Classifier domains of competence: The landscape contest is a research competition aimed at finding out the relation between data complexity and the performance of learners. Comparing your techniques to those of other participants on targeted-complexity problems may contribute to enrich our understanding of the behavior of machine learning techniques and open further research lines.

The contest will take place on August 22, during the 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2010) at Istanbul, Turkey.

We encourage everyone to participate and share with us your work! For further details about dates and submission, please see http://www.salle.url.edu/ICPR10Contest/.

SCOPE OF THE CONTEST

The landscape contest involves the running and evaluation of classifier systems over synthetic data sets. Over the last two decades, the pattern recognition and machine learning communities have developed many supervised learning techniques. Nevertheless, the competitiveness of such techniques has always been claimed over a small and repetitive set of problems. This contest provides a new and configurable testing framework, reliable enough to test the robustness of each technique and detect its limitations.

INSTRUCTION FOR PARTICIPANTS

Contest participants are allowed to use any type of technique. However, we highly encourage and appreciate the use of novel algorithms.

Participants are required to submit the results by email to the organizers.
Submission e-mail: nmacia@salle.url.edu
Meet the submission deadline: Wednesday May 26, 2010

The contest is divided into two phases: (1) offline test and (2) live test. For the offline test, participants should run their algorithms over two sets of problems, S1 and S2. However, the real competition, the live test, will take place during the conference. Two more collections of problems, S3 and S4, will be presented.

S1: Collection of data sets spread along the complexity space to train the learner. All the instances will be duly labeled.

S2: Collection of data sets spread along the complexity space with no class labeling to test the learner performance.

S3: Collection of data sets with no class labeling, like S2 to be run for a limited period of time.

S4: Collection of data sets with no class labeling covering specific regions of the complexity space to determine the neighborhood dominance.

For the offline test, the results report consists of:

1. Labeling the data sets of the collection S2.

The procedure is the following:

1. Train the learner using Dn-trn.arff in S1.
2. Provide the rate of the correctly classified instances over a 10-fold cross validation.
3. Label the corresponding data set Dn-tst.arff in S2.
4. Store the n models generated for each data set to perform the live contest on August 22. Be ready to load them on this day.

2. Describing the techniques used.

A brief summary (1~2 pages) of the machine learning technique/s used in the experiments must be submitted. We expect details such as the learning paradigm, configuration parameters, strength and limitations, and computational cost.

IMPORTANT DATES

* May 26, 2010: Deadline for submission of the results and technical report

* May 29, 2010: Notification of participation

* Aug 22, 2010: Release of S3 and S4

* Aug 22, 2010: ICPR 2010 – Interactive Session

CONTACT DETAILS

Dr. Tin Kam Ho – tkh at research.bell-labs.com
Núria Macià – nmacia at salle.url.edu
Prof. Albert Orriols Puig – aorriols at salle.url.edu
Prof. Ester Bernadó Mansilla – esterb at salle.url.edu

The contest will take place on August 22, during the 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2010) at Istanbul, Turkey.

We are planning to have a day workshop during the ICPR 2010, so that participants will be able to present and discuss their results.

We encourage everyone to participate and share with us your work! For further details about dates and submission, please visit The landscape contest webpage.

Largest Conference in the Field of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation.

A recombination of the 19th International Conference on Genetic Algorithms (ICGA) and the 15th Annual Genetic Programming Conference (GP).

GECCO 2010 will be held on 7-11 July 2010 in Portland, Oregon (USA).

Program Tracks
Three days of presentations of the latest high-quality results in at least 14 separate and independent program tracks specializing in various aspects of genetic and evolutionary computation.

Free Tutorials & Workshops!
Two days of free tutorials and workshops (included with conference registration) presented by some of the world’s foremost experts in topics of interest to genetic and evolutionary computation researchers and practitioners.

The two keynotes given by Ms. Lueny Morell, How can engineering education address the challenges of the 21st century?, and Prof. David E. Goldberg, The missing basics: What engineers don’t know and why they don’t know them, were enlightening and inspiring, and an excellent starting point for professors, students, and engineers eager to take part in a new era for engineering. Both told their beautiful and encouraging story about change. Stories that took place in very different lands and under different circumstances, but with a common aim, implementing approaches to train the new generation of engineers, and with a common villain, the education Establishment.

A passionate Lueny Morell made an impressive show and captivated her audience. According to her experience, the change has to come from professors. Their role is to take care of students, teach them how to face problems, stop punishing failure and help them to succeed by using innovative techniques.

Creativity, flexibility, communication, and leadership were mentioned many times along the workshop as the characteristics of the engineer of the future. This set of soft skills should be present in the engineering education program to provide the student with the capacity of questioning, labeling, modeling, decomposing, measuring, ideating, and communicating, skills that have been coined by Prof. Goldberg as “the missing basics”.

Nowadays, current engineers rush to MBAs to acquire these non-technical skills. Taking this kind of courses, however, is not a guarantee to be able to master them. In fact, in the panel debates, the most inspiring ideas came up from “the normal guy with no MBA”, Mr. Miguel Vidal. With fresh and creative comments, he pointed out demotivation as a recurrent trait of the present engineers, feeding the Prof. Goldberg’s proposal for, in his bottom-up change, recovering “the joy of engineering”.

Unfortunately, time run out and capacity of synthesis was not in the agenda. Nobody gave insight into how to teach and assess these skills, and questions such as how to awake these abilities in students and whether or not engineers of the past will be able to build the engineer of the future remained unanswered.

The 2010 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering & Technology (fPET-2010) is an outgrowth of the Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering (WPE-2007 in Delft and WPE-2008 in London).

The mission of the Forum is (1) to encourage reflection on engineering, engineers, and technology by philosophers and engineers alike and (2) to build bridges between existing organizations of philosophers and of engineers.

fPET-2010 will be held as an intensive one-day meeting on 9-10 May 2010 (Sunday evening-Monday) at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO.

ICPR 2010 is the twentieth conference of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).

ICPR 2010 will be an international forum for discussions on recent advances in the fields of Computer Vision; Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning; Signal, Speech, Image and Video Processing; Biometrics and Human Computer Interaction; Multimedia and Document Analysis, Processing and Retrieval; Medical Imaging and Visualization.

ICPR 2010 will be held during August 23-26, 2010 at the Istanbul Convention & Exhibition Centre (ICEC), Istanbul, Turkey.

Times Square, New York (USA)

In addition, jaywalking has an integration effect over people coming from abroad. Tourists, their first days in the City, observe the traffic lights, but they realize soon that it makes no sense to wait for a light to change its color. At the beginning, it is uncomfortable to break the rules but, eventually, it becomes uncomfortable waiting for the indications. And you feel better soon.

To justify the violation, one can think that the system is designed for the vehicular traffic and manages the transit to avoid crash accidents in the intersection. As the traffic is not uniformly distributed, the system is inefficient for pedestrian which must wait unnecessarily. Taking into account the bug of the system, pedestrian has the right to decide when crossing.

Apart from justifying this behavior, other questions arise such as why we cannot wait. Is it a waste of time? Because of the rush of the society? We could just enjoy the wait…

Anyway, if you want to be a pure New Yorker, ignore the lights and cross the street unless the traffic is moving. And please, bear in mind that the guide of “How to become a true jaywalker” states in its first chapter the sole rule that nobody can forget when stepping in the road: “Cabs do not like jaywalkers”. You will learn this soon.

The advances in AI field, however, start to raise some serious concerns about robot autonomy and its social status as well as how to face this social disruption, and the three Laws elaborated by Asimov to protect humans from machines start to make sense for other than computer geeks. Scientifics are concerned about the “loss of human control of computer-based intelligences”, and the past February, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence organized a conference in Asilomar (not a casual place) to discuss the limits of the research in this field. Development of machines that are close to kill autonomously are worth a discussion by those involved in the creation of the brain of such devices. The news of this event has leaked in the Markoff’s article in the New York Times.

On the other hand, who will be responsible for damages caused by these autonomous friends? Themselves or the corresponding designer? In this sense, philosophy should play a leading role in the design and integration of these “future citizens” since they should have a moral system allowing them to learn ethics from experience and people, and also find their place in our society. The latter implies to create a legal framework that defines machine’s civic rights and duties which is a proposal under study (see the news published by “El Periódico”, in Spanish language).

Finally, one may ask whether or not we are ready to live with human emulators. In my view, we are not. Although in the past years we have been skillful to adapt to new and challenging situations, and our experience with immigration integration and race conflicts should help us to welcome these new electronic neighbors, I tend to think that coexistence with robots will be one of the greatest challenges mankind has ever faced. Anyway, we will need to figure out the way to overcome it because the individualism and loneliness ruling our current society is leading us unrelentingly to a future with custom-made roommates.

For further information, please see the program.

New York (USA)

Morning saw the City calm after eleven days of rains. This sunny day allowed people to have picnics and enjoy a peaceful holiday. At eight, however, things got hectic. The roofs of the buildings welcomed the most impatient onlookers. Neighbor communities began the preparations with the following ingredients: barbecues, beers, and joy. The streets became crowded. The flood of people was on the Hudson River way to attend the expected spectacle. It was nearly time of fireworks!
And, it was amazing! For one hour, bright cubes, palms, smilies, flowers, and multicolored spheres sparkled on the sky. The views were impressive, beautiful fireworks superimposed along the Hudson River and with New Jersey at the back.