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[SIPTA] Post-doc Researcher in the area of robust estimation (IDSIA, Lugano, Switzerland)
by Alessio Benavoli July 19, 2012

July 19, 2012

A position for a post-doctoral researcher in the area of robust estimation is available at IDSIA (Lugano, Switzerland, www.idsia.ch) Occupancy degree is 100%. **Background In performing a Bayesian analysis concerning the unknown value of a parameter, one is required to express the prior beliefs about the parameter in the form of a prior distribution. However, prior information is often imprecise and cannot be expressed with a single prior distribution. In this case, an alternative approach is to express prior information in terms of a family consisting of all prior distributions that are deemed reasonable in representing one’s prior beliefs. Inferences should then carried out by considering the whole family of distributions. This approach is known as Bayesian robustness - examples are contamination models, intervals of measures, density ratio classes, etc. In the case almost no prior information is available on the parameter, the family of distributions should be as large (i.e., as least-committal, or as weak) as possible in order to describe this state of prior ignorance. In this respect, the class of families known as near-ignorance priors has recently been the focus of much research: these are models that express a minimal state of beliefs a priori, thus representing a condition of prior ignorance on some random quantities of interest, while always leading to informative posterior inferences. Prior near-ignorance models can be regarded as an objective-minded approach to inference, in that prior beliefs are maximally weakened in favor of information coming from data. You can obtain further information and references from our website: http://ipg.idsia.ch/. **Keywords: robust estimation, Bayesian robustness, set of distributions, imprecise probability, consistency of the posterior distribution, asymptotic analysis. **Job description The goal of this project is first of all to develop new methods for robust estimation based on families of distributions with particular emphasis on near-ignorance models. Therefore the project will be mostly based initially on methodological developments at the theoretical level. The second part of the project will focus on the application of those methods to problems in which robustness is an issue such as, for instance, regression, filtering, time series analysis (e.g., robust Kalman filter) etc. The project is granted by the Swiss National Science Foundation and focuses on basic research. **Requirements -have excellent mathematical skills, preferable in the area of probability and statistics, -have both a Master and a Ph.D. degree in mathematics or statistics or physics or engineering or related area, -have a strong publication record on topics related to statistical estimation, robust estimation, applied probability. -strong commitment to research and publication. **We offer -a two-years position (degree of occupancy 100%), with possibility of prolongation; -international working environment (English is the official language); -funded travels in case of papers accepted by well-known international conferences. **Application Applicants should submit the following documents, written in English: -curriculum vitae; -list of exams and grades obtained during the Bachelor and the Master of Science; -list of three references (with e-mail addresses); -brief statement on how their research interests fit the topics above (1-2 pages); -publication list and possibly links to the thesis. Applications should be submitted by 31 August 2012 through the online form at the address: www.supsi.ch/go/bando_robustestimation_researcher_IDSIA Incomplete applications, or submitted to other addresses, or beyond the deadline will be not accepted. For further information please refer to the official page for this position: http://www.supsi.ch/home/supsi/lavora-con-noi/2012-08-31.html or contact Alessio Benavoli, alessio(a)idsia.ch

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[SIPTA] FW: Call for Papers: IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Engineering Solutions
by Kreinovich July 17, 2012

July 17, 2012

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[SIPTA] URSW 2012: Call for Papers
by Thomas Lukasiewicz July 11, 2012

July 11, 2012

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[SIPTA] CFP: SeRSy 2012 - Semantic Technologies meet Recommender Systems & Big Data
by Thomas Lukasiewicz July 11, 2012

July 11, 2012

Apologies for possible multiple posts ============================ CALL FOR PAPERS ============================ International Workshop on Semantic Technologies meet Recommender Systems & Big Data - SeRSy 2012 in conjunction with ISWC 2012, Boston, USA, November 11-15, 2012 http://sisinflab.poliba.it/sersy2012/ IMPORTANT DATES --------------- Submission for workshop papers: Jul 31 Notification of acceptance: Aug 21 Camera-ready versions: Sep 10 MOTIVATION ---------- People generally need more and more advanced tools that go beyond those implementing the canonical search paradigm for seeking relevant information. A new search paradigm is emerging, where the user perspective is completely reversed: from finding to being found. Recommender Systems may help to support this new perspective, because they have the effect of pushing relevant objects, selected from a large space of possible options, to potentially interested users. To achieve this result, recommendation techniques generally rely on data referring to three kinds of objects: users, items and their relations. Recent developments of the Semantic Web community offer novel strategies to represent data about users, items and their relations that might improve the current state of the art of recommender systems, in order to move towards a new generation of recommender systems which fully understand the items they deal with. More and more semantic data are published following the Linked Data principles, that enable to set up links between objects in different data sources, by connecting information in a single global data space: the Web of Data. Today, Web of Data includes different types of knowledge represented in a homogeneous form: sedimentary one (encyclopedic, cultural, linguistic, common-sense) and real-time one (news, data streams, ...). This data might be useful to interlink diverse information about users, items, and their relations and implement reasoning mechanisms that can support and improve the recommendation process. The challenge is to investigate whether and how this large amount of wide-coverage and linked semantic knowledge can be automatically introduced into systems that perform tasks requiring human-level intelligence. Examples of such tasks include understanding a health problem in order to make a medical decision, or simply deciding which laptop to buy. Recommender systems support users exactly in those complex tasks. The primary goal of the workshop is to showcase cutting edge research on the intersection of Semantic Technologies and Recommender Systems, by taking the best of the two worlds. This combination may provide the Semantic Web community with important real-world scenarios where its potential can be effectively exploited into systems performing complex tasks. TOPICS ------- Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): Recommendation approaches using Semantic technologies - Linked Data for Recommender Systems - Ontology-based recommendation algorithms - Merging and ranking recommendations - Social recommender systems - Reasoning with Big Data Data Acquisition - Discovery of relevant Linked Data sources for recommendation algorithms - Tracking provenance, evaluating reliability, quality and trustworthiness of Linked Data - Linking, aggregating, intertwining and mining Linked Data for recommender systems - Integrity and privacy issues New Reference Architectures for Recommender Systems - Linked Data in new Recommender Systems architectures - Efficiency, performance and scalability issues - Distributed architectures Innovative applications - Semantic technologies for Cross-lingual and cross-domain recommender systems - Mining user data streams - Semantic technologies for improving transparency and explanations Evaluation methodologies and approaches - Big datasets for the evaluation - Evaluation methodologies for real time personalization in big datasets - Semantic technologies for improving novelty, diversity and serendipity SUBMISSION ----------------------- We welcome work at all stages of development: papers can describe applied systems, empirical results or theoretically grounded positions. Accepted papers will be published as CEUR workshop proceedings (http://ceur-ws.org) Based on the quality of accepted papers we are planning to schedule a special issue of a top-level journal in 2013. * Full papers (10-12 pages) * Short papers (4-6 pages) * Demos (2-4 pages for description) Papers should be formatted according to the general ISWC2012 submission guidelines. Accepted format is PDF. Please submit your paper via EasyChair at the following URL: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sersy2012 You need to open a personal account upon the first login, if you do not have one. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE -------------------- Marco de Gemmis - University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy Tommaso Di Noia - Politecnico of Bari, Italy Pasquale Lops - University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy Thomas Lukasiewicz - University of Oxford, UK Giovanni Semeraro - University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy PROGRAM COMMITTEE ----------------- Fabien Abel (L3S Research Centre - Germany) Claudio Bartolini (HP Labs @ Palo Alto - USA) Marco Brambilla (Politecnico di Milano - Italy) Andrea Cali (Birkbeck, University of London - UK) Ivan Cantador (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid - Spain) Pablo Castells (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid - Spain) Federica Cena (University of Turin - Italy) Bettina Fazzinga (Universita della Calabria - Italy) Tim Furche (Oxford University Computing Laboratories - UK) Nicola Henze (Leibniz Universitaet Hannover - Germany) Leo Iaquinta (Univ.di Milano Bicocca - Italy) Roberto Mirizzi (Politecnico of Bari - Italy) Enrico Motta (Open University in Milton Keynes - UK) Cataldo Musto (Universita di Bari "Aldo Moro" - Italy) Fedelucio Narducci (Univ.di Milano Bicocca - Italy) Vito Claudio Ostuni (Politecnico of Bari - Italy) Alexandre Passant (seevl.net - Ireland) Gerardo I. Simari (University of Oxford - UK) Markus Zanker (Alpen-Adria-Universitaet Klagenfurt - Austria) CONTACT ----------------- e-mail:sersy2012(a)gmail.com Web page:http://sisinflab.poliba.it/sersy2012/ twitter: @sersy2012 linkedin:http://tinyurl.com/sersy2012

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[SIPTA] risk analysis
by Kreinovich June 29, 2012

June 29, 2012

Dear Friends, I am currently attending a joint conference on risk and safety analysis PSAM/ESREL in Helsinki, Finland (my presentation was at an uncertainty session organized by Matthias Troffaes). I have learned a lot about risk analysis, the corresponding problems are very interesting and often misundertood. Misunderstanding comes from the fact that the word `risk' has two different meanings: in financial applications, any possibility to lose momey -- whether we know its probability or not -- is called risk. In this sense, taking risk into account is a part of normal decision making. In engineering applications of risk analysis, however, risk usually refers to rare events, events for which normal decision makers are not good in taking them into account. For example, when designing a nuclear power station, an offshore oil platform, or a space station, we need to take into account vey rare events, events that may lead to catastrophic consequences, such as an unusual strong earthquake at the location of the nuclear power station. To properly take such rare events into account, we need to estimate the probability of such an event. For usual events -- e.g., small earthquakes -- we can estimate their probability by looking into the past records and estimating the frequency of similar events in the past. For rare events, we may have one record in the distant past or no records at all, so we cannot estimate their probabilities as simply frequencies. Instead, we can, e.g., estimate the frequencies of earthquakes of different strength s and extrapolate -- e.g., if these probabilities follow the power law A*s^(-a) for some constants A and a -- to the desired strength S. As a result of an extrapolation, we do not get precisely known probabilities, we need imprecise probabilities -- and many imprecise probability techniques such as p-boxes (bounds on cumulative distribution functions) are indeed actively used in risk analysis. In the extrapolation, we can also use expert knowledge -- and several talks described how fuzzy techniques can be used to capture such knowledge. Risk analysis is an extremely important but still under-developed part of engineering design. I would like to join the conference organizers and participants in encouraging researchers to contribute ideas and results.

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[SIPTA] Open faculty position at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne , France
by Thierry Denoeux June 27, 2012

June 27, 2012

Open Faculty Position: "Maître de Conférences" (Assistant Professor), Chaire d'excellence CNRS Employer: Université de Technologie de Compiègne, France Laboratory: Heudiasyc, UMR CNRS 7253, http://www.hds.utc.fr Research area: Uncertainty management for complex technological system modeling and control The Université de Technologie de Compiègne invites candidacies for a fully tenured Assistant Professorship (Maître de Conférences, sections 61/27) in combination with a "Chaire d'Excellence CNRS" starting on December 1, 2012. Description of the research environment Heudiasyc is a joint laboratory with the Université de Technologie de Compiègne (UTC) and the French governmental agency for research (CNRS). In 2011, it was rated A+ (the highest rate) by the French Research evaluation agency (AERES). Heudiasyc fosters interdisciplinary research on information science and technology including machine learning, uncertain reasoning, operations research, robotics and knowledge management. In 2011 Heudiasyc was awarded with an excellence project (LabEx) on the « Control of Technological Systems of Systems ». Research and teaching requirements The successful candidate is expected to carry out research on the management of uncertainty for the modeling and control of complex technological systems. The position is proposed within the framework of the « CNRS-Higher Education chairs » program and benefits from a reduction of the teaching service and a salary bonus during the first five years. We are looking for an outstanding candidate with a background in at least one of the following areas: - Theories of uncertainty (Bayesian networks, belief functions, possibility theory, imprecise probability, decision under uncertainty, preference modeling, etc.); - Machine learning and data mining (analysis of complex data, learning with weak supervision, etc.); - Combinatorial optimization (stochastic/robust/fuzzy optimization, probabilistic constraints, etc.); - Robotic perception (multi-sensor fusion, machine vision, etc.); - Reliability and system safety (risk management, modeling of epistemic uncertainty, etc.); - Artificial intelligence (uncertain reasoning, representation of uncertain knowledge, logical approaches to uncertainty, etc.). Teaching is expected at the Master level in the Engineering program at UTC and in the newly created Master program on Complex Technological Systems. Prerequisites for this position are a university degree, a doctoral degree and teaching skills at the university level. International experience as post-doctoral fellow and/or in collaborative research with industrial or international academic partners would be highly appreciated. The candidate should be ready to integrate in a multinational team and must be fluent in English. French language skills are beneficial. Application: Consideration for applications will begin around 7 July 2012 and the application procedure will remain opened until early September. Details on the procedure will be available soon. The position will start on 1st December 2012. Contact: Prof. Thierry Denoeux (Thierry.Denoeux(a)hds.utc.fr) ------------- Prof. Thierry DENOEUX Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Approximate Reasoning http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ijar Universite de Technologie de Compiegne U.M.R. C.N.R.S. 7253 Heudiasyc Centre de Recherches de Royallieu B.P. 20529 F-60205 Compiegne Cedex France http://www.hds.utc.fr/~tdenoeux

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[SIPTA] URSW 2012: Call for Papers
by Thomas Lukasiewicz June 21, 2012

June 21, 2012

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[SIPTA] 1st CFP - Semantic Technologies meet Recommender Systems & Big Data
by Thomas Lukasiewicz June 19, 2012

June 19, 2012

Apologies for possible multiple posts ============================ CALL FOR PAPERS ============================ International Workshop on Semantic Technologies meet Recommender Systems & Big Data - SeRSy 2012 in conjunction with ISWC 2012, Boston, USA, November 11-15, 2012 http://sisinflab.poliba.it/sersy2012/ IMPORTANT DATES --------------- Submission for workshop papers: Jul 31 Notification of acceptance: Aug 21 Camera-ready versions: Sep 10 MOTIVATION ---------- People generally need more and more advanced tools that go beyond those implementing the canonical search paradigm for seeking relevant information. A new search paradigm is emerging, where the user perspective is completely reversed: from finding to being found. Recommender Systems may help to support this new perspective, because they have the effect of pushing relevant objects, selected from a large space of possible options, to potentially interested users. To achieve this result, recommendation techniques generally rely on data referring to three kinds of objects: users, items and their relations. Recent developments of the Semantic Web community offer novel strategies to represent data about users, items and their relations that might improve the current state of the art of recommender systems, in order to move towards a new generation of recommender systems which fully understand the items they deal with. More and more semantic data are published following the Linked Data principles, that enable to set up links between objects in different data sources, by connecting information in a single global data space: the Web of Data. Today, Web of Data includes different types of knowledge represented in a homogeneous form: sedimentary one (encyclopedic, cultural, linguistic, common-sense) and real-time one (news, data streams, ...). This data might be useful to interlink diverse information about users, items, and their relations and implement reasoning mechanisms that can support and improve the recommendation process. The challenge is to investigate whether and how this large amount of wide-coverage and linked semantic knowledge can be automatically introduced into systems that perform tasks requiring human-level intelligence. Examples of such tasks include understanding a health problem in order to make a medical decision, or simply deciding which laptop to buy. Recommender systems support users exactly in those complex tasks. The primary goal of the workshop is to showcase cutting edge research on the intersection of Semantic Technologies and Recommender Systems, by taking the best of the two worlds. This combination may provide the Semantic Web community with important real-world scenarios where its potential can be effectively exploited into systems performing complex tasks. TOPICS ------- Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): Recommendation approaches using Semantic technologies - Linked Data for Recommender Systems - Ontology-based recommendation algorithms - Merging and ranking recommendations - Social recommender systems - Reasoning with Big Data Data Acquisition - Discovery of relevant Linked Data sources for recommendation algorithms - Tracking provenance, evaluating reliability, quality and trustworthiness of Linked Data - Linking, aggregating, intertwining and mining Linked Data for recommender systems - Integrity and privacy issues New Reference Architectures for Recommender Systems - Linked Data in new Recommender Systems architectures - Efficiency, performance and scalability issues - Distributed architectures Innovative applications - Semantic technologies for Cross-lingual and cross-domain recommender systems - Mining user data streams - Semantic technologies for improving transparency and explanations Evaluation methodologies and approaches - Big datasets for the evaluation - Evaluation methodologies for real time personalization in big datasets - Semantic technologies for improving novelty, diversity and serendipity FORMAT ----------------------- We welcome work at all stages of development: papers can describe applied systems, empirical results or theoretically grounded positions. * Full papers (10-12 pages) * Short papers (4-6 pages) * Demos (2-4 pages for description) Papers should be formatted according to the general ISWC2012 submission guidelines. Accepted format is PDF. SUBMISSION ----------------------- Please submit your paper via EasyChair at the following URL: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sersy2012 You need to open a personal account upon the first login, if you do not have one. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE -------------------- Marco de Gemmis - University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy Tommaso Di Noia - Politecnico of Bari, Italy Pasquale Lops - University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy Thomas Lukasiewicz - University of Oxford, UK Giovanni Semeraro - University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy PROGRAM COMMITTEE ----------------- Fabien Abel (L3S Research Centre - Germany) Claudio Bartolini (HP Labs @ Palo Alto – USA) Marco Brambilla (Politecnico di Milano – Italy) Andrea Calì (Birkbeck, University of London – UK) Ivan Cantador (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid – Spain) Pablo Castells (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid – Spain) Federica Cena (University of Turin – Italy) Bettina Fazzina (Università della Calabria – Italy) Tim Furche (Oxford University Computing Laboratories – UK) Nicola Henze (Leibniz Universitä Hannover – Germany) Leo Iaquinta (Univ.di Milano Bicocca – Italy) Roberto Mirizzi (Politecnico of Bari – Italy) Enrico Motta (Open University in Milton Keynes – UK) Cataldo Musto (Università di Bari "Aldo Moro" – Italy) Fedelucio Narducci (Univ.di Milano Bicocca – Italy) Vito Claudio Ostuni (Politecnico of Bari – Italy) Alexandre Passant (DERI, National University of Ireland – Ireland) Gerardo I. Simari (University of Oxford – UK) Markus Zanker (Alpen–Adria–Universitä Klagenfurt – Austria) CONTACT ----------------- e-mail: sersy2012(a)gmail.com Web page: http://sisinflab.poliba.it/sersy2012/ twitter: @sersy2012 linkedin: http://tinyurl.com/sersy2012

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[SIPTA] WPMSIIP 2012: 2nd Announcement
by Marco Cattaneo June 15, 2012

June 15, 2012

==================================================================== WPMSIIP 2012 (10-15 Sept 2012, Munich, Germany) --- 2nd Announcement ==================================================================== Dear friends and colleagues, The Working Group on Foundations of Statistics at the Department of Statistics, LMU Munich, organizes a workshop on principles and methods of statistical inference with interval probability. This workshop is a follow-up to four earlier WPMSIIPs held in Durham (2008, 2010), Munich (2009), and Ljubljana (2011). The WPMSIIP workshop runs from Monday 10 September until Saturday 15 September 2012. Each of the five workdays is focused on a specific topic, while on Saturday 15 an excursion is planned. The major aim of the workshop is to stimulate discussion of ongoing research in imprecise/interval probability theories, providing a platform to discuss unsolved problems and to address unanswered questions. Therefore, especially the afternoons are structured very informally. For more information and an outline of the tentative programme, please visit: http://www.statistik.lmu.de/institut/ag/statsoz_neu/research/WPMSIIP_2012/ Everyone, including PhD students, is welcome to participate and/or to present their views on one or more of the covered topics, on one or more days! We welcome any stimulating contribution, ranging from a presentation to a short informal statement. If you want to join the workshop, please contact Marco Cattaneo (cattaneo(a)stat.uni-muenchen.de) or the organisers of the specific day(s) that you would like to contribute to, preferably before the end of June. Best wishes, The local organizing committee Thomas Augustin Marco Cattaneo Georg Schollmeyer Gero Walter Andrea Wiencierz

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[SIPTA] Information Fusion, special issue thank you
by Paul Snow June 14, 2012

June 14, 2012

Long ago, Al Ozonoff, Fabio Cuzzolin and I posted CFPs to the list. Bit by bit, a special issue of Elsevier's _Information Fusion_ journal came together, and has now been published. Here's the electronic table of contents of the issue, which is dedicated to human health and safety applications: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/15662535/13/2 Thank you to the list managers for helping to get us the word out in the community, and to make the project a success.

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