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[SIPTA] REGISTRATION - BFAS Spring School on Belief Functions Theory and Applications
by Arnaud Martin Dec. 22, 2012

Dec. 22, 2012

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[SIPTA] Workshop: SIMRIDE 2013 - 1st Announcement
by Matthias Troffaes Dec. 21, 2012

Dec. 21, 2012

Dear SIPTA colleagues, Durham is organising a workshop on simulation and decision making - see announcement below. Contributions linking imprecise probability to simulation are obviously also very welcome. Registration is not open yet, but if you are interested, please drop me an email. Cheers, Matthias --- [Apologies for cross-posting] http://www.maths.dur.ac.uk/users/matthias.troffaes/simride2013/ The Department of Mathematical Sciences and the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences, Durham University, organise a workshop on uncertainty quantification and data assimilation in numerical simulation of physical systems for risk-informed decision making; in short, simulation for risk-informed decisions, or SIMRIDE. The workshop will run from Monday 18 March until Thursday 21 March 2013. Key to solving many large industrial scale problems is assimilation of data along with real-time simulation of a physical system, combined with uncertainty quantification to allow risk-informed decisions to be made. Often these systems are highly non-linear and require vast computing power, which presents a serious challenge to assimilation of data in real-time, and to quantify uncertainty bounds resulting from model uncertainty and measurement error. A major aim of SIMRIDE is to facilitate the link between industry and academia. The workshop will consist of talks by people from both camps, with ample time for discussion in a relaxed environment. The themes of each day are as follows: * Monday: Risk & Decision (keynote by Simon Blake, ECS, UK) * Tuesday: Extreme Events (keynote by David Randell, Shell, UK) * Wednesday: Simulation (keynote by Michael Goldstein, Maths, Durham) * Thursday: Energy (keynote by Robert Jeffers, Idaho National Laboratory, US) A list of currently confirmed speakers and titles of talks is at: http://www.maths.dur.ac.uk/users/matthias.troffaes/simride2013/programme.ht… There will be a formal workshop dinner on Tuesday 19 March. Everyone, including PhD students, is welcome to participate and/or to present their views. Registration for the first 25 places on this workshop is free, as these places are funded by an EPSRC grant. Once these places have been used up, a fee of around 150 GBP will be charged. Registration covers coffee & biscuits during breaks, buffet lunch, the workshop dinner and conference materials. If you require any further information, then please do not hesitate to contact one of the organisers. Best wishes, Matthias Troffaes (matthias.troffaes(a)gmail.com) Grant Ingram (grant.ingram(a)durham.ac.uk)

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[SIPTA] PhD studentship on Belief Theory - EXTENDED TO JANUARY 15
by Fabio Cuzzolin Dec. 13, 2012

Dec. 13, 2012

The Department of Computing and Communications Technologies at Oxford Brookes University is pleased to announce that it is able to offer a Doctoral Bursary to a new PhD student in for full time study commencing in January 2013. The successful applicant will have course fees waived and will be awarded a bursary of £10,000 per annum for three years (with no inflation increase). The PhD project will be focus on decision making and estimation. These are central problems in most applied sciences, as both people and machines need to make inferences about the state of the external world, and take appropriate actions. Traditionally, the (uncertain) state of the world is assumed to be described by a probability distribution over a set of alternative, disjoint hypotheses. Sometimes, however, as in the case of extremely rare events (e.g., a volcanic eruption), few statistics are available to drive the estimation. Part of the data can be missing. Furthermore, under the law of large numbers, probability distributions are the outcome of an infinite process of evidence accumulation, drawn from an infinite series of samples: in all practical cases, instead, the available evidence only provides some sort of constraint on the unknown probabilities governing the process. All these issues have led to the recognition of the need for a coherent mathematical theory of uncertainty. Shafer’s theory of belief functions, in particular, allows us to express partial belief by providing lower and upper bounds to probability values. It is appealing because it addresses all the above mentioned issues; its rationale is neat and simple; it is a straightforward generalization of probability theory; it does not require abandoning the notion of event. The widespread influence of uncertainty at different levels explains why belief functions are being increasingly applied to fields as diverse as robotics, fault analysis, decision making, sensor fusion, machine vision, and many more. Mathematically, a belief function is a random set, i.e. a probability distribution on the power set (the collection of all subsets). Equivalent alternative interpretations can be given in terms of compatibility relations, inner measures, and sum functions. However, the necessary mathematical tools for prediction and estimation in this framework have only partially been developed yet, due to their inherent complexity: this is the case, in particular, for the generalization of the classical total probability theorem to belief functions. The aim of this studentship is to study the mathematical properties of belief functions, and give a contribution towards the development of crucial tools such as the total belief theorem. Informal requests: fabio.cuzzolin(a)brookes.ac.uk Formal applications: follow the instructions here: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AFL096/phd-studentship/ and contact jheaton(a)brookes.ac.uk -- Best, Fabio Dr Fabio Cuzzolin Head of Artificial Intelligence Group Department of Computing and Communication Technologies Oxford Brookes University Oxford, UK http://cms.brookes.ac.uk/staff/FabioCuzzolin/ +44 (0)1865 484526

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[SIPTA] IUKM 2013: Paper Submission Deadline Extension (24 Dec 2012)
by Thierry Denoeux Dec. 6, 2012

Dec. 6, 2012

We apologize if you receive multiple copies of this message. Just a friendly reminder to those interested participants, due to numerous requests and for giving opportunity for more participation, the deadline of paper submission has been extended to 24th December 2012. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ IUKM2013 3rd International Symposium on Integrated Uncertainty in Knowledge Modelling and Decision Making Beijing, 10-12 May, 2013 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Important dates: -------------------- -Paper Submission (Full Paper): 24 December 2012 -Notification of Acceptance: 20 January 2013 -Final Paper Submission: 15 February 2013 -Authors' Registration: 1 April 2013 -IUKM 2013 Conference Dates: 10-12 May 2013 Website: http://icmll.buaa.edu.cn/IUKM2013/ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Following IUM 2010 in Ishikawa (Japan) and IUKM 2011 in Hangzhou (China), IUKM 2013 will be held at Beihang University, Beijing ,China between 10th and 12th of May 2013.IUKM 2013 aims to bring together worlds' specialists in the field of uncertainty management who will have an opportunity to debate throughout the conference and exchange research results, ideas as well as their experience towards developing applications. Objectives: -------------- Solving complex practical problems often requires the integration of data and knowledge from different relevant sources and further takes uncertainty and impreciseness into account. This gives rise to the demand for innovative methodologies and efficient techniques of managing and integrating various types of data and knowledge with uncertainty/imprecision so as to ultimately improve the solution to any such complex problems in practice. This symposium aims to provide a forum for exchanges of research results, ideas for and experience of application among researchers and practitioners involved with all aspects of uncertainty management and application. Its objectives are outlined as follows: -to bring together researchers working on uncertainty formalisms in information and knowledge systems; -to attract researchers working in social sciences (economics, business, management and environmental sciences) who are interested in applying uncertainty-related tools and techniques; -to bring together researchers and practitioners in order to foster the collaboration on research and application involving uncertainty management; and -to present and discuss open research problems and novel applications. Topics: --------- IUKM2013 calls for papers that report original research results on (but are is limited to) the following topics: Theory and Methodology: -Uncertainty formalisms: Bayesian probability, Dempster-Shafer theory, imprecise probability, random sets, rough sets, fuzzy sets and interval methods; logics for uncertainty reasoning -Information fusion and knowledge integration in uncertain environments -Decision making under various types of uncertainty -Aggregation operators -Copulas for dependence modelling -Granular and soft computing -Type-2 Fuzz set Applications: -Data mining and knowledge discovery -Ontology engineering and Semantic Web -Software engineering -Medical informatics and bioinformatics -Ranking and recommendation systems -Kansei engineering and evaluation -Engineering management -Supply chain management -Management of services -Environmental and economics sciences -Social Network Analysis -Social Network Mining Abstract and Paper Submission: --------------------------------------- Electronic abstract and paper should be submitted through the IUKM 2013 submission site: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iukm2013. If you can't login the submission system, please try to submit through email: Email: iukm2013(a)gmail.com (.pdf and .doc) The proceedings of IUKM 2013 will be published by Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence from Springer. The Best Paper Award of IUKM 2013 is sponsored by Elsevier and after the Symposium, the authors of the best ranked papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their work for consideration in a special issue of International Journal of Approximate Reasoning from Elsevier.

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[SIPTA] ISIPTA'13: Call for papers and posters
by ISIPTA2013 Dec. 5, 2012

Dec. 5, 2012

============================================================================= ISIPTA '13 - CALL FOR PAPERS ============================================================================= Your help with circulating this announcement locally is much appreciated. Apologies for multiple postings. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ISIPTA '13 8th International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications Tuesday 2 to Friday 5 July 2013 Monday 1st: tutorials Université de Technologie de Compiegne Compiegne, France http://www.sipta.org/isipta13 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dear colleague(s), We would like to draw your attention to the 8th International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications, which be held at the Université de Technologie de Compiegne from July 2 to July 5, 2013. In addition, a tutorial afternoon is organized the 1st july, with the following speakers: - Thierry Denoeux, université de Technologie de Compiègne - Matthias Troffaes, Durham university The ISIPTA meetings are one of the primary international forums to present and discuss new results on the theories and applications of imprecise probability. Imprecise probability is a generic term for the many mathematical or statistical models which allow us to measure chance or uncertainty without using sharp numerical probabilities. These models include lower and upper expectations or previsions, interval valued probabilities, sets of probability measures, belief functions, Choquet capacities, fuzzy measures, comparative probability orderings, possibility measures, plausibility measures, and sets of desirable gambles. Imprecise probability models are needed in inference and decision problems where the relevant information is scarce, vague or conflicting, and where preferences may be incomplete. In this edition, we are particularly interested in contributions dealing with the connection between belief functions and other imprecise probabilistic models, as well as by contributions concerning real-world applications emphasizing the advantages and challenges of using imprecise probability theories in them. CALL FOR PAPERS and POSTERS ONLY ABSTRACTS For your convenience, a detailed call. It can also be found at http://www.sipta.org/isipta13/isipta13_call_for_papers.pdf Two kinds of submission can be done to ISIPTA: - full reviewed papers who will be included in the proceedings - abstract of posters presenting preliminary work or possible applications For further details about (pre)registration, paper submission, program committee, scientific and social program visit the ISIPTA '13 web site at http://www.sipta.org/isipta13/. IJAR SPECIAL ISSUE Following the conference, a selection of extended papers will appear in a special issue of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning. IJAR YOUNG RESEARCHER AWARD We invite applications for the "IJAR Young Researcher Award", which is granted by the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (IJAR), elsevier. The award is open to Master students, PhD students and young post-doc researchers who received their PhD after ISIPTA'11 and who have demonstrated excellence in research on imprecise probabilities (Career stage is taken into account in the judgment). More details will be found soon on the website. IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission deadline: 3 February 2013. Posters only abstract submission deadline: 21 April 2013 Symposium: July 2-5, 2013. ISIPTA/ECSQARU JOINT ACTIONS The ECSQARU 2013 conference (http://www.projects.science.uu.nl/ecsqaru/index.html) will be held in Utrecht from Sunday 7 to Wednesday 10 July 2013. As some of the themes of the two conferences are closely related, we propose the following joint actions: - a reduced fee to attend both conferences, including the travel from Compiegne to Utrecht by bus; - in each conference, tutorial and talks concerning themes; - a workshop on sunday 7th July about bridges and connections between topics usually treated in one (but not both) of the conferences. More information can be found on the respective websites of the conferences. INVITED SPEAKERS The following invited speakers have confirmed their venue: - Alessio Benavoli, IDSIA, Lugano - Linda van der Gaag, Utrecht Universiteït - Christophe Labreuche, Thales industry - Jean-Marc Tallon, Sorbonne STEERING COMMITTEE Fabio Cozman (Sao paulo University, Brazil) Thierry Denoeux (Université de Technologie de Compiegne, France) Sébastien Destercke (Université de Technologie de Compiegne, France) Thomas Fetz (Innsbruck University, Austria) Serafin Moral (Granada University, Spain) Teddy Seidenfeld (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) Matthias Troffaes (Durham University, UK) QUESTIONS If you have any questions about the symposium and/or about related events, please send an email to isipta13(a)hds.utc.fr, or at the following address: Sébastien Destercke, Université de Technologie de Compiegne, Centre de recherche de Royallieu, 60200 Compiègne, France. For more information about SIPTA, the international organisation responsible for organizing both the ISIPTA meetings and the SIPTA Schools on Imprecise Probabilities, please consult the SIPTA web site at http://www.sipta.org. The ISIPTA 2013 Steering Committee

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[SIPTA] ECSQARU 2013 in Utrecht, The Netherlands (Call for Papers)
by Gaag Dec. 3, 2012

Dec. 3, 2012

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[SIPTA] FW: IEEE SSCI with 14 Keynotes & 28 Special Sessions (planned) in Singapore, April 2013
by Kreinovich Nov. 28, 2012

Nov. 28, 2012

FYI, engineering-related imprecise probability papers are welcome at Engineering Applications Symposium ********************************************************************************************* From: Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam Suganthan (Assoc Prof) [mailto:EPNSugan(a)ntu.edu.sg] please use the CFP appearing below. please indicate that the submission will close on 12th Dec at midnight GMT. thanks Suganthan ________________________________________ Please kindly forward to your colleagues and contacts who may attend this event. CALL For Contributions LISTING OF PLANNED KEYNOTES & TUTORIALS (more will be included to this listing): http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/epnsugan/index_files/SSCI2013/Keynote-Tutorial.h… To submit a paper, please go to: http://ieee-ssci.org/ IMPORTANT DATES: Tutorial \ Keynote Proposal Submission: Before 15th Jan 2013 Tutorial \ Keynote Decision Notification: 10 Feb 2013 Paper submission: 12 Dec 2012 , Midnight GMT. Decision: 10 Jan 2013 Final submission: 05 Feb 2013 Early Registration: 05 Feb 2013 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2013 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, IEEE SSCI 2013 15-19 April 2013, Singapore http://ieee-ssci.org/ IEEE SSCI 2013 is one of the two flagship biennial international events sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS) promoting all aspects of the theory and applications of computational intelligence. The IEEE SSCI co-locates several technical meetings at one location. This event attracts top researchers, professionals, and students from around the world. The IEEE SSCI 2013 (Singapore) now calls contributions from experts around the world. Please visit the IEEE SSCI 2013's web pages to learn more about the relevant topics and proposal submission procedures. The conference proceedings of the IEEE SSCI have always been included in the IEEE Xplore and indexed by all other important databases. For example, the proceedings of the IEEE SSCI 2011 have already been included in the IEEE Xplore and indexed by databases such as EI, SCOPUS, etc. LIST OF SYMPOSIA & WORKSHOPS: http://ieee-ssci.org/ ADPRL 2013, IEEE Symposium on Adaptive Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning, Marco Wiering, The Netherlands; Jagannathan Sarangapani, USA; Huaguang Zhang, China. IEEE ALIFE 2013, IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life, Terry Bossomaier, Australia; Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, UK; Hiroki Sayama, USA. CCMB 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence, Cognitive Algorithms, Mind, and Brain, Leonid Pervlovsky, USA; Damien Coyle, UK; Kai Keng Ang, Singapore; Jose F Fontanari, Brazil; Robert Kozma, USA. CIASG 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence Applications in Smart Grid, Ganesh K Venayagamoorthy, USA; Jung-Wook Park, Korea; Haibo He, USA. CIBCB 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Jung-Hsien Chiang, Taiwan; Pau-Choo (Julia) Chung, Taiwan. CIBIM 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Biometrics and Identity Management, David Zhang, Hong Kong; Qinghan Xiao, Canada; Fabio Scotti, Italy. CIC 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Creativity, Chuan-Kang Ting, Taiwan; Francisco Fernández de Vega Spain; Palle Dahlstedt, Sweden; CICA 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Control and Automation, Xiao-Jun Zeng, UK. CICARE 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Healthcare and e-health, Amir Hussain, UK; Calum MacRae, Harvard Medical School, USA; Warner Slack, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. CIComms 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Communication Systems, Maode Ma, Singapore; Paolo Rocca, Italy; Sasitharan Balasubramaniam, Ireland. CICS 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Cyber Security, Dipankar Dasgupta, USA; Justin Zhan, USA; Kumaraguru Ponnurangam, India. CIDM 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Data Mining, Barbara Hammer, Germany; Zhi-Hua Zhou, China; Lipo Wang, Singapore; Nitesh Chawla, USA. CIDUE 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Dynamic and Uncertain Environments, Yaochu Jin, UK; S Yang, UK; Robi Polikar, USA. CIES 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Engineering Solutions, Michael Beer, UK; Vladik Kreinovich, USA; Rudolf Kruse, Germany. CIEL 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Ensemble Learning, Nikhil R Pal, India; Xin Yao, UK; P N Suganthan, Singapore. CIFEr 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Financial Engineering and Economics, Shu-Heng Chen, Taiwan; Robert Golan, USA; Han La Poutre, The Netherlands; Ronald R. Yager, USA. CIfIoT 2013, IEEE International Workshop on Computational Intelligence for the Internet of Things, Antonio Manzalini, Italy; Hussein Mouftah, Canada; Vincenzo Piuri, Italy. CIHLI 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Human-like Intelligence, Jacek Mandziuk, Poland; Wlodzislaw Duch, Poland. CII 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Industry, Piero Bonissone, USA; Keeley Crockett, UK; Cristian Figueroa, Chile; Emilio Corchado, University of Salamanca, Spain. CIMI 2013, IEEE International Workshop on Computational Intelligence in Medical Imaging, Gerald Schaefer, UK; Sergio Damas, Spain. CIMSVP 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Multimedia Signal and Vision Processing, K M Iftekharuddin, USA; S Bouzerdoum, Australia. CIPLS 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Production and Logistics Systems, Bülent Çatay, Turkey; Raymond Chiong, Australia; Patrick Siarry, France. CIRAT 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies, Guilherme N DeSouza,USA; Shuzhi Sam Ge, Singapore. CISched 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Scheduling, Rong Qu, UK; Ling Wang, China; Quanke Pan, Liaocheng University, China. CISDA 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Security and Defense Applications, Akira Namatame, Japan; Nur Zincir-Heywood, Canada; Rami Abielmona, Canada. CIVI 2013, IEEE Workshop on Computational Intelligence for Visual Intelligence, Guilherme N DeSouza, USA; Yuanqiang (Evan) Dong, USA. CIVTS 2013, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Vehicles and Transportation Systems, Dimitar Filev, USA; Danil Prokhorov, USA. CompSens 2013, IEEE Workshop on Merging Fields of Computational Intelligence and Sensor Technology, Ivo Bukovsky, Czech Republic; Torsten Wagner, Japan EAIS 2013, IEEE Symposium on Evolving Adapting Intelligent Systems, Plamen Angelov, UK; Dimitar Filev, USA; Nikola Kasabov, New Zealand. FOCI 2013, IEEE Symposium on Foundations of computational Intelligence, Manuel Ojeda-Aciego, Spain; Carlos Cotta, Spain. GEFS 2013, IEEE International Workshop on Genetic and Evolutionary Fuzzy Systems, Rafael Alcala, Spain; Yusuke Nojima, Japan. HIMA 2013, IEEE Workshop on Hybrid Intelligent Models and Applications, Patricia Melin, Mexico; Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, India. IA 2013, IEEE Symposium on Intelligent Agents, Hani Hagras, UK; Vincenzo Loia, Italy. ICES 2013, IEEE International Conference on Evolvable Systems - From Biology to Hardware, Andy M Tyrrell, UK; Pauline C Haddow, Norway. MC 2013, IEEE Symposium on Memetic Computing, Zexuan Zhu, China; Maoguo Gong, China; Ji Zhen, China; Yew-Soon Ong, Singapore. MCDM 2013, IEEE Symposium on Multicriteria Decision-Making , Carlos A Coello Coello, Mexico; Piero Bonissone, USA; Yaochu Jin, UK. OC 2013, IEEE Workshop on Organic Computing, Rolf Würtz, Germany. QCCI 2013, IEEE Symposium on Quantum Computing and Computational Intelligence, William N N Hung, USA; Swagatam Das, India; Marek Perkowski, USA. RiiSS 2013, IEEE Workshop on Robotic Intelligence in Informationally Structured Space, Honghai Liu, UK; Naoyuki Kubota, Japan. SDE 2013, IEEE Symposium on Differential Evolution, Janez Brest, Slovenia; Swagatam Das, India; Ferrante Neri, Finland; P N Suganthan, Singapore. SIS 2013, IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium, Yuhui Shi, P. R. China; P N Suganthan, Singapore. T2FUZZ 2013, IEEE Symposium on Advances in Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Systems, Simon Coupland, UK; Woeiwan Tan, National University of Singapore, Singapore WACI 2013, Workshop on Affective Computational Intelligence, Jean-Claude Martin, France, Marie-Jeanne Lesot, France; Maria Rifqi, France.

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[SIPTA] BFAS Spring School on Belief Functions Theory and Applications
by Arnaud Martin Nov. 26, 2012

Nov. 26, 2012

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[SIPTA] PhD studentship on Belief Theory
by Fabio Cuzzolin Nov. 23, 2012

Nov. 23, 2012

Dear all, I have an opening for a PhD studentship in belief functions theory, could you please make me aware of strong candidates with strong math skills interested in the job. Deadline (for now) is December 5th. Best, Fabio The Department of Computing and Communications Technologies at Oxford Brookes University is pleased to announce that it is able to offer a Doctoral Bursary to a new PhD student in for full time study commencing in January 2013. The successful applicant will have course fees waived and will be awarded a bursary of £10,000 per annum for three years (with no inflation increase). The PhD project will be focus on decision making and estimation. These are central problems in most applied sciences, as both people and machines need to make inferences about the state of the external world, and take appropriate actions. Traditionally, the (uncertain) state of the world is assumed to be described by a probability distribution over a set of alternative, disjoint hypotheses. Sometimes, however, as in the case of extremely rare events (e.g., a volcanic eruption), few statistics are available to drive the estimation. Part of the data can be missing. Furthermore, under the law of large numbers, probability distributions are the outcome of an infinite process of evidence accumulation, drawn from an infinite series of samples: in all practical cases, instead, the available evidence only provides some sort of constraint on the unknown probabilities governing the process. All these issues have led to the recognition of the need for a coherent mathematical theory of uncertainty. Shafer’s theory of belief functions, in particular, allows us to express partial belief by providing lower and upper bounds to probability values. It is appealing because it addresses all the above mentioned issues; its rationale is neat and simple; it is a straightforward generalization of probability theory; it does not require abandoning the notion of event. The widespread influence of uncertainty at different levels explains why belief functions are being increasingly applied to fields as diverse as robotics, fault analysis, decision making, sensor fusion, machine vision, and many more. Mathematically, a belief function is a random set, i.e. a probability distribution on the power set (the collection of all subsets). Equivalent alternative interpretations can be given in terms of compatibility relations, inner measures, and sum functions. However, the necessary mathematical tools for prediction and estimation in this framework have only partially been developed yet, due to their inherent complexity: this is the case, in particular, for the generalization of the classical total probability theorem to belief functions. The aim of this studentship is to study the mathematical properties of belief functions, and give a contribution towards the development of crucial tools such as the total belief theorem. Informal requests: fabio.cuzzolin(a)brookes.ac.uk Formal applications: follow the instructions here: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AFL096/phd-studentship/ and contact jheaton(a)brookes.ac.uk

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[SIPTA] Special Session on Imprecise Probabilities at FUSION 2013, Istanbul, 9 - 12 July 2013
by Benjamin Noack Nov. 15, 2012

Nov. 15, 2012

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[SIPTA] Invitation to track classification and clustering in ICMSAO 2013
by Zied Elouedi Nov. 12, 2012

Nov. 12, 2012

I am writing to cordially invite you to submit a paper to the track classification and clustering organized in The 5th International Conference on Modeling, Simulation and Applied Optimization (ICMSAO’13) that will be held in April 28-30, 2013, Hammamet, TUNISIA (http://www.icmsao.org/) Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed. All accepted and presented papers will be published in IEEEXplore (pending). Selected papers will be published in one or more special issues of reputed, abstracted, and indexed journals. For any questions please send me an email: zied.elouedi(a)gmx.fr Track: Classification and clustering http://icmsao13.trackchair.com/track/1085 Track Chair: Zied Elouedi University of Tunis, Tunisia Email: zied.elouedi(a)gmx.fr Deadline : December 1, 2012 best regards zied

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[SIPTA] Track "classification and classification" in ICMSAO 2013
by Zied Elouedi Nov. 7, 2012

Nov. 7, 2012

FYI -------------------------------------------------------------------------- A track on classification and clustering is organized in This is a track of The 5th International Conference on Modeling, Simulation and Applied Optimization (ICMSAO’13) That will be held in April 28-30, 2013, Hammamet, TUNISIA Track: Classification and clustering http://icmsao13.trackchair.com/track/1085 Track Chair: Zied Elouedi University of Tunis, Tunisia Email: zied.elouedi(a)gmx.fr deadline : December 1, 2012 submissions of papers are well welcome for any questions please send me an email: zied.elouedi(a)gmx.fr

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[SIPTA] SIPTA Blog at http://www.sipta.org/blog/
by Erik Quaeghebeur Oct. 31, 2012

Oct. 31, 2012

Dear colleagues, The SIPTA Blog at http://www.sipta.org/blog/ has, after a bit of delay, received its second post and is now officially launched. Please go and have a look. The blog is edited by Fabio Cozman and Erik Quaeghebeur; our Executive Editor Sébastien Destercke provides support in the background. Everyone in the SIPTA Community can contribute! Contact one of the editors if you are interested in doing so. We see it as an electronic continuation of the Newsletter, so do not hesitate to send us contributions (reports on meetings, book or recent literature reviews, interviews, software presentations,...) or request an account in case you would like to make regular posts. Best regards, Fabio & Erik

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[SIPTA] open faculty positions at University of Texas at El Paso
by Kreinovich Oct. 30, 2012

Oct. 30, 2012

This is not specifically about uncertainty, but maybe this fits your area of expertise or area of someone you know: http://www.cs.utep.edu/DeptCS/hiring/open-position2013.html The Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position for start of fall 2013. We seek candidates whose research focus is in security or big data, especially with interdisciplinary connections. Exceptional candidates in other areas will also be considered. We strongly encourage women and candidates from underserved groups to apply. http://www.admin.utep.edu/DesktopModules/DNN%20Faculty%20Job%20Board/MoreIn… POSITION DESCRIPTION: The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) in coordination with the Cyber-ShARE Center of Excellence (www.Cyber-ShARE.utep.edu) is seeking applicants for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position to support the growth of the Center's interdisciplinary Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-centered research efforts in Knowledge Representation and Semantic Web. Duties include teaching and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students; conducting publishable research; grantsmanship; interdisciplinary collaboration at the Center; and department/university service. The ideal applicant should have extensive experience in working with interdisciplinary teams, a substantial record of scholarly work and professional service, the potential to secure external funding, experience in mentoring students, and the ability to contribute to the education and training of the next-generation of CI-savvy scientists and engineers. Anticipated appointment date is fall 2013.

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[SIPTA] what does IP say about US elections?
by Alessio Benavoli Oct. 25, 2012

Oct. 25, 2012

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[SIPTA] 2nd CfP: Uncertain Reasoning 2013 - Special Track at FLAIRS-26
by Christoph Beierle Oct. 19, 2012

Oct. 19, 2012

[Apologies for multiple copies] ******************************************************************** 2nd Call for Papers: Uncertain Reasoning (UR) 2013 ============================= Special Track at the 26th International FLAIRS Conference (FLAIRS-26) St. Pete Beach, Florida, USA May 22-24, 2013 http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/wbs/ur13/ The Special Track on Uncertain Reasoning (UR) is the oldest track in FLAIRS conferences, running annually since 1996. The UR'2013 Special Track at the 26th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-26) is the 18th in the series. As the past tracks, UR'2013 seeks to bring together researchers working on broad issues related to reasoning under uncertainty. Scopes ------ Papers on all aspects of uncertain reasoning are invited. Papers of particular interest include, but are not limited to: - Uncertain reasoning formalisms, calculi and methodologies - Reasoning with probability, possibility, fuzzy logic, belief function, vagueness, granularity, rough sets, and probability logics - Modeling and reasoning using imprecise and indeterminate information, such as: Choquet capacities, comparative orderings, convex sets of measures, and interval-valued probabilities - Exact, approximate and qualitative uncertain reasoning - Bayesian networks - Graphical models of uncertainty - Multi-agent uncertain reasoning and decision making - Decision-theoretic planning and Markov decision process - Temporal reasoning and uncertainty - Nonmonotonic reasoning - Conditional Logics - Argumentation - Belief change and merging - Similarity-based reasoning - Construction of models from elicitation, data mining and knowledge discovery - Uncertain reasoning in information retrieval, filtering, fusion, diagnosis, prediction, situation assessment - Practical applications of uncertain reasoning Paper Submission and Publication --------------------------------- Submitted papers must be original, and not submitted concurrently to a journal or another conference. Full papers may be up to 6 pages, and poster papers up to 4 pages. Papers must be in AAAI format, and submitted as PDF through the EasyChair conference system. Instructions on the submission procedure are available at the UR'2013 website: http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/wbs/ur13/ All accepted papers will be published as FLAIRS proceedings by the AAAI. We anticipate that the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (IJAR) will publish a special issue devoted to extended versions of the top papers at the track. Important Dates --------------- Paper submission due: Nov. 19, 2012 Author Notification: Jan. 21, 2013 Camera Ready Copy Due: Feb. 25, 2013 Conference: May 22-24, 2013 Program Committee ----------------- [ Track Chairs ] Christoph Beierle University of Hagen, Germany Souhila Kaci University of Montpellier 2, France [ PC Members ] Xiangdong An York U., Canada Richard Booth U. of Luxembourg, Luxembourg Cory Butz U. of Regina, Canada Fabio Cuzzolin Oxford Brookes U., England Sylvie Doutre U. Toulouse, France Marek Druzdzel U. Pittsburgh, USA Love Ekenberg Stockholm U., Sweden Konstantinos Georgatos CUNY, USA Lluis Godo IIIA, Spanish National Research Council, Spain Kevin Grant U. Lethbridge, Canada Gabriele Kern-Isberner U. Dortmund, Germany Pawan Lingras Saint Mary's U., Canada Weiru Liu Queen's U. Belfast, UK Tsai-Ching Lu HRL Laboratories, USA Anders Madsen HUGIN Expert, Denmark Cristina Manfredotti U. of Copenhagen, Denmark Nicholas Mattei NICTA and U. of New South Wales, Australia Malek Mouhoub U. Regina, Canada Eric Neufeld U. Saskatchewan, Canada Thomas Nielsen Aalborg U., Denmark Laurent Perrussel IRIT - Universite de Toulouse, France Eugene Santos Dartmouth College, USA Guillermo Simari Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina Paul Snow New Hampshire, USA Luis E. Sucar Inst. Astrophysics, Optics, Electronics, Mexico Choh-Man Teng Inst. For Human & Machine Cognition, USA Dan Wu U. Windsor, Canada Yang Xiang U. Guelph, Canada Changhe Yuan Queens College, City U. of New York, USA Travel Information ------------------ FLAIRS 2013 will be held in St. Pete Beach, Florida. Additional information on the conference location and travel planning can be found at: http://www.flairs-26.info/ ********************************************************************

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[SIPTA] FW: Deadline Extension & List of Keynote Speakers
by Kreinovich Oct. 8, 2012

Oct. 8, 2012

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[SIPTA] Post-doc Researcher in the area of robust estimation (IDSIA, Lugano, Switzerland)
by Alessio Benavoli Sept. 14, 2012

Sept. 14, 2012

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[SIPTA] CfP: Uncertain Reasoning 2013 - Special Track at FLAIRS-26
by Christoph Beierle Sept. 4, 2012

Sept. 4, 2012

[Apologies for multiple copies] ******************************************************************** Call for Papers: Uncertain Reasoning (UR) 2013 ============================= Special Track at the 26th International FLAIRS Conference (FLAIRS-26) St. Pete Beach, Florida, USA May 22-24, 2013 http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/wbs/ur13/ The Special Track on Uncertain Reasoning (UR) is the oldest track in FLAIRS conferences, running annually since 1996. The UR'2013 Special Track at the 26th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-26) is the 18th in the series. As the past tracks, UR'2013 seeks to bring together researchers working on broad issues related to reasoning under uncertainty. Scopes ------ Papers on all aspects of uncertain reasoning are invited. Papers of particular interest include, but are not limited to: - Uncertain reasoning formalisms, calculi and methodologies - Reasoning with probability, possibility, fuzzy logic, belief function, vagueness, granularity, rough sets, and probability logics - Modeling and reasoning using imprecise and indeterminate information, such as: Choquet capacities, comparative orderings, convex sets of measures, and interval-valued probabilities - Exact, approximate and qualitative uncertain reasoning - Bayesian networks - Graphical models of uncertainty - Multi-agent uncertain reasoning and decision making - Decision-theoretic planning and Markov decision process - Temporal reasoning and uncertainty - Nonmonotonic reasoning - Conditional Logics - Argumentation - Belief change and merging - Similarity-based reasoning - Construction of models from elicitation, data mining and knowledge discovery - Uncertain reasoning in information retrieval, filtering, fusion, diagnosis, prediction, situation assessment - Practical applications of uncertain reasoning Paper Submission and Publication --------------------------------- Submitted papers must be original, and not submitted concurrently to a journal or another conference. Full papers may be up to 6 pages, and poster papers up to 4 pages. Papers must be in AAAI format, and submitted as PDF through the EasyChair conference system. Instructions on the submission procedure are available at the UR'2013 website: http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/wbs/ur13/ All accepted papers will be published as FLAIRS proceedings by the AAAI. We anticipate that the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (IJAR) will publish a special issue devoted to extended versions of the top papers at the track. Important Dates --------------- Paper submission due: Nov. 19, 2012 Author Notification: Jan. 21, 2013 Camera Ready Copy Due: Feb. 25, 2013 Conference: May 22-24, 2013 Program Committee ----------------- [ Track Chairs ] Christoph Beierle University of Hagen, Germany Souhila Kaci University of Montpellier 2, France [ PC Members ] Xiangdong An York U., Canada Richard Booth U. of Luxembourg, Luxembourg Cory Butz U. of Regina, Canada Fabio Cuzzolin Oxford Brookes U., England Sylvie Doutre U. Toulouse, France Marek Druzdzel U. Pittsburgh, USA Love Ekenberg Stockholm U., Sweden Konstantinos Georgatos CUNY, USA Lluis Godo IIIA, Spanish National Research Council, Spain Kevin Grant U. Lethbridge, Canada Gabriele Kern-Isberner U. Dortmund, Germany Pawan Lingras Saint Mary's U., Canada Weiru Liu Queen's U. Belfast, UK Tsai-Ching Lu HRL Laboratories, USA Anders Madsen HUGIN Expert, Denmark Cristina Manfredotti U. Milano-Bicocca, Italy Nicholas Mattei U. of Kentucky, USA Malek Mouhoub U. Regina, Canada Eric Neufeld U. Saskatchewan, Canada Thomas Nielsen Aalborg U., Denmark Laurent Perrussel IRIT - Universite de Toulouse, France Eugene Santos Dartmouth College, USA Guillermo Simari Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina Paul Snow New Hampshire, USA Luis E. Sucar Inst. Astrophysics, Optics, Electronics, Mexico Choh-Man Teng Inst. For Human & Machine Cognition, USA Dan Wu U. Windsor, Canada Yang Xiang U. Guelph, Canada Changhe Yuan Queens College, City U. of New York, USA Travel Information ------------------ FLAIRS 2013 will be held in St. Pete Beach, Florida. Additional information on the conference location and travel planning can be found at: http://www.flairs-26.info/ ********************************************************************

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[SIPTA] WPMSIIP 2012: Final Announcement
by Marco Cattaneo Sept. 1, 2012

Sept. 1, 2012

====================================================================== WPMSIIP 2012 (10-15 Sept 2012, Munich, Germany) --- Final 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 a tentative programme, please visit: http://www.statistik.lmu.de/institut/ag/statsoz_neu/research/WPMSIIP_2012/ Everyone 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. Best wishes, The local organizing committee Thomas Augustin Marco Cattaneo Georg Schollmeyer Gero Walter Andrea Wiencierz

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[SIPTA] ISIPTA 2013: first call for papers
by Sébastien Destercke Aug. 27, 2012

Aug. 27, 2012

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[SIPTA] PhD position: imprecise probabilities in stochastic modelling at Ghent University (Belgium)
by Gert de Cooman Aug. 22, 2012

Aug. 22, 2012

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Re: [SIPTA] IEEE SSCI 2013, Singapore: Call for Contributions
by Kreinovich Aug. 18, 2012

Aug. 18, 2012

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[SIPTA] DEADLINE EXTENSION -- SeRSy@ISWC2012
by Thomas Lukasiewicz July 30, 2012

July 30, 2012

Apologies for possible multiple posts !!! SUBMISSION DEADLINE ESTENDED !!! [NEW DATE] Submission for workshop papers: Aug 7 ============================ 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 --------------- [NEW DATE] Submission for workshop papers: Aug 7 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 CalÃ¬ (Birkbeck, University of London - UK) Ivan Cantador (Universidad AutÃ³noma de Madrid - Spain) Pablo Castells (Universidad AutÃ³noma de Madrid - Spain) Federica Cena (University of Turin - Italy) Bettina Fazzinga (UniversitÃ della Calabria - Italy) Tim Furche (Oxford University Computing Laboratories - UK) Nicola Henze (Leibniz UniversitÃ¤ Hannover - Germany) Dominikus Heckmann (DFKI - Germany) Leo Iaquinta (Univ.di Milano Bicocca - Italy) Ahsan Morshed (CSIRO - Australia) Roberto Mirizzi (Politecnico of Bari - Italy) Enrico Motta (Open University in Milton Keynes - UK) Cataldo Musto (UniversitÃ 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 (Alpenâ€“Adriaâ€“UniversitÃ¤ 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] Deadline Extension: URSW 2012
by Thomas Lukasiewicz July 28, 2012

July 28, 2012

*********************************************************** CALL FOR PAPERS (AND EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE) 8th International Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW 2012) http://c4i.gmu.edu/ursw/2012 In conjunction with the 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2012) Boston, USA November 11-12, 2012 *********************************************************** You are invited to participate in the upcoming workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW), to be held as part of the 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in November of 2012 at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers, USA. ISWC is a major international forum for presenting visionary research on all aspects of the Semantic Web. The Uncertainty Reasoning Workshop is an exciting opportunity for collaboration and cross-fertilization between the uncertainty reasoning community and the Semantic Web community. Effective methods for reasoning under uncertainty are vital for realizing many aspects of the Semantic Web vision, but the ability of current-generation web technology to handle uncertainty is extremely limited. Recently, there has been a groundswell of demand for uncertainty reasoning technology among Semantic Web researchers and developers. This surge of interest creates a unique opening to bring together two communities with a clear commonality of interest but limited history of interaction. By capitalizing on this opportunity, URSW could spark dramatic progress toward realizing the Semantic Web vision. AUDIENCE The intended audience for this workshop includes the following: - Researchers in uncertainty reasoning technologies with interest in Semantic Web and Web-related technologies; - Semantic web developers and researchers; - People in the knowledge representation community with interest in the Semantic Web. - Ontology researchers and ontological engineers; - Web services researchers and developers with interest in the Semantic Web; - Developers of tools designed to support semantic web implementation, e.g., Jena developers, Protégé developers, OWL-API developers. TOPIC LIST We intend to have an open discussion on any topic relevant to the general subject of uncertainty in the Semantic Web (including fuzzy theory, probability theory, and other approaches). Therefore, the following list should be just an initial guide. - Syntax and semantics for extensions to Semantic Web languages to enable representation of uncertainty; - Logical formalisms to support uncertainty in Semantic Web languages; - Probability theory as a means of assessing the likelihood that terms in different ontologies refer to the same or similar concepts; - Architectures for applying plausible reasoning to the problem of ontology mapping; - Using fuzzy approaches to deal with imprecise concepts within ontologies; - The concept of a probabilistic ontology and its relevance to the Semantic Web; - Best practices for representing uncertain, incomplete, ambiguous, or controversial information in the Semantic Web; - The role of uncertainty as it relates to Web services; - Interface protocols with support for uncertainty as a means to improve interoperability among Web services; - Uncertainty reasoning techniques applied to trust issues in the Semantic Web; - Existing implementations of uncertainty reasoning tools in the context of the Semantic Web; - Issues and techniques for integrating tools for representing and reasoning with uncertainty; - The future of uncertainty reasoning for the Semantic Web. IMPORTANT DATES August 7, 2012 (new!) Paper submissions due August 21 Paper acceptance notification September 10 Camera-ready papers due November 11-12 URSW 2012 SUBMISSION DETAILS The URSW workshop will be accepting submissions of technical papers and position papers. Each submission will be evaluated for acceptability by at least three members of the Program Committee. Decisions about acceptance will be based on relevance to the above topic list, originality, potential significance, topicality, and clarity. Since all accepted papers will be presented at the workshop, we require that at least one of the submitting authors must be a registered participant at the ISWC 2012 conference, and committed to attend the URSW workshop. Submissions to the workshop are only accepted in electronic format and should be sent via the workshop’s submission site: https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=ursw2012. Papers must be formatted in the style of the Springer publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). This is the very same format adopted by the ISWC 2011. For complete details, see Springer’s Author Instructions (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0) Technical papers submitted to the URSW Workshop must not exceed 12 pages, including figures. Submissions exceeding this limit will not be reviewed. Position papers consist of a summary of ideas, projects, or any research efforts that are relevant to the URSW Workshop and must not exceed 4 pages. Following the general acceptance rules of the ISWC 2012 conference, papers that, at the time of submission, are under review for or have already been published in or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference will not be accepted to the URSW workshop. PRESENTATION AND PUBLICATION URSW 2012 will be a full-day workshop divided into 4 sessions. The first session will start with the workshop's keynote presentation, which will be followed by technical paper presentations. Sessions two and three will be devoted to presenting our selected technical and position papers, while the remaining session will be planned in a format that invites an open debate on results, conclusions, and recommendations. We plan to convey a work meeting after the workshop, if the last session needs to be extended. All papers accepted to URSW 2012 will be presented during the workshop and published in the workshop proceedings. Authors of accepted technical papers will have 20 minutes to present their work, while authors of accepted position papers will have a 10-minute slot to share their ideas. After each presentation, 5 minutes will be allocated to questions from the audience. Both technical and position papers will be published in the URSW workshop proceedings, to be available after the ISWC 2012 Conference. In addition, technical papers accepted for presentation at URSW 2012 will be eligible for participating in an international journal special issue or in a post-proceedings book. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE The organizing committee is as follows (in alphabetical order): Fernando Bobillo - University of Zaragoza, Spain Rommel N. Carvalho - George Mason University, USA Paulo C. G. Costa - George Mason University, USA Nicola Fanizzi - University of Bari, Italy Kathryn B. Laskey - George Mason University, USA Kenneth J. Laskey - MITRE Corporation, USA Thomas Lukasiewicz - University of Oxford, UK Trevor Martin - University of Bristol, UK Matthias Nickles - Technical University of Munich, Germany Michael Pool - Vertical Search Works, Inc., USA PROGRAM COMMITTEE The confirmed members of the program committee are the following (in alphabetical order): Fernando Bobillo - Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain Silvia Calegari - University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy Rommel N. Carvalho - George Mason University, USA Davide Ceolin - VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands Paulo C. G. Costa - George Mason University, USA Fabio G. Cozman - Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil Nicola Fanizzi - University of Bari, Italy Marcelo Ladeira - University of Brasilia, Brazil Kathryn B. Laskey - George Mason University, USA Kenneth J. Laskey - MITRE Corporation, USA Thomas Lukasiewicz - University of Oxford, UK Trevor Martin - University of Bristol, UK Matthias Nickles - Technical University of Munich, Germany Rafael Peñaloza - Technical University Dresden, Germany Michael Pool - Vertical Search Works, Inc., USA Livia Predoiu - University of Magdeburg, Germany Guilin Qi - Southeast University, China Célia Ralha - University of Brasilia, Brazil Dave Robertson - University of Edinburgh, UK Daniel Sánchez - European Centre for Soft Computing, Spain Sergej Sizov - University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany Giorgos Stoilos - National and Technical University of Athens, Greece Umberto Straccia - ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy Matthias Thimm - Universität Koblenz, Germany Andreas Tolk - Old Dominion University, USA Peter Vojtas - Charles University, Czech Republic We are looking forward to seeing you in Boston!

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[SIPTA] Final CFP - SeRSy@ISWC 2012 - Semantic Technologies meet Recommender Systems & Big Data
by Thomas Lukasiewicz July 28, 2012

July 28, 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 CalÃ¬ (Birkbeck, University of London - UK) Ivan Cantador (Universidad AutÃ³noma de Madrid - Spain) Pablo Castells (Universidad AutÃ³noma de Madrid - Spain) Federica Cena (University of Turin - Italy) Bettina Fazzinga (UniversitÃ della Calabria - Italy) Tim Furche (Oxford University Computing Laboratories - UK) Nicola Henze (Leibniz UniversitÃ¤ 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 (UniversitÃ 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 (Alpenâ€“Adriaâ€“UniversitÃ¤ 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] 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 16, 2012

July 16, 2012

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[SIPTA] URSW 2012: Call for Papers
by Thomas Lukasiewicz July 10, 2012

July 10, 2012

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[SIPTA] CFP: SeRSy 2012 - Semantic Technologies meet Recommender Systems & Big Data
by Thomas Lukasiewicz July 10, 2012

July 10, 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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[SIPTA] Post-doctoral Researcher in the area, of data mining (Lugano, Switzerland)
by Giorgio Corani June 7, 2012

June 7, 2012

A position for a post-doctoral data mining researcher is available at IDSIA (Lugano, Switzerland, www.idsia.ch) **Duties -Research and development of original data mining methods for classification, regression and clustering. -Implementation of data mining algorithms within an existing Business Intelligence software program. **Requirements - Master’s Degree in computer science, statistics, physics, engineering or other highly quantitative areas. -PhD in data mining related topics, or in statistical data modeling, preferably involving Bayesian networks. -Strong publication record in the fields of data mining, machine learning or computational statistics. -Strong commitment to research and scientific publication, together with the willingness to cooperate with a leading business intelligence company. -Strong background in programming languages such as C++, C# or Java. -Ability to produce high-quality data mining implementations, to efficiently analyze very large databases. -Excellent oral and written English skills. **We offer -A two-year position with an employment contract of 100% and with the possibility of contract extension. -International working environment. -Collaboration with expert data mining researchers and with leading Business Intelligence companies. -Participation in prominent international conferences, with the possibility for funded travel. -Attractive salary, in line with Swiss employment standards. **Applications Applicants should submit the following documents, written in English: - curriculum vitae - list of exams and grades obtained in the course of studies conducted at Bachelor’s and Master’s level; - names of three references (with e-mail addresses); -letter of motivation: brief statement on how the applicant’s research interests correspond with the above mentioned topics (1 - 2 pages); -list of publications, and, if possible, link to the thesis. Completed applications should be submitted by the 5th July 2012 using the online form found at the following address: www.supsi.ch/go/bando_data_mining_idsia For further information please refer to the official page for this position: http://www.supsi.ch/home/supsi/lavora-con-noi/2012-07-05.html or contact Giorgio Corani giorgio.corani(a)supsi.ch

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[SIPTA] Imprecise Probability Group at IDSIA
by Marco Zaffalon June 6, 2012

June 6, 2012

Dear SIPTAnts, In case you want to take a look, we have finally created a web site for our group on imprecise probability at IDSIA: http://ipg.idsia.ch. We are putting there all our preprints; in the future we might try to put there our software too, but this will require some more time. All the best wishes from Lugano, Marco

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[SIPTA] Imprecise probability theories for statistical problems: why? how? when?
by Marco Cattaneo June 4, 2012

June 4, 2012

======================================================================== Imprecise probability theories for statistical problems: why? how? when? CFE-ERCIM 2012 (1-3 Dec 2012, Oviedo, Spain) Organized Session ======================================================================== Dear friends and colleagues, A session on imprecise probabilities theories for statistical problems (why? how? when?) is being organized at the next CFE-ERCIM conference, that shall take place in Oviedo (Spain) on 1-3 December 2012: http://www.cfe-csda.org/ercim12/ The idea of the session is to have position/applied/theoretical papers discussing the point of using IP theories, their advantages/disadvantages and in which case they may prove useful (compared to classical approaches). Abstracts should be submitted by 5 September 2012 (preferably before 15 July) through the online submission tool by selecting the organized session ES62: Imprecise probability theories for statistical problems: why? how? when? Please let us know if you plan to submit an abstract. Organizers: Marco Cattaneo, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany (cattaneo(a)stat.uni-muenchen.de) Inés Couso Blanco, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain (couso(a)uniovi.es) Sébastien Destercke, French National Research Center, Heudiasyc Joint Unit, France (sdestercke(a)gmail.com) Best regards, Marco Cattaneo -- Marco Cattaneo, Dr. sc. math. Department of Statistics, LMU Munich http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~cattaneo/

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