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.

Data Mining Competition: Discovering Knowledge in NHANES Data

The Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Working Group of the American Medical Information Association (AMIA) is announcing its second annual data mining competition for the purpose of studying best practices related to knowledge discovery in health care data. This year’s data set is the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). This is a juried, international data mining competition open to students of any subject or discipline. Four winning individuals or teams will be invited to present their results at the AMIA 2008 Annual Symposium. (No funds for travel or Symposium registration will be provided). Final submissions for the competition are due to the moderator by midnight, September 15, 2008, MDT. Winners of the contest will be invited to present their work at the AMIA Annual Symposium in a panel sponsored by the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Working Group. Winners will be selected and recognized by an international panel of judges associated with the KDDM-WG. Please visit http://www.amia.org/mbrcenter/wg/kddm/contest.asp for more details.

Eligibility

This contest is open to student members of the American Medical Informatics Association, planning to attend the AMIA 2008 Annual Symposium. However, students may hail from any subject or discipline. For information on joining AMIA, please visit: http://www.amia.org/mbrcenter/mbrshp/ . The work can be completed by an individual or group, but only one individual will present at the symposium for a winning team.

Participation in the Contest

As a contestant, you are invited to produce meaningful information/ knowledge with knowledge discovery or data mining approaches of your choice, using the publicly available National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data. The data itself is publicly accessible, and available here: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes.htm. The latest data release (as of this announcement) is 2005-2006, but there is no restriction on the specific data release to be used, and entries may utilize multiple data releases. A wide variety of data mining approaches are acceptable, including both supervised and unsupervised learning and the extraction of temporal association and precedence rules. Both applied and methodological entries are appropriate. Final submissions for the competition are due to the moderator by midnight, September 15, 2008, MDT (U.S. Mountain Daylight Time). Winners will be selected and recognized by an international panel of judges associated with the KDDM-WG. Winners of the contest will be invited to present their work at the AMIA Annual Symposium in a dedicated session. (No funds for travel or registration will be provided).

Contest Entry

Entries should consist of the following:

1. A written report (paper), not to exceed a maximum of five (8.5 x 11 inch) pages, including:
   • An abstract of 125 - 150 words
   • Names, academic degree(s), affiliations, and locations (city, state, and country, if international) of all authors (advisers should be added as authors).
   • Content could include sections of introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion, but is left to author discretion.
   • See the Submission Template (MS Word) for correct format. The (pdf) may be helpful.
2. Name and address of student's training education program
3. Advisor's name and contact information
4. A joint statement, signed by the student and the advisor, that identifies the student's specific contribution to the work presented, and attests that the studend prepared the paper.

Submission

Entries must be submitted as .doc or .pdf files. Submit entry to the contest moderator via e-mail: mollie.poynton@nurs.utah.edu. The deadline is midnight, September 15, 2008, MDT.

Useful Links

• National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES)
• American Medical Informatics Association, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Working Group
• 2007 Data Mining Competition, Winning Entries

PAKDD 2009

The 13th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2009) is held on Bangkok, Thailand, 27-30 April 2009.

The 13th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD-09) is a major international conference in the areas of data mining and knowledge discovery. It provides an international forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all KDD-related areas including data mining, data warehousing, machine learning, databases, statistics, knowledge acquisition and automatic scientific discovery, data visualization, causal induction and knowledge-based systems. The conference website is at http://www.pakdd2009.org.

Important Dates:

• 09 September 2008, Abstract Submission (CFP)
  
• 16 September 2008, Paper Submission
• 19 September 2008, Workshop Proposal (CF Workshop Proposal)
  
• 26 September 2008, Workshop Notification
• 17 November 2008, Tutorial Proposal (CF Tutorial Proposal)
  
• 28 November 2008, Tutorial Notification
• 08 December 2008, Author Notification
• 09 January 2009, Camera Ready
• 27-30 April 2009, Conference & Workshop

Workshop on Web Search Click Data 2009

Via Nihil Obstat Blog, I read about a interesting call for research proposals, Workshop on Web Search Click Data 2009, held in conjunction with WSDM09. The workshop is organized by Microsoft and Yahoo! Labs. The workshop aims to work with a MSN search log containing about 15 million queries, which is reeeeeeally interesting :)

More information in the post written by José María Gómez or in the workshop webpage.

Conference Rankings

One important process in Science is the publication of the results of research. Sometimes, happens that you have written an excelent paper (not to me, I use to work with a deadline in mind in order to work under pressure) but you don't know a good journal/conference to publish the results. JCR listings makes easier some decisions about publishing in journals but there isn't an equivalent indicator for conferences.

One of my Thesis advisors, Ana Iglesias, gave me some good advices in order to choose relevant conferences. "Translating" those advices into rules, a good conference is the one that

• Appears on the first 33% of Citeseer impact ranking.
• Or has a A or A+ calification on CORE classification.
• Or has a value higher than 0.75 in CS Conference Ranking.

Do you use any other ranking based criteria in order to choose a good conference?

According to these rules, the conferences I've attended recently or I will attend soon, are:

• CIKM: A in Core (OK), top 35% in Citeseer (NO), 0.90 in CS (OK) => OK
• IDEAL: C in Core (NO), top 96.72% in Citeseer (NO) => NO
• ECDM: => NO

And the conferences I have sent some papers:

• ICDM: A+ in Core (OK), top 59.86% in Citeseer (OK), 0.73 in CS (NO) => OK
• ICDIM: =>NO

Most of the results make sense, CIKM and ICDM are really interesing conferences, IDEAL is an interesting forum as combines information processing, data mining with more applied topics as bioinformatics and financial engineering, but is not a really cutting-edge conference. ECDM is not a good conference and it is logical that it doesn't appear in those rankings. The only conference where I disagree with the previous "rules" is ICDIM. I think ICDIM is a good conference but, maybe due to its short life, it doesn't appear on the rankings.

According to these rankings, the most interesting conferences on Data Mining and Machine Learning are:

• Citeseer: ICML, IJCAI, KDD, AAAI, NIPS
• CS Ranking: KDD, CIKM, AAAI, NIPS, IJCAI
• CORE: It's not a real ranking, but it gives A+ to all the best conferences from citeseer and CS Ranking.