News and Announcements

The Mind Association Research Fellowship 1996-97

The Association proposes to award from time to time, as funds permit, to individual scholars a sum of £ 5,000 to assist in their research activities. It is envisaged that the sum would be paid to the University at which the scholar is employed and that the funds would be used by the department in which the scholar works to release him or her from teaching and administrative duties, so that the scholar to whom the award is made can concentrate upon their research activities. The Fellowship is specifically designed to help academics who are unduly burdened with departmental commitments. The award will be competitive and scholars wishing to apply should write to the Secretary of the Association enclosing a CV and a short statement of the research to be carried out. A committee consisting of the Editor of Mind and two members of the Executive Committee of the Association will then make the award. The Secretary of the Association will communicate the result of the competition to the applicants. The deadline for applications for the academic year of 1996-7 is the 31st of December, 1995. Previous recipients of the award are Graham Macdonald, University of Bradford (1994-5), and Colin Howson, London School of Economics (1995-6).


ISIS: Information, Statistics and Induction in Science

Melbourne, Australia, 20-23 August 1996

*** CALL FOR PAPERS ***

Conference Chair: David Dowe

Co-chairs: Kevin Korb and Jonathan Oliver

INVITED SPEAKERS:

Henry Kyburg, Jr. (University of Rochester, NY)

J. Ross Quinlan (Sydney University)

Jorma J. Rissanen (IBM Almaden Research, San Jose, California)

Ray Solomonoff (U.S.A.)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

Lloyd Allison, Mark Bedau, Hamparsum Bozdogan, Wray Buntine, Peter Cheeseman, Honghua Dai, David Dowe, Doug Fisher, Alex Gammerman, Clark Glymour, Randy Goebel, David Hand, Bill Harper, David Heckerman, Colin Howson, Lawrence Hunter, Frank Jackson, Max King, Kevin Korb, Henry Kyburg, Ming Li, Nozomu Matsubara, Aleksandar Milosavljevic, Richard Neapolitan, Jonathan Oliver, Michael Pazzani, J. Ross Quinlan, Glenn Shafer, Peter Slezak, Ray Solomonoff, Paul Thagard, Neil Thomason, Raul Valdes-Perez, Tim van Gelder, Paul Vitanyi, Chris Wallace, Geoff Webb, Xindong Wu, Jan Zytkow.

Inquiries to:

isis96@cs.monash.edu.au

David Dowe: dld@cs.monash.edu.au

Kevin Korb: korb@cs.monash.edu.au or

Jonathan Oliver: jono@cs.monash.edu.au

Information is available on the WWW at:

http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/~jono/ISIS/ISIS.html

This conference will explore the use of computational modelling to understand and emulate inductive processes in science. The problems involved in building and using such computer models reflect methodological and foundational concerns common to a variety of academic disciplines, especially statistics, artificial intelligence (AI) and the philosophy of science. This conference aims to bring together researchers from these and related fields to present new computational technologies for supporting or analysing scientific inference and to engage in collegial debate over the merits and difficulties underlying the various approaches to automating inductive and statistical inference.

AREAS OF INTEREST.

The following streams/subject areas are of particular interest to the organisers:

Concept Formation and Classification.

Minimum Encoding Length Inference Methods.

Scientific Discovery.

Theory Revision.

Bayesian Methodology.

Foundations of Statistics.

Foundations of Social Science.

Foundations of AI.

CALL FOR PAPERS.

Prospective authors should mail five copies of their papers to Dr. David Dowe, ISIS chair. Alternatively, authors may submit by email to isis96@cs.monash.edu.au. Email submissions must be in LaTex (using the ISIS style guide [will be available at the ISIS WWW page]). Submitted papers should be in double-column format in 10 point font and not exceeding 10 pages. An additional page should display the title, author(s) and affiliation(s), abstract, keywords and identification of which of the eight areas of interest (see http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/~jono/ISIS/ISIS.Area.Interest.html) are most relevant to the paper. Refereeing will be blind; that is, this additional page will not be passed along to referees.

The proceedings will be published; details have not yet been settled with the prospective publisher. Accepted papers will have to be represented by at least one author in attendance to be published.

Papers should be sent to:

Dr David Dowe

ISIS chair

Department of Computer Science

Monash University

Clayton Victoria 3168

Australia

Phone: +61-3-9 905 5226

FAX: +61-3-9 905 5146

Email: isis96@cs.monash.edu.au

Submission (receipt) deadline: 11 March, 1996

Notification of acceptance: 10 June, 1996

Camera-ready copy (receipt) deadline: 15 July, 1996

CONFERENCE VENUE

ISIS will be held at the Old Melbourne Hotel, 5-17 Flemington Rd. North Melbourne.

The Old Melbourne Hotel is within easy walking distance of downtown Melborne, Melbourne University, many restaurants (on Lygon Street) and the Melbourne Zoo. It is about fifteen to twenty minutes drive from the airport.

REGISTRATION

A registration form will be available at the WWW site:

http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/~jono/ISIS/ISIS.shtml,

or by mail from the conference chair. Dates for registration will be considered to be met assuming that legible postmarks are on or before the dates and airmail is used. Student registrations will be available at a discount (but prices have not yet been fixed). Relevant dates are:

Early registration (at a discount): 3 June, 1996

Final registration: 1 July, 1996


SORITES

An Electronic Quarterly of Analytical Philosophy