In this post I referred to an upcoming paper that we were preparing for submitting to the SGAI AI-2008. The paper is currently in the reviewing process. If you’re interested, the draft can be downloaded from our research group’s publication database. Feel free to read it and leave your comments in this blog.

For the SGAI-2008 conference paper it is required that the figures are in black-and-white. I can’t just convert the color figures into b/w because the color maps are wrecked and dark parts in SOMs that were clearly distinguishable before are the same shade of black after the conversion. The som_show function in the SOM toolbox has a colormap parameter. As it turned out, as usual, there’s just one more thing to do to generate the figures in a gray-scale colormap, using Matlab’s colormap function:

som_show(sM, [... more parameters ...],'colormap',colormap(gray))

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I feel as if I had just returned from AI-2007 (at least the expenses were paid just recently by the University) and there’s the deadline approaching for AI-2008, again held at Peterhouse College, UK.
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As recent as of March 28th, another paper of my/our work on the agriculture data got accepted. The conference is the Industrial Conference on Data Mining 2008, which will be taking place not far away in Leipzig, Germany. Based on the results and the information from those conferences, I might try to submit advanced work at BCS AI-2008, which will again take place at (frosty) Peterhouse College in Cambridge, UK. I won’t be there for long, though, as offspring is already on his/her way.

There are quite a few deadlines for publications approaching in January and I will submit another paper detailing some of the recent accomplishments on the agriculture data there. One of the conferences is ICDM 2008, held in Leipzig, Germany. It targets industrial applications of data mining and I felt the paper fit in there quite nicely.

I have also received more data sets from Martin Schneider at Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg which will have to be mined. There are quite a lot of interesting tasks to be performed on those data — that requires thorough planning. I probably won’t be able to do that planning until my return from the organizational business trip to Melbourne, starting a cooperation project between our research group and the one that I worked with in 2004/2005.

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I’ve returned from the Specialist’s Group on Artificial Intelligence of the British Computer Society’s meeting at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, UK. The event was quite worthwile, where undoubtedly the best speaker was Max Bramer himself. On Monday he gave a talk to PhD students on „How to survive a viva“. Since he often has been and will be an external supervisor or reviewer of PhD students‘ theses, he told us what he thinks is important in the thesis, how to write it, what and what not to do and so on. His talk was riddled with hilarious real examples of what he saw in thesis drafts or even final theses. That event, even featured as a free event to PhD students, was actually included for the first time at the conference before the main conference began on Tuesday.
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