Stanley Wasserman, President
Phipps Arabie, President-Elect
Jennifer Pittman, Editor
- The President's Report of Winter 2003
- Notes from the Secretary/Treasurer
- A Message from the Editor of the JoC (including Election 2002 Results!)
- Reports on CSNA 2003 (and the DIMACS MDS Workshop),
JSM 2003, and IFCS 2004- Review of Whisky Classified ...
- In Memory of Winifred Sewell
- Other News and Events
It's been awhile since I have communicated with you ... a few important things have happened in the interim.
First, I want to welcome Carolyn and Kert to the Board, both elected in December to three year terms. And I want to say au revoir to Jacqueline and Jim, who have been good Board members over the past three years. Thanks, you two, for your service, and thanks to the former two for agreeing to serve!
And special congratulations and thanks go to Stan Sclove, re-elected as Secretary/Treasurer through 2005.
On to news ....
We are working on arrangements for IFCS '04 in Chicago ... we now have secured hotel rooms at two locations in Chicago, and have a scientific committee in place that is choosing invited speakers. I am sure you will hear more details about the meeting during 2003.
Hope you are all staying warm and not too snowy. More next month.
Take care,
CSNA 2003. We are looking forward to the meeting planned for mid-June at Florida State University, hosted by Mike Brusco.
CSNA 2004. The 2004 meeting will be combined
with that of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS).
The Chicago arrangements committee is spearheaded by Buck McMorris, Chair of
the Math Department at Illinois Institute of Tecnology (I.I.T.). The meeting
is slated tentatively for Thursday to Monday, 15 to 19 July, 2004.
[Editor's Note: See below for further details on both meetings.]
Membership renewal notices will be mailed out in several weeks. These will go not only to those who paid dues for 2002 but also to a number of individuals who were members in recent years but not in 2002. Membership has dwindled a bit during the past couple of years. Let's each try to recruit one or two new members during 2003! We have a great meeting coming up at Florida State this year, and the international meeting in Chicago in 2004!
At the end of each year, terms of two members of the Board of Directors expire. The slate this year includes five candidates for the two open positions,
- Carolyn Anderson (Ed Psych, University of Illinois)
- David Holmes (Math & Stat, The College of New Jersey)
- Dean Judson (Census Bureau)
- Vicki Laidler (Computer Sciences Corp. at the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore)
- Kert Viele (Statistics, University of Kentucky).
In addition this year, the term of the Secretary/Treasurer expires. Stan Sclove is running unopposed for this office.
Thanks are due to all the candidates for agreeing to run, and to this year's Nominating Committee, consisting of Phipps Arabie, Mike Brusco, Chris Fraley, Larry Hubert, Stan Sclove, and Stan Wasserman, ex officio.
Ballots have been e-mailed and mailed to eligible voters (regular members and student members). Votes are due by e-mail or regular mail to the Secretary by 24-December.
Update! The results of Election 2002 are in! Mank thanks to the Nominating Committee: Phipps Arabie, Mike Brusco, Chris Fraley, Larry Hubert, Stan Wasserman (ex officio) and myself. Special thanks to the candidates for the positions on the Board of Directors, Carolyn Anderson, David Holmes, Dean Judson, Vicki Laidler, and Kert Viele.
The two new members of the Board of Directors will be Carolyn Anderson and Kert Viele. Congratulations! Their term of office begins on 1-January-2003. To those whose terms as Directors will end, Jacqueline Meulman and Jim Rohlf, many thanks for your time and efforts.
We hope and expect that "retiring" officers will remain especially active, particularly given their experience. We urge the whole slate of candidates to remain active.
Below is a list of the Board, effective 1-January-2003. Note: There are 14 positions: four officers, six elected directors, and four editors.
The September 2002 issue of the Journal of Classification is the first one under my editorship, and I would like to make a few comments on this propitious occasion. First and foremost, thanks are due to Phipps Arabie, founding editor of the Journal, for leaving his brainchild (which was conceived, as Phipps never stopped reminding us, by J. Douglas Carroll) in my care. I will continue in his footsteps, but following my own path, to serve the Classification community by facilitating scholarly communication of new methodological results and insights, across a variety of disciplines. I am very grateful to the Board of Directors of the Classification Society of North America (CSNA) for their confidence in me, and praise their broad-mindedness in appointing someone from overseas to run this operation.
All Members of the Editorial Board most graciously resigned upon termination of Phipps' editorship, enabling me to make changes and invite new people. Fortunately, nineteen of the old Members accepted my invitation to stay on the Board. They are the ambassadors of the Journal of Classification, and my safeguard for continued high-quality reviewing and advice. I look forward to receiving the benefit of their extensive experience and expertise. It is also my pleasure to introduce ten new Board members, from eight different countries. In alphabetical order, these are: Jean-Pierre Barthélemy (France), Wayne DeSarbo (USA), Anuska Ferligoj (Slovenia), Wolfgang Gaul (Germany), Henk Kiers (The Netherlands), Fred McMorris (USA), Akinori Okada (Japan), Philippa Pattison (Australia), Roberta Siciliano (Italy), and Michel Wedel (The Netherlands). Having worked personally with all of these excellent colleagues on various previous occasions, I am delighted that they enthusiastically agreed to serve the Journal, and I trust that we will have a smooth and fertile cooperation.
The editorial office is being run in a friendly and firm manner by my Editorial assistant Ellen Imthorn, who also answers all your E-mails. I am very grateful to Springer Verlag for having sponsored us financially to get started. Our Technical Editor, Eva Whitmore, has been a really great help in getting this issue together, and our communication already has that fine quality as if it had existed for years. There currently is a vacancy for the Book Editorship, and I would very much welcome suggestions for candidates to run this section of the Journal.
Apart from announcements and acknowledgements, this issue consists of five articles. The papers by Stanley Sclove, Kohei Adachi, and Christian Hennig were still processed under the editorial responsibility of Phipps Arabie, while the paper by Meulders, De Boeck, Kuppens and Van Mechelen and the paper by Hubert, Arabie and Meulman are the first products of the new editorship. The first of the latter papers builds a nice three-way bridge between the probabilistic world of latent class analysis and the deterministic worlds of overlapping clustering and three-way methods. The second, which is a reworked version of a paper presented at the DIMACS Working Group Meeting on Algorithms for Multidimensional Scaling (DIMACS Center, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, August 6-9, 2001), compares several approaches to least squares unidimensional scaling in terms of speed and local minima, and introduces the first working nonmetric (or ordinal) method of that kind. Together, this fascinating collection of five papers covers quite a wide range of distinct areas of our field. I sincerely hope that it will encourage prospective authors to submit their work in similar areas to this Journal. My objective is to have the Journal of Classification operate on the broadest possible basis.
| October 25 2002 | Willem J. Heiser |
Due in large part to the efforts of Mike Brusco (mbrusco@cob.fsu.edu), the conference organizer, CSNA'03 has been scheduled for 12-15 June 2003 at the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Tallahassee, Florida. The conference will open on Thursday, June 12, with a day of short courses and an evening reception followed by two days of sessions and ending on Sunday, June 15, with a half-day of sessions. The website for the conference is located at
| http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~mbrusco/csna.htm. |
If you are interested in presenting a contributed paper information regarding the call for abstracts can be found at the above website. The deadline for abstract submission is April 1, 2003.
| Working Group: Algorithms for Multidimensional Scaling II |
Immediately preceding the CSNA-2003 meeting being hosted by Mike Brusco at the Doubletree Hotel in Tallahassee, Florida (June 12-15, 2003) there will be a followup meeting of a previous Workshop on MDS Algorithms held in August, 2001, at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. This meeting will be held at the same site as the CSNA meeting, and is sponsored by DIMACS (the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science) at Rutgers. The DIMACS meeting will begin at 1PM on Wednesday, June 11, just before the CSNA meeting begins, and continue during the day on Thursday, June 12, independent of the Thursday workshops associated with CSNA, but prior to the opening reception for CSNA on Thursday evening.
All participants should directly contact the Doubletree Hotel to make suitable reservations. The nightly rate is $85, excluding tax and fees, and is guaranteed through May 20, 2003. Please indicate that you are with the CSNA group when you make reservations. The telephone is (850)-224-5000, and their fax number is (850)-513-9516. Further information about the CSNA meeting may be obtained from the CSNA website http://www.pitt.edu/~csna. The DIMACS website for this event is http//dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Scaling2/
The organizing committee for this MDS event will consist of
On Friday morning, Larry Hubert will give an invited talk on MDS. This talk is jointly sponsored by DIMACS and CSNA, and all CSNA attendees are welcome to attend. CSNA attendees who would also like to attend and/or participate in the DIMACS Workshop on MDS Algorithms must notify the workshop organizers in advance and pay a workshop registration fee of $75. This fee will cover participation in the workshop, coffee breaks and meals.
Anyone wishing to attend the DIMACS meeting should either register by means of the DIMACS web site
| http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Scaling2/. |
The CSNA proposal for an invited session at JSM 2003 was successful in the competition. Our invited session will be on Bayesian Modeling of Social Networks, with talks by Pip Pattison (University of Melbourne), Mark Handcock (University of Washington), Adrian Raftery (University of Washington), and Stan Wasserman (University of Illinois).
We should thank Paramjit Gill (Okanagan University College, British Columbia) for organizing and Tim Schwartz (Simon Fraser University) for chairing.
[submitted by D. Banks (BanksD@cber.FDA.gov) 08/19/02]Planning for IFCS 2004, to be held from 15-19 July 2004 on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL, is being organized by David Banks (BanksD@cber.FDA.gov) and Buck McMorris (mcmorris@iit.edu). The conference is being hosted by CSNA. A Scientific Program Committee has been formed and the selection of plenary and distinguished speakers will soon be completed.
Further information about these conferences will be posted here and at the CSNA website (http://www.cs-na.org/) as soon as it becomes available.
It was noted in the previous issue of this newsletter that David Wishart (david@clustan.com) has published a new book entitled Whisky Classified: Choosing Single Malts by Flavour. The book is now being distributed in the US by Trafalgar Square Publishing (list $24.95) and is available for purchase. For example, the book is currently being offered by Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/) for $17.47.
As promised, here is a review of David's book: I hope that it encourages those interested to explore the its contents in more detail:
Having read David's book I can honestly recommend it to anyone who enjoys single malts and is interested in learning about their history, production and wide range of flavors. The history of whisky is quite fascinating (ever wonder about the origins of the phrase 'the real McCoy'?) and the wonderful range of single malts which the Scots have managed to create using just four simple ingredients - barley, peat, water and yeast - helps to explain why whisky is often referred to as aqua vitae or "the water of life".
The main focus of the book is on the flavors of malt whiskies and a classification of all of the principal malts of Scotland according to their taste. This is priceless information to anyone who is either searching for a single malt to call their own or who has a favorite and is interested in discovering malts of similar flavor. There is an entry for each distillery producing a single malt; these entries contain, among other information, a unique "flavor profile" for the distillery's principal malt and what facilities are available at the distillery for visitors.
This book serves as a useful and entertaining guide to those who wish to go exploring in the world of single malts.
Further information is available atWord has been received from Winifred Sewell's sister Martha that Winifred passed away recently.
Winifred "Win" Sewell was 85 years old. Win had been a member of CSNA every year since 1971. She had been renewing her CSNA membership as a regular member, but last year she renewed as a "retired" member.
On her membership renewal form she wrote a note,
I am 84 years old and do a lot of volunteer professional work without income for past couple of years. So I decided it was time to declare my retirement.
WS 12/16/01
Win was a medical librarian and was responsible for Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) as a team member creating the early medical information system MEDLARS.
This issue of Machine Learning may be of interest to other CSNA members. The editors are seeking papers regarding advances in the theory of data clustering. An online version of the Call for Papers, including topics of interest, review criteria, and information about the submission process, can be found at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Nina_Mishra/MLJ-clustering.html.
Important dates
- December 6, 2002
- Abstract Submission deadline.
- December 13, 2002
- Full submissions should be received.
- May 27, 2003
- Decisions sent to authors; papers accepted with no more than minor revisions accepted to the special issue.
- December 27, 2003
- Final versions of accepted papers should be received in the format specified for full submissions, using Kluwer style guidelines.
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