Call for Participation

The 2007 Meeting of the Classification Society of North America

Finding Structure in Complex Data

Extracting useful information from large and complex machine-readable data sets is a problem faced by people in nearly every area of commerce, manufacturing, government, and in every academic discipline and science. Creating an environment conducive to solving such problems is not a mystery, but it is difficult since it requires assembling a community with broad collective expertise in mathematics, statistics, computing, and a wide variety of different application areas.

For the past thirty years the Classification Society of North America (CSNA) has gathered just such a community at its annual meetings. CSNA members contribute a wide range of backgrounds in mathematics, statistics, computing, information and decision sciences, in addition to expertise in business, the physical, social, life, and earth sciences. We are brought together by a common interest in the shape of data analysis, extraction and summarization problems, and with the goal of making sense of those commonalities despite differences in terminology, notation, and the disparate professional literatures in which we read and publish. Our meetings offer the participant a kind of productivity that can't be matched at the discipline-specific, tool-specific, and problem-specific meetings that we attend at other times of the year.

CSNA 2007

The 2007 CSNA meeting will take place June 7–10, 2007, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, Illinois. The meeting is sponsored by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the UIUC College of Education and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. We invite proposals for contributed paper sessions in all areas relating to classification, clustering and data analysis.

The types of problems that interest us are often described as machine learning, pattern recognition, or data mining problems, or with reference to the application area such as information retrieval, molecular bioinformatics, authorship attribution, market segmentation, psychometrics, social networks, and so on. One can get a better sense of our diverse application areas and computational techniques by browsing the abstracts from previous meetings (2006, 2005, 2004, 2003).

CSNA meeting sessions are traditionally informal, with presentations aimed at soliciting critique, discussion, and suggestions for improving the work. In keeping with this atmosphere, we distribute abstracts of presented papers, but do not publish a proceedings.

CSNA and Digital Humanities

This year CSNA follows directly after the 2007 Digital Humanities meeting, which will take place at the same venue. Although CSNA sessions will reflect the usual range of disciplines, our meetings will intersect on June 7 with a Joint Workshop on Data Analysis and Research in the Humanities. In addition, DH 2007 and CSNA 2007 will have a mutual registration agreement, by which participants in either meeting will be able to attend sessions at both. So plan to come to Urbana early for some or all of the Digital Humanities meeting starting June 2nd. Further information on DH 2007 can be found at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dh2007/

Student Poster Competition

Students enrolled full time in a graduate or undergraduate program are eligible to participate in our student research poster competition. First prize (to be announced at the meeting) is a $500 travel stipend. Posters will be judged by a panel of data analysis experts on research originality, technical merit, and effectiveness of presentation. There is a limit of one entry per student, and one author per entry. Poster topics can be in any area of classification research.

Students wishing to enter the competition should submit a 1–2 page extended abstract of the work by email to the proposal address below no later than March 19, 2007. Selected entries will be invited to exhibit posters for the judging panel at the meeting.

Submitting your proposal

Proposals for CSNA papers are due March 19, 2007 and should include a title, author affiliation and contact information, and an abstract of no more than 200 words. This information should be sent as either a plain text or LaTeX attachment by email to csna2007@classification-society.org. In the event of difficulties using the address, contact David Dubin at the University of Illinois either by email (ddubin@uiuc.edu) or by telephone (217-244-3275). Proposals for work at the intersection of data analysis and humanistic scholarship should indicate whether they wish to be considered for case study discussion at the Joint DH/CSNA workshop. Student poster competition proposals are limited to two pages.

Join us in Urbana

Registration, travel, and schedule information for CSNA 2007 will be posted as it becomes available at http://classification-society.org/csna/csna07.html Further information about the society can be found at http://classification-society.org/csna/ CSNA is a member of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS).