- SIPTA News - lists.sipta.org

[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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