotics, ICAR 2015 27-31 July, 2015, Istanbul, Turkey http://www.icar2015.org/ *Call for Papers* The 17th International Conference on Advanced Robotics, ICAR 2015 is organized by Middle East Technical University in collaboration with Kadir Has University. The conference will take place in Kadir Has University campus in Istanbul, Turkey, on July 27-31, 2015. Keeping up with the same spirit of innovation, ICAR wants to bring high quality papers, workshops and tutorials to the geographical areas where the larger robotics conferences have not been organized yet. After the successful conference last year in Montevideo, Uruguay (www.icar2013.org), next year, the 17th ICAR will be held in Istanbul, Turkey where ?the east meets the west?. The conference is organized by Middle East Technical University (METU) in collaboration with Kadir Has University. The venue is Kadir Has Campus situated on the historic peninsula along Halic bay ( www.icar2015.org). ICAR 2015 will be technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. The technical program of ICAR 2015 will consist of plenary talks, workshops and oral presentations. Submitted papers should describe original work in the form of theoretical modelling, design, experimental validation, or case studies from all areas of robotics, focusing on emerging paradigms and application areas including but not limited to: Robotics Vision Adversarial Planning Cognitive Robotics Robot Operating Systems Robotics Architectures Simulation and Visualization Mobile Robots Robot Swarms Humanoid Robots Biologically-Inspired Robots Self-Localization and Navigation Embedded and Mobile Hardware Spatial Cognition Robotic Entertainment Human-Robot Interaction Robot Competitions Multi-Robot Systems Unmanned Aerial Robots Search and Rescue Robots Underwater Robotic Systems Learning and Adaptation Educational Robotics Cooperation and Competition Rehabilitation Robotics Dynamics and Control Immersive Robotics *Keynote speakers* Danica Kragic Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden http://www.csc.kth.se/~danik/ Oussama Khatib Stanford University, USA http://cs.stanford.edu/groups/manips/ok.html Todd P. Coleman University of California, San Diego, USA http://coleman.ucsd.edu/ Noah J. Cowan Johns Hopkins University, USA http://limbs.lcsr.jhu.edu/people/cowan/ *Important Dates* Paper submission February 15, 2015 Workshop and tutorial proposals February 1, 2015 Notification of paper acceptance April 15, 2015 Camera-ready papers May 15, 2015 ICAR 2015 Conference July 27-31, 2015 *Paper Submission* Original technical paper contributions are solicited for presentation at ICAR 2015. Accepted papers will be published in IEEE Xplore conference proceedings. Submissions should be 6-8 pages following the IEEE Xplore format available at: http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html Papers will be submitted online via EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icar2015 *For more information* http://www.icar2015.org/ https://www.facebook.com/ICAR2015 Sinan Kalkan, Erol Sahin Publicity and Publication Co-chairs -- Sinan KALKAN, Asst. Prof. Dept. of Computer Engineering Middle East Technical University Ankara TURKEY Web: http://kovan.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~sinan Tel: + 90 - 312 - 210 5547 / 210 7372 Fax: +90 - 312 - 210 5544 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brody at princeton.edu Thu Jan 29 11:15:02 2015 From: brody at princeton.edu (Carlos Brody) Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2015 11:15:02 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: postdoc in decision-making at Princeton Message-ID: Postdoc in computational neuroscience of decision-making. My group at Princeton University is looking for a talented computational postdoc to work on theory-driven modeling and data analysis of the neurophysiology of decision-making. We carry out both computational modeling (e.g., Brunton et al., Science?2013 ) and experiments (e.g., Hanks, Kopec et al., Nature?2015 ), and this computational position will provide a powerful opportunity to influence and help direct experiments as they are conceived and develop. The data to be worked with will focus on simultaneous multi-neuron recordings, both electrophysiological and using two-photon cellular-resolution imaging (e.g., Scott et al., Neuron 2013 ), in decisions driven by accumulation of evidence. We are working towards single-trial, population-level understanding of the neural circuit mechanisms underlying decision-making. A background in quantitative sciences (e.g., machine learning, physics, math, computer science) and a strong interest in neuroscience are preferred. Please contact me directly at brody at princeton.edu with a brief email describing your interests, your CV, and the names and contact info for two references. I look forward to hearing from you! Carlos Brody http://brodylab.princeton.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Carlos Brody (609) 258-7645 brody at princeton.edu Howard Hughes Medical Institute & Princeton University Princeton Neurosci. Inst. & Dept. of Molecular Biology 155 Princeton Neuro Inst, Washington Rd, Princeton NJ 08544 http://brodylab.princeton.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tatsuno at uleth.ca Thu Jan 29 13:20:02 2015 From: tatsuno at uleth.ca (Tatsuno, Masami) Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2015 18:20:02 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: New book: Analysis and modeling of multi-neuronal activity Message-ID: * Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this email * Dear Colleagues, Some of you might be interested in our recent book, Analysis and Modeling of Coordinated Multi-neuronal Activity (Springer Series in Computational Neuroscience, Vol. 12). The book covers - State-of-the-art introduction of multi-electrode recordings and how they contribute to the understanding of hippocampal memory - Overview of the modeling approach to hippocampal memory - Presentation of hippocampal local circuits and hippocampal-cortical interactions http://www.springer.com/biomed/neuroscience/book/978-1-4939-1968-0 http://www.amazon.com/Analysis-Coordinated-Multi-neuronal-Computational-Neuroscience/dp/1493919687/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top Best regards, Masami Tatsuno (Editor) University of Lethbridge, AB, Canada ----- Table of Contents 1. Techniques for Large-Scale Multiunit Recording; H. Steenland and B. McNaughton 2. Silicon Probe Techniques for Large-Scale Multiunit Recording; H. Steenland and B. McNaughton 3. Overview of Neural Activity in the Awake and Sleeping Hippocampus; M. Eckert and M. Tatsuno 4. Associative Reactivation of Place-Reward Information in the Hippocampal-Ventral Striatal Circuitry; C. Lansink and C. Pennartz 5. Hippocampal Sequences and the Cognitive Map; A. Wikenheiser and D. Redish 6. Reorganization of Hippocampal Place- Selective Patterns During Goal-Directed Learning and Their Reactivation During Sleep; D. Dupret and J. Csicsvari 7. Causal Relationship Between SPWRs and Spatial Learning and Memory; G. Girardeau and M. Zugaro 8. Packets of Sequential Neural Activity in Sensory Cortex; A. Luczak 9. Coordinated Sequence Replays Between the Visual Cortex and Hippocampus; D. Haggerty and D. Ji 10. Memory Consolidation, Replay, and Cortico- Hippocampal Interactions; E. Holleman and F. Battaglia 11. Memory Reactivation in Humans; J. Farthouat and P. Peigneux 12. Models and Theoretical Frameworks for Hippocampal and Entorhinal Cortex Function in Memory and Navigation; N. Schultheiss, J. Hinman, and M. Hasselmo 13. Information Encoding and Reconstruction by Phase Coding of Spikes; Z. Nadasdy 14. Reinforcement Learning and Hippocampal Dynamics; A. Johnson and S. Venditto 15. Off-Line Replay and Hippocampal- Neocortical Interaction; S. K?li From t.hospedales at qmul.ac.uk Thu Jan 29 17:56:47 2015 From: t.hospedales at qmul.ac.uk (Timothy Hospedales) Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2015 22:56:47 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: PhD Position in autonomous learning at QMUL Message-ID: PhD Position in Biologically Plausible Autonomous Learning Queen Mary University of London School of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD studentship undertaking research into robotic learning within the context of a European Union Horizon 2020-funded project DREAM (Deferred Restructuring of Experience in Autonomous Machines). DREAM is a joint Horizon 2020 project combining strength of 5 academic partners throughout Europe. The project aims to develop a machine that can accumulate and develop increasingly complex skills over an extended time period through consolidation and restructuring of knowledge. The successful candidate will develop models for machine perception and control that are capable of compositional and open-ended learning, and also study their biological plausibility. Nationality: Open to all. Deadline: 1st March 2015. Interviews expected: March 2015. Start Date: Spring 2015. For more details and a application: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AKL097/phd-studentship-in-autonomous-learning/ For queries contact: Dr. Timothy Hospedales t.hospedales at qmul.ac.uk From gluck at pavlov.rutgers.edu Fri Jan 30 16:23:15 2015 From: gluck at pavlov.rutgers.edu (Mark Gluck) Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2015 16:23:15 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: Postdoctoral or Research Assistant Position Offered for Summer/Fall 2015 in Computational Neuroscience, Machine Learning, & Neural Network Modeling at Rutgers University-Newark (just outside New York City) Message-ID: <1033EE68-E987-453D-B237-DD74B2F33D13@pavlov.rutgers.edu> Postdoctoral or Research Assistant Position Offered for Summer/Fall 2015 in Computational Neuroscience, Machine Learning, & Neural Network Modeling at Rutgers University-Newark (just outside New York City) We seek someone with a MS or PhD (or equivalent experience) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, or Artificial Intelligence with substantial prior experience in neural-network modeling and machine learning methods, and excellent computer programming skills. Research will involve a mixture of (1) computational neuroscience modeling of brain circuits for learning, memory, and decision making, and how these are altered by neurological and psychiatric disorders, and (2) application of these brain circuits to applied problems in machine learning, pattern recognition, and novelty detection. Training component of the position will involve opportunities to learn about neuroscience, anatomy, physiology, cognitive neuroscience, psychopathology, through courses, seminars, and participation in meetings and practical experience. Our ideal candidate is someone with a strong quantitative background in CS/EE/AI who wants to make a career transition to applying these skills to the life sciences, especially to systems, cognitive and clinical neuroscience. No prior neuroscience experience or training is required (we will provide training in that area). We expect the position to be for at least two-years, possibly longer, depending on funding. If interested, please email a single PDF file with a cover letter, your CV and a copy of one relevant published paper of which you are first author to gluck at pavlov.rutgers.edu . The cover letters should summarize your prior training and future career goals and why this position is appropriate for you based on criteria noted above. Applicants should review the papers and research overviews on our lab first at www.gluck.edu ___________________________________ Dr. Mark A. Gluck, Professor Director, Rutgers Memory Disorders Project Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Rutgers University 197 University Ave. Newark, New Jersey 07102 Web: http://www.gluck.edu Email: gluck at pavlov.rutgers.edu Ph: (973) 353-3298 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From grlmc at urv.cat Sat Jan 31 07:01:55 2015 From: grlmc at urv.cat (GRLMC) Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 13:01:55 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: AlCoB 2015: 3rd call for papers Message-ID: <3A0674AA0CED4A7CB0275D33A8B31C50@Carlos1> *To be removed from our mailing list, please respond to this message with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line* **************************************************************************** ****** 2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ALGORITHMS FOR COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY AlCoB 2015 Mexico City, Mexico August 4-6, 2015 Organized by: Centre for Complexity Sciences (C3) School of Sciences Institute for Research in Applied Mathematics and Systems (IIMAS) Graduate Program in Computing Science and Engineering National Autonomous University of Mexico Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC) Rovira i Virgili University http://grammars.grlmc.com/alcob2015/ **************************************************************************** ****** AIMS: AlCoB aims at promoting and displaying excellent research using string and graph algorithms and combinatorial optimization to deal with problems in biological sequence analysis, genome rearrangement, evolutionary trees, and structure prediction. The conference will address several of the current challenges in computational biology by investigating algorithms aimed at: 1) assembling sequence reads into a complete genome, 2) identifying gene structures in the genome, 3) recognizing regulatory motifs, 4) aligning nucleotides and comparing genomes, 5) reconstructing regulatory networks of genes, and 6) inferring the evolutionary phylogeny of species. Particular focus will be put on methodology and significant room will be reserved to young scholars at the beginning of their career. VENUE: AlCoB 2015 will take place in Mexico City, the oldest capital city in the Americas and the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world. The venue will be the main campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. SCOPE: Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to: Exact sequence analysis Approximate sequence analysis Pairwise sequence alignment Multiple sequence alignment Sequence assembly Genome rearrangement Regulatory motif finding Phylogeny reconstruction Phylogeny comparison Structure prediction Compressive genomics Proteomics: molecular pathways, interaction networks ... Transcriptomics: splicing variants, isoform inference and quantification, differential analysis Next-generation sequencing: population genomics, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics ... Microbiome analysis Systems biology STRUCTURE: AlCoB 2015 will consist of: invited lectures peer-reviewed contributions INVITED SPEAKERS: Julio Collado-Vides (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Cuernavaca), >From Curation of Information to Knowledge Encoding Gaston Gonnet (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich), Human-Dog-Mouse, Probably and Provable Non-trivial Evolution Close to the Root of the Mammalian Clade Peter D. Karp (SRI International, Menlo Park), Algorithms for Metabolic Route Search and Determination of Reaction Atom Mappings PROGRAMME COMMITTEE: Stephen Altschul (National Center for Biotechnology Information, Bethesda, USA) Yurii Aulchenko (Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia) Pierre Baldi (University of California, Irvine, USA) Daniel G. Brown (University of Waterloo, Canada) Yuehui Chen (University of Jinan, China) Keith A. Crandall (George Washington University, Washington, USA) Joseph Felsenstein (University of Washington, Seattle, USA) Michael Galperin (National Center for Biotechnology Information, Bethesda, USA) Susumu Goto (Kyoto University, Japan) Igor Grigoriev (DOE Joint Genome Institute, Walnut Creek, USA) Martien Groenen (Wageningen University, The Netherlands) Yike Guo (Imperial College, London, UK) Javier Herrero (University College London, UK) Karsten Hokamp (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) Hsuan-Cheng Huang (National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan) Ian Korf (University of California, Davis, USA) Nikos Kyrpides (DOE Joint Genome Institute, Walnut Creek, USA) Mingyao Li (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA) Yun Li (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA) Jun Liu (Harvard University, Cambridge, USA) Rodrigo L?pez (European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, UK) Andrei N. Lupas (Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, T?bingen, Germany) B.S. Manjunath (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) Carlos Mart?n-Vide (chair, Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain) Tarjei Mikkelsen (Broad Institute, Cambridge, USA) Henrik Nielsen (Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark) Zemin Ning (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, UK) Christine Orengo (University College London, UK) Modesto Orozco (Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Barcelona, Spain) Christos A. Ouzounis (Centre for Research & Technology Hellas, Thessaloniki, Greece) Manuel Peitsch (Philip Morris International R&D, Neuch?tel, Switzerland) David A. Rosenblueth (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico) Julio Rozas (University of Barcelona, Spain) Alessandro Sette (La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, USA) Peter F. Stadler (University of Leipzig, Germany) Guy Theraulaz (Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France) Alfonso Valencia (Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, Madrid, Spain) Kai Wang (University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA) Lusheng Wang (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong) Zidong Wang (Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK) Harel Weinstein (Cornell University, New York, USA) Jennifer Wortman (Broad Institute, Cambridge, USA) Jun Yu (Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China) Mohammed J. Zaki (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, USA) Louxin Zhang (National University of Singapore, Singapore) Hongyu Zhao (Yale University, New Haven, USA) ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona) Francisco Hern?ndez-Quiroz (Mexico City) Carlos Mart?n-Vide (Tarragona, co-chair) David A. Rosenblueth (Mexico City, co-chair) Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona) 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, references, proofs, etc.) and should be prepared according to the standard format for 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=alcob2015 PUBLICATIONS: A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS/LNBI series will be available by the time of the conference. A special issue of a major journal will be later published containing peer-reviewed substantially extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation. REGISTRATION: The registration form can be found at: http://grammars.grlmc.com/alcob2015/Registration.php DEADLINES: Paper submission: March 2, 2015 (23:59 CET) Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: April 10, 2015 Final version of the paper for the LNCS/LNBI proceedings: April 19, 2015 Early registration: April 19, 2015 Late registration: July 21, 2015 Submission to the journal special issue: November 6, 2015 QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION: florentinalilica.voicu at urv.cat POSTAL ADDRESS: AlCoB 2015 Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC) Rovira i Virgili University Av. Catalunya, 35 43002 Tarragona, Spain Phone: +34 977 559 543 Fax: +34 977 558 386 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: National Autonomous University of Mexico Rovira i Virgili University --- Este mensaje no contiene virus ni malware porque la protecci?n de avast! Antivirus est? activa. http://www.avast.com From muftimahmud at gmail.com Sat Jan 31 15:40:28 2015 From: muftimahmud at gmail.com (Mufti Mahmud) Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 21:40:28 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Call for Applications: School on Neurotechnologies 2015 (March 23-27, 2015) at Padova, Italy. Message-ID: Dear All, Sorry for the cross posting of this message. I am glad to communicate that the NeuroChip Laboratory of University of Padova, Padova, Italy is organizing a School on Neurotechniques with special emphasis on "Tools for Investigating the Function of Neural Circuits". The school will be held from March 23 ? 27, 2015 and the deadline for application is February 20, 2015. The following topics will be covered in the school: 1. Multi-electrode and multi-transistor arrays 2. Implantable brain probes for acute and chronic recording 3. Calcium imaging 4. Voltage sensitive dye imaging 5. Optogenetics 6. Transcranic magnetic stimulation and EEG 7. Mixed electrophysiology, genetics and behavior approaches 8. Information theory and the analysis of neuronal population signals 9. Closed-loop electrophysiology and hybrid neuromorphic-neural systems Thank you for your attention. Best regards, Mufti Mahmud Call for participation ------------------------- School on Neurotechniques 2015: The toolbox for investigating the function of neural circuits 23-27 March 2015 NeuroChip Lab, University of Padova, Italy Website: http://www.vassanellilab.eu/school-neurotechniques/ OBJECTIVE Investigating information processing and identifying operational rules of brain neural circuits relies on the capability to selectively record and stimulate multiple neurons within a network. The toolbox of available techniques conceived to meet this need is rapidly expanding. The CSN School on Neurotechniques 2015 will offer an overview on advanced electrical- and light-based recording methods of neuronal excitability, focusing on those that are most relevant for the investigation of neural networks ?in vitro? and ?in vivo? and for application in neuroprosthetics. Techniques derived from information theory for the analysis of neuronal population signals will be presented and practical demonstrations of experimental recording sessions provided. The school targets doctoral students, post-doctoral researchers, scientists working in the related fields. Since the school's topics are interdisciplinary covering neurobiology, neuronal biophysics, microscopy, and electronics, preliminary knowledge in these fields is highly recommended. SPEAKERS Luca Berdondini, Italian Institute of Technology, Italy Paolo Del Giudice, National Institute of Health, Italy Stefano Ferraina, University of Rome ?La Sapienza?, Italy Marta Giacomello, University of Padova, Italy Michele Giugliano, University of Antwerp, Belgium Bernd Kuhn, Okinawa Institute of Science & Technology, Japan Gabriele Losi, CNR Institute of Neuroscience, Padova, Italy Sergio Martinoia, University of Genova, Italy Marcello Massimini University of Milan , Italy Silvestro Micera, EPFL, Switzerland & SSSUP, Italy Ofer Yizhar, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel Stefano Panzeri, Italian Institute of Technology, Italy Patrick Ruther, University of Freiburg, Germany Roland Thewes, University of Berlin, Germany Paul Verschure, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain Guenther Zeck, NMI at the University of Tuebingen, Germany Ralf Zeitler, MPI for Intelligent Systems, Germany REGISTRATION To apply, please register at ( http://www.vassanellilab.eu/school-neurotechniques/registration/) on or before February 20, 2015. If you have any further questions, please contact silviamaria.lattanzio at unipd.it or stefano.vassanelli at unipd.it The registration is FREE, however, the number of places are limited. The registration is sponsored by the European Commission, Project CSNII csnetwork.eu (GA No 601167, FP7, FET Proactive, Neuro-Bio-Inspired Systems). Travel and accommodation costs are not funded. LOCATION The school will be hosted by the NeuroChip Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Padova, Via f. Marzolo 3, 35131 - Padova, Italy. The location is very close the city centre and is easily reachable from the railway or bus station of Padova. WHEN March 23-27, 2015. Target audience (N = ~25 active full-time): PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, scientists, members of associated EC CSNII consortia. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: