Tutorials and Workshops

The first day of the conference comprises a range of tutorials and workshops, to be held on Monday 15th December. Delegates will find these events to be especially valuable where there is a current need to consider the introduction of new AI technologies into their own organisations.

There are two streams of tutorials and a third of workshops, each with a morning and an afternoon session, plus an all-day workshop (the eighth UK CBR Workshop). Delegates are free to choose any combination of morning and afternoon sessions to attend.


Stream 1 Morning (9.30-13.00): Tutorial

Association rule mining and its wider context
Dr Frans Coenen, University of Liverpool

Association rule mining (ARM) is now a well-established branch of knowledge discovery in databases (KDD). This tutorial will commence by presenting an overview of ARM, the most significant issues that limit the operation of ARM, and how these issues are being addressed. The tutorial will then continue to explore the wider application of ARM techniques. Finally, it will consider distributed and parallel ARM in the context of established approaches and techniques.

Stream 1 Afternoon (14.00-17.30): Tutorial

Knowledge engineering for automated planning
Professor Lee McCluskey and Mr Ron Simpson, University of Huddersfield

Algorithms for automated planning have become significantly more powerful in recent years, but the industrial take up of the technology has been slow. One reason for this has been the difficulty of modelling problem areas with sufficient rigour to allow for their automated solution. This tutorial will address this difficulty by developing example domain models using dedicated knowledge engineering tools. The tutorial will begin with a review of the scope and power of the currently available automated planning systems. It will then focus on the languages used for domain problem specification and the associated knowledge engineering issues. The tutorial will provide attendees with an insight into the range of potential applications of the technology and the level of difficulty in deploying the technology within their own specialisms.


Stream 2 Morning (9.30-13.00): Tutorial

Applying evolutionary computation, genetic programming and local search
Dr Andrew Tuson and Dr Peter Smith, City University

Evolutionary computation and local search methods such as genetic programming and tabu search have proved to be effective approaches for a range of problems including scheduling and data mining. The aim of the tutorial is to provide an overview of these methods for other AI specialists and to show how they can be applied effectively. Reference will be made throughout to issues of principled design and evaluation. The tutorial will also address practical applications and available software tools.

Stream 2 Afternoon (14.00-17.30): Tutorial

Data clustering algorithms and their applications
Dr Ahmed Shihab, Kingston University

The amount of data that is generated, stored, and streamed has been steadily increasing. Meanwhile, new applications require the storage and retrieval of complex multimedia objects that are often represented by high-dimensional feature vectors. Data clustering is a basic technique for finding the valuable information hidden in large data sets. Although originally developed for relatively small data sets, cluster analysis algorithms have now been extended to work efficiently on large data sets and have been used in the clustering of high-dimensional feature vectors. Many algorithms use some kind of index structure for an efficient retrieval of the required data, while other approaches are based on pre-processing for more efficient clustering. The main goal of the tutorial is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in cluster discovery methods for large data sets. It will cover well-known clustering methods from related fields such as statistics, pattern recognition, and machine learning.


Stream 3 Morning (9.30-13.00): Workshop

AI to Support E-Government
Professor Ann Macintosh, Napier University
Dr. Thomas Gordon, Fraunhofer

A workshop on the use of artificial intelligence techniques for e-government and e-democracy applications.

Stream 3 Afternoon (14.00-17.30): Workshop

Practical Aspects of Developing AI-Based Systems
Richard Ellis, Stratum Management Ltd

A workshop exploring practical issues in developing and fielding AI-based systems.
Workshop Programme


Stream 4: All Day Workshop

Eighth UK CBR Workshop