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ipo.tue.nl>SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS You are invited to submit an abstract plus title, before January 15 1999, to the ESCA TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKSHOP ON DIALOGUE AND PROSODY EINDHOVEN (THE NETHERLANDS), SEPTEMBER 1-3, 1999 http://www.tue.nl/ipo/sli/etrw.html INTRODUCTION The IPO, Center for Research on User-System Interaction in Eindhoven (The Netherlands), in association with the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) and the European Speech Communication Association (ESCA), is pleased to announce a 3-day workshop on dialogue and prosody, which will take place in the Eindhoven area in the week before Eurospeech `99. Anyone dealing with theoretical, empirical, computational or experimental approaches to the interplay between dialogue and prosody is invited to submit an abstract. We specifically welcome those contributions of which the content is directly relevant for human-computer interaction. MOTIVATION Now that spoken dialogue systems are becoming more sophisticated, increasing demands are placed on the way these systems deal with prosody, both in the generation of system utterances as in the processing of user utterances. On the one hand, appropriate prosody may facilitate the processing of system utterances by users of a dialogue system. On the other hand, dialogue systems may profit from taking into consideration prosodic information of user utterances at different levels of representation. However, for experts in the area of prosody it is not always easy to link their work to the developments in the domain of dialogue modelling, whereas researchers working in the area of dialogue modelling often are rather naive with respect to prosodic modelling. The goal of the workshop is bringing together researchers from both domains to provide either group with a better view of developments in the other domain and in this way stimulate progress. FORMAT The format of the workshop will consist of keynote presentations by experts in the field of dialogue and prosody modelling, combined with oral and poster presentations of accepted papers. All presentations will be plenary. All contributions to the workshop will be published in workshop proceedings, that will consist of 4-page camera-ready papers. As an additional result of the workshop, the organizers intend to produce a working document that will contain an overview of the state-of-the-art, some open research questions, and position statements regarding the theme of dialogue and prosody. In order to maximize the possibilities for fruitful discussion, the number of participants will be limited to about a hundred. Priority will be given to persons with accepted papers on a first-come first-served basis. TOPICS Questions in this domain that could be addressed at the workshop are for instance: - Which prosodic features of user utterances help the system to improve performance with respect to ASR, speech understanding, and dialogue management (turn-taking, back-channeling)? - How can those features be extracted automatically and be made available at the right time? - With which prosodic features should system utterances be provided to help the user extract the information conveyed by the system, and to improve the fluency of the interaction? - To what extent are prosodic characteristics of user utterances in their interactions with dialogue systems different from those in human-human interaction? - How do we deal with prosodic variability in interactions between humans and machines, for instance due to level of expertise (novices versus experts)? SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Researchers working in this domain are invited to email a 400-words abstract (plain ascii format), together with title, affiliation and keywords to diaproMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cs.uu.nl>AIMDM'99 -- Call for Papers for the workshop ** Prognostic Models in Medicine ** Artificial Intelligence and Decision Analytic Approaches during the Joint European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Medical Decision Making (AIMDM'99) in Aalborg, Denmark, 20th - 24th June 1999 (WWW version of this CFP: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~lucas/ipm-aimdm99.html) (WWW version of of AIMDM http://www.miba.auc.dk/AIMDM99/) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Important dates * Submission deadline of structured abstracts: 1 March 1999 * Notification of acceptance: 15 April 1999 * Conference: 20th - 24th June 1999 * Workshop: Sunday, 20th June 1999 Prognostic models are increasingly used in medicine to predict the natural course of disease, or the expected outcome after treatment. Prognosis forms an integral part of systems for treatment selection and treatment planning. In evaluating quality of care, prognostic models are used for predicting outcome, such as mortality, which is compared with the actual measured outcome. Furthermore, prognostic models may play an important role in guiding diagnostic problem solving, e.g. by only requesting information concerning tests, of which the outcome affects knowledge of the prognosis. In recent years several methods and techniques from the fields of artificial intelligence, decision theory and statistics have been introduced into models of the medical management of patients (diagnosis, treatment, follow-up); in some of these models, assessment of the expected prognosis constitutes an integral part. Typically, recent prognostic methods rely on explicit (patho)physiological models, which may be combined with traditional models of life expectancy. Examples of such domain models are causal disease models, and physiological models of regulatory mechanisms in the human body. Such model-based approaches have the potential to facilitate the development of actual systems, because the medical domain models can be (partially) obtained from the medical literature. Various methods have been suggested for the representations of such domain models ranging from quantitative and probabilistic approaches to symbolic and qualitative ones. Semantic concepts such as time, e.g. for modelling the progressive changes of regulatory mechanisms, have formed an important and challenging modelling issue. Moreover, automatic learning techniques of such models have been proposed. When model construction is hard, less explicit domain models have been studied such as the use of case-based and neural network representations and their combination with more explicit domain models. In medical decision analysis, where the theories of probability and utility are combined, various representations and techniques are suggested such as decision trees, regression models, and representations in which advantage is taken from the Markov assumption (such as in Markov decision problems). This workshop aims at bringing together various theoretical and practical approaches to computational prognosis that comprise the state of the art in this field. This workshop is a follow up on the initiative started with the successful invited session on "Intelligent Prognostic Methods in Medical Diagnosis and Treatment Planning" in 1998 during the conference "Computational Engineering in Systems Applications 1998 (cesa'98) (http://www.cs.ruu.nl/~lucas/ipm-cesa98.html) which has resulted in a special issue on prognosis of the journal Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. Papers are sought that describe medical prognosis applications using methods and techniques from artificial intelligence, decision theory, and statistics as well as papers proposing theoretical foundations of such methods. The workshop will also include one or more invited talks (details will appear in due time on the corresponding WWW-page of this workshop and the AIMDM'99 pages). Topics of interest Papers are sought on topics including, but not limited to: * Modelling and Reasoning: o the specification of prognostic models, possibly as part of diagnostic or therapy-planning applications o representation and reasoning about (multiple) model types such as empirical, anatomical and (patho)physiological ones o representation of and reasoning with time o qualitative representation and reasoning o decision modelling and analysis o (dynamic) probabilistic networks o representation and interpretations of strategies and guidelines o health care quality assurance o technology assessment and health policy making o function-based representation and reasoning o case-based representation and reasoning * Knowledge Acquisition: o acquisition of the medical prognostic models o automated learning of domain or task models using machine learning and data-mining techniques * Formalisation: o use of logical, set-theoretical or probabilistic methods to formalise various aspects of prognosis and therapy planning * Medical Applications: o clinical context of actual prognostic models o role of prognostic models in diagnosis or treatment planning of a specific disease o evaluation of prognostic models Each submission will be refereed by at least two members of the programme committee. Accepted papers will appear in the working notes of the workshop "Prognostic Models in Medicine: Artificial Intelligence and Decision Analytic Approaches". Attempts are made to organise a special issue of a suitable international journal based on the best papers. Instructions to authors Structured abstracts (up to 4 pages) are to be addressed to the first co-chair and should be written in English with a short abstract and a list of keywords. Electronic submissions by e-mail are encouraged (either postscript files or plain text). Alternatively, 3 paper copies may be submitted. The accepted abstracts will appear in the working notes. Note that authors planning to submit a structured abstract to the workshop may also submit their contributions (full paper or structured abstract) to the main conference of AIMDM'99. Registration fee Workshop only 750 DKK, for participants of AIMDM'99 500 DKK. The fee includes light refreshments and lunch. Workshop organization Co-Chairs: Ameen Abu-Hanna, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Peter Lucas, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Programme committee A. Abu-Hanna, The Netherlands S. Andreassen, Denmark P.M.M. Bossuyt, The Netherlands J. Fox, UK L.C. van der Gaag, The Netherlands J.D.F. Habbema, The Netherlands P. Haddawy, USA P. Hammond, UK E. Keravnou, Cyprus N. Lavrac, Slovenia J. van der Lei, The Netherlands P.J.F. Lucas, The Netherlands L. Ohno-Machado, USA M. Ramoni, UK M. Stefanelli, Italy Th. Wetter, Germany J. Wyatt, UK For more information about the workshop please contact one of the co-chairs. - -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ameen Abu-Hanna Peter Lucas Dept. of Medical Informatics Dept. of Computer Science Academic Medical Center Utrecht University University of Amsterdam Padualaan 14 Meibergdreef 15 3584 CH Utrecht 1105 AZ Amsterdam The Netherlands The Netherlands Telephone: +31 20 565959 Telephone: +31 30 2534094 Fax : +31 20 6919840 Fax: +31 30 2513791 A.Abu-HannaMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue