Nokia Workshop on Machine Consciousness

A good friend of mine, Raúl Arrabales, is attending the "Nokia Workshop on Machine Consciousness 2008", celebrated in conjunction with the Finnish AI Conference ath the Nokia Research Center in Helsinki. He has posted a personal summary of the workshop, in his blog about conscious robotics, that I think is interesting to read.

KDD 2009 in Paris

KDD comes to Europe, that's a great new for european dataminers :) From June 28 to July 1, KDD will be held at Paris. There are no key dates defined for the conference, but I suppose the Call for Papers will be by the end of January 2009.

Automated Microarray Classification Challenge

The diagnosis of cancer on the basis of gene expression profiles is well established, so much so that micro-array classification has become one of the classic applications of machine learning in
computational biology. The field has now reached the stage where a large scale evaluation exercise is warranted to determine the advantages and disadvantages of competing approaches. We have therefore organized a challenge for ICMLA'08, the aim of which is to determine the best fully automated approach to micro-array classification. An unusual feature of the competition is that instead of submitting predictions on test cases, the competitors submit a MATLAB implementation of their algorithm (R and Java interfaces are also in development), which is then tested off-line by the challenge organizers. This will test the true operational value of the method, in the hands of an end user who is not necessarily an expert in a given technique. The winner of the challenge will receive a free registration to ICMLA'08.

Further details and background information regarding the competition are available from the challenge website, http://theoval.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~gcc/projects/amcc. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the challenge organizers (g...@cmp.uea.ac.uk).

The results of the challenge will be presented at a special session at ICMLA'08. Competitors are encouraged to participate in the special session and are invited to submit a technical paper describing their technique. Submissions should be made electronically in PDF format using the central ICMLA'08 website. The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2008. All accepted papers must be presented by one of the authors in order to be published in the conference proceeding.

Important Dates

Challenge opens March 10, 2008
Challenge closes Julu 15, 2008
Paper submission due July 15, 2008
Notification of acceptance September 1,
2008
Camera-ready papers & pre-registration October 1, 2008
ICMLA'08 conference December 11-13, 2008

Special Session Chair

Dr Wenjia Wang, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.

Special Session Organizers

Dr Gavin Cawley, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
Dr Wenjia Wang, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
Mr Geoffrey Guile, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.

KDD Cup 2008 and Workshop on Mining Medical Data

KDD Cup is the first and the oldest data mining competition, and is an integral part of the annual ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). Based on data provided by Siemens Medical Solutions USA, this year's KDD Cup competition focuses on the early detection of breast cancer from X-ray images of the breast. We are looking forward to an interesting competition and your participation. We particularly encourage the participation of students.

There are 2 different parallel options for participating:

1. Submit entries to the KDD Cup competition
2. Paper submissions for the associated Workshop on MiningMedical Data

Further details on each option are provided below.

KDD Cup 2008

Siemens Medical Solutions is proud to provide the data for the KDD Cup 2008 competition. The competition focuses on the early detection of breast cancer from X-ray images of the breast. There are two specific tasks, selected to be interesting to participants from academia and industry. The tasks are described in detail at www.kddcup2008.com. You can choose to compete in either or both of the tasks. The training data can be downloaded after April 3, 2008. Important dates are listed below.

April 1 Web site up. Registration opens
April 3 Training data and evaluation code available after login
June 2 Test data available for download after login
June 20 Registration for KDD Cup closes
July 7 Last date for submission of results on test set
July 15 Notification of KDD Cup competition results
July 31 Winners submit their camera ready papers to the workshop
August 24-27 Winners present their work at the workshop.


Workshop on Mining Medical Data

We invite the submission of papers related to mining medical data. Participants in the KDD Cup 2008 may optionally submit papers to this workshop describing their entry. However, the workshop is broader in scope, and we also welcome other submissions related to the mining of
medical data from structured sources such as structured databases and from unstructured data sources such as medical images, textual notes, etc. We particularly invite papers describing systems that are able to combine all available patient information whether from structured sources or from unstructured sources, to support medical decision making.

All submitted papers will be evaluated by the workshop program committee based on scientific merits and novelty as perceived by the committee. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. Authors of the accepted papers are required to present their papers at the workshop. Depending on interest, a subset of the selected papers may also be published in a special issue of a journal later on. Important dates are listed below.

All submitted papers must be in PDF format, must be restricted to 4 pages, and must use the template found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates.

July 7 Last date for submitting papers for the workshop
July 28 Author Notification about Accepted papers
July 31 Final Camera ready papers due
August 24-27 Authors of accepted papers present their work.