Bulletin #1, January 2011

News

ECCAI Travel Awards 2011

An ECCAI Travel Award Scheme has been established to support students, young researchers and faculty who are members of an ECCAI affiliated society participating in ECAI or ACAI. The awards, valued at 400 Euros each, are for reimbursement of travel and partial payment of registration fees.

In 2011 the ECCAI Travel Award Scheme supports participation in ACAI 2011. No funding for any other event will be given. More information, including eligibility rules and application procedure, is found at the ECCAI Travel Award web page.

ECCAI Fellows 2011 -- Call for Nominations

INTRODUCTION

Nominations are sought for ECCAI Fellows 2011. The ECCAI Fellows program was initiated in 1999 to recognize individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe. The ECCAI Fellows Program honors only a very small percentage of the total membership of all ECCAI member societies (up to a maximum of 3%).

WHO IS ELIGIBLE TO BE AN ECCAI FELLOW?

To be eligible for consideration, candidates must be a current member of an ECCAI member organisation. Usually only individuals who have made contributions to AI for a decade or more after receiving their PhD (or are at an equivalent career stage) will be selected.

WHO CAN MAKE A NOMINATION?

There are two ways that an individual can be nominated:

  • A nomination can be made by an ECCAI member society. See http://www.eccai.org/member/ for a list of member societies.
  • A nomination can be made by two ECCAI fellows, who must be from different countries.

WHAT IS THE NOMINATION PROCESS?

Nominations should include (all in English):

  • a statement confirming which ECCAI member society the candidate is currently a member of;
  • a comprehensive current CV of the candidate;
  • three separate letters of reference (1 letter with 3 signatures is not acceptable), each of which should clearly make the case why the individual is considered appropriate for ECCAI fellowship.

These documents must be provided in PDF format. Nominations must be sent by email to the chair of the Fellows 2011 committee, Michael Wooldridge NO LATER THAN Friday 11 March 2011. The nominator will be informed of the decision of the committee. We hope to complete the evaluation process by mid May 2011.

HOW WILL NOMINATIONS BE EVALUATED?

All nominations will be evaluated by the ECCAI fellows committee. The key criterion of evaluation will be whether the nominee has achieved unusual distinction in AI in Europe. Distinction may be evidenced in several ways -- fellows' accomplishments range from pioneering advances in the theory of AI, to unusual accomplishments in AI technology and applications. Leadership in ECCAI or ECCAI member societies, support of forums for the exchange of ideas, and extended service for the international AI community may also play a role in the selection process. Evidence of technical contribution will often be in the form of publications, but other evidence will also be considered, such as patent awards or statements of longstanding contribution to an industrial group effort.

Conferences

ECCAI Conferences

  • ACAI Summer School on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ACAI 2011)
    Freiburg, Germany, June 7-10, 2011.

    The ability to plan one's actions autonomously and to schedule given actions is a crucial capability of intelligent agents – and therefore planning and scheduling is one of the central research areas in AI. In particular, the last 15 years have seen a tremendous advance in planning and scheduling research, both theoretically and practically. Much of this progress is not adequately covered in AI courses and textbooks, yet. For this reason, the 2011 Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence (ACAI-11) will focus on Automated Planning and Scheduling to give interested students an in-depth look into the field.

    The ACAI summer school is an intense four-day educational and mentoring program for graduate students and young researchers. The school will bring together subject experts in order to introduce the foundations of automated planning and scheduling and the broad range of current approaches, and to consider ways of developing and exploiting these to build a realistically usable tool for complex problem-solving. Likewise, we hope the school will also provide a lively forum for attendees to discuss their research lines.

    In order to not only teach students the foundations of the field, but also get them into contact with the planning and scheduling research community and give them access to the latest developments in the field, ACAI-11 will be co-located with the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2011). ACAI students will have free access to the ICAPS pre-conference programme (workshops and tutorials).

    More information on this event, including programme, registration and available travel grants, is found at the ACAI 2011 web site.

ECCAI Sponsored conferences

National conferences

Journals

AI Communications

Contents of latest issue (Volume 24, no.1 / 2011)

  1. Martin C. Cooper, Marie de Roquemaurel and Pierre Régnier, A weighted CSP approach to cost-optimal planning
  2. Pasquale De Meo, Antonino Nocera, Domenico Rosaci and Domenico Ursino, Recommendation of reliable users, social networks and high-quality resources in a Social Internetworking System
  3. Xiaofang Wang, Nicola Policella, Stephen F. Smith and Angelo Oddi, Constraint-based methods for scheduling discretionary services
  4. Geoff Sutcliffe, The 5th IJCAR automated theorem proving system competition – CASC-J5
  5. Johan Wittocx, Finite domain and symbolic inference methods for extensions of first-order logic
  6. Leander Schietgat, Graph-based data mining for biological applications
  7. Francisco Martínez-Álvarez, Clustering preprocessing to improve time series forecasting
  8. Axel J. Soto, On the use of machine learning methods for modern drug discovery
  9. Josep Argelich, Max-SAT formalisms with hard and soft constraints

IEEE Intelligent Systems

Contents of latest issue (Volume 25, no.6, November/December 2010)

  1. Fei-Yue Wang, Recollections of People and Ideas
  2. Daniel Zeng, Hsinchun Chen, Robert Lusch, Shu-Hsing Li, Social Media Analytics and Intelligence
  3. Yulei Zhang, Ximing Yu, Yan Dang, Hsinchun Chen, An Integrated Framework for Avatar Data Collection from the Virtual World
  4. Jonghun Park, Yongwook Shin, Kwanho Kim, Beom-Suk Chung, Searching Social Media Streams on the Web
  5. Davide Barbieri, Daniele Braga, Stefano Ceri, Emanuele Della Valle, Yi Huang, Volker Tresp, Achim Rettinger, Hendrik Wermser, Deductive and Inductive Stream Reasoning for Semantic Social Media Analytics
  6. Xiance Si, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Modeling Social Annotations via Latent Reason Identification
  7. Efthimios Bothos, Dimitris Apostolou, Gregoris Mentzas, Using Social Media to Predict Future Events with Agent-Based Markets
  8. Zhuo Feng, Qingpeng Zhang, Xin Li, Guanyan Ke, Gang Xiong, A Bibliographic Analysis of IEEE Intelligent Systems Publications
  9. Qingpeng Zhang, Zhuo Feng, Xin Li, Xiaolong Zheng, Liu Zhang, 25 Years of Collaborations in IEEE Intelligent Systems
  10. Ronald R. Yager, Marek Z. Reformat, Giray Gumrah, WebPET: An Online Tool for Lexicographic Decision Making
  11. Kees van der Sluijs, Geert-Jan Houben, Exploiting User Tags to Build a Semantic Cultural Heritage Portal
  12. Robert R. Hoffman, Peter A. Hancock, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Metrics, Metrics, Metrics, Part 2: Universal Metrics?