SIG KM NEWSLETTER Issue December 2005 Newsletter of the German Special Interest Group on Knowledge Management www.fgwm.de Subscribe or unsubscribe via http://www.fgwm.de Send contributions to: fgwm'at'wi2.uni-trier.de TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Call for Papers: Third International Workshop on Philosophy and Informatics (WSPI 2006) 2. Call for Papers: Symposium on Adaptation and Learning on the Web 3. Call for Papers: 8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR 2006) 4. Call for Workshop Proposals: 8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR 2006) 5. Call for Papers: 9th International Conference on Quality Engineering for Software-Based Systems (CONQUEST 2006) 6. AIRE Special Issue on Explanation in Case-Based Reasoning 7. New YALE release 8. Postdoc or research scientist at College of Computing, Georgia Tech 9. Ph.D. program at RPI, NY ......................................................................... *sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm* ......................................................................... CALL FOR PAPERS Third International Workshop on PHILOSOPHY AND INFORMATICS (WSPI 2006) May 3-4, 2006, Saarbrücken (Germany) http://wspi2006.workshop.hm Paper submission deadline: 16 January 2006 The Third International Workshop on Philosophy and Informatics is organized by the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (http://ifomis.org) and the Special Interest Group on Philosophy and Informatics of the German Informatics Society (http://philosophyandinformatics.org). GOAL OF THE PHILOSOPHY AND INFORMATICS WORKSHOP SERIES The workshops are designed to encourage interdisciplinary exchange on the philosophical foundations of informatics. They seek to bring together researchers from philosophy and informatics and neighboring disciplines in order to explore common points of interest and to develop an interface between the disciplines and a common vocabulary. The workshop also serves as the annual meeting platform of the members of the Special Interest Group on Philosophy and Informatics. The 2006 Workshop has a special focus on the area of bio- and biomedical informatics. INTENDED AUDIENCE Philosophers and informaticians/computer scientists or representatives of related disciplines with an interest in the crossdisciplinary exchange of ideas. WORKSHOP LANGUAGE The workshop will be held in English. TOPICS WSPI 2006 focuses on bioinformatics, but contributions on philosophy and informatics in general are also invited. The main topics are: * Philosophical ontology in informatics, with special focus on bioinformatics - Ontology, terminology, and taxonomy - The ontology of the Electronic Health Record * Philosophy and artificial intelligence - Knowledge in software - Reliability - Cognitions in software agents * Philosophical aspects of context in informatics and bioinformatics * The domain problem - Questions of isolation and transfer - Adaptation to logics * Philosophical contributions to knowledge representation in informatics and bioinformatics * Epistemology in informatics and bioinformatics * Philosophical reflections on methods of evaluation in informatics and bioinformatics SUBMISSIONS Workshop submission will be electronic, in pdf format only. A submission system will be available at the workshop website in due time. Submitted papers must not exceed 12 pages and should conform to Springer LNCS style (see below). Papers must be written in English. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop and present the contribution in order to be published in the workshop proceedings. Formatting: Authors are strongly encouraged to use LaTeX and the Springer llncs class files available at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. While the pages in the final camera-ready form of a paper must be unnumbered (this is the default in llncs style), numbered pages are preferred for reviewing. Page numbering can be turned on using the LaTeX command \pagestyle{plain}. Do not hesitate to contact the workshop chairs for further questions: mailto:wspi2006@dfki.uni-kl.de. Workshop proceedings: All accepted papers will be published as a technical report (with ISSN) as well as electronically at http://CEUR-WS.org (for past workshops, see http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-130/, http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-112/). Review process: All submissions will be subject to review by the WSPI Program Committee. The workshop chairs and the organizing committee have final authority over the review process and all decisions relating to acceptance of papers. Review criteria include originality of ideas, technical soundness, significance of results, and quality of presentation. The intention is to have three reviews per submission. Notification of acceptance or rejection of submitted papers will be mailed to the corresponding authors. IMPORTANT DATES Submission deadline: 16 January 2006 Notification of acceptance: 20 February 2006 Camera-ready copy: 20 March 2006 Workshop: 3-4 May, 2006 WORKSHOP SCHEDULE The workshop schedule will be announced at the workshop website. WORKSHOP CHAIRS Prof. Ingvar Johansson, ingvar dot johansson (at) ifomis dot uni-saarland dot de IFOMIS, Saarland University, 66041 Saarbrücken, Germany Dipl.-Ing. Bertin Klein, bertin dot klein(at) dfki dot uni-kl dot de, DFKI GmbH, Erwin-Schrödinger-Str. 57, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer, trb (at) dfki dot uni-kl dot de, University of Kaiserslautern / DFKI GmbH, Erwin-Schrödinger-Str. 57, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Prof. Gregor Büchel, University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Germany PD Dr. Ruth Hagengruber, University of Paderborn, Germany Prof. Barry Smith, IFOMIS, Saarbrücken, Germany PROGRAM COMMITTEE Stephan Baumann, Competence Center Computational Culture, DFKI Paul Buitelaar, Competence Center Semantic Web, DFKI, Germany Werner Ceusters, European Centre for Ontological Research, Germany Luciano Floridi, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, UK Pierre Grenon, IFOMIS, Saarland University, Germany Nicola Guarino, Lab. for Applied Ontology, Trento, Italy Pascal Hitzler, AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany Norbert Jastroch, MET Communications GmbH, Bad Homburg, Germany Klaus Kornwachs, Brandenburg Univ. of Technology, Cottbus, Germany Carsten Lutz, University of Dresden, Germany J�rgen M�ller, Univ. of Cooperative Education, Mannheim, Germany Steve Probert, Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom Michael M. Richter, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany Christophe Roche, University of Savoie, France Francis Rousseaux, IRCAM, Paris, France Stefan Schulz, SCE, Carleton University, Canada Marcus Spies, University of Munich, Germany Boris Wyssusek, Queensland University of Technology, Australia ......................................................................... *sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm* ......................................................................... CALL FOR PAPERS Symposium on Adaptation and Learning on the Web 3rd to 4th April 2006 University of Bristol, Bristol, UK http://aisb.ilrt.org Learning can be seen as the key technology to adapt systems to new situations. The current Web is mainly custom-made by humans and, similarly, adaptations are also often made by hand. By contrast, through upcoming technologies like Semantic Web, Semantic Grid and Semantic Web Services, the Web is becoming more machine understandable, enabling more knowledge to be included and integrated through learning algorithms. New techniques which automatically push new content into the Web and adapt to new situations are required and are currently being developed in areas like ontology learning. On the current Web adaptation takes place implicitly in, for example, personalised Amazon pages, Page Rank calculations in the Google search engine, voting in online news sites like Slashdot, buyer-seller dynamics in an eBay online auction or, attack and counter measure between viruses and browser software. However, in the case of biologically inspired algorithms adaptation is explicit, with techniques such as artificial immune systems and neural networks now being applied to adaptive settings like recommender systems and Web security. This symposium will explore whether learning and Semantic Web technologies might be usefully combined with ideas from biological systems so that a future Web would be able to automatically adapt to new situations and be as flexible as possible. To achieve this the symposium aims to bring together researchers, from disciplines such as machine learning, data mining, information extraction, computational linguistics, statistics and biologically inspired backgrounds, who share a common interest in how adaptation and learning, in various forms, may be used in a future Web, Semantic Web, GRID and Web Services. The symposium on Adaptation and Learning on the Web will take place as part of: AISB'06: Adaptation in Artificial and Biological Systems April 3rd-6th 2006, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK SUBMISSIONS Research spanning the numerous fields that make up the intersection between AI and the Web is, by its very nature, highly multidisciplinary. This symposium will offer a chance for a number of currently disjoint communities to begin to develop a common vocabulary - the first step towards sharing ideas and disseminating work across subject boundaries. Topics of interest include but are not limited to: * Semantic Web, Semantic Grid and Web Services * Biologically inspired systems * Ontology learning, extraction and evolution * Semantic integration, co-ordination and matching * Artifcial immumity on the Web * Personalisation and profiling on the Web * Adaptive search and information retrieval * Desktop search and the Personal Semantic Web * Augmented memory, user interest and focus * Security, trust and privacy * Social network mining * Collabative filtering, annotation and extraction * Recommender systems We also encourage submissions which relate research results from other areas (e.g. data mining, information retrieval, knowledge representation, computational linguistics, inductive logic programming) to the symposium topics. Please do not hesitate to contact either of the organisers for further details. In keeping with the open spirit of AISB, you may submit EITHER a full paper (max 6000 words) that showcases your work *OR* a two page summary paper (extended abstract) of more speculative ideas, ongoing work or issues for discussion. Poster submissions are also welcome in addition to or as an alternative to a paper. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the programme committee, and those accepted will appear in the workshop proceedings and in the published conference volume. Papers should be submitted as PDF files to simon.price@bristol.ac.uk by 13th January 2006. Formatting instructions will be available from the symposium website shortly. ORGANISERS Andreas Hotho, Universität Kassel, Germany Email: hotho@cs.uni-kassel.de Web: http://www.kde.cs.uni-kassel.de/hotho Simon Price, University of Bristol, UK Email: simon.price@bristol.ac.uk Web: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/aboutus/staff?search=ecsnp Download full contact details of the organisers as a vCard file: http://aisb.ilrt.org/cgi-bin/aisb-dates.pl PROGRAMME COMMITTEE - Dave Beckett, Yahoo, USA - Dan Brickley, W3C Semantic Web Interest Group, Bristol, UK - Steve Cayzer, HP Labs, UK - Peter Flach, University of Bristol, UK - Andreas Hotho (chair), Universität Kassel, Germany - Francesca A. Lisi, Universita' di Bari, Italy - Libby Miller, Asemantics, Netherlands - Simon Price, University of Bristol, UK - York Sure, Universität Karlsruhe, Germany Download a Semantic Web description of the symposium, organisers and committee as an RDF file: http://aisb.ilrt.org/aisb.rdf IMPORTANT DATES Submission of papers by: 3rd February 2006 Notification of decision: 27th February 2006 Camera ready copies by: 13th March 2006 Download all the symposium dates as a vCalendar file: http://aisb.ilrt.org/cgi-bin/aisb-dates.pl NEWS CHANNEL To receive announcements and news about the event, subscribe to the symposium's RSS news channel: http://aisb.ilrt.org/aisb.rss ......................................................................... *sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm* ......................................................................... ------------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS 8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning ECCBR 2006 Ölüdeniz/Fethiye, Turkey 4-7 September 2006 http://2006.eccbr.org/ Paper Submission Deadline: 13 February 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------- ECCBR 2006 is the 8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning following a series of successful European conferences/workshops. This four-day conference will be held in the conference center of the Lykiaworld Resort hotel in Ölüdeniz/Fethiye, Turkey. The ECCBR Industry Day starts the program, followed on the second day by workshops devoted to specific areas of interest to the CBR community. The remaining two days feature invited talks, presentations and posters on both theoretical and applied research in CBR. Announcements concerning these events will be posted at the website. Submission Topics ----------------- The ECCBR 2006 Program Committee invites submissions of original research and application papers on all aspects of Case-Based Reasoning. We especially encourage submissions on new areas. Example submission areas include, but are not limited to: * Case and knowledge representation, acquisition, modeling, visualization, maintenance and management for CBR * CBR system design issues (e.g., indexing, retrieval, similarity assessment, and adaptation) * System architectures and integration of CBR with other methods * Collaborative agent architectures involving CBR * Learning and knowledge acquisition for CBR knowledge containers * Analogical reasoning, cognitive models, and creative reasoning approaches based on CBR * Formal, empirical, and psychological evaluations of CBR models and systems * Methodologies for developing and maintaining CBR applications * Lazy- (case/instance/memory-based) learning methods * Case-based approaches to planning, scheduling, design and robot navigation * Applications of CBR (e.g., in customer support, education, electronic commerce, pattern recognition, image processing, legal reasoning, manufacturing and medicine) * Human Computer Interaction: Adaptive interfaces, user modeling, customization and personalization using CBR * CBR-related areas (e.g., corporate memories, decision support, information retrieval, knowledge discovery, data mining, knowledge and experience management, software reuse and engineering redesign) * Computer models of case-based argumentation * Intelligent tutoring systems teaching or employing CBR * Explanations and CBR * Context and CBR * Peer-to-Peer Networks and CBR * CBR in the Semantic Web Papers may be accepted for presentation as talks, or as posters. Proceedings ----------- All accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html). Important Dates --------------- February 13, 2006 Paper Submission Deadline March 30, 2006 Acceptance notification April 25, 2006 Camera-ready copy due Conference Chairs ----------------- Mehmet H. Göker, PwC (mehmet.goker at us.pwc.com) Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer, DFKI (trb at dfki.uni-kl.de) Local Chair ----------- H. Altay Güvenir, Bilkent University (guvenir at cs.bilkent.edu.tr) Workshop Chair -------------- Mirjam Minor, University of Trier (minor at uni-trier.de) Industry Day Chair ------------------- Bill Cheetham, General Electric (cheetham at crd.ge.com) Review Criteria --------------- Submissions must be identified as either *research* or *application* papers and will be reviewed using criteria appropriate to their category. Review criteria for research papers will include scientific significance, originality, technical quality, and clarity. Review criteria for application papers will include practical or economic significance, potential to lead to more powerful technology, technical quality, and clarity. Submission Procedure -------------------- Authors must submit a full paper plus a title page by the submission date. The title page must include: name(s) of the author(s); address, phone number, fax number and email of the contact person; title and abstract of the paper; a set of keywords; a statement whether the submission is to be reviewed as a research paper or an application paper. The title page, the abstract and the text of the paper must be submitted electronically through the ECCBR web site. You will find details there in due time. Submission Format ----------------- Papers MUST be submitted in Springer LNCS format, which is the format required for the final camera ready copy, with a maximum of 15 pages. Authors instructions along with LaTeX and Word macro files are available on the web: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. All authors of accepted papers must transfer their copyrights to Springer. Multiple Submission Policy -------------------------- Papers submitted to other conferences or journals must state this fact on the title page. If a paper will appear in another conference or journal, it must be withdrawn from ECCBR2006 before March 30, 2006. This restriction does not apply to papers appearing in proceedings of specialized workshops. Author Registration Policy -------------------------- In order for a paper to appear in the proceedings, at least one of the authors must register for the conference by the deadline for camera-ready copy (April 25, 2006). Program Committee Members ------------------------- * Agnar Aamodt, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway * David W. Aha, Naval Research Laboratory, USA * Esma Aimeur, University of Montreal, Canada * Vincent Aleven, Carnegie Mellon University, USA * Ethem Alpaydin, Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey * Klaus-Dieter Althoff, University of Hildesheim, Germany * Josep Lluís Arcos, IIIACSIC, Spain * Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA * Brigitte Bartsch-Spoerl, BSR Consulting, Germany * Ralph Bergmann, University of Trier, Germany * Isabelle Bichindaritz, University of Washington, USA * Enrico Blanzieri, University of Trento, Italy * L. Karl Branting, LiveWire Logic, Inc * Derek Bridge, University College Cork, Ireland * Stefanie Bruninghaus, University of Pittsburgh, USA * Robin Burke, DePaul University, USA * Hans-Dieter Burkhard, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany * Bill Cheetham, General Electric Co. NY, USA * Susan Craw, Robert Gordon University, Scotland * Michael Cox, Wright State University, Dayton, USA * Pádraig Cunningham, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland * Belén Díaz-Agudo, Univ. Complutense de Madrid, Spain * Kurt D. Fenstermacher, University of Arizona, USA * Peter Funk, Malardalens University, Sweden * Ashok Goel, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA * Andrew Golding, Lycos Inc, USA * Pedro A. Gonzalez Calero, Univ. Complutense de Madrid, Spain * Christiane Gresse von Wangenheim, Uni. do Vale do Itajai, Brazil * Igor Jurisica, Ontario Cancer Institute, Canada * David Leake, Indiana University, USA * Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, IIIACSIC, Spain * Michel Manago, Kaidara, France * Cynthia R. Marling, Ohio University, USA * Lorraine McGinty, University College Dublin, Ireland * Bruce McLaren, CMU, USA * David McSherry, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland * Erica Melis, Universitat des Saarlandes, Germany * Mirjam Minor, University of Trier, Germany * Stefania Montani, University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy * Hector Munoz-Avila, Lehigh University, USA * Bart Netten, Delft University, The Netherlands * David Patterson University of Ulster, Northern Ireland * Petra Perner, Institute of Computer Vision and Applied CS, Germany * Enric Plaza, IIIACSIC, Spain * Luigi Portinale, University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy * Alun Preece, University of Aberdeen, UK * Lisa S. Purvis, Xerox Corporation, NY, USA * Francesco Ricci, ITC-irst, Italy * Michael M. Richter, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany * Edwina Rissland, University of Massachusetts/Amherst, USA * Rainer Schmidt, Universitat Rostock, Germany * Barry Smyth, University College Dublin, Ireland * Raja Sooriamurthi, Indiana University, USA * Armin Stahl DFKI, Germany * Jerzy Surma, Technical University of Wroclaw, Poland * Henry Tirri, University of Helsinki, Finland * Brigitte Trousse, INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France * Ian Watson, AI-CBR, University of Auckland, New Zealand * Rosina Weber, Drexel University, USA * Stefan Wess, empolis, Germany * David C. Wilson, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA * Nirmalie Wiratunga, Robert Gordon University, Scotland * Qiang Yang, University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong ......................................................................... *sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm* ......................................................................... ------------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS 8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning ECCBR 2006 Ölüdeniz/Fethiye, Turkey 4-7 September 2006 http://2006.eccbr.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- ECCBR 2006 Workshops: The organising committee of the 8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning ECCBR 2006 invites proposals for the Workshop program. Workshops will be held on 5 September 2006 in the Lykiaworld Resort Hotel in Ölüdeniz/Fethiye, Turkey. General Information: ECCBR 2006 workshops will provide an informal setting in which participants will have the opportunity to discuss specific technical topics in an atmosphere that fosters the active cross-fertilization of ideas. Workshops that explore interactions between sub-areas of CBR, focus on unique or interdisciplinary applications of CBR, and investigate newly evolving areas of CBR are particularly encouraged. Workshops will last about 4 hours. The format and content of each workshop will largely be determined by each workshop organizing committee although "mini-conference" proposals are discouraged. To stimulate interaction and a broad exchange of ideas, ample time should be allotted in each workshop for general discussion. As in past conferences, a time slot of about 20 minutes each will be provided for the presentation of workshop summaries to all conference attendants during the main conference. These summaries should be presented by (one of) each workshop's organizers. Each workshop organizing committee will be responsible for: 1. Producing a Call for Participation for their workshop. It should clarify the process by which the organizing committee will review and select the papers and presentations. In addition, the submission procedure, format, and dates should be included, and be in accordance with the dates listed below; 2. Review and select presentations and papers; 3. Edit their workshop's notes and send them to the workshop coordinator (contact details below) in accordance with the dates listed. ECCBR 2006 will provide: * A meeting place for the workshop. * Printing of the workshop notes. Important Dates for Workshops: February 20, 2006 Deadline for workshop proposal submission March 14, 2006 Notification of acceptance for workshop proposals May 15, 2006 Suggested deadline for workshop paper submission June 16, 2006 Notification of acceptance for workshop papers July 14, 2006 Final camera ready copies to be received by workshop organizers August 4, 2006 Final camera ready copies for each workshop to be received by workshop coordinator September 5, 2006 Workshops held at ECCBR 2006 (in parallel) Submission of Workshop Proposals Members from all areas of the CBR and related communities are invited to submit workshop proposals for review. Workshop proposals should provide sufficient information to evaluate the quality and importance of the topic, the goals of the workshop, and the size of the interested community. Proposals should identify one or more chairs and a program committee. An example layout for a proposal can be found at the end of this call. Proposals should be 2-4 pages and contain the following information: * Proposed title of the workshop. * Contact information for the proposer, including the names, postal * addresses, phone numbers, and email address. * A brief technical description of the workshop, specifying the workshop * goals and the technical issues that will be its focus. * A brief discussion of why and to whom the workshop is of interest. * A draft call for papers. * A preliminary workshop agenda and schedule for the workshop. This should * include a brief description of how the organizers intend to conduct the * workshop (e.g., discussions, panel discussions, paper presentations, * invited talks or other types of communication). * If available, a list of interested participants or groups. If a similar * workshops were held in the past, include information about received * submissions and attendance. * Intended means of advertising the workshop. * Contact information, including the names, postal addresses, phone numbers, * and email addresses (if available) of the proposed workshop organizing * committee. This committee should consist of three or four people * knowledgeable about the technical issues to be addressed. Ideally, these * people should not be from the same institution. Workshop proposals should be submitted via e-mail. Please forward an electronic copy in pdf format as soon as possible but no later than February 20, 2006 to the workshop coordinator: eccbr06-ws-org@dfki.uni-kl.de (Subject: ECCBR 2006 Workshop Proposal) Proposals will be reviewed by the organizing committee and prospective organizers will be notified of their decision no later than March 14, 2006. Other Information Workshop papers should be submitted in Springer LNCS format, which is the format required for the final camera ready copy, with a maximum of 10 pages. Authors' instructions along with LaTeX and Word macro files are available on the web at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html Any special audio-visual requirements and special room requirements must be arranged with the workshop coordinator (Mirjam Minor) by July 14, 2006. ECCBR reserves the right to cancel any workshop if deadlines are missed, if too few submissions are received, or if too few attendees register for the workshop to support the costs of holding it. In special cases, the ECCBR organizing committee may suggest the consolidation of workshops, to prevent the need for cancellation. To cover costs, it may be necessary to charge workshop participants a workshop fee in addition to the normal ECCBR 2006 conference registration fee. Please, note that all workshop participants must register for the conference, and that the workshops must be open to all registered participants of ECCBR 2006. Contact Please send proposals and further inquiries to: Mirjam Minor Lehrstuhl Wirtschaftsinformatik II University of Trier Phone: +49 (651) 201 - 3883 Fax: +49 (651) 201 - 3396 Email: eccbr06-ws-org@dfki.uni-kl.de ......................................................................... *sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm* ......................................................................... ***************************************************************** CONQUEST 2006 9th International Conference on Quality Engineering for Software-Based Systems Emphasising this year Software Quality in Service-Oriented Architectures 27-29 September 2006, Berlin, Germany ***************************************************************** KEYNOTES Frank Leymann, IBM Richard Soley (Inquired), OMG Wolfgang Grieskamp, Microsoft CALL FOR PAPERS Important Dates: Submission of papers and tutorials: 03 April 2006 Notification of acceptance: 15 May 2006 Submission of final papers: 03 July 2006 Submission of tutorial and paper slides: 01 September 2006 Scope and Objectives: Since 1997, CONQUEST is the platform for software professionals bringing together the software engineering community to discuss software quality aspects, to see how quality engineering methods and techniques are used in both industrial and research environments, to see the latest tools, to share experiences on projects and representative case studies, and to hear about future directions. CONQUEST 2006 will feature tutorials and presentations of invited speakers and from members of the quality and software engineering community. It provides a full picture of software quality in theory and practice: - first-hand information on the practical use and further development of methods and techniques; - user experience in introducing, implementing and operating software quality engineering; - specific real-life case studies with detailed quality analysis and evaluation; and - capabilities and availability of quality engineering tools. This year special emphasis is given to service-oriented architectures (SOA) - how they help in engineering and assuring software quality, how they integrate with model-driven techniques and how development processes can be optimized to develop the systems efficiently and effectively based on service principles. Papers on software quality in SOA are appreciated in particular. CONQUEST 2006 is co-organized by ASQF and the Technical University Berlin/Fraunhofer FOKUS. It is supported by the SIG on Testing, Analysis, and Verification of Software of the German Society for Informatics (GI TAV), the GI Joint Interest Group Modelling, and the Software Initiative Berlin-Brandenburg (SIBB). Submission Details: Contributions may cover any quality related aspect of software engineering, but should be classified by choosing the topics below, which characterize the contribution best: - Development processes and their models - Requirements engineering - Verification, validation and testing - Metrics and measurements of system quality and of development processes - Analytical models of software engineering - Software architectures and platforms - Management aspects of software engineering Contributions related to industrial experiences are particularly welcomed. Proposals should be submitted electronically to the Program Committee by April 3, 2006. A proposal should not be longer than 12 pages. It must include a title, the name(s) of the author(s), a contact address, and a subject classification according to the scheme above. Proposals (in pdf format) should be sent to conquest2006-org@asqf.de A template for proposals can be downloaded from: http://www.asqf.de/deu/conf/conquest/2006/cfp.php ......................................................................... *sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm* ......................................................................... A Special Issue of Artificial Intelligence Review on Explanation in Case-Based Reasoning, edited by David Leake and David McSherry, has been published on line at: http://www.springerlink.com Artificial Intelligence Review ISSN: 0269-2821 (Paper) 1573-7462 (Online) Issue: Volume 24, Number 2, pp. 145 - 161 ......................................................................... *sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm* ......................................................................... new version 3.1 of YALE (Yet Another Learning Environment) available at: http://yale.sf.net The new version includes a huge number of improvements. The list of changes can be found at: http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=372998&group_id=114160 YALE provides more than 200 operators for data mining and machine learning and allows the design of complex process chains/trees. The well known machine learning library Weka is also fully integrated. YALE is a freely available open source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Since YALE is entirely written in Java, it runs on any major platform/operating system. You are welcome to use it! ......................................................................... *sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm* ......................................................................... Georgia Tech's Cognitive Computing Lab has an opening for a postdoc or research scientist in artificial intelligence. The ideal candidate will combine traditional AI and cognitive approaches (e.g., case- based reasoning, planning, natural language) with newer statistical approaches (e.g., machine learning, intelligent systems, text mining). Ongoing projects include AI Agents for RTS Games, Real-Time Information Triage for Human Decision Support, Interactive Systems for Science Education, and more. Please email resume to: Ashwin Ram, Associate Professor Director, Cognitive Computing Lab College of Computing, Georgia Tech www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin ......................................................................... *sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm* ......................................................................... The Ph.D program of the Cognitive Science department at RPI is accepting applications. Graduate assistantships and other forms of financial support for graduate students are available. Prospective graduate students with interests in Cognitive Science, especially in learning and skill acquisition and in the relationship between cognition and sociality, are encouraged to apply. Prospective applicants should have background in computer science (the equivalent of a BS in computer science), and have some prior exposure to psychology, artificial intelligence, connectionist models (neural networks), multi-agent systems, and other related areas. Students with a Master's degree already completed are preferred. RPI is a top-tier research university. The CogSci department has identified the Ph.D program and research as its primary missions. The department is conducting research in a number of areas: cognitive modeling, human and machine learning, multi-agent interactions and social simulation, neural networks and connectionist models, human and machine reasoning, cognitive engineering, and so on. See the Web page below regarding my research: http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/~rsun For the application procedure, see http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/ The application deadline is Jan.15, 2005. If you decide to apply, follow the official procedure as outlined on the Web page. Send me a short email (in plain text) after you have completed the application. ......................................................................... *sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm*sigkm* .........................................................................