IAPR-TC11 Newsletter February 6, 2008 http://www.iapr-tc11.org Call for Papers ============================================================================ - ICFHR2008 **Extended Deadline** - DAS2008 **Extended Deadline and News** ============================================================================ Announcements ============================================================================ - Challenge on Causality ============================================================================ ============================================================================ ICFHR 2008 At the request of authors, and to encourage more papers for the conference and for selection for the Special Issue on Handwriting Recognition in the Pattern Recognition journal, the ICFHR-2008 Organizing Committee has decided to extend the deadline of paper submission to Feb. 15, 2008 midnight North American EST. FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS The 11th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition ICFHR 2008 An IAPR Conference August 19-21, 2008 Concordia University Montréal, Québec, Canada http://www.icfhr2008.ca Important dates: Submission deadline: February 15, 2008 *Updated* Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2008 Camera-ready paper: May 5, 2008 ============================================================================ ============================================================================ D A S 2 0 0 8 @ N A R A . J A P A N September 17 - 19, 2008 C A L L f o r P A P E R S http://www.u-pat.org/das08/ NEWS : (1) New publisher of the proc. is IEEE. (2) New deadline for the submission of regular papers is March 31, 2008. (updated due to the change of publisher) (3) New length of a regular paper is 8 pages in the IEEE CS format. IMPORTANT DATES: (1) Regular papers Submission: March 31, 2008 Acceptance: May 30, 2008 Camera-ready: June 25, 2008 (2) Extended abstracts & Demo abstracts Submission: July 1, 2008 Acceptance: July 15, 2008 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Prof. Rangachar Kasturi Douglas W. Hood Professor and Chair, Computer Science & Engineering, University of South Florida (The 2008 President of the IEEE Computer Society) Tentative title: Detection of text objects in video documents: Recent progress Prof. Toshiro Kamiuchi Visiting Professor, University of Florence Director, Strategic Products Development Center, HITACHI, Ltd. Tentative title: DIS (Digital Image System) and "The Mind of Leonardo" exhibition ============================================================================ ============================================================================ Challenge on CAUSATION AND PREDICTION Deadline April 30, 2008 http://www.causality.inf.ethz.ch/challenge.php This challenge bridges the gap between data mining/machine learning and causal discovery. Several datasets drawn from real data, or emulating real data, are provided, with the goal of making predictions under "manipulations". The setting is very similar to a usual machine learning setting: We have a training set and a test set; a target variable, whose values are concealed in test data, must be predicted. But, the test data are not distributed like the training data: some variables in test data are "manipulated" by an external agent, i.e. set to given values instead of being drawn from the "natural" distribution. Such problems are encountered in many application domains: In medicine to predict the effect of a new treatment, in economy or ecology to predict the consequences of new issued policies, in marketing to predict customer response to marketing campaigns. Feature selection researchers should be particularly interested in that challenge. The problems posed by the challenge require finding subsets of predictive variables, taking into account whether such variables remain predictive when manipulations are performed. We anticipate that this should require the knowledge of causal relationships between variables since acting on causes of the target may result in a response change while acting on consequences should not. However, we encourage participants to enter the challenge with other approaches to the problem. This challenge is part of the EC Pascal challenge and the WCCI 2008 competition programs and is funded by the NSF Grant N0 ECCS-0725746. The results of the challenge will be discussed at a WCCI workshop (June 2008) and the proceedings will be published in JMLR. Several prizes will be awarded to top ranking participants. ============================================================================ With warm regards, Dr. Jianying Hu, IAPR-TC11 Chair jyhu@us.ibm.com Dr. Apostolos Antonacopoulos, IAPR-TC11 Vice Chair A.Antonacopoulos@primaresearch.org