SGAI Bulletin Board |
Announcements about group activities will be placed here from time to time in date order, the most recent first.
SGAI/AISB Artificial Intelligence Evening Lectures
The two British AI organisations The BCS Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence
and the Society for the Study of Artificial
Intelligence are delighted to announce we are resuming the Artificial Intelligence
Evening Lectures at The City University in London.
Speaker:Aaron Sloman, University of Birmingham.
Title: When is seeing (possibly in your mind's eye) better than deducing, for reasoning?
Time and Place: 8th of March at 5pm (for 5.15pm) in CM505 of the Tait Building of The City University
Directions: http://www.city.ac.uk/maps/buildings/tait.html
Anyone with an interest in AI is most welcome.
Abstract: Over many years, like many others interested in how human minds work and how human mental functioning might be replicated in machines, I have been trying to understand the role of spatial/visual/diagrammatic reasoning both in mathematics and in everyday life, and how it depends on aspects of human vision with a very old evolutionary history. My first AI paper on this was a critique at IJCAI 1971, in London, of logicist AI as summarised by McCarthy and Hayes in 1969. The 1971 paper, slightly revised as chapter 7 of The Computer Revolution in Philosophy (1978 http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/crp/chap7.html) analysed a (non-exhaustive) distinction between 'Fregean' and 'analogical' representations, arguing that both were required by intelligent systems and that both could be used in rigorous reasoning. However, it was clear that for real progress in this area we would need to achieve a deep understanding and deep modelling of human vision. This remains a distant goal despite much progress on tiny fragments of the problem, e.g. use of images in recognition, tracking, robot-localisation, or production of object representations suitable for image generation.
What all that lacked was the understanding of relations between spatial structure, motion and affordances. Seeing affordances involves seeing not merely what exists but what *can* and *cannot* exist, and how that is related to what exists, whereas all work on machine vision seems to be solely concerned with representing what actually exists in images or scenes depicted. I am still not able to present a working human-like visual system capable of visual reasoning, but I hope to present some new ideas about *requirements* for such a system which emerged recently in the course of the EC-funded CoSy robot project.
Work on a robot with 3-D manipulative capabilities made me realise that vision involves simulating concurrent processes at different levels of abstraction in registration with each other and the optic array. I shall try to explain what that means and show how it relates to visual reasoning, e.g. in mathematics or planning, and, if there is time, how it suggests a host of research questions about the multiple 'orthogonal' competences required for learning to see as well as a typical 5 year old child does.
More information can be found in these presentations:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/talks/
[Posted February 18th 2006]
Dr. Rob Milne
To members and friends of SGAI
Members of the SGAI committee were shocked to hear of the death of our Treasurer, Dr. Rob Milne, on Everest on Sunday June 5th.
As well as being an Artificial Intelligence expert, Rob was a highly skilled climber whose ambition was to climb the 'seven summits': the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. Everest was the last one and he was within 1200 feet of the summit when he suffered a heart attack.
Rob was a committee member of SGAI for over 15 years and played a major role in the development of the group. He was a leading organiser for many of our annual conferences and was the driving force behind bringing the IJCAI world AI conference to Britain this year for the first time in over 30 years. He was a past President of ECCAI, the European Co-ordinating Committee on Artificial Intelligence, as well as the Managing Director of Sermatech Intelligent Applications, a leading AI software company.
We have lost a good friend as well as a highly skilled and valued colleague. He will be greatly missed.
Obituary: http://www.bcs.org/BCS/News/OtherNews/robmilne.htm
Max Bramer
Chairman, BCS Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence
June 10th 2005
[Posted January 3rd 2006]
BCS SGAI Symposium/Colloquium on Mobile
and Complex Agent Systems
The Distributed Systems and Mobile Agents (DSMA) research group in the School
of Computing at Napier University, Edinburgh is organizing a BCS SGAI Symposium/Colloquium
on Mobile and Complex Agent Systems on Friday, 3 September 2004. Further information
is available at http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~bill/sgai.html.
[Posted July 1st 2004]
Careers Advisor Information Event
SGAI is co-organising an AI careers advisor information event (with the AI society AISB) at City University on 5th May 2004.
For further information see: http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/news/AInews.html
If your department runs AI-related degrees and you would like to send some copies of your AI recruitment materials for the advisors to look at please feel free to do so. Please send materials to:
BCS Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence (Schools Liaison)
c/o Su Rao
Undergraduate Admissions Team
Department of Computing
City University, London
Northampton Square
London EC1V 0HB
There will probably be around 20-25 advisors attending.
If you have any queries contact:
Dr Andrew Tuson (andrewt@soi.city.ac.uk)
Schools Liaison, BCS SGAI and City University
ECCAI Travel Awards
SGAI is a member of ECCAI, the European Co-ordinating Committee on Artificial Intelligence. This entitles our members to a number of benefits, one of which is described below.
Travel grants for ECAI-04 (Valencia, August 2004) http://www.dsic.upv.es/ecai2004/
An ECCAI Travel Award Scheme has been established to support students, young researchers and faculty who are members of an ECCAI affiliated society [SUCH AS SGAI] participating in ACAI and ECAI.
The awards, valued at 400 Euros each, are for reimbursement of travel and part payment of registration fees.
Conditions for award.
If you accept the ECCAI Travel award you must include an acknowledgement to
ECCAI both in your paper --it must be included in the camera-ready version--
and in your presentation.
Before 7 May 2004, Applicants should send:
(a) A brief CV, including current professional status (PhD student, postdoc,
teaching staff, research staff, etc.) and a list of publications.
(b) Letter or other evidence of professional status and confirmation that the applicant will be allowed leave to attend the event from a Department Head, Professor or Supervisor. This also needs to state that the additional funds needed to attend will be available.
(c) Evidence of membership of an ECCAI affiliated society.
(d) A case for support, no more than 3 pages, which includes:
1. Evidence of existing interest and expertise in Artificial
Intelligence.
2. Reasons why ECCAI should make the award to the applicant and a description
of the part the applicant will play in the event.
3. The amount the visit will cost together with evidence of any financial support
for the reminder of the cost.
Send these items to:
Ulises Cortés, ECCAI Travel Grant Officer
LSI - Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya UPC
c/Jordi Girona, 1 & 3, 216
Mòdul C5
08034 BCN, Catalonia, Spain
phone: +34-934017016
fax: +34-934017014
email: ia@lsi.upc.es
Further information is available at http://www.eccai.org/travelaw.shtml
Max Bramer
Chair, BCS Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence
[Posted March 29th 2004]
ECCAI Fellows: Call for Nominations
Each year ECCAI, the European Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence, invites nominations for its Fellows Programme 'to recognize individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe'.
Fellows' accomplishments range from pioneering advances in the theory of AI to unusual accomplishments in AI technology and applications. 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. Leadership in ECCAI or ECCAI member societies, support of forums for the exchange of ideas, and extended service for the international AI community also play a role in the selection process. Further information is available on the ECCAI website at http://www.eccai.org/fellows.html.
ECCAI member societies such as SGAI are asked to put forward nominations each year for consideration by the ECCAI Fellows Selection Committee. Those wishing to apply for nomination via SGAI must be paid-up members of the Specialist Group of at least three years' standing and comply with the conditions given at http://www.bcs-sgai.org/sgai/ECCAI_fellows.htm.
The deadline for nominations is Friday May 21st 2004.
Max Bramer
Chairman, SGAI
[Posted March 28th 2004]
SGAI Workshop on 'State of the Art Natural Language Processing Systems'
Nottingham Trent University, UK
Friday 12th Sept. 2003
Subject matter covered includes:
* Machine learning from dialogue corpora to generate chatbots
* Annotating documents for the semantic web using adaptive information extraction
and integration
* Generating textual weather forecasts from numerical weather prediction data
* GATE
* Recurrent neural learning for helpdesk call routing
* Connectionist parsing
* Neural networks for thematic concept extraction.
Cost: SGAI & BCS-members £35 + VAT including lunch
Non-members £40 + VAT including lunch
Venue: Nottingham Trent University
School of Computing & Mathematics
Burton Street
Nottingham NG1 4BU
UK
Date: Friday 12th Sept. 2003
Enquires: tony.allen@ntu.ac.uk
Workshop website: See http://www.scm.ntu.ac.uk/bcs for further details.
[Posted July 13th 2003]
Loebner Prize Contest 2003
SGAI is co-sponsoring this year's Loebner Prize Contest, which will be held at the University of Surrey UK on the afternoon of Saturday 18th October 2003. This Contest, sponsored by Dr Hugh Loebner, has been running annually since 1990. It is based on Turing's 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", which considered the question "Can machines think?". Entries for this year's Contest close on 30 June. Attendance is open to all and free of charge. For more information, see http://www.surrey.ac.uk/dwrc/loebner/.
The Contest has been arranged at the end of two days of events (also open to all and free of charge). The timetable is as follows.
- On Friday 17th October, there will be a workshop - "Let's Talk" focusing on the human and social aspects of natural language interfaces. It will be multi-disciplinary, bringing together researchers from a wide area of expertise: as well as those from HCI, psychology, and computing, contributors are expected from sociology, economics, anthropology, science and technology studies, and innovation studies. For the call for papers and registration form, please see: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/dwrc.
- In the morning of Saturday 18th October, there will be a workshop and panel discussion - Bots mean Business - with invited speakers for a business audience: see http://www.surrey.ac.uk/dwrc/loebner/bots4biz.html.
- And finally, in the afternoon of Saturday 18th October, the Loebner Prize Contest will be held.
[Posted June 9th 2003]
ECCAI Fellows: Call for Nominations
Each year ECCAI, the European Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence, invites nominations for its Fellows Programme 'to recognize individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe'.
Fellows' accomplishments range from pioneering advances in the theory of AI to unusual accomplishments in AI technology and applications. 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. Leadership in ECCAI or ECCAI member societies, support of forums for the exchange of ideas, and extended service for the international AI community also play a role in the selection process. Further information is available on the ECCAI website at http://www.eccai.org/fellows.html.
ECCAI member societies such as SGAI are asked to put forward nominations each year for consideration by the ECCAI Fellows Selection Committee. Those wishing to apply for nomination via SGAI must be paid-up members of the Specialist Group of at least three years' standing and comply with the conditions given at http://www.bcs-sgai.org/sgai/ECCAI_fellows.htm.
The deadline for nominations is Friday March 28th 2003.
Max Bramer
Chairman, SGAI
[Posted March 3rd 2003]
First Annual BCS Prize for Progress Towards Machine Intelligence
December 11th 2002, Cambridge UK, in association with ES2002
Click here for details
SGES Renamed SGAI
At the end of May the group officially changed its name from SGES to SGAI, the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence. It is likely that both names will remain in use for some time.
The Group's organising committee believes that the new name much better reflects the wide scope of our activities, in particular
There are no plans to rename our list server AI-SGES at present. Our forthcoming annual conference will retain the name ES2002, but the series will be renamed AI-2003 etc. from next year onwards.
Max Bramer
Chairman, SGAI
June 2002
SGES and NCAF
SGES is entering into closer co-operation with NCAF, the Natural Computing Applications Forum. Click here for further information.
Max Bramer
Chairman, SGES
[Posted March 11th 2002]
SGES Evening Lectures
This long-running series of evening lectures is open to all, whether SGES members or non-members, and is free of charge.
Next lecture: Wednesday March 27th 2002 (6 p.m. to 7 p.m.)
Unifying AI
Gerry Wolff (University of Wales)
Venue: Department of Computer Science, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London (nearest underground: Goodge Street).
Chairman: Dr. Chris Christodoulou, Birkbeck College. Email: chris@dcs.bbk.ac.uk.
Further details of this year's programme will be placed here as they become available.
[Posted February 7th 2002.]
ECCBR 2002
SGES is co-sponsoring the Sixth European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning which will be held in Aberdeen,
Scotland from September 4th-7th 2002.
The conference website is at http://www.scms.rgu.ac.uk/eccbr2002/.
The final date for submitting papers is approx. March 1st 2002 (exact date to be announced).
For further information contact the conference chair Professor Susan Craw
or the co-chair Dr. Alun Preece.
Max Bramer
Chairman, SGES
[Posted October 28th 2001]
SGES Evening Lectures
This long-running series of evening lectures is open to all, whether SGES members or non-members, and is free of charge.
Next lecture: Wednesday November 21st 2001 (6 p.m. to 7 p.m.)
Iris Recognition
Professor John Daugman (University of Cambridge)
Venue: Department of Computer Science, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London (nearest underground: Goodge Street).
Chairman: Prof. Boris Mirkin, Birkbeck College. Email: mirkin@dcs.bbk.ac.uk.
NOTE: This SGES lecture will be combined on the 21 November 2001 with a meeting of the British Classification Society in the Department of Computer Science, Birkbeck College, London from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. (3 speakers), which is also free of charge and open to all. Click here for further details.
Further details of this year's programme will be placed here as they become available.
[Posted October 4th 2001. Revised October 13th 2001 and November 16th 2001]
IJCAI Returning to Britain
I am very pleased to be able to announce that a bid by SGES to host the 2005 IJCAI Conference was accepted by the IJCAI Trustees at their recent meeting.
The biennial IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) conferences are the premier world forum for presenting advances in Artificial Intelligence. It is a great achievement to have been able to bring the conference back to Britain after an absence of over 30 years and this is largely due to the efforts of our Treasurer, Dr. Rob Milne, who has led the preparations for our bid over the last few years.
The IJCAI-2005 conference will be held in Edinburgh. It will be timed to finish just before the Edinburgh Festival and is likely to attract a large number of delegates from all parts of the world. SGES will be organising the conference jointly with the University of Edinburgh.
Further information will be circulated and also placed on the SGES website as it becomes available.
Max Bramer
Chairman, SGES
[August 11th 2001]
December 11th 2001, Cambridge UK, in association with ES2001
Click here for details
SGES is hosting this year's UK CBR workshop which will be held at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, UK on Monday December 10th. A special rate will be available for those attending ES2001 on the following two days. SGES are also subsidising a reduced rate for non-presenting students.
Click here for the Call for Papers (Word 2000 format).
This long-running series of evening lectures is open to all, whether SGES members or non-members, and is free of charge.
Next lecture: Wednesday April 25th 2001
Programming Robots with Natural Language
Dr Guido Bugmann (University of Plymouth)
Venue: Department of Computer Science, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London (nearest underground: Goodge Street).
Chairman: Dr. Chris Christodoulou, Birkbeck College. Email: chris@dcs.bbk.ac.uk
Further details of this year's programme will be placed here as they become available.
[Posted February 12th 2001]
In 2000, SGES launched a new series of workshops, looking at applications of Knowledge-Based Systems and Intelligent
Systems in the 21st Century. The goals of these workshops are to promote discussion, review progress, and identify
new opportunities. The workshops may have a technology or an applications emphasis. The first workshop in the series
was on "Intelligent Systems in the Knowledge-Driven Economy" held at Liverpool University in May 2000,
from which very positive feedback was obtained.
We invite all SGES members to submit proposals for workshops under this overall scheme.
[Posted January 19th 2001]
SGES is hosting this year's UK CBR workshop which will be held at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, UK on Monday December 11th, immediately before the group's annual conference ES2000. A special rate is available for those attending the conference on the following two days. SGES are also subsidising a reduced rate for non-presenting students.
Click here for the Call for Papers.
[Posted July 28th 2000]
This long-running series of evening lectures is open to all, whether SGES members or non-members, and is free of charge.
Next lecture: October 11th 2000
Data Mining in Practice
Dr. Alan Montgomery
Venue: Department of Computer Science, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London (nearest underground: Goodge Street).
Chairman: Dr. Hui Liu, Birkbeck College
Further details of this year's programme will be placed here as they become available.
[Posted July 28th 2000]
ECCAI, the European Co-ordinating Committee on Artificial Intelligence is making the full text of its international journal AI Communications available free of charge to SGES members via the world-wide web. Issues published in the last three years (volumes 10 to 12) are currently available and others will be added in due course.
Details of how to access the AI Communications electronic archive and the necessary identifier and password have been sent to all paid-up SGES members.
[Posted April 21st 2000]
The Group's arrangement with Springer-Verlag to provide a reduced rate to SGES members for individual subscriptions to the journals Neural Computing & Applications and Pattern Analysis & Applications has been extended for a further year. Discounts are also available on other Springer publications.
Click here for further details.
[Posted April 15th 2000]
A report of the workshop on Using AI to Enable Knowledge Management held during
ES99 in Cambridge in December 1999 is available here.
*** Call for Participation ***
A One-Day Workshop organised by SGES
May 8, 2000
Foresight Centre, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~apreece/iskde/
This is the first in a new series of workshops organised by SGES, looking at applications of Knowledge-Based Systems and Intelligent Systems in the 21st Century. The goals of these workshops are to promote discussion, review progress, and identify new opportunities. For further details click here.