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Re: [SIPTA] IEEE SSCI 2014 Update

by Kreinovich

Feb. 2, 2014

[SIPTA] AlCoB 2014: extended submission deadline 11 February

by GRLMC

*To be removed from our mailing list, please respond to this message with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line* ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ***** SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED: February 11 ***** ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ********************************************************************* 1st INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ALGORITHMS FOR COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY AlCoB 2014 Tarragona, Spain July 1-3, 2014 Organized by: Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC) Rovira i Virgili University http://grammars.grlmc.com/alcob2014/ ********************************************************************* 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 2014 will take place in Tarragona, located 90 kms. to the south of Barcelona. The venue will be the Catalunya Campus. 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 2014 will consist of: invited talks invited tutorials peer-reviewed contributions INVITED SPEAKERS: Michael Galperin (National Center for Biotechnology Information, Bethesda), Comparative Genomics Approaches to Identifying Functionally Related Genes Uwe Ohler (Max-Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine, Berlin), Decoding Non-coding Regulatory Regions in DNA and RNA (tutorial) Jason Papin (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), Network Analysis of Microbial Pathogens PROGRAMME COMMITTEE: Tatsuya Akutsu (Kyoto, JP) Amihood Amir (Ramat-Gan, IL) Alberto Apostolico (Atlanta, US) Joel Bader (Baltimore, US) Pierre Baldi (Irvine, US) Serafim Batzoglou (Stanford, US) Bonnie Berger (Cambridge, US) Francis Y.L. Chin (Hong Kong, HK) Benny Chor (Tel Aviv, IL) Keith A. Crandall (Washington, US) Bhaskar DasGupta (Chicago, US) Joaquín Dopazo (Valencia, ES) Liliana Florea (Baltimore, US) Olivier Gascuel (Montpellier, FR) David Gilbert (Uxbridge, UK) Gaston H. Gonnet (Zurich, CH) Roderic Guigó (Barcelona, ES) Dan Gusfield (Davis, US) Vasant Honavar (University College, US) Sorin Istrail (Providence, US) Tao Jiang (Riverside, US) Inge Jonassen (Bergen, NO) Anders Krogh (Copenhagen, DK) Giovanni Manzini (Alessandria, IT) Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, ES, chair) Satoru Miyano (Tokyo, JP) Burkhard Morgenstern (Göttingen, DE) Shinichi Morishita (Tokyo, JP) Cédric Notredame (Barcelona, ES) Graziano Pesole (Bari, IT) Mark Ragan (Brisbane, AU) Timothy Ravasi (Thuwal, SA) Allen G. Rodrigo (Durham, US) Steven Salzberg (Baltimore, US) David Sankoff (Ottawa, CA) Thomas Schiex (Toulouse, FR) João C. Setubal (São Paulo, BR) Steven Skiena (Stony Brook, US) Peter F. Stadler (Leipzig, DE) Wing-Kin Sung (Singapore, SG) Alfonso Valencia (Madrid, ES) Jacques van Helden (Marseille, FR) Arndt von Haeseler (Vienna, AT) Lusheng Wang (Hong Kong, HK) Limsoon Wong (Singapore, SG) Xiaohui Xie (Irvine, US) Dong Xu (Columbia, US) Zohar Yakhini (Santa Clara, US) Alex Zelikovsky (Atlanta, US) Michael Q. Zhang (Dallas, US) ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona) Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, chair) Bianca Truthe (Magdeburg) 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) and should be formatted 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=alcob2014 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 IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB, 2012 impact factor: 1.616) will be later published containing peer-reviewed extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation. REGISTRATION: The period for registration is open from September 21, 2013 to July 1, 2014. The registration form can be found at: http://grammars.grlmc.com/alcob2014/Registration.php DEADLINES: Paper submission: February 11, 2014 (23:59 CET) EXTENDED Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: March 15, 2014 Final version of the paper for the LNCS/LNBI proceedings: March 22, 2014 Early registration: March 29, 2014 Late registration: June 17, 2014 Starting of the conference: July 1, 2014 End of the conference: July 3, 2014 Submission to the post-conference TCBB special issue: October 3, 2014 QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION: florentinalilica.voicu(a)urv.cat POSTAL ADDRESS: AlCoB 2014 Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC) Rovira i Virgili University Av. Catalunya, 35 43002 Tarragona, Spain Phone: +34 977 559543 Fax: +34 977 558386 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Departament dEconomia i Coneixement, Generalitat de Catalunya Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Feb. 2, 2014

[SIPTA] PGM 2014 in Utrecht, The Netherlands: Call for Papers

by Gaag

__________________________________________________________________________ PGM 2014: The Seventh European Workshop on Probabilistic Graphical Models September 17-19, 2014 Utrecht, The Netherlands __________________________________________________________________________ Important Dates: Deadline for abstract submissions: May 12, 2014 Deadline for paper submissions: May 16, 2014 Notification of acceptance: June 23, 2014 Final versions due: July 18, 2014 Workshop dates September 17-19, 2014 Call for papers opened December 2013 Submission open from March 2014 __________________________________________________ Call for papers: The aim of the workshop is to bring together people interested in probabilistic graphical models and to provide a forum for discussion of the latest research developments in this field. To promote interactions among the participants, parallel sessions will be avoided and the workshop will be organised around a single thread of plenary and poster sessions. We welcome theoretical and applied contributions related to various aspects of probabilistic graphical models, such as: - Principles of Bayesian (belief) networks, chain graphs, decision networks, influence diagrams, probabilistic relational models, and other probabilistic graphical models (PGMs). - Information processing in PGMs (exact and approximate inference). - Learning and data mining in the context of PGMs: machine learning approaches, statistical testing and search methods, MCMC simulation. - Exploitation for the construction of PGMs of results from related disciplines such as statistics, information theory, optimization, and decision making under uncertainty. - Software systems based on PGMs. - Application of PGMs to real-world problems. Papers submitted for review should report on original, previously unpublished work. Each submitted paper will be reviewed by at least three reviewers. Proceedings: All accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings. At this stage, we are negotiating publication by a renowned publisher. Submission procedure: PGM 2014 requires electronic submission of papers according to the instructions found on the web site of the workshop: http://www.projects.science.uu.nl/PGM/ The authors must prepare their papers according to the Springer LNCS format, and submit the full version of the papers by the deadline stated above. The page limit is 16 pages, including figures and bibliography. The web page for author instructions contains further format information and provides access to style files and templates. Paper presentation: Papers will be accepted for plenary or poster presentation. In the proceedings, no distinction is made between the two. At least one author of accepted papers is required to register for the workshop. After the workshop, authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their paper for a special issue of a journal, which is yet to be decided. The extended papers will undergo a full reviewing process. Organisation: The workshop is hosted by the Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. __________________________________________________________________________

Jan. 30, 2014

[SIPTA] WPMSIIP 2014 - First announcement

by Jasper De Bock

Jan. 28, 2014

[SIPTA] SLSP 2014: 1st call for papers

by GRLMC

*To be removed from our mailing list, please respond to this message with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line* **************************************************************************** ****** 2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON STATISTICAL LANGUAGE AND SPEECH PROCESSING SLSP 2014 Grenoble, France October 14-16, 2014 Organised by: Équipe GETALP Laboratoire dInformatique de Grenoble Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC) Rovira i Virgili University http://grammars.grlmc.com/slsp2014/ **************************************************************************** ****** AIMS: SLSP is a yearly conference series aimed at promoting and displaying excellent research on the wide spectrum of statistical methods that are currently in use in computational language or speech processing. It aims at attracting contributions from both fields. Though there exist large, well-known conferences and workshops hosting contributions to any of these areas, SLSP is a more focused meeting where synergies between subdomains and people will hopefully happen. In SLSP 2014, significant room will be reserved to young scholars at the beginning of their career and particular focus will be put on methodology. VENUE: SLSP 2014 will take place in Grenoble, at the foot of the French Alps. SCOPE: The conference invites submissions discussing the employment of statistical methods (including machine learning) within language and speech processing. The list below is indicative and not exhaustive: phonology, phonetics, prosody, morphology syntax, semantics discourse, dialogue, pragmatics statistical models for natural language processing supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning methods applied to natural language, including speech statistical methods, including biologically-inspired methods similarity alignment language resources part-of-speech tagging parsing semantic role labelling natural language generation anaphora and coreference resolution speech recognition speaker identification/verification speech transcription speech synthesis machine translation translation technology text summarisation information retrieval text categorisation information extraction term extraction spelling correction text and web mining opinion mining and sentiment analysis spoken dialogue systems author identification, plagiarism and spam filtering STRUCTURE: SLSP 2014 will consist of: invited talks invited tutorials peer-reviewed contributions INVITED SPEAKERS: to be announced PROGRAMME COMMITTEE: Sophia Ananiadou (Manchester, UK) Srinivas Bangalore (Florham Park, US) Patrick Blackburn (Roskilde, DK) Hervé Bourlard (Martigny, CH) Bill Byrne (Cambridge, UK) Nick Campbell (Dublin, IE) David Chiang (Marina del Rey, US) Kenneth W. Church (Yorktown Heights, US) Walter Daelemans (Antwerpen, BE) Thierry Dutoit (Mons, BE) Alexander Gelbukh (Mexico City, MX) Ralph Grishman (New York, US) Sanda Harabagiu (Dallas, US) Xiaodong He (Redmond, US) Hynek Hermansky (Baltimore, US) Hitoshi Isahara (Toyohashi, JP) Lori Lamel (Orsay, FR) Gary Geunbae Lee (Pohang, KR) Haizhou Li (Singapore, SG) Daniel Marcu (Los Angeles, US) Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, ES, chair) Manuel Montes-y-Gómez (Puebla, MX) Satoshi Nakamura (Nara, JP) Shrikanth S. Narayanan (Los Angeles, US) Vincent Ng (Dallas, US) Joakim Nivre (Uppsala, SE) Elmar Nöth (Erlangen, DE) Maurizio Omologo (Trento, IT) Mari Ostendorf (Seattle, US) Barbara H. Partee (Amherst, US) Gerald Penn (Toronto, CA) Massimo Poesio (Colchester, UK) James Pustejovsky (Waltham, US) Gaël Richard (Paris, FR) German Rigau (San Sebastián, ES) Paolo Rosso (Valencia, ES) Yoshinori Sagisaka (Tokyo, JP) Björn W. Schuller (London, UK) Satoshi Sekine (New York, US) Richard Sproat (New York, US) Mark Steedman (Edinburgh, UK) Jian Su (Singapore, SG) Marc Swerts (Tilburg, NL) Jun'ichi Tsujii (Beijing, CN) Gertjan van Noord (Groningen, NL) Renata Vieira (Porto Alegre, BR) Dekai Wu (Hong Kong, HK) Feiyu Xu (Berlin, DE) Roman Yangarber (Helsinki, FI) Geoffrey Zweig (Redmond, US) ORGANISING COMMITTEE: Laurent Besacier (Grenoble, co-chair) Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona) Benjamin Lecouteux (Grenoble) Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, 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) and should be prepared according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNAI/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=slsp2014 PUBLICATIONS: A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNAI/LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference. A special issue of a major journal will be later published containing peer-reviewed extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation. REGISTRATION: The period for registration is open from January 16, 2014 to October 14, 2014. The registration form can be found at: http://grammars.grlmc.com/slsp2014/Registration.php DEADLINES: Paper submission: May 7, 2014 (23:59h, CET) Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: June 18, 2014 Final version of the paper for the LNAI/LNCS proceedings: June 25, 2014 Early registration: July 2, 2014 Late registration: September 30, 2014 Submission to the post-conference journal special issue: January 16, 2015 QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION: florentinalilica.voicu(a)urv.cat POSTAL ADDRESS: SLSP 2014 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: Departament dEconomia i Coneixement, Generalitat de Catalunya Laboratoire dInformatique de Grenoble Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Jan. 25, 2014

[SIPTA] FW: Beyond Bayesian State Estimation - Special Session at FUSION 2014, Salamanca, 7 - 10 July 2014

by Kreinovich

Jan. 18, 2014

[SIPTA] Beyond Bayesian State Estimation - Special Session at FUSION 2014, Salamanca, 7 - 10 July 2014

by Benjamin Noack

Jan. 17, 2014

[SIPTA] CfP: Imprecise Probabilities in Statistics and Philosophy (LMU, 27-28 June 2014)

by Marco Cattaneo

**************************************************** IMPRECISE PROBABILITIES IN STATISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY LMU Munich 27-28 June 2014 www.ipsp2014.philosophie.lmu.de **************************************************** Imprecise probabilities offer a model of uncertainty that is more general, less idealised than the standard precise probability framework. Imprecise probabilities are receiving increasing attention in statistics (as well as in artificial intelligence and in economics). Recently, there has been a resurgence of philosophical interest in these generalised models of uncertainty. The aim of this workshop is to bring together philosophers and statisticians to see what we can learn from each other. We are sure that such interdisciplinary collaboration will be valuable both to philosophers and to statisticians. Topics on which we might expect fruitful discussions include: * updating imprecise probabilities and dilation; * foundations of imprecise probabilities; * procedures for eliciting imprecise probabilities; * decision making with imprecise probabilities. We invite submissions of extended abstracts of 1500 words for contributed talks by 1st March 2013. Decisions will be made by 15th March 2014. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Fabio Cozman (São Paulo), James M. Joyce (Michigan), and Teddy Seidenfeld (CMU) ORGANIZERS: Thomas Augustin, Seamus Bradley, Marco Cattaneo, Stephan Hartmann, and Roland Poellinger -- Marco Cattaneo, Dr. sc. math. Department of Statistics, LMU Munich http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~cattaneo/

Jan. 15, 2014

[SIPTA] SSTiC 2014: January 18, 2nd registration deadline

by GRLMC

*To be removed from our mailing list, please respond to this message with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line* ********************************************************************* 2014 TARRAGONA INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL ON TRENDS IN COMPUTING SSTiC 2014 Tarragona, Spain July 7-11, 2014 Organized by Rovira i Virgili University http://grammars.grlmc.com/sstic2014/ ********************************************************************* --- January 18, 2nd registration deadline --- ********************************************************************* AIM: SSTiC 2014 is the second edition in a series started in 2013. For the previous event, see http://grammars.grlmc.com/SSTiC2013/ SSTiC 2014 will be a research training event mainly addressed to PhD students and PhD holders in the first steps of their academic career. It intends to update them about the most recent developments in the diverse branches of computer science and its neighbouring areas. To that purpose, renowned scholars will lecture and will be available for interaction with the audience. SSTiC 2014 will cover the whole spectrum of computer science through 5 keynote lectures and 24 six-hour courses dealing with some of the most lively topics in the field. The organizers share the idea that outstanding speakers will really attract the brightest students. ADDRESSED TO: Graduate students from around the world. There are no formal pre-requisites in terms of the academic degree the attendee must hold. However, since there will be several levels among the courses, reference may be made to specific knowledge background in the description of some of them. SSTiC 2014 is also appropriate for more senior people who want to keep themselves updated on developments in their own field or in other branches of computer science. They will surely find it fruitful to listen and discuss with scholars who are main references in computing nowadays. REGIME: In addition to keynotes, 3 parallel sessions will be held during the whole event. Participants will be able to freely choose the courses they will be willing to attend as well as to move from one to another. VENUE: SSTiC 2014 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: Larry S. Davis (U Maryland, College Park), A Historical Perspective of Computer Vision Models for Object Recognition and Scene Analysis David S. Johnson (Columbia U, New York), Open and Closed Problems in NP-Completeness George Karypis (U Minnesota, Twin Cities), Recommender Systems Past, Present, & Future Steffen Staab (U Koblenz), Explicit and Implicit Semantics: Two Sides of One Coin Ronald R. Yager (Iona C, New Rochelle), Social Modeling COURSES AND PROFESSORS: Divyakant Agrawal (U California, Santa Barbara), [intermediate] Scalable Data Management in Enterprise and Cloud Computing Infrastructures Pierre Baldi (U California, Irvine), [intermediate] Big Data Informatics Challenges and Opportunities in the Life Sciences Stephen Brewster (U Glasgow), [introductory] Multimodal Human-computer Interaction Rajkumar Buyya (U Melbourne), [intermediate] Cloud Computing John M. Carroll (Pennsylvania State U, University Park), [introductory] Usability Engineering and Scenario-based Design Kwang-Ting (Tim) Cheng (U California, Santa Barbara), [introductory/intermediate] Smartphones: Hardware Platform, Software Development, and Emerging Apps Amr El Abbadi (U California, Santa Barbara), [introductory] The Distributed Foundations of Data Management in the Cloud Richard M. Fujimoto (Georgia Tech, Atlanta), [introductory] Parallel and Distributed Simulation Mark Guzdial (Georgia Tech, Atlanta), [introductory] Computing Education Research: What We Know about Learning and Teaching Computer Science David S. Johnson (Columbia U, New York), [introductory] The Traveling Salesman Problem in Theory and Practice George Karypis (U Minnesota, Twin Cities), [intermediate] Programming Models/Frameworks for Parallel & Distributed Computing Aggelos K. Katsaggelos (Northwestern U, Evanston), [intermediate] Optimization Techniques for Sparse/Low-rank Recovery Problems in Image Processing and Machine Learning Arie E. Kaufman (U Stony Brook), [advanced] Visualization Carl Lagoze (U Michigan, Ann Arbor), [introductory] Curation of Big Data Bijan Parsia (U Manchester), [introductory] The Empirical Mindset in Computer Science Charles E. Perkins (FutureWei Technologies, Santa Clara), [intermediate] Beyond LTE: the Evolution of 4G Networks and the Need for Higher Performance Handover System Designs Sudhakar M. Reddy (U Iowa, Iowa City), [introductory] Test and Design for Test of Digital Logic Circuits Robert Sargent (Syracuse U), [introductory] Validation of Models Mubarak Shah (U Central Florida, Orlando), [intermediate] Visual Crowd Analysis Steffen Staab (U Koblenz), [intermediate] Programming the Semantic Web Mike Thelwall (U Wolverhampton), [introductory] Sentiment Strength Detection for Twitter and the Social Web Jeffrey D. Ullman (Stanford U), [introductory] MapReduce Algorithms Nitin Vaidya (U Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), [introductory/intermediate] Distributed Consensus: Theory and Applications Philip Wadler (U Edinburgh), [intermediate] Topics in Lambda Calculus and Life ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona) Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, chair) Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona) REGISTRATION: It has to be done at http://grammars.grlmc.com/sstic2014/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 when the capacity of the venue will be complete. It is very convenient to register prior to the event. FEES: As far as possible, participants are expected to attend for the whole (or most of the) week (full-time). Fees are a flat rate allowing one to participate to all courses. They vary depending on the registration deadline. ACCOMMODATION: Information about accommodation will be available on the website of the School in due time. CERTIFICATE: Participants will be delivered a certificate of attendance. QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION: florentinalilica.voicu(a)urv.cat POSTAL ADDRESS: SSTiC 2014 Lilica Voicu Rovira i Virgili University Av. Catalunya, 35 43002 Tarragona, Spain Phone: +34 977 559 543 Fax: +34 977 558 386 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Departament dEconomia i Coneixement, Generalitat de Catalunya Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Jan. 12, 2014

[SIPTA] visas to attend US-based international conferences

by Kreinovich

Dear Friends, In many situations, when a conference is organized in the US, some presenters do not get their visas by the time of the conference and are, therefore, unable to participate. In some such cases, the visa is eventually granted, but it is too late for this particular conference. The National Academies of Sciences and professional organizations have been petitioning for changes in regulations which would make the process easier for scientists. However, while the current processes are in place, it is important to help scientists from outside the US properly estimate how long the visa approval process can last and what support material needs to be provided with the original applications to enhance this process. Here is such an information as provided by the American Mathematical Society (we cite from http://jointmathematicsmeetings.org/meetings/national/jmm2014/2160_faq) "Visa regulations are continually changing for travel to the United States. Visa applications may take from three to four months to process and require a personal interview, as well as specific personal information. International participants should view the important information about traveling to the U.S. found at sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/biso/visas/ and travel.state.gov/visa/visa_1750.html. ... If you discover you do need a visa, the National Academies website (see above) provides these tips for successful visa applications: * Visa applicants are expected to provide evidence that they are intending to return to their country of residence. Therefore, applicants should provide proof of "binding" or sufficient ties to their home country or permanent residence abroad. This may include documentation of the following: - family ties in home country or country of legal permanent residence - property ownership - bank accounts - employment contract or statement from employer stating that the position will continue when the employee returns; * Visa applications are more likely to be successful if done in a visitor's home country than in a third country; * Applicants should present their entire trip itinerary, including travel to any countries other than the United States, at the time of their visa application; * Include a letter of invitation from the meeting organizer or the U.S. host, specifying the subject, location and dates of the activity, and how travel and local expenses will be covered; * If travel plans will depend on early approval of the visa application, specify this at the time of the application; * Provide proof of professional scientific and/or educational status (students should provide a university transcript). This list is not to be considered complete. Please visit the websites above for the most up-to-date information."

Dec. 29, 2013