IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 January 29, 1996 Volume XIII, Number 5 Issue 292 ********************************************************** II. JOBS 1. UMBC: Chair, Information Systems III. NOTICES A. Publications B. Meetings 1. ASIS SIG/CR: Classification Research Workshop: An Interdiscplinary Meeting 2. Detecting and Preventing Miscommunication C. Miscellaneous 1. For US readers: NSF Director N. Lane on S&T Funding, Scientist's Role ********************************************************** II. JOBS II.1. Fr: Timothy Finin Re: UMBC: Chair, Information Systems Chairperson -- Department of Information Systems University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore MD 21228 The Department of Information Systems invites applications for the position of Chair. The successful candidate will be an experienced academic leader and researcher with scholarly accomplishments that qualify for the rank of full professor. The new chair will play a leadership role in filling several tenure track positions in the planned expansion of this highly interdisciplinary research & academic department. Information Systems, which offers BA, BS, BS/MS, MS, and PhD degrees, is one of the key departments in the School of Arts and Sciences. Its undergraduate programs are the largest on campus with over 700 majors. In addition, there are about 100 MS students and 40 doctoral students. The Department's faculty and programs have a broad view of Information Systems. Research and teaching interests currently include decision support system, intelligent tutoring systems, human-computer interaction, human factors, artificial intelligence, hypertext & multimedia environments, neural networks, information systems & software design, modeling & simulation of information systems, telecommunication & networks, management information systems, health informatics, and legal informatics. The department has excellent research and teaching facilities that include Sun SparcStations, NEXT machines, high-end Mac's , PC's and an assortment of scanners, printers, and graphic plotters. In addition, the department has access to the University's VAX cluster of UNIX and VMS machines, SGI cluster of Indigos, the University's Imaging Research Center and to the Supercomputer Consortium. Salary is competitive and commensurate with experience. Starting date is flexible. Screening of Applicants will begin on February 1, 1996, and continue until the position is filled. Applicants are invited to send a complete curriculum vitae with a statement of interest and name and addresses of 4 to 6 references. Nominations and applications should be sent to: Dr. Y. J. (Ray) Chen Chair, Search Committee Department of Information Systems University of Maryland Baltimore County Baltimore, MD 21228-5398. UMBC is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Employer _________________________________________________________________ UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE COUNTY (UMBC). A dynamic research university, UMBC places special focus on undergraduate education and on research in the sciences, technology and policy. We offer undergraduates 27 majors ranging from the sciences and engineering to the arts and humanities, plus 12 pre-professional and allied health programs, and 4 certificate programs. The Graduate School offers 27 master's and 18 doctoral programs. Unique to UMBC are its state-of-the art centers for imaging research and structural biochemistry; its Shriver Center for learning and service; its Center for Health Program Development and Management, and its Howard Hughes Medical Institute research laboratory. UMBC enrolls an ethnically diverse student body including about 10,000 undergraduate and 1,600 graduate students. They come from 45 states and 80 foreign countries. Over 2,200 students live on campus. There are over 700 full-time and adjunct faculty members, who are committed to undergraduate teaching. Last year, their research programs attracted over $31 million in contracts and grants. THE COMMUNITY. UMBC is centrally located in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, which has a population of 2 million. It is 10 miles from Baltimore's Inner Harbor, 32 miles from Washington, DC, and 4 miles from BWI airport. UMBC is located on a 500-acre suburban campus in Catonsville. It includes 34 major buildings enclosed by a 2-mile elliptical drive. The Atlantic Ocean beaches are a 2 1/2 hour drive to the east, and on a clear day, one can see the Chesapeake Bay from UMBC's Library tower. UMBC's web page is and the Department's is . ********************************************************** III. NOTICES III.B.1. Fr: Paul Solomon Re: ASIS SIG/CR: Classification Research Workshop: An Interdiscplinary Meeting CALL FOR PARTICIPATION 7th ASIS SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop: An Interdisciplinary Meeting The American Society for Information Science Special Interest Group on Classification Research (ASIS SIG/CR) invites submissions for the 7th ASIS Classification Research Workshop, to be held at the 59th Annual Meeting of ASIS in Baltimore, MD. The workshop will take place Sunday, October 20th, 1996, 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. ASIS '96 continues through Thursday, October 24th. The Classification Research Workshop is designed to promote the exchange of ideas among active researchers with interests in classification creation, development, management, representation, display, comparison, compatibility, theory, and application. Emphasis will be on semantic classification, in contrast to statistically based schemes. Topics include, but are not limited to: - Applications such as subject analysis, natural language understanding, information retrieval, expert systems. - Automated techniques to assist in creating classification schemes. - Bases for semantic classes. - Classification algorithms. - Comparison and compatibility between classification schemes. - Concept acquisition. - Data structures and programming languages for classification schemes. - Image classification. - Inheritance and subsumption. - Interfaces for displaying classification schemes. - Knowledge representation schemes. - Procedural knowledge in classification schemes. - Reasoning with classification schemes. - Relations and their properties. - Representation and access on the Internet. - Software for management of classification schemes. - Statistical techniques used for developing explicit semantic classes. - User-based classification strategies. - Warrant for concepts in classification schemes. The Classification Research Workshop welcomes submissions from various disciplines. Those interested in participating are invited to submit: 1) a short (1-2 page single-spaced) position paper summarizing substantive work that has been conducted in the above areas or other related areas, 2) a statement briefly outlining the reason for wanting to participate in the workshop, and 3) a brief (1 page) personal statement describing research interests. * Submissions may include background papers as attachments. Submitted position papers will be refereed for acceptance. The authors of accepted position papers will be asked to submit an expanded version. Some of the authors of expanded papers will be invited to speak to their papers in brief presentations during the workshop. All expanded papers will be published in the preliminary proceedings and posted to all early registrants prior to the workshop. After the workshop, authors will be given the opportunity to revise their papers for final publication of the proceedings by Information Today, Inc. Early registration fees for ALL PARTICIPANTS are $35.00 for SIG/CR members and/or participants with expanded papers; $45.00 for ASIS members; $60.00 for non-members. (As the workshop is separate from the ASIS Annual Meeting, an additional registration is required for the Annual Meeting). Previous proceedings are titled "Advances in Classification Research: proceedings of the ... ASIS SIG/CR Classification Workshop" and are published by Information Today, Inc., 143 Old Marlton Pike, Medford, NJ 08055. Tel: 609/654-6266. Submissions should be made by email (preferred), or by paper copy (fax or postal), to arrive by April 15, 1996, to: Paul Solomon, CB# 3360, School of Information & Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360, USA Work Phone: 919-962-8068; Fax: 919-962-8071; Home Phone: 919-933-3893; Email: solomon@ils.unc.edu URL: http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/www/asis/crwork.html Email or Postcard confirmations will be sent upon receipt of submissions. For additional information, email solomon@ils.unc.edu or access URL: http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/www/asis/crwork.html ********** III.B.2. Fr: Dr. Susan McRoy Re: Detecting and Preventing Miscommunication DETECTING, REPAIRING, AND PREVENTING HUMAN--MACHINE MISCOMMUNICATION AAAI '96 Workshop---Portland, OR Any system that communicates must be able to cope with the possibility of miscommunication---including misunderstanding, non-understanding, and misinterpretation: o In misunderstanding, one participant obtains an interpretation that she believes is complete and correct, but which is, however, not the one that the other speaker intended her to obtain. o In non-understanding, a participant either fails to obtain any interpretation at all, or obtains more than one interpretation, with no way to choose among them. o In misinterpretation, the most likely interpretation of a participant's utterance suggests that their beliefs about the world are unexpectedly out of alignment with the other's. All three forms of miscommunication can eventually lead to repair in a dialogue; however, misinterpretations and non-understandings are typically recognized immediately, whereas a participant is not aware, at least initially, when a misunderstanding occurs. Additionally, misinterpretation can be a source of misunderstanding. Successful communication requires that participants share considerable knowledge. For example, they must share some knowledge about the state of their interaction and about the physical and social situation in which they are communicating. Knowledge of their interaction includes the current topic under discussion (often a shared task), the focus of attention, and the relevance of each utterance to the previous interaction. In practice, no two participants start with an identical understanding of their task or of the situation---nor can they take the time to identify and resolve discrepancies beforehand. As a result, participants must be prepared to handle miscommunication during dialogue. Research related to achieving robust interaction is an important subarea in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Early work concerned the correction of spelling or grammatical errors in a user's utterance so that the system could more easily match them against a fixed linguistic model; work has also been done in the area of speech recognition, attempting to find the best fit of a sound signal to legal sequences of linguistic objects. Other systems have attempted to detect misconceptions in the user's model of the domain of discourse. All of these approaches have assumed that the system's model is always correct. More recently, researchers have been looking at detecting and correcting errors in the system's model of an interaction. This work includes research on speech repairs, miscommunication, misunderstanding, non-understanding, and related work in planning, such as plan misrecognition and plan repair. The focus of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in developing theoretical models of robust interaction or in designing robust systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: o Theories that delineate what knowledge must be represented, how it will be obtained and updated, and how responsibility for achieving robustness might be distributed among the interactants. o Strategies for identifying POTENTIAL causes of breakdowns, such as ambiguities, misconceptions, and plan misrecognition, in order to avert miscommunication. o Strategies for identifying symptoms of ACTUAL breakdowns, such as deviations from expected behavior, unresolvable ambiguities, and speech errors. o Techniques for correcting errors in interpretation that have been used in other areas of AI, such as plan recognition and computer vision, and in related areas, such as human-computer interaction and multimedia. o Approaches to minimizing and correcting miscommunication in tutoring systems and education. o Empirical data regarding the occurrence of miscommunication and approaches to robust communication that derive from empirical methods. o Research in knowledge representation that would be useful in detecting, repairing, and preventing miscommunication. We solicit papers that explore these issues, and papers that discuss implementations of solutions to the problems of detecting, repairing, and preventing human--machine miscommunication. Papers submitted to the workshop should address these topics explicitly. As AAAI procedures require, participation will be limited to 65. COMMITTEE: Susan McRoy, chair University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee mcroy@cs.uwm.edu (414) 229--6695 (phone) (414) 229--6958 (fax) Brad Goodman Kathleen McCoy Mitre Corporation University of Delaware bgoodman@linus.mitre.org mccoy@louie.udel.edu Susan Haller Ronnie Smith University of Wisconsin--Parkside East Carolina University haller@cs.uwp.edu rws@math1.math.ecu.edu Graeme Hirst David Traum University of Toronto TECFA, Universite de Geneve gh@cs.toronto.edu David.Traum@tecfa.unige.ch SCHEDULE: Submission deadline: March 18, 1996 Author notification: April 15, 1996 Camera-ready copy due: May 13, 1996 Conference dates: August 4--8, 1996 SUBMISSIONS: Submit an extended abstract. Abstracts should not exceed 10 pages, exclusive of references, in 12 point, double-spaced text, with one-inch margins. We strongly encourage electronic submissions, either plain text or postscript. Emailed submissions should be emailed to mcroy@cs.uwm.edu with a subject heading ``ATTN: AAAI MNM''. In the event that electronic submission is not possible, send 6 copies to: Susan McRoy ATTN: AAAI MNM Workshop Computer Science, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee 3200 North Cramer Street, EMS Room 503 Milwaukee, WI 53211 This cfp is on the WWW at http://www.cs.uwm.edu/faculty/mcroy/mnm.html ********** III.C.1. Fr: Maria Zemankova Re: For US readers: NSF Director N. Lane on S&T Funding, Scientist's Role The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News Number 9: January 22, 1996 NSF Director Neal Lane on Science Funding Outlook, Role of Scientists National Science Foundation Director Neal Lane, in a speech entitled, "Thin Ice Over Deep Water: Science and Technology in a Seven Year Downsizing," comments on the outlook for federal science funding and the role of scientists in the political process. Lane delivered his remarks at a January 15 meeting of the American Astronomical Society. See FYI #8 for Lane's description of the effect of the shutdown on NSF. FYIs #10 and 11 provide guidance on communicating with Congress. "Science in America is strong. The American system of higher education is strong. NSF is strong, in part due to its efficiency, effectiveness, and high standards of decision making through peer review, and most importantly the support and active involvement of the U.S. science community. But, we are not operating in a healthy environment for science -- research or education.... "The overall cuts in spending over the next seven years (1996-2002) are designed to help balance the budget, at least through the year 2002. However, the specific reductions and cuts by which we reach that goal can, in fact, spell trouble or triumph. My concern is that these plans target major portions of the Federal R&D enterprise for dismantlement, creating "thin ice" on which we attempt to skate toward continued economic success. "...we are now challenged to more clearly articulate the benefits of federally funded research and education to a nation that is largely uninformed about science and increasingly skeptical of federal funding of all sorts. Now it is important that scientists move beyond their intuitive understanding of the importance of their work and begin to fold in anecdotal evidence from the past with the results of careful assessments -- both existing and still to be done -- of the tangible societal benefits of scientific research and education. "Recently we have had strong validation of both our intuition and data. The President's Council of Economic Advisors issued a report in October entitled `Supporting Research and Development to Promote Economic Growth.' The economy is not the only benefit to be derived from R&D, but it is an important one. The report stresses that every federal dollar spent on R&D adds much more to the economy than simply a dollar of R&D. "The report goes on to state, `Investments in research and development are the key to increasing productivity, accounting [in recent history] for half or more of the growth in output per person.' And it has long been accepted that improved worker productivity is the key to the increased competitiveness of a business, and of an industry, and of the general economic environment within a state. "Further recognition of the importance of productivity came from the Economist Magazine which did a special survey on American business in its mid-September, 1995 issue. The report states, `What really matters is a country's ability to raise its own productivity. That is the only way in which a country's industries can sell their wares in international markets while raising their workers' wages.' The article also quotes Stanford economist Paul Krugman on this same issue. He says, `Productivity is not everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.' "And so here we have this tightly integrated cycle. R&D investments in science and technology, for the most part, advance productivity through improved processes and products. Highly trained technical workers are required for the kinds of jobs that research and development help create. This all comes together when you put skilled workers into high-value jobs and promote economic growth. All well and good if, among other things, the umbrella investment in federal R&D is maintained at a healthy level and the workers get the education they need. As Shakespeare would say, `aye, there's the rub.' "The federal investment in non-defense R&D is projected by the AAAS to decrease by approximately 33 percent in real terms by 2002, and the cuts in education are larger. In essence, this nation is getting ready to run an experiment it has never done before--to see if we can reduce the federal investment in R&D by one-third and still be a world leader in the 21st century. Nobody knows the outcome. But it seems pretty high risk.... "Mother Nature may have shut down Washington with a pair of blizzards, but before that the entire nation suffered something of a "whiteout" by the shutdown of the federal government on two occasions for a total of four weeks. In this last go-around, several agencies or programs that are politically visible and popular were pulled out of the usual appropriations bills by the Congress and given targeted appropriations, i.e., long-term C.R.s [continuing resolutions], through the end of the fiscal year. NSF was not one of them; nor was NASA -- we are in business only through January 26.... "My message to you today is that if you don't take it as one of your professional responsibilities to inform your fellow citizens about the importance of the science and technology enterprise, then that public support, critical to sustaining it, isn't going to be there. Who knows more about science, its complex relationship with technology, the linkage between research and education, the often unexpected benefits to society, than you? Who has greater credibility in discussing science, not just astronomy but science, than you? Who understands better than anyone the price our nation will pay if we fall behind in science and technology in the effort to downsize government? Is it self-serving to advocate support for science? Perhaps. But if the `self' is the American people and the position of leadership of the U.S. in all fields of science and technology in the 21st century, then I wouldn't worry too much about appearing self serving. "One thing that has been striking during this year of budget battles and, most recently, the shutdown, is the perceived stony silence of the science and technology community -- the universities, where most of the fundamental research is done, and with a few exceptions, business and industry, which depend on the knowledge and technologies research provides. And I can assure you that this perceived lack of concern has not gone unnoticed in Washington. "Clearly, this is a time of great challenge for science and technology in America. But, I believe we can seize this time as one of opportunity to work together in ways we have never done before, to raise our voices, together, to send out a clear and coherent message. This is not the time to plead for biology vs. chemistry or astronomy vs. engineering, or even basic vs. applied research or technology. It's a time to speak out about the importance of the Federal investment in science and technology, in research and education, in universities, in national laboratories and other institutions -- and in the partnerships that have been formed with industry and other sectors that use the knowledge and technologies for the public good...." Richard M. Jones Public Information Division American Institute of Physics fyi@aip.org (301) 209-3095 ********************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, Division of Library Automation, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA. 94612-3550. Send subscription requests and submissions to: NCGUR@UCCMVSA.UCOP.EDU Editorial Staff: Clifford Lynch calur@uccmvsa.ucop.edu Nancy Gusack ncgur@uccmvsa.ucop.edu The IRLIST Archives is set up for anonymous FTP. 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