President: Henk Kiers Contents Word from the President Report from IFCS Secretary Report on the IFCS-2004 Meeting in Chicago From the Editor - IFCS-2004 in Chicago Class-L listserver News from SKAD News from VOC News from the SFC News from JCS Information on upcoming Conferences The International Federation of Classification Societies, founded in 1985, is composed of: Associaçáo Portuguesa de Classificaçào e Análise de Dados, British Classification Society, Central American and Carribean Society of Classification and Data Analysis, Classification Society of North America, Gesellschaft für Klassifikation, Irish Pattern Recognition and Classification Society, Japanese Classification Society, Korean Classification Society, Société Francophone de Classification, Società Italiana di Statistica, Vereniging voor Ordinatie en Classificatie and Section of Classification and Data Analysis of the Polish Statistical Society. The IFCS is a non-profit, non-political scientific organization, the aims of which are to further classification research. Among other activities, the IFCS organises a biennial conference, and supports the Journal of Classification. International Federation of Classification Societies Newsletter Number 28 November 2004 Editor: Krzysztof Jajuga The term of several persons in IFCS Council ends at the end of 2004. I would like to thank Taerim Lee and David Banks for their excellent performance serving eight years as Treasury and Secretary. I would like to thank also Carlo Lauro for his excellent work as President and Vice- President and as well as John Gower and Ludovic Lebart for their work as Members of Council. It was real pleasure to work with you. Krzysztof Jajuga, Publication Officer IFCS Homepage: http://www.classification-society.org/ Designed and maintained by David Dubin. The website contains among others: the IFCS Constitution and By-Laws, the IFCS newsletters, and pointers to the websites of the member societies. Next IFCS Conference The next Tenth IFCS Conference will take place from July 25 to July 29, 2006 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Anuska Ferligoj and Vladimir Batagelj are the organizers of the conference. More information will soon appear on IFCS Website. A Word from the President: Towards More Direct Communication Since the last newsletter, many things have happened in the IFCS. First of all, we have had our biggest two-yearly event, the IFCS Conference in Chicago. It was a very successful conference, with lots of interesting invited and contributed papers, leading to the desired inspired scientific discussions. I wish to thank all the organizers again, in particular Buck McMorris, Stan Sclove and David Banks. In the mean time, the organization of the next IFCS conference, IFCS2006 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, is in full swing. The dates are July 25-29, 2006. A website for the conference is being prepared now. Also, various other matters within IFCS have been handled. The website has been revised considerably. A totally new style has been implemented by Handan Arik, to conform with our new logo and housestyle (designed by her earlier this year). New items have been posted on the website, among which are the considerably revised Constitution, By-Laws and Election Rules. The Election Rules are currently being followed for the organization of possibly the biggest election the IFCS Council ever had since its foundation (among other offices, the election of a Treasurer, Secretary, President-Elect). One of the major issues I wanted to pay attention to in my term as president is to achieve more direct communication of IFCS with individuals. So far, each individual receives IFCS material and information only via its member society. Furthermore, for individuals it is difficult to seek direct contact, for instance on methodological advice on classification, with groups of people within the global IFCS community. Communication across IFCS member societies is still limited, and essentially has to be carried out via the IFCS secretary. In the current electronic age, where every researcher has an email account, such detours are no longer necessary. At the council meeting in Chicago, various possibilities were discussed, and it then turned out that a major possibility for this, using a listserver, has already been available for a long time, but is heavily underused for this purpose. I refer to the Class-L listserver, set up by CSNA, but available to any researcher interested in classification. The basic idea of the listserver is that people can subscribe to it (currently over 500 subscribers exist) and that anyone can send a message to it that is then distributed over all subscribers. Such messages could very well be requests for advice or information on classification methods, for instance, "Who knows about an overview of methods for ..?", or "Where could I find programs for ... ?", or "Who has compared various methods for ...?" Besides, the listserver can very well be used to spread announcements of conferences, courses, or similar activities in classification and data analysis that could potentially be of interest to the whole IFCS community. I would like to use it for at least announcing any IFCS supported activities, such as IFCS supported courses, IFCS supported meetings, etc. Of course, the success of the listserver depends on careful and modest use of it. So it is important to choose the subject headings well. Therefore, IFCS announcements sent out via the listserver should be marked as such in the subject heading. Whether or not the class-L listserver will turn out a successful medium for communication to and between individuals in IFCS depends crucially on whether or not individuals will subscribe to it. Even though the listserver has many subscribers, it appears that a great majority of individuals in IFCS, even among the very active ones, have not subscribed yet. Elsewhere in this Newsletter, James Rohlf describes how one can (very easily) subscribe to this listserver. I recommend everybody to read this and actually subscribe to the listserver. Also, you can go to the listserver's website (lists.sunysb.edu) to have a look at its archive of previous exchanges. I hope that by using this listserver, we can make a first step to more direct communication with and between IFCS individuals. Depending on its success and your participation, it may grow to become the main communication medium of our Federation. Henk Kiers News from the IFCS Secretary As 2004 rattles to a close, the IFCS is engaged with several important projects. First, there will soon be elections for the offices of President- Elect, Secretary, Treasurer, two Additional Members, and a new appointment to the finance Committee. Hans Bock is chairing the committee to seek nominees for these positions. Also, we are experimenting with a new on-line voting system for the Council. Dave Dubin is working on this, and we hope to have it operational in time for the next election. That may be an unrealistic timetable, and Council members will be apprised when the new voting system becomes operational. Third, at the end of this year the membership on the Council will shrink substantially. At the Chicago meeting it was decided that all but the largest member societies would have a single representative. Thus most societies should begin now in planning which of their two representatives will continue on the Council. Fourth, each of the member societies should submit to the Secretary, before the end of this year, their membership lists. This is needed in order to determine the appropriate number of representatives and to help with related administrative work. So far I have received lists for the Irish Pattern Recognition and Classification Society (IPRCS) and from the Societe Francophone de Classification (SFC). I hope to get the rest soon. Finally, I shall be stepping down as Secretary, after eight years. Since this is my last newsletter piece, I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone in the IFCS for your collegiality, your scholarship, your help, and your friendship. This has been a great experience for me, and I am very proud to be associated with this group. David Banks, IFCS Secretary Report on the IFCS-2004 Meeting in Chicago The ninth meeting of the IFCS was held in Chicago on July 15-18, 2004. There were slightly more than 200 attendees, and the meeting was hosted by the Classification Society of North America. Regarding the quality of the presentations, the organizers are grateful to all of the member societies for their contributions. There were many wonderful talks, on the usual broad range of topics. But we particularly want to thank Gilles Celeux, David Hand, Jim Ramsay, and Mike Steel for outstanding plenary sessions, and also the special distinguished speakers: Lynn Billard, Pedro Domingas, Anuska Ferligoj, Wolfgang Gaul, Bruno Leclerc, Taerim Lee, Regina Liu, Masahiro Mizuta, Carey Preibe, and Vladimir Vapnik. Finally, we all owe special thanks to David Wishart, who closed the conference with a unique empirical study of the classification of single malt scotch whiskies. An enormous amount of work goes into organizing a conference like this, and many who work behind the scenes do not get the recognition they deserve. In that regard, Stan Sclove was heroic in handling the registration process and many other aspects of conference management, and Dave Dubin was tireless in keeping the website up-to-date as last minute changes arose. We could not have done this without their support. David Banks and F. R. McMorris, IFCS-2004 Co-Organizers From the Editor - IFCS-2004 in Chicago The Ninth IFCS Conference took place in Chicago, from July 14 to July 18, 2004. In the conference 196 persons from 21 countries participated. The number of papers presented in different categories of sessions is as follows: 4 keynote papers; 12 invited papers; 63 papers in invited sessions; 91 papers in contributed sessions. There were 21 invited sessions: Data Analysis Issues in PLS Regression and Path Modeling, Graphics in Statistics, Clustering Methods for Multiarray Data, Latent Variables, Multiway Data Analysis, Classification and Clustering in Astronomy, Market Research, Data Mining and Web Mining Interface, Teaching and Training Classification and Data Analysis, Data Mining (3 sessions), Information Retrieval (2 sessions), Statistical Methods in Immunology and Medicine, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Statistical Issues in Counterterrorism, Dimension Reduction, Issues in Statistical Metrology, Data Analysis in Financial Risk Management, Memorial Session for Chikio Hayashi. There were 16 contributed sessions: Approaches to Contingency Tables, Symbolic Data Analysis (2 sessions), New Approaches in Cluster Analysis, New Kinds of Problems, Graphs and Consensus, New Ideas in Classification, Text Analysis, Neural Nets and Variable Selection, Applications in Business, Issues in k-means Clustering, Applications in Medicine, New Ideas in Cluster Analysis, New Ideas for Binary Data, Latent Variables and Related Topics, Odds and Ends. The more extensive information on IFCS-2004 Conference is on the Website: www.classification-society.org/ifcs2004 Krzysztof Jajuga Class-L listserver The purpose of this list server is to enable researchers in classification, clustering, phylogeny estimation, and related methods of data analysis to quickly contact other researchers in this area with questions or announcements of general interest. While the list was originally developed for the Classification Society of North America, the use of this list is not limited to members of particular professional societies. The only requirement is an interest. There are two methods that one can use to subscribe to CLASS-L list and to control the various subscription options that are available. E-mail commands. You can subscribe by sending the one-line message: sub CLASS-L your name to the address listserv@lists.sunysb.edu, where "your name" is your name (without quotes) as you wish to be listed. You do not include your e-mail address as that will be taken automatically from your e-mail message (which means that you must subscribe from the same e-mail account on which you want to receive the messages). You will not start receiving messages until you confirm your subscriptions (see below). To unsubscribe, send a message with the single command unsub (or the command signoff). There are a number of other commands that can be sent but it is much easier to use the web interface described next. Web interface. The "Subscriber's Corner" link on the http://lists.sunysb.edu website allows a user to subscribe, unsubscribe, and to set various options. You will be requested for your e-mail address and password. New subscribers should click on the link "get a new LISTSERV password" in order to create a new entry. Existing users can login to set various subscriber options as well as to view the archives of messages back to February 2000. For both methods of subscribing, a confirmation e-mail will be sent to the e-mail address that you provided. You can confirm by simply replying with the text "ok" in the message body (without the quotes). Alternatively, you can click on the hyperlink provided in that message. Once you have confirmed you will be able to receive messages. Note that this list is relatively quiet so you should not be concerned if several days go by before you receive any messages. To send messages to the list, you simply send a normal e-mail message addressed to: class-l@lists.sunysb.edu. Your message will then be distributed to all subscribers. Note that when you do a normal reply to a message that you receive from the list it will be sent to everyone on the list! If you intend to reply just to the original sender of the message then you will need to modify the To: field of your message. Please be careful not to send a personal comment to the over 500 subscribers! F. James Rohlf, Dept. of Ecology & Evolution, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5245, USA. News from SKAD The Annual Conference of SKAD - Section of Classification and Data Analysis of Polish Statistical Society took place in Bialowieza, from September 15 to September 17, 2004. About 100 papers were presented during the conference, in the following sessions: Methods of Classification and Data Analysis (4 sessions), Data Analysis in Finance and Insurance (3 sessions), Forecesting Methods and Energy Market, Applications in Data Analysis, Data Analysis in Medicine, Data Analysis in Marketing, Spatial Data Analysis. The elections of the members of the Board for years 2005-2006 took place during the conference. The new Board consists of the following persons: Krzysztof Jajuga - chairman, Andrzej Sokolowski - vice-chairman, Eugeniusz Gatnar - secretary, Marek Walesiak, Waldemar Tarczynski, Zdzislaw Hellwig, Kazimierz Zajac, Joannicjusz Nazarko - members. Krzysztof Jajuga News from the VOC The celebration of the 15th anniversary of the VOC on November 11 and 12 2004 was a successful event with about 50 attendants. Twelve speakers covered nicely a broad range of topics related to the central theme "All in Good Place", on spatial data and spatial representation of data. H. Elffers opened the meeting with a lively discussion of spatial models on burglary. S. Heisterkamp presented a bayesian approach to model the health impact of air pollution. R. Wehrens gave a highly informative overview on the clustering of image data, like MRI scans. H. Kiers discussed the dependency of bootstrap confidence intervals, which was illustrated well by bootstrap movies. After dinner, W. Heiser expressively sketched the history of inertia in statistics. On Friday, A. Buja discussed nonlinear dimension reduction and showed illustrative graphical representations. T. Bijmolt talked about multi-level latent class analysis of data on financial product ownership. K. van Deun presented ways of spatial representation of preference data, using the permutation polytope. M. van de Velden discussed aspects of correspondence analysis of rating data. P. Debba talked about the application of segmentation techniques to derive an optimal sampling scheme for collecting field samples. J. de Gruijter discussed a method developed to classify agricultural fields in The Netherlands on the basis of their susceptibility for nitrate leaching. E. Lesaffre closed our meeting with a sophisticated method for estimating caries incidence, correcting for misclassification. The spring meeting on April 15 2005 in Leiden will be entirely devoted to modeling high dimensional data. The up-to-date information on the activities of the VOC is available via www.voc.ac. Marieke Timmerman News from the SFC 1. SFC'2004 Bordeaux The 11th annual conference of the Francophone Classification Society took place at the Mathematical Institute of Bordeaux1 University, France, on September 8-10, 2004. The conference was organized by the Laboratory "Mathématiques Appliquées de Bordeaux (MAB)". About 120 persons attended the conference and 60 papers were presented. They are published in the proceedings of the conference. Some of them (extended version) are published in a special volume of the RNTI: "Revue des Nouvelles Technologies de l'Information" (Michel Langlais and Marie Chavent, eds, I.S.B.N. 2.85428.667.7) (Cepadues Editions). The "Simon Régnier" award was given to Jean Philippe Vert for his results in Genomic. Together with the usual topics of classification and clustering, interesting and versatile themes have been developed : Pattern Recognition, Environment, Data Mining, Genomic, Scoring, Symbolic Data Analysis, Taxonomic Cognitive Models and 9 invited plenary lectures were given: Paula Brito (Portugal), Bernard Burtschy (France), Hubert Cardot (France), John Gower ( England), André Hardy (Belgium), Georges Hébrail (France), Boris Mirkin (England), Gilles Venturini (France), Jean Philippe Vert (France). The organizers would like to thank all the participants and the program committee for making this conference a successful event. 2. SFC' 2005 Conference, Mai 30 - June 1, Montréal, Québec SFC 2005 meeting will take place in Montréal from Mai 30 to June 1, 2005. The official language of the meeting "de la Société Francophone de Classification" is French. However, the talks can be given in both French and English. The manuscripts can be also submitted either in English or in French. All the information is available on the website of the conference: http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/~sfc05/ 3. SFC'2006 Conference, September 2006 The 2006 annual meeting of the SFC will be organized by the "LITA" laboratory of the university of Metz in September 2006. 4. EGC 2005 The 5th conference on Extraction and Knowledge Management will be held at Université Paris 5, René Descartes, PARIS 6, FRANCE, January 19-21, 2005. For further information and contact: mail : egc2005@math-info.univ-paris5.fr http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/egc2005 André Hardy SFC Secretary News from JCS (I) The 20th Annual Research Meeting of the Japanese Classification Society The 20th Annual Research Meeting of the Japanese Classification Society was held at the Institute of Statistical Mathematics on March 23, 2004. The speakers and the titles of their talks are as follows: 1. Extracting of center points of retailers from large area geographical mesh data and deriving of ranges of their influence Hitoshi Tamura (Tokyo University of Science) 2. An Automatic Exploration and Visualization of Related Articles Takao Ishizuka*, Keisuke Takashima**, Hisashi Yamamoto** *Asia University, **Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology 3. A study on the validity of a shortened test battery for evaluating ambulation and transfer activities in post-stroke patients by means of the principal component analysis and Cronbach's alpha coefficient Kazuhiko Shimizu*, Tosiko Tajiri*, Hisako Tajiri*, Masuo Shirataka*, Hayato Tanabe**, Hideo Miyahara * Kitasato University, ** Chigasaki Rehabilitation College 4. Notes on "Data Science" by Chikio Hayashi (2001) Keiji Yajima (Tokyo University of Science) 5. Clustering of large scale 2-value data Yoshiharu Sato (Hokkaido University) 6. Health and culture in cross national comparative survey: Pattern analysis of question items and areas Kazue Yamaoka*, Ryozo Yoshino** *The National Institute of Public Health, **The Institute of Statistical Mathematics (II) Information about 21th Annual Research Meeting of the Japanese Classification Society The 21th Annual Research Meeting is to be opened on December 17, 2004. The detailed announcement will be appeared on the JCS Web-page as http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/jcs/ in the future. Nobuo Shimizu Japanese-German Symposium The Japanese Classification Society (JCS) and the German Classification Society (GfKl) have made plans for a bilateral Japanese-German symposium. With support from DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Science Foundation), Industries, and Tama University an Interdisciplinary Japanese- German Symposium "Advances in Data Analysis and Related New Techniques and Applications" will be held at Shinagawa Campus ,Tama University in Tokyo, September 1-3, 2005. Up to now about 40 presentations could be scheduled in 12 sessions. Local organization will be done by K. Yajima, A. Okada, T. Imaizumi, and A. Hayashi. COMPSTAT 2006 The 17th Conference of the International Association for Statistical Computing (IASC), will be held in Rome, Italy (August 28 -September 1, 2006); Alfredo Rizzi is the organizer. The first announcement and the call for papers is scheduled for February, 2005. The conference website is available at http://w3.uniroma1.it/compstat2006; the email address for the organizers is compstat2006@uniroma1.it. Symposium - PLS and Related Methods We are very pleased to announce the: "4th International Symposium on PLS and Related Methods (PLS'05)". The Web site of the Conference, with forms for registering and reserving the hotel and information about the social events, is now available at the following address: http://www.pls05.upc.edu. The Conference will take place on Barcelona from September 7th to 9th of 2005. The Department of Statistics and the Laboratory of Informatics Faculty of the Technological University of Catalonia (UPC) are taking care of the organization in co-operation with HEC School of Management (Jouy-en- Josas, France) and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Naples "Federico II". The Conference runs with the scientific sponsorship of IFCS (International Federation of Classification Societies), IDESCAT (Catalan Statistical Office), DECISIA (Paris, France), CMB (Barcelona Club of Marketing) and BEMI (Barcelona Marketing Institute). The Symposium is addressed to people who are interested in either the methodological aspects or the application potentialities of the PLS methods. Therefore, it is very suitable for actual and potential users such as managers, researchers and decision-makers working in the most different fields: management, economics, marketing, consumer behavior, sensory analysis, psychology, advertising, pharmaceutical laboratories, food and chemical industry and information systems. The deadline for submitting an abstract is April 11th, 2005. We have concluded an agreement with "Computational Statistics" to publish a special number with the best papers of the Symposium according the objectives of the journal. Tomas Aluja Co-chairman of PLS'05 pls05@upc.edu 29th Annual Conference of the German Classification Society, March 9-11, 2005 The 29th Annual Conference of the German Classification Society will be hosted by the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg during March 9-11, 2005. This year's conference focuses on the transfer of methods from data analysis to knowledge engineering and on the challenges inherent to various types of information for a large number of application areas. The conference is organized jointly with the Slovenian Artificial Intelligence Society (SLAIS). The conference languages are English and German. The scientific program will include plenary and semi-plenary sessions with invited talks and parallel sessions of contributed presentations from a broad area of topics. Dedicated tracks will be organized on the following topics: Classification and Data Science . Clustering and Data Analysis Methods (H.-H. Bock, RWTH Aachen, Germany) . Discrimination, Supervised Classification, Pattern Recognition (G. Ritter, University Passau, Germany) . Multiway Classification and Data Analysis (S. Krolak-Schwerdt, Saarland University, Germany und H. Kiers, University of Groningen, Netherlands) . Multimode Clustering and Dimensionality Reduction (M. Vichi, University Roma - "La Sapienza", Italy) . Robust Methods in Multivariate Statistics (A. Cerioli, University of Parma, Italy) . Dissimilarities and Clustering Structures (B. Fichet, University of Aix- Marseille II, France) . PLS Path Modeling, PLS Regression and Classification: New Methods and Applications (C. Lauro, University "Federico II" of Napoli, Italy und V. Esposito Vinzi, University "Federico II" of Napoli, Italy) . Ranking, Multi-Label Classification and Preference Learning (J. Fürnkranz, Technical University Darmstadt, Germany und E. Hüllermeier, Philipps-University Marburg, Germany) . Computational Advances in Data Analysis (H.-J. Lenz, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) . Neuro-Fuzzy Methods for Data Analysis (R. Kruse, Otto-von-Guericke- University Magdeburg, Germany) . Visualization (P. Groenen, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands) Information Analysis and Knowledge Engineering . Classification and Analysis for Data Intensive Scenarios (G. Saake, Otto- von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany) . Data Mining and Explorative Multivariate Data Analysis (L. D'Ambra, University "Federico II" of Napoli, Italy und P. Giudici, University of Pavia, Italy) . Text Mining (A. Nürnberger, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany und D. Mladenic, Jozef Stefan Institute Ljubljana, Slovenia) . Web Mining (M. Spiliopoulou, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany) . Adaptivity and Personalization (A. Geyer-Schulz, University Karlsruhe, Germany und L. Schmidt-Thieme, Albert-Ludwigs-University \Freiburg, Germany) . Information Management for User and Data Authentication in IT Security (J. Dittmann, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany) Applications . Banking and Finance (H. Locarek-Junge, Technical University Dresden, Germany) . Marketing (D. Baier, Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus, Germany und M. Meyer, Ludwig-Maximilians-University München, Germany) . Environmental Scanning (R. Decker, University Bielefeld, Germany und R. Wagner, University Bielefeld, Germany) . Economics (O. Opitz, University Augsburg, Germany) . Mining in Business Processes (C. Rautenstrauch, Otto-von-Guericke- University Magdeburg, Germany) . Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (B. Lausen, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany) . Genomics (H.-P. Klenk, e.gene Biotechnologie GmbH Feldafing, Germany) . Classification of Highdimensional Observations and Biometrical Applications (S. Kropf, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany und J. Bernarding, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany) . Medical and Health Sciences (K.-D. Wernecke, Charité Berlin, Germany) . Music Analysis (C. Weihs, University Dortmund, Germany) . Library Classification (H.-J. Hermes, Technical University Chemnitz, Germany) Plenary Talks So far, the following plenary talks will be part of the conference program: . Thorsten Joachims, Cornell University, USA Support Vector Machines for Structured Outputs . Nada Lavrac, J. Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia Data analysis: Selected SolEuNet Data Mining Techniques and Applications Doctoral Workshop For the first time, the conference will host a doctoral workshop before the conference on March 8. PhD students are encouraged to present their work in this workshop. Further information can be found on the conference website. Data Mining Competition In the run up to the conference a data mining competition takes place, which is sponsored by the "Deutsche Sparkassen- und Giroverband" (DSGV). Details about the data mining problem, deadlines and prizes can be found on the conference website. Participation is still possible until January 15, 2005. Venue Magdeburg, the state capital of Saxony-Anhalt, celebrates its 1200 year anniversary in 2005 with several social and cultural events all over the year. Therefore, conference participants can expect - in addition to the events organized as part of the conference - an attractive social program. Since the University is located close to the centre of the city, participants have easy access to cultural sights as well as hotels, cafés, bars, and restaurants by foot or streetcar. Further details concerning the conference program, registration and the conference venue can be found at: http://www.gfkl.de/gfkl2005/ Andreas Nürnberger XIth International Symposium on Applied Stochastic Models and Data Analysis Brest, France - May 17-20 2005. http://asmda2005.enst-bretagne.fr GENERAL INFORMATION Since 1981, the aim of ASMDA has been to serve as an interface between Stochastic Modeling and Data Analysis and their real life applications such as business, finance and insurance, management, production and reliability, biology and medicine. The 2005 Symposium will take place in Brest, France. Both theoretical and practical contributions presenting new results and having the potential for solving real-life problems are concerned. More specifically, one main goal of the symposium is to promote new methods for analyzing data, in fields like stochastic modeling, optimization techniques, statistical methods and inference, data mining and knowledge systems, computing-aided decision supports and neural networks. Acting as an interface between theory and practice, ASMDA is of great interest for both the academic and the business world. The high standard of ASMDA meetings is guaranteed by international scientific committees and recently by a permanent world-wide ASMDA Committee. The symposium will include keynote presentations, invited sessions and regular papers. A poster session on solving problems will be organized: the proposed solutions will be presented on posters at the Symposium. In the ASMDA'05 website, interested authors will find a short list of problems to be resolved, proposed by participants. An IBM scientific price will be awarded to the best student works (1 to 3) presented at the conference. See the ASMDA'05 Website for more information. Some papers will be selected for publication in international journals after an extended version has been reviewed. CONFIRMED KEYNOTE PRESENTATIONS Giovani Barone-Adesi (University of Lugano, Switzerland), "The stability of Factor Models of Interests rates". Erhan Cinlar (Princeton University, USA), "Brownian movement in gamma fields". William H. E. Day (Port Maitland, Canada), "Biological Aggregation at the Interface Between Theory and Practice". Paul Deheuvels (Université Paris 6, France), title to be precised. Trevor Hastie (Stanford University, USA), "The Entire Regularization Path for the Support Vector Machine". CONFIRMED INVITED SESSIONS WITH THEIR CHAIRMAN Modeling functional data analysis in practice, organized by Pr. M.-J. Valderrama (Sp.). Functional statistics, organized by Pr. G. Biau (Fr.). Sequential Analysis and Applications, organized by Pr. J. Glaz (USA). Migration credit risk models, organized by Pr. J. Janssen (Belg. & Fr.). Stochastic Models for insurance, organized by Pr. R. Manca (It.). Probabilistic Methods in Reliability, organized by Pr. S. Ross (USA). Statistical Analysis of data text, organized by Dr. L. Lebart (Fr.). Bioinformatics, organized by Pr. J.-F. Zagury (Fr.). Semi-Markov Processes: Estimation and Control, organized by Pr. N. Limnios (Fr.). Lifetime Data Analysis, organized by Pr. M.-L. Ting Lee (USA). Internet Modelling, organized by Dr. S. Vaton (Fr.). Business Intelligence, organized by Dr. D. Ho (Fr.). Biological Data Analysis, organized by Prof. O. Hudry (Fr.) and Dr. A. Guénoche (Fr.). Degradation and Accelerated Models in Life Sciences and Industry, organized by Prof. M. Nikulin (Fr.). CALL FOR INVITED SESSIONS The organization of invited sessions is encouraged. Prospective organizers are requested to send a session proposal together with the three invited papers list (see the Website for details). MAIN TOPICS 1) Methodological approaches - Poisson models, Markov models and extensions (semi-Markov, hidden-Markov, non homogeneous Markov , ...), Point processes (Poisson, ...), Martingales, stochastic calculus, Diffusion and Poisson approximations, Stochastic control and decision, Asymptotic models and weak convergences, Statistical inference for stochastic processes, Fitting models for data, Reliability and survival analysis, Bayesian inference, Functional data analysis, Discriminant and regression analysis, Mixture model and probabilistic approach to clustering, Theories of uncertainty, Graphical models and Bayesian networks, Multidimensional scaling and multi-way data analysis, Sensory analysis, Classification, Analysis of complex data: incomplete, censored, missing, spatio-temporal, imprecise, fuzzy, etc., Data and text mining. 2) Special techniques and algorithms - Neural Networks, Genetic and fuzzy algorithms, Support vector machine, Monte Carlo Methods. 3) Application fields - Engineering, Production, inventory and logistics, Reliability and maintenance, Planning and control, Quality control, Finance and insurance, Management and administration, Marketing, Environment, Human resources, Biotechnology, bioinformatics, genome and medicine, Signal processing and telecommunication. FURTHER INFORMATION AND CONTACT http://asmda2005.enst-bretagne.fr/ asmda2005-organisation@enst-bretagne.fr DATES Paper and invited session submission deadlines Dec. 15, 2004 Submission of problems - Jan. 31, 2005 Notification to authors - Feb. 15, 2005 Submission of problem solutions March. 15, 2005 Camera ready paper and registration March. 15, 2005 ASMDA 2005 Conference May 17-20, 2005 REGISTRATION FEES Students Before 17/03/05 162 euros (TTC) After 17/03/05 195 euros (TTC) University members Before 17/03/05 270 euros (TTC) After 17/03/05 324 euros (TTC) Other participants Before 17/03/05 405 euros (TTC) After 17/03/05 486 euros (TTC) CHAIRMEN J.P. Barthélemy (ENST Bretagne, France), N. Limnios (UTC, Compiègne, France), G. Saporta (CNAM, Paris, France) SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE HEAD J. Janssen (CESIAF, Belgium and EURIA, France), Ph. Lenca (ENST Bretagne, France) SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE N. Balakrishnan, McMaster University, Canada, M. Bardos, Banque de France, France, E. Cinlar, Princeton University, Princeton, USA, J. Glaz, University of Connecticut, Stors, USA, F. Guillet, Université de Nantes, France, G. Govaert, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, France, C. Huber, Université Paris V, France, D. Ho, IBM, Paris, France, S. Lallich, University Lyon 2, France, L. Lebart, CNRS, NST, Paris, France, N. Limnios, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, France, R. Manca, University La Sapiensa, Roma, Italy, M. Mesbah, Université Paris VI, France, M. Nikulin, Université Bordeaux II, France, J. Teghem, Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium, M.L Ting Lee, Harvard University, USA, S.M. Ross, University of Southern California, USA, G. Saporta, CNAM, Paris, France, C. Skiadas, Technical University of Creta, Chania, Greece, M. J. Valderrama, Universidad de Granada, Spain, D. Zighed, Université Lyon 2, France ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE HEAD P. Bertrand (ENST Bretagne, France) ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE F. Brucker, ENST Bretagne, France, T. Chonavel, ENST Bretagne, France, G. Coppin, ENST Bretagne, France, G. Le Gall, ENST Bretagne, France, N. L'Hopital, ENST Bretagne, France, S. Moga, ENST Bretagne, France, D. Pastor, ENST Bretagne, France, Ph. Tanguy, ENST Bretagne, France, B. Vaillant, ENST Bretagne, France. Prof. Andre HARDY, Department of Mathematics, University of Namur, 8, Rempart de la Vierge, B-5000 Namur, BELGIUM Tel : (32) (81) 72.49.05 (Office) Fax : (32) (81) 72.49.14 (Dept. Math) Tel : (32) (81) 21.20.25 (Private) Email: andre.hardy@fundp.ac.be Contributions for the coming issue of the IFCS newsletter can be sent to: krzysztof.jajuga@ae.wroc.pl Text files are by preference in ascii or word, with pc format. For graphical materials, by preference GIF is used. Editor: Krzysztof Jajuga Wroclaw University of Economics Komandorska 118/120 53-345 Wroclaw Poland tel: +48 71 3680340 fax: +48 71 3680322