In this issue:
Stephen C. Hirtle
School of Information Sciences
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
sch@sis.pitt.edu
+1 412 624-9402
I would like to begin my term as President by thanking all of the outgoing officers and directors for their contributions to the Society during the past few years. Mike Windham has remained a staunch supporter of the society as Past-President. Mel Janowitz and Stan Wasserman are ending their terms on the Board, but I am sure that they will continue service to the society in other ways. Buck McMorris, who has seen the newsletter move from paper to electronic format, while providing thought-provoking articles and other important information to the membership, has stepped down as Newsletter Editor.
At the same, I want to welcome our new officers. Our new president-elect is David Banks. Our two new board members are Francois-Joseph Lapointe and J. Douglas Carroll. Bill Shannon takes over as Newsletter Editor. It clear that the society remains in very capable hands (with perhaps the exception of the president!) and look forward to moving the society into the next millenium.
I hope all members are considering attending the upcoming annual meeting, which this year is joint with the Psychonomic society. Stan Wasserman has put together an exciting program for the meeting at the University of Illinois. There is also the opportunity to attend IFCS'98 in Rome in July. Several of our members will be presenting at this conference, which brings together researchers from all the member classification societies, once every two years.
Finally, I look forward to your ideas on how to best serve the membership. I, along with the Board, are always looking for new ideas for the society. For example, although CSNA had one of the earliest websites among academic societies, it is now looking a little old and shabby. I appreciate your feedback as to what is needed and how the information should be presented to both members and non-members alike. I would encourage you to send me email about this issue, or any other concerns or questions that you might have. The society remains very strong and I look forward to serving the membership in this new role as President.
Stanley L. Sclove
Department of Information and Decision Sciences M/C 294
College of Business Administration
University of Illinois at Chicago
601 S. Morgan Street
Chicago, IL 60607-7124
slsclove@uic.edu
www.uic.edu/~slsclove
Election Results: The results of the annual election held at the end of 1997 were as follows.
David Banks of NIST is President-Elect for 1998 and 1999; he will assume the Presidency for 2000 and 2001.
CSNA has six Directors, with three year terms, two elected each year.
Francois-Joseph Lapointe of the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Montreal, was elected to the Board of Directors, as was J. Douglas Carroll of the Graduate School of Management, Rutgers University. (As probably most of you know, Doug has been active in CSNA since its earliest days, serving in many capacities, including President and member of the Board.)
The resolution relating to voting methods passed.
Congratulations to the winners, and many thanks to all the candidates, and to the Nominating Committee, Pascale Rousseau (Chair), Stephen Hirtle and Glenn Milligan.
Finally, thanks to the Board members whose terms just ended, Mel Janowitz and Stanley Wasserman, and to Pete Bryant, who will continue on the Board as Past President; we look forward to his continued good counsel, wisdom, friendship and dedication to the Society.
Here are the names of those whose membership applications have been accepted by the Board since the Annual Meeting in June (a few have been members before).
Gillian M. Arnold
Mark Baruch
Michael E. Bellow
Hamparsum Bozdogan
Anil Chaturvedi
Kwang-Sun Cho
Mary Christman
David W. Dorsey
P. R. Hunter
Charles D. Judge
Rodger Knaus
Roy Maxion
Madhu Mazumdar
Robert Olszewski
Anand Ramaswami
Leming Shi
David J. Holland Smith
A.V. Swan
Paul C. Taylor
John Weinstein
Lorie Wijntjes
Mark Wilkinson
Lara J. Wolfson
Pedro L. Ardisson
Wayne A. Baughman
Jennifer Biagi
Yun-Fei Chen
David I. Holmes
Gang Jia
Stephen Jones
Alexey Koloydenko
Herbie Lee
Chunming Li
Paula Morais
A.P.M. Coxon
George J. Knafl
Natarajan Sriram
Richard H. Zander
Meetings
Annual Meeting
The Annual Meeting will take place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, jointly with the Psychometric Society. Stan Wasserman is a Program Chair. See the announcement elsewhere in this Newsletter.
IFCS
The biennial meeting will take place in Rome in July. Brochures and registration material went into the mail to our North American members. Also enclosed was a copy of the IFCS Newsletter.
Homepage
All the newsletters are posted and accessible at the CSNA homepage at the URL http://www.pitt.edu/~csna/. Check the page from time to time for updates and new issues. In addition, the CSNA bibliographic reference Service is also posted there. The Service, as well as the newsletters, are now therefore free and accessible anytime.
Membership
Membership fees are still $65 for regular members, $50 for retired members, $35 for student members, and $50 for affiliates (who receive the Journal of Classification but do not vote). Encourage your colleagues to join! We look forward to another fine year with CSNA!
William D. Shannon
Washington University School of Medicine
Division of General Medical Sciences
660 South Euclid Ave., Campus Box 8005
St. Louis, MO 63110
email to: shannon@osler.wustl.edu
web site at: osler.wustl.edu/~shannon
I would like to thank the CSNA Board of Directors, and Buck McMorris in particular, for giving me the opportunity to serve as the CSNA Newsletter Editor. During my few years as a member of CSNA, and as a recent graduate and newly independent researcher, I have found this group to be encouraging and supportive for my academic and intellectual growth. The CSNA has become an academic home for me, and I feel privileged to have the opportunity to provide service back. Thank you.
Now onto the job!
The purpose of this newsletter is to provide news about CSNA to the members. This includes the regular columns such as 'The President's Corner' and 'From the Secretary/Treasurer', covering news that relates directly to operation and activities of the CSNA and its membership. This newsletter must also serve as a vehicle for bringing news from outside of CSNA. For example, Rian van Blokland-Vogelesang has agreed to continue to edit the bookshelf column which lets readers have access to titles relevant to their work which might otherwise have gone unnoticed. I cannot thank Rian enough for continuing on in this capacity.
The 'Upcoming Meetings' column keeps the membership up-to-date on when and where they can go to meet with colleagues, present their work, and hear about new ideas and applications in classification. In this issue we have details on CSNA 98, OSDA 98, and IFCS 98. (If you don't know what these meetings are read up on them on them and think about attending!)
The 'Forum' is another important column for the newsletter. In past issues we have had David Banks discussing Bayesian philosophy, Dave Dubin giving a student perspective of CSNA 96, and J. P. Sutcliffe discussing the future direction of classification. In the future I hope to expand the Forum to include overviews of classification problems in different fields (e.g., library science, operations research, biology), tutorials on technical aspects of clustering and classification, and 'soapboxes' for members to stand on to present their views of the field.
Finally, I hope the newsletter can be used to bring information from the many other societies which use clustering and classification. For example, the current craze of datamining in computer science has generated a huge group of basic and applied researchers working on new clustering and classification algorithms, software, and strategies which might be of interest to some of our membership. I hope everyone will help by sending me their favorite web sites, meeting announcements, and article references.
I hope anyone with a suggestion on how to improve the newsletter will let me know. I've never done anything like this and welcome the help. I look forward to my time as the Newsletter Editor. See you next issue.
The 1998 annual meetings of the Classification Society of North America (CSNA) and the Psychometric Society (PS) will be held jointly at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Illinois from Wednesday June 17th until Sunday June 21st, 1998, at the Levis Faculty Center on the University of Illinois campus. The meeting is supported by the Department of Statistics and the Department of Psychology, University of Illinois.
Two short courses are planned for Wednesday June 17th, with regular sessions beginning on the morning of Thursday June 18th. There will be a reception, business meetings of both societies, and a banquet during the meeting. CSNA and PS meetings are traditionally informal and very interdisciplinary. Abstracts of papers are distributed, but no formal proceedings are produced. Speakers are encouraged to discuss work in progress, of either applied or methodological nature.
Invited addresses will be given by Adrian Raftery, Erich Lehmann, and James Bezdek. Presidential addresses will be given by Ivo Molenaar and Stephen Hirtle.
The two day-long short courses on Wednesday June 17th are "An Introduction to Classification and Clustering", taught by Stephen Hirtle, Pierre Legendre, and Glenn Milligan, and an "Introduction to Tests and Measurement", taught by Terry Ackerman. The latter is sponsored by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research.
Further details of the conference (along with a list of contributed paper sessions) can be found at the website: http://www.conted.ceps.uiuc.edu/fmpro/psychometric_society.form.html Abstracts of contributed papers should be sent to Stanley Wasserman, University of Illinois, 603 East Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820 USA; telephone 1-217-333-3325; fax 1-217-244-5876; email pscsna98@s.psych.uiuc.edu. Please indicate which contributed paper session you are contributing to, and please keep abstracts under 200 words in length. Please send electronic versions of the abstracts, including the names, affiliations, and email addresses of the authors.
Abstracts are due March 31, 1998.
M.B. Allen and E.I. Isaacson, 1997, Numerical analysis for applied science, Chichester (UK): Wiley, Series: Pure and Applied Mathematics, pp. 500, £ 45.50. ISBN 0-471-55266-6.
A. Agresti, 1996, An Introduction to Categorical Data Analysis, New York: Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics, pp.290, $43.ISBN 0-471-11338-7 (hb).
E.B. Andersen, 1997, Introduction to the Statistical Analysis of Categorical Data, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, pp. 265, $44.95. ISBN 3-540-62399-X
Y. Ben-Haim and H.G. Natke, 1997, Uncertainties: Models and Measures, Proceedings of the International workshop held in Lambrecht, Germany, July 22-24, 1996; Chichester: Wiley, pp. 250, £ 39.95. ISBN 3055-59486-5.
I. Borg and P. Groenen, 1996, Modern Multidimensional scaling: Theory and applications, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, pp. 496, $54.95. ISBN 0-387-94845-7.
Dell-Amico, F. Maffioli, and S. Martello, 1997, Annotated Bibliographies in Combinatorial Optimization, Chichester (UK): Wiley, pp. 300, £ 60.00. ISBN 0471-96574 X.
S.B. Gerber and K.E. Voelkl, The SPSS Guide to the New Statistical Analysis of Data, 1997, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. ISBN 0-387-94821-X.
M.A. Goberna and M.A. Lopez Cerda, 1997, Linear semi-infinite optimization, Chichester (UK): Wiley, Series: Mathematical Methods in Practise optimization, pp. 346, £ 40.00 (hb). ISBN 0471-97040-9.
H. Gordon, 1997, Discrete probability, Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 266, $ 39.95 (hb). ISBN 0-387-98227-2.
I.S. Graham, 1997, The HTML Sourcebook: A Complete Guide to HTML 3.2 and HTML Extensions (3rd ed.), Chichester (UK): Wiley, pp. 197, £ 19.99. ISBN 0471-17575-7.
D. Gusfield, 1997, Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences, Cambridge University Press, pp. 592, £ 40.00. ISBN 0-521-58519-8.
W.G. Jacoby, 1997, Statistical Graphics for Univariate and Bivariate Data, London (UK): Sage: Quantitative applications in the social sciences series, Vol. 117, pp. 96, £ 7.95. ISBN 0-7619-0083-7.
N.L. Johnson, S. Kotz, and N. Balakrishnan, 1997, Discrete Multivariate Distributions, Chichester (UK): Wiley, pp. 320, £ 65.00. ISBN 0471-12844-9.
G. Firebaugh, 1997, Analyzing Repeated Surveys, London (UK): Sage: Quantitative applications in the social sciences, Vol. 115, pp. 96, £ 7.95. ISBN 0-8039-7398-5.
S.A. Klugman, H.H. Panjer, and G.E. Willmot, 1998, Loss Models: From Data to Decisions, Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics, pp. 650, £ 60, ISBN 0-471-29884-8 (hb).
D.J. Koosis, 1997, Business Statistics: A Self-Teaching Guide (3rd ed.), Chichester (UK): Wiley, pp. 288, £ 13.99 (pb). ISBN 0471-16261-2.
A. Krause, 1997, Einf2uhrung in S und S-Plus, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, pp. 319, DM 38. ISBN 3-540-60932-6.
Quesenberry, 1997, SPC Methods for Quality Improvement, Chichester (UK) ), pp. 416, £ 60.00 (hb): Wiley. ISBN 0471-13087-7.
Senn, 1997, Statistical Issues in Drug Development, Chichester (UK): Wiley, pp. 280, £ 24.95 (hb). ISBN 0471-97488-9.
P. Tryfos, 1997, Methods for Business Analysis and Forecasting: Text and Cases, Chichester (UK): Wiley, pp. 544, £ 22.95 (hb). ISBN 0471-12384-6.
W.N. Venables and B.D. Ripley, 1997 (2nd ed.), Modern Applied Statistics With S-Plus (4.0), Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, pp. 540, $54.95. ISBN 0-387-98214-0.
J. Whitehead, 1997, Design and Analysis of Sequential Clinical Trials, 2nd ed, Chichester (UK): Wiley., pp. 300, £ 40.00 (hb). ISBN 0471-97550-8.
Winder and G. Roberts, 1997, Developing Java Software: Application, Design and Development for the Network Age, Chichester (UK): Wiley, pp. 176, £ 22.50. ISBN 0471-97655-5.
* JULY 6-10, 1998: 14th Australian Statistical Congress, Jupiter's Casino, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. Programme Chair: K. Basford, Local Organization: W. Robb. Address: ASC14, School of Mathematical Sciences, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane QLD 4001, Australia. email: asc14@qut.edu.au, fax: +61 7 38642310. web: http://www.math.fsc.qut.edu.au/asc14.html
* JULY 21-24, 1998: 6th Conference of the International Federation of Classification Societies, Rome, Italy. Put it on your calendars - - - more information will be appearing later.
A committee consisting of Peter Bryant, David Banks, and F. James Rohlf has applied on behalf of CSNA to the National Science Foundation for a group travel grant to support the participation of US researchers at the meeting of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS-98), to be held in Rome in July. If approved, the grant will be administered at the University of Colorado at Denver for CSNA.
The intent of the grant is to provide a travel stipend equal to approximately the cost of a round-trip economy class air ticket between the applicant's home city and Rome. Detailed policies and procedures will be specified after final approval of the grant, but as currently envisioned:
1. Applications will be evaluated by a point system based on the applicant's participation in CSNA meetings, planned participation in the IFCS meeting, and other recent activity and publications in classification and statistics.
2. To encourage participation by new researchers, extra points will be awarded to applicants within five years of receipt of the PhD or appropriate terminal degree.
3. CSNA membership is not required, but applicants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
4. The committee will evaluate applications and make final recommendations concerning disposition of funds.
5. Applicants receiving funds will be required to submit a brief report of their participation in the meeting and provide evidence of registration at IFCS-98 and original receipts for travel.
Details and application procedures will be posted on the CSNA web site and distributed in the CSNA newsletter when the final status of the grant application becomes known. Those wishing further information may get in touch with Peter Bryant (Telephone: (+1)-303-556-5833, Fax: (+1)-303-556-5899, E-mail: Peter.Bryant@cudenver.edu).
* SEPTEMBER 28-30, 1998: Ordinal and Symbolic Data Analysis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.
(OSDA98)
at the University of Massachusetts
Lincoln Campus Center
Amherst, MA, 01003, USA
Beginning: September 28, 1998, 9:00 a.m.
Ending: September 30, 1998, 2:30 p.m.
This conference continues a sequence of conferences which started with two conferences on Ordinal Data Analysis in March 1992 at the TH Darmstadt and in October 1993 at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and continued with the International Conference on Ordinal and Symbolic Data Analysis in June 1995 at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (Paris), as well as the Ordinal and Symbolic Data Analysis Conference in March, 1997 at TH Darmstadt. The theme of the conferences is motivated by the fact that ordinal and symbolic data occur quite frequently, but theoretical tools for handling ordinal and symbolic data are not sufficiently developed. The physical layout of the facilities, as well as the design of the program, will encourage active discussions and frequent exchanges of information during the conference. E. Diday (Paris), M. F. Janowitz (Amherst), and R. Wille (Darmstadt) are the conference organizers. The conference will be supported in part by the University of Massachusetts. Despite this, attendance at the Conference will involve a nominal registration fee. Courses on Conceptual Data Analysis and on Conceptual Knowledge Processing will be offered immediately following the conference (the afternoon of September 30) at the University of Massachusetts.
The DEADLINE for applications and abstracts is July 1, 1998. If possible the abstract should be submitted in LaTex, and should not consist of more than a single page. A template for the abstracts is available on request.
Inquiries, applications and abstracts should be sent to:
Prof. Melvin F. Janowitz
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
University of Massachusetts
Lederle Graduate Research Tower
Box 34515
Amherst, MA 01003-4515, USA
Further information about the conference may be obtained from the Conference Web site:
Associated with the Conference there will be a special session on "Ordinal Structures in the Social and Behavioral Sciences". Information about this session may be obtained from its organizers, Professor Jean-Paul Doignon of the Universite Libre de Brussels (Email: doignon@ulb.ac.be) and Professor Jean-Claude Falmagne of the University of California at Irvine (Email: wcf@aris.ss.uci.edu)
There will also be a special session on "Applications to Medicine" organized by Professor William Shannon of Washington University School of Medicine at St. Louis. MO (Email: shannon@osler.wust1.edu)
Immediately following the conference, three afternoon tutorials are planned. One is being organized by Professor Edwin Diday, and will involve an exposition of Symbolic Data Analysis. The second one is being organized by Professor Dr. Rudolf Wille in the general area of Formal Concept Analysis. The third tutorial is being organized by Professors Jean-Paul Doignon and Jean-Claude Falmagne with the help of Eric Cosyn. It will involve lectures on Knowledge Spaces and a demonstration of the computer software called ALEKS.
The Conference organizers ask that if you are interested in either attending or presenting a paper at the OSDA98 conference, you advise them. They also ask that if you might wish to attend one of the tutorials, you advise the organizers of your intent. This can either be done via e-mail or via the web site address given earlier in this announcement.
Here is a partial list of people who have shown preliminary interest
in participating in the conference:
Jean-Pierre Barthelemy, Patrice Bertrand, Victor Chepoi, Edwin Diday,
David Dilts, Jean-Paul Doignon, Andreus Dress, Jean-Claude Falmagne,
Bernard Fichet, Herman Friedman, Francois Lapointe, Bruno Leclerc,
F. R. McMorris, Bernard Monjardet, Robert C. Powers, Fred Roberts,
Donald Saari, William Shannon, Dr. John Siegel, Tom Trotter, Rudolf Wille.
For further information on becoming a member of CSNA, please contact the CSNA Business Manager.
Stephen Hirtle, hirtle+@pitt.edu, CSNA Webmaster.