Classification Society of North America
Mel Janowitz, President
Fionn Murtagh, President-Elect
Mike Larsen, Newsletter Editor

Classification Society of North America (CSNA) Newsletter

January 2006, Issue #71

Contents

           Notes from the Newsletter Editor
  From the new CSNA President, Mel Janowitz
  From the CSNA Secretary/Treasurer, Stan Sclove
  CSNA Annual Conference Information
  CSNA Elections Results
  CSNA Board of Directors
  Classification Literature Automated Search Service, Fionn Murtagh
  Member benefits
  Conference Listings
  Chikio Hayashi Award (Deadline: Imminent)

This and previous issues of the newsletter can be read online through the CSNA web page ( http://www.classification-society.org/csna/csna.html ) and here . All suggestions are welcome! (larsen at iastate dot edu).

Notes from Newsletter Editor

Greetings and Happy New Year! Welcome to the Winter of 2006 edition of the CSNA Newsletter!

The 2006 CSNA meeting will occur at the DIMACS Center at Rutgers University, May 10-13, 2006. CSNA president Mel Janowitz is organizing. David Banks and Bill Shannon are the program committee members. The meeting will overlap with the DIMACS workshop on Clustering Problems in Biological Networks May 9 - 11, 2006. Despite the fact that the date is a little earlier than usual, we hope that many of you will be able to attend the CSNA meeting and that several of you will also take advantage of hte DIMACS workshop.

There is very little time to submit applications for the Chikio Hayashi Award to attend the IFCS meeting. New researchers please check it out right away.

CSNA Board of Directors elections occurred at the end of last year. The results are reported in this newsletter.

As always, suggestions, comments, and news items are welcome.

Best regards,
Mike

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Introducing Your New President

My greetings to the CSNA membership. I have been a CSNA member since around 1967, and have dearly enjoyed the meetings I have attended and the people I have met. My original interest in CSNA stemmed from curiosity about computer algorithms that produce estimates of evolutionary history. This remains a current interest, but I am in great awe of the changes in the field. Who could have predicted the current role played by mathematics, statistics and computer science in the study of the evolutionary history of organisms? I am equally in awe of the accomplishments of data mining in the understanding of subtle patterns in huge data sets. My goal is to help CSNA remain a scientific leader in areas such as these. I humbly ask all of you to help me achieve this in the two years I have as President.

I want to tell you that I am an email person, and will welcome suggestions, ideas, complaints, and whatever concerns you have about CSNA. Please just mention CSNA in the subject of any email you send me (melj at dimacs dot rutgers dot edu). I want to be open and available to the entire membership.

Let me now express my thanks to the many people who have already helped me with their advice and criticisms. First and foremost there is our new Past President Phipps Arabie. Phipps has made the transition from President Elect to President seamless for me, and has been supportive of my efforts to explore new ideas and programs during his tenure as President. Let me also just mention David Banks, Jennifer Pittman Clark, Herbie Lee, Fionn Murtagh, Jim Rohlf, Bill Shannon, and Stanley Wasserman as being especially helpful to me. And a special vote of thanks goes to Stan Sclove. Without his tireless efforts, I could not do my job. There are others too that I may have forgotten to mention. Sorry! I plan a monthly communiqué to the Executive Board, and will do as much business as I can via email. Anyone wishing to be copied into these communiqués should let me know, and I will include you in the mailing, though decisions must be made by the Board.

Plans for CSNA06 are coming along, and I will cover those in a separate article. The dates are May 10-13, 2006, and the place is DIMACS at Rutgers University. I hope to see you there. The meeting looks exciting, and I hope you can attend. Important talks are scheduled in areas related to bioinformatics, machine learning, data mining, social networks, and unsupervised approaches to computer security. I especially hope you can present a paper or organize a special session related to these or other topics. The web site address for the meeting is http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/CSNA/.

There are a number of new developments that I should briefly mention. First of all, we have a new 5 year contract with Springer. Jim Rohlf was our indefatigable lead negotiator here, and I thank him for his efforts. Part of this contract involves a 20% discount for CSNA members on all books purchased from Springer. There will also be access to back issues of the Journal of Classification. The details will be sent to the membership via individual email. The SERVICE CD will have some new additions. I have contacted each of our sister societies of IFCS with the thought of making it easier for their members to also become members of CSNA. The arrangements may differ from Society to Society, but I am anxious to make closer contacts with them. This is leading to a cooperative arrangement with SFC (Société Francophone de Classification). The details of this are being worked out, but it will involve SFC members being able to become affiliate members of CSNA by making payments through SFC. It is my hope that arrangements like this will lead to meaningful joint scientific collaborations between CSNA and other member societies of IFCS.

The election results appear elsewhere in this Newsletter. I welcome the newly elected officers, and thank the departing officers for their past efforts. I will be working closely with the new Board of Directors. So that's it for now. I will do the best job I know how to do. Let me know if I am doing things right, and let me know especially if you think I am heading in the wrong direction on some issue. Let's all work together for a great two years for CSNA! I hope to be an active and innovative leader for you.

Mel Janowitz, CSNA President

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News from the Secretary/Treasurer Stan Sclove

Stan reports to the membership on four topics:

  1. ELECTION

    On January 1, President-Elect Mel Janowitz became President and President Phipps Arabie became Past President. The terms of Board members Carolyn Anderson and Kert Viele expired; we thank them for their service. Webmaster David Dubin did a superb job of setting up online voting for the annual election. The results are as follows:


  2. MEMBERSHIP INCENTIVES FROM SPRINGER

    Please renew your membership if you have not already done so.

    The Journal of Classification is published by Springer Verlag. Springer offers the following incentives to CSNA members: a 20% discount for all CSNA members on all Springer books; a 33% discount to new members on all Springer books they order during April, May, and June, 2006.

    Another important perquisite of CSNA membership: Springer will shortly provide online access to all back issues of the Journal.

    New members receive the bibliographic CD, Classification Literature Automated Search Service, with their membership. The CD includes out-of-print classification-classic books by Hartigan, Bock, Jain and Dubes, and van Rijsbergen.

  3. MEETINGS

    We are looking forward to the 2006 Annual Meeting, which will be held from May 10 to 13. The meeting, organized by Mel Janowitz, will take place in Piscataway, New Jersey, at the DIMACS Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers University. The meeting will be co-sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. It will be held jointly with a DIMACS Workshop on Clustering Problems in Biological Networks, which will take place May 9-11. Information on participation, registration, accommodations, and travel can be found at: http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/CSNA.

  4. MATERIALS FROM IFCS 2004 CHICAGO STILL AVAILABLE

    The following items are still available through Stan Sclove, CSNA Secretary/Treasurer, at (slsclove at uic dot edu), in limited quantities, at reduced rates:
Stan Sclove, CSNA Secretary

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CSNA Annual Conference Information

Classification Society of North America 2006 Meeting
on
Network Data Analysis and Data Mining:
Applications in Biology, Computer Science,
Intrusion Detection, and Other areas

May 10 - 13, 2006
DIMACS Center, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

Organizer:
Mel Janowitz, DIMACS, melj at dimacs dot rutgers dot edu

Program Committee:
David Banks, Duke University, banks at stat dot duke dot edu
William Shannon, Washington University School of Medicine, shannon at ilya dot wustl dot edu
Stan Sclove, University of Illinois at Chicago, slsclove at uic dot edu

This meeting will be held partly was a joint meeting with the DIMACS workshop on Clustering Problems in Biological Networks May 9 - 11, 2006. The Institute for Mathematical Statistics is a cosponsor of the meeting. w
This is the annual meeting of the Classification Society of North America. (CSNA). Further information about CSNA may be obtained from its web site http://www.classification-society.org/csna/csna.html. The theme of the meeting is Network Data Analysis and Data Mining: Applications in Biology, Sociology, Computer Science, Intrusion Detection, and Related Areas.

Further information about the meeting may be obtained by email from csna06 at dimacs dot rutgers to edu. Proposals for special sessions, contributed papers and invited speakers are welcome and may be submitted via this email address.

This meeting will be held partly as a joint meeting with the DIMACS workshop "Clustering Problems in Biological Networks" that is being held May 9-11, 2006 at DIMACS. See: http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Clustering/. Both DIMACS and the CSNA cordially invite you to participate in these meetings. Registration for the CSNA meeting alone is welcome, and there will also be a special combined rate available for people wishing to attend both events.

The general theme involves data analysis of various types of networks, and as is typical in DIMACS sponsored events, the meeting will involve interdisciplinary approaches that will include ideas from discrete mathematics, statistics, and computer science. Background material will be provided by means of tutorials and expository talks, and there will be a strong emphasis on the solution of real world problems. The formation of research alliances for future work will be encouraged. CSNA meetings are traditionally informal and interdisciplinary. The annual meeting of CSNA will be held as part of this meeting, as will the meeting of its Board of Directors.

The organizers of the meeting are especially interested in the inclusion of a wide variety of contributed papers involving applications and theory for classification, clustering and related methodologies as they might apply to topics related to the theme of the meeting. There will be ample opportunity for informal discussions and the exploration of new research ideas. Suggestions for invited paper sessions, short courses, panel discussions and invited speakers are encouraged, and may be directed by email to csna06 at dimacs dot rutgers dot edu. Proposals for contributed talks or special sessions should be directed to that same address.

Registration: Pre-registration deadline: May 3, 2006
Please see website for additional registration information.
Information on participation, registration, accommodations, and travel can be found at: http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/CSNA/.

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CSNA Elections Results

The Nominating Committee (Mel Janowitz, Chair; Phipps Arabie, Jennifer Pittman Clarke, Herbie Lee, Stan Sclove) formed the slate. Dave Dubin administered the web-voting application. These are the results, as well as notes about Board member status.

On January 1, President-Elect Mel Janowitz became President and President Phipps Arabie became Past President. The terms of Board members Carolyn Anderson and Kert Viele expired; we thank them for their service. Webmaster David Dubin did a superb job of setting up online voting for the annual election. The results are as follows:
The list of current officers is given below. Thanks to all who ran for office and to all who voted!

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CSNA BOARD OF DIRECTORS, eff. 1-Jan-2006             latest update 2006: Jan 15

OFFICE         OFFICER                      TERM         E-MAIL

                        OFFICER DIRECTORS
Pres.          Melvin F. Janowitz      2006-2008    melj at dimax.rutgers.edu
Pres.-Elect    Fionn Murtagh           2006-2008    fmurtagh at acm.org
Past Pres.     Phipps Arabie           2006-2008    arabie at andromeda.rutgers.edu 
Secy/Treas.    Stanley L. Sclove       2006-2008    slsclove at uic.edu

                        ELECTED DIRECTORS
Director       Michael Brusco          2004-2006    mbrusco at garnet.acns.fsu.edu
Director       Wm. D. Shannon	       2004-2006    wshannon at wustl.edu

Director       Robert C Powers         2005-2007    rcpowe01 at louisville.edu
Director       Douglas Steinley        2005-2007    steinleyd at missouri.edu  

Director       Carolyn J. Anderson     2006-2008    cja at uiuc.edu
Director       Jim Rohlf               2006-2008    rohlf at life.bio.sunysb.edu

                        EDITOR DIRECTORS
J. of Cl.      Willem Heiser        (indefinite)    heiser at fsw.leidenuniv.nl
CSNA Service   Fionn Murtagh        (indefinite)    fmurtagh at acm.org
Newsletter     Michael D. Larsen    (indefinite)    larsen at iastate.edu
Webmaster      David S. Dubin       (indefinite)    ddubin at uiuc.edu

                       REPRESENTATIVES TO IFCS COUNCIL 
(Elected by Board.  By custom, the terms are overlapping terms of four years.)
F. R. Buck McMorris                 2006-2009       mcmorris at iit.edu
F. James Rohlf                      2004-2007       rohlf at life.bio.sunysb.edu
Notes.
(i) There are 16 positions: four officers, six elected directors, four editors, and two ex officio IFCS Reps. The IFCS Reps are non-voting members of the Board.
(ii) For matters regarding the Journal, please use: joc at fsw dot leidenuniv dot nl

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CSNA Service: The Future

The "Classification Literature Automated Search Service" or CSNA Service is, firstly and for more than 25 years, a bibliography of publications citing one or more of a set of "classical" references in clustering and classification. More recently scanned copies of books that are out of print have been added to it. CSNA Service is produced - now on CD - each year and distributed with issue number 1 of the annual volume of the Journal of Classification. In regard to future prospects, it is this latter aspect - scanned books - that I would like to discuss a little in this article.

Books currently on the CSNA Service are Trends and evolution relating to the journal literature are the subject of major debates. The Open Access movement seeks to have all published material openly accessible. The NIH in 2004 mandated NIH-funded scientists to use the PubMed Central repository (www.pubmedcentral.gov) six months after publication. The jury is out on whether the cost models of (non-profit or commercial) publishers are compatible with fully open access to journal publications.

The book domain though is different. It is mainly off the radar screen in the Open Access debate for a start. And books have a relatively short life - shorter than most journals.

One example of a growing repository of online, and otherwise out of print, books is to be found in computer vision. The CVonline resource area is at http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CVonline/books.htm. This is a good resource for students or for any of us - at any time - to access important information.

CSNA Service has not limited itself to books in English, so it is very clearly a service for the international clustering and classification community. We have H.H. Bock's book in German, and I.C. Lerman's in French. I proposed to J.P. Benzecri that his original volumes on Taxonomy and on Correspondence Analysis should be similarly made available through CSNA Service and his feeling was not only positive but he also pointed to possible interest in having the entire run of his journal, Les Cahiers de l'Analyse des Donnees, which ceased publication in 1996, similarly scanned and made available. At a quick calculation, there were about 10,000 pages over the lifetime of that journal. I am also keen to have out of print books on p-adic algebra and ultrametric calculus included, in the course of time.

My purpose in sketching out some current thoughts, and interesting perspectives to be pursued, is to invite feedback on these ideas and also on other important content which could be made available in this way. So far, I have not noted sufficient overlap from the direction of Google Scholar.

Various considerations point to the benefits of a books repository in the area of clustering and classification, and related data analysis. Firstly it is a learning resource. Secondly it serves to profile the domain, and the expertise and indeed scholarly heritage of those working in it. Thirdly, in line with the underlying idea of open access, it is democratic and non-exclusive. Fourthly it gives new life to out of print material which is well deserved. Finally, it helps to avoid reinventing the wheel, since often enough approaches and methods have been pursued in the past but have been forgotten in the course of time.

Fionn Murtagh, Editor, CSNA Service, fmurtagh at acm dot org.

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Member benefits

A brief reminder of some member benefits:

So keep your membership active and encourage others to join!

                        Membership form

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Conference Listings

IFCS 2006 Conference: Data Science and Classification

From Henk A.L. Kiers:

As I hope you already know, the /IFCS 2006 Conference: Data Science and Classification/ is scheduled for July 25-29, 2006, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It provides an interdisciplinary forum for social scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, biologists, ethnologists and all others interested in data analysis and classification. Conference sessions allow individuals interested in theory, methods or applications of data analysis or classification to share ideas and explore common interests.

Details on submission of abstracts (*deadline February 15, 2006*), registration (e.g., conference fees), set up of the program, and CHA travel fund for young researchers are now available on the website, and further information will become available soon. So please quickly take a look at http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/info/ifcs06/.

Also new is that names of the invited speakers are available now: Presidential Address: David J. Hand; Keynote Speaker: Adrian E. Raftery; Invited Speakers: Hamparsum Bozdogan, Maria Paula Britto, Patrick Doreian, Christian Hennig, Carlo Lauro, Pierre Legendre, Jacqueline Meulman, Boris Mirkin, and John Shawe-Taylor.

I hope to meet you all in Ljubljana,

Sincerely,

Henk A.L. Kiers, Past President of IFCS

The 2006 Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare

The Eighth International Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare will be held in Istanbul, 13-17 July 2006. This is a short and early announcement to facilitate your making travel plans. As the meeting draws closer, more information will be posted on its website, which is already open at http://scw2006.bilgi.edu.tr. See also http://www.classification-society.org/csna/socialchoice.html.

CFP: Computational Proteomics: Management and Analysis of Proteomics Data

IEEE Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (IEEE CBMS 2006), Marriott, Salt Lake City, City Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, June 22-23, 2006. Special Track on Computational Proteomics: Management and Analysis of Proteomics Data. Special Track Website: http://bioinformatics.unicz.it/cbms2006/

CFP: Symposium on Network Analysis in Natural Sciences and Engineering

Network Analysis in Natural Sciences and Engineering, April 4th-6th 2006, http://irgroup.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/NAiNE/, part of AISB'06: Adaptation in Artificial and Biological Systems, University of Bristol, Bristol, England.

CFP: CIBB 2006 - Genova (ITALY)

CIBB 2006, Third International Meeting on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Genova, ITALY -- September August 29-31, 2006. Meeting Website: http://cibb06.disi.unige.it/. CIBB 2006 addresses a cutting edge area of application of Neural Networks, Fuzzy Logic and Evolutionary Computation methods.

CFP: GfKl 2006 - Special Track on Web and Text Mining

Special Track on Web and Text Mining: http://irgroup.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/GfKl2006_WTM_Track/, as part of the 30th Annual Conference of the German Classification Society (GfKl 2006) Berlin, Germany, 8-10 March 2006. The conference features tracks on specific problems in classification. The objective of this track is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas on various aspects of Web and Text Mining.

Interface 2006

"Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to you to call your attention to an upcoming conference, and ask for your help in making your organization or department colleagues and students aware of it. Interface 2006, the 38th Symposium on the Interface of Computing Science and Statistics, will be held in Pasadena, CA next May. This is the annual symposium of the Interface Foundation of North America, a professional society of statisticians, computer scientists, mathematicians and discipline scientists who work on the "interface" of computing science, statistics, and applications.

Interface 2006 will be May 24-27, 2006 at the Westin Pasadena. The theme is Massive Data Sets and Streams. The invited program includes a wide variety of sessions including: Defense and Homeland Security, Astrophysics and Astronomy, Climate and Weather, Solar and Space Physics, Solid Earth Geophysics, Mining Earth Science Data, Spatio-temporal Data Mining, Streaming Data, Statistics and Information Technology, Telecom Data Streams, Network Traffic Analysis, and Curve Fitting for Massive Complex Data Sets. There are also sessions devoted to life science, social science, and other topics: Genomics, Proteomics, Medicine, Alcoholism, Forensic Statistics, Text Mining, and Statistics and the Arts.

Besides the invited program there are three other categories of papers and talks we are soliciting: refereed, special focus, and contributed. Refereed submissions are full, conference style, peer-reviewed papers, and if accepted, will be published in Computing Science and Statistics, the Interface Symposium's proceedings. Special Focus sessions are new this year, and effectively allow anyone to become a session organizer by collecting 4 or 5 submissions from colleagues and submitting them as a set. For example, among the special focus sessions that have already been proposed are: Data Fusion, Virtual Data Sets and Metaservers, Remote Sensing, Massive Data Set Visualization, Analysis of fMRI Data, and Bioinformatics. Finally, contributed papers are encouraged from all methodological and application areas.

Please consider participating in Interface 2006. Abstract submission and registration are now open. You can find links to the appropriate forms and more information about the conference at http://www.galaxy.gmu.edu/Interface2006/i2006webpage.html."

Amy Braverman, Amy.Braverman at jpl dot nasa dot gov.

Other Listings

The IFCS conference page: http://www.classification-society.org/ifcsconf.html

See also the IFCS Newsletter: Number 30 (November, 2005): IFCS newsletter.

American Statistical Association meetings page: http://www.amstat.org/meetings

The International Biometric Society conferences page: http://www.tibs.org/conferences.htm

Institute of Mathematical Statistics meetings page: http://www.imstat.org/meetings/

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Chikio Hayashi Award

Below are links to Guidelines and an Application Form for the Chikio Hayashi Awards for funding several promising young (under age 35) researchers who attend the IFCS conference.    We urge your prompt attention to this matter, as the deadline is now. Please send applications to CSNA president Mel Janowitz immediately (melj at dimacs dot rutgers dot edu), that is, by January 23rd, so that Dr. Janowitz can meet his deadline for submitting applications from CSNA: Application, Guidelines.

About CSNA

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.classification-society.org/csna/csna.html ). Information on becoming a member of CSNA is available at the CSNA website.

CSNA Webmaster: Dave Dubin, ddubin at uiuc dot edu      
Newsletter editor: Mike Larsen, larsen at iastate dot edu

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