Phipps Arabie, President
Mel Janowitz, President-Elect
Jennifer Pittman, Editor
At the end of the year there will be election of two new members of the Board of Directors. If you have suggestions for nominees, please send them to me or to Phipps Arabie, President. The names will be passed on to a Nominating Committee.
Thank you for joining, and welcome to our ranks! It is your financial support that enables us to bring you the journal, our bibliographic research service, and our meetings. We depend upon your participation to enable us to continue to provide you with classification-related publications, information and activities.
The arrangements for the 2004 meeting of the International Federation of Classification Societies are essentially in place. The conference website (http://www.classification-society.org/ifcs04/) has a copy of the invited program, automatic on-line registration, and information about housing options, as well as other useful information. The copies of the refereed proceedings are being printed up this week, the lecture halls and other conference facilities have been reserved, and the social arrangements are all confirmed.
We expect about 300 attendees, and besides the scientific program there will be a cruise on Lake Michigan, a traditional Chicago cookout, and the conference will close with a whiskey tasting (I encourage people to stay over Sunday night, and try to sleep in on Monday morning).
However good the social arrangements, the real reason to come is the research. We are fortunate to have Lynne Billard, Gilles Celeux, Pedro Domingos,Anuska Ferligoj, Wolfgang Gaul, David Hand, Bruno Leclerc, Taerim Lee, Regina Liu, Masahiro Mizuta, Fionn Murtagh, Carey Preibe, Jim Ramsay, Michael Steel Vladimir Vapnik, and Rosanna Verde as invited speakers. And there are many other distinguished researchers participating in the program---I am particularly impressed by the many excellent contributions we have received from new researchers.
So I urge everyone to move swiftly to register and to make their travel arrangements. It will be a great meeting, and I look forward to seeing all of the CSNA members there.
The XXIInd International Biometric Conference (IBC 2004) will be held jointly with the 2004 Australian Statistical Conference (ASC 2004) in Cairns, Australia, from 11th to 16th July 2004. With less than three months to go the program and list of speakers for the Invited sessions have been completed and can be viewed on the conference website (http://www.ozaccom.com.au/ibc2004/).
The Contributed Sessions are currently being finalised and the website will be updated with this information by mid May. Several exciting Short Courses are being run in Cairns prior to the conference and a special pre-conference satellite Workshop is being held in Sydney. Please see website for details.
The In-Conference tours have proved extremely popular. The Great Barrier Reef tour is already fully booked, but a second boat can be arranged if sufficient demand exists. There is also strong demand for tickets for the Conference Dinner and Tjapukai dance performance. DonŐt wait until you arrive in Cairns to book your tours or dinner, as places are limited and you may miss out.
To date Conference registrations have exceeded expectations. If you have not registered yet, please do so as soon as possible. July is peak tourist season in Cairns and flights and accommodation are at a premium.
Members of the Local Organising Committee look forward to seeing you in Cairns for what promises to be a memorable conference.
[submitted by K. Basford (http://www.uq.edu.au/~agkbasfo) 04/16/04]The Workshop on Symbolic and Spatial Data Analysis will be held on September 20, 2004, in Pisa, Italy. The main goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different communities such as machine learning, data analysis, symbolic data analysis and data mining to promote discussion and the development of new ideas and methods to deal with complex structured data.
The workshop is intented to be a highly communicative meeting place for researchers working on similar topics, but coming from different communities. In order to achieve these goals, the workshop will consist of invited talks, short presentations and discussions. Depending on the number of attendees, participants may be asked to present themselves, and state their research interests. Depending on the submitted papers, sessions will be organized by topics. At the end of each session, a discussion of the presented papers will take place.
The call for papers has been released and the submission deadline is June 14th, 2004. Notification of acceptance will be provided by July 5th, 2004 and camera-ready copies of submitted papers will be due July 14th, 2004.
The workshop chairs are Monique Noirhomme-Fraiture of the Institut d'Informatique, Namur, Belgium, and Paula Brito of the Faculdade de Economia, University of Porto. Further information including the complete call for papers is available at the workshop web site http://www.info.fundp.ac.be/ssda-pkdd04/
[submitted by M. Paula Brito (mpbrito at fep.up.pt) 04/24/04]The "Classification Literature Automatic Search Service", now in its 32nd year, is provided on CD with the first issue each year of the Journal of Classification. From a "profile" of 92 journal articles or books, in 2003 there were 4239 citations to one or more of them. On the CD is the cumulative bibliographic data, from 1994 to date (2003) - ten years data, about 25,000 citations.
Appearing on the CD are also the following books, in their entirety
A list (abbreviated) of "profile" literature references can be downloaded from http://www.isds.duke.edu/~jennifer/csna/profile_citation.txt. The first three columns give number of citations in the Science and Social Science Citation Indexes (SCI, SSCI), provided by ISI.
[submitted by F. Murtagh (F.Murtagh at qub.ac.dot.uk) 01/19/04]The WWW and ascii version of the CSNA Newsletter is made available as a service of the Classification Society of North America (web site: http://www.cs-na.org/). Further information on becoming a member of CSNA is also available at the CSNA website.
CSNA Webmaster: Stephen Hirtle, hirtle at pitt.edu