20.529 events: Brad Paley at Maryland; ICANN'07

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 529.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

   [1] From: "Matt Kirschenbaum" <mkirschenbaum_at_gmail.com> (125)
         Subject: Brad Paley at Maryland

   [2] From: "alexandra" <aao_at_fe.up.pt> (61)
         Subject: ICANN'07 paper deadline extension (April 6)

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 08:23:28 +0000
         From: "Matt Kirschenbaum" <mkirschenbaum_at_gmail.com>
         Subject: Brad Paley at Maryland

*** BRAD PALEY at MARYLAND ***

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and the
Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland
are jointly sponsoring two events by BRAD PALEY, the innovative
information designer probably best known for the amazing and beautiful
TextArc (www.textarc.org). PALEY will offer a formal talk and a less
formal workshop. Both events are free and open to the public.

The short schedule is as follows:

Wednesday, March 28, "Interaction Design as a Branch of the
Humanities: A Healthier Fit than Technology or Computer Science?"
4:00, 3258 A.V. Williams Bldg.

Thursday, March 29, (Workshop) "Domain- and Task-Specific Tools for
the Humanities: We'll explore what's needed now, what's attainable."
10:00-12:30, MITH (B0131 McKeldin).

Abstracts and biography of BRAD PALEY are below:

*** Talk

"Interaction Design as a Branch of the Humanities: A Healthier Fit
than Technology or Computer Science?"
Wednesday, March 28, 4:00, 3258 A.V. Williams Bldg.

Interaction design centers on the ability for a person to absorb,
react to, and act upon information inside computers. It is clear that
the manipulation of bits is well served by the strategies and
techniques of computer science and electrical engineering, but close
scrutiny of the human side of that gap might help us fit minds as well
as we optimize algorithms. The last good decade has seen much more
focus on "human I/O" in the form of perception, but we can take even
better advantage of the eye if we know how it feeds "upstream"
sense-making processes. Red may be a visually salient danger
warning--but not if it's a tulip in a field in Haarlem, or red type
and ornaments in a centuries-old codex. We understand objects in
context and reinterpret our perceptions in radically different ways
depending on that context.

The center of my research and practice for the last five years has
been the exploration of higher and higher mental processes--beyond
sensation and perception to object recognition and cognition.
Necessity has lately driven me even farther: all the way past
semiotics to psycholinguistics, and finally the humanities. It has
become an axiom for me that many interfaces are best driven to be
consistent not with other interfaces, but the way people think about a
specific task. And the best doors into that realm have been
explorations in the plastic arts (how people use visual richness to
differentiate among categories of information), poetry (using metaphor
to tame abstract information), and perhaps even storytelling (to
understand process and aid long-term retention). These human endeavors
may have more to offer us on the level of technique than we realize.

This talk will structure these observations, support them with
references from source materials outside computer domains (such as
psycholinguistics and hermeneutics), and show examples of antique
information visualization techniques which in many ways are much more
sophisticated that what we do today. I will deconstruct as an example
recently-completed work for the 2006-7 transition of the New York
Stock Exchange to a half-human, half-electronic "Hybrid Market;" a
design that has sped up brokers in their most fundamental task from 7
seconds to less than a second--a 15:1 speedup directly resulting from
an application of these principles.

*** Workshop

"Domain- and Task-Specific Tools for the Humanities: We'll explore
what's needed now, what's attainable."
Thursday, March 29, 10:00-12:30 MITH (B0131 McKeldin)

This workshop is an initial exploration of how KWIRQI design
principles (Knowledge Work Interfaces: Reality-Quoting Interfaces)
might be applied to the domain of research and criticism in
literature. The heart of a KWIRQI design is the way it adopts jargon
and metaphors from a very limited community of practice, "quoting the
reality" of that community. Here, we will be trying to isolate and
understand what ideas are common in this domain, and what tasks might
best be supported by the development of new computer-based tools for
literature.

I will lead the group in an enumeration of bits of jargon and
discovery of common concept spatializations. For example, in the
financial domain a "high price" is a large number; there is no
a-priori reason to assume that a large number is "up." But that
pairing of a concrete adjective with an abstract noun tells us that
traders have mapped numbers into space: specifically a vertical
dimension in their minds. Remarkably, this mapping seems to happen in
all knowledge work domains I have studied. We will search for these
domain-specific implicit metaphors shared by critics and text
analysts; for this reason it will be extremely valuable to have
"pre-digital" researchers who have been practicing for many years:
they carry the wealth of this local culture in their minds.

We hope to justify their time by developing a listing of tasks that
manipulate these concepts and metaphors then doing an economics-style
tradeoff; ranking which tasks will help support the field the most,
yet be easiest to implement and take best advantage of local
university resources and expertise. We want to take the most tedious
work they do and offload it to a computer, then present the results in
exactly the way they would sketch them on a napkin to relate them to a
student. The overall goal will be the creation of scope definitions
and perhaps initial design sketches for tools that can be designed,
built, and put into use in the immediate future.

*** Biography

W. BRADFORD PALEY uses computers to create visual displays with the
goal of making readable, clear, and engaging expressions of complex
data. His visual representations are inspired by the calm, richly
layered information in natural scenes. His process applies three
perspectives: [1] rendering methods used by fine artists and graphic
artists are [2] informed by their possible underpinnings in human
perception, then [3] applied to creating narrowly-scoped, almost
idiosyncratic representations whose visual semantics are often driven
by the real-world metaphors of the experts who know the domains best.

Brad did his first computer graphics in 1973, graduated Phi Beta Kappa
from UC Berkeley in 1981, founded Digital Image Design Incorporated
(didi.com/brad) in 1982, and started doing financial & statistical
data visualization in 1986. He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern
Art; he created TextArc.org; he is in the ARTPORT collection of the
Whitney Museum of American Art; has received multiple grants and
awards for both art and design, and his designs are at work every day
in the hands of brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
He is an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University, and is
director of Information Esthetics: a fledgling interdisciplinary group
exploring the creation and interpretation of data representations that
are both readable and esthetically satisfying.

Contact: Matthew Kirschenbuam, Associate Director, MITH
(www.mith.umd.edu, mgk_at_umd.edu, 5-8505) or Catherine Plaisant,
Research Scientist, HCIL (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil, plaisant_at_cs.umd.edu,
5-2786).

-- 
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Assistant Professor of English
Associate Director,
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)
University of Maryland
301-405-8505 or 301-314-7111 (fax)
http://www.mith.umd.edu/
http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 08:24:09 +0000
         From: "alexandra" <aao_at_fe.up.pt>
         Subject: ICANN'07 paper deadline extension (April 6)
   International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks - ICANN 2007
   9-13 September 2007, Ipanema Park Hotel, Porto, Portugal
   Web page: http://www.icann2007.org
   *** Last Call for Papers***
June, 29 - Early registration
   The 17th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN
   2007, will be held from September 9 through September 13 at the Ipanema
   Park Hotel, Porto, Portugal. ICANN is an annual conference organized by=
  the
   European Neural Network Society in co-operation with the International
   Neural Network Society, and is a premier event in all topics related to
   neural networks.
   ICANN 2007 welcomes contributions on the theory, algorithms and
   applications in the following broad areas:
   -     Computational neuroscience;
   -     Connectionist cognitive science;
   -     Data analysis and pattern recognition;
   -     Graphical network models, Bayesian networks;
   -     Hardware implementations and embedded systems;
   -     Intelligent Multimedia and the Semantic Web;
   -     Neural and hybrid architectures and learning algorithms;
   -     Neural control, planning and robotics applications;
   -     Neural dynamics and complex systems;
   -     Neuroinformatics;
   -     Real world applications;
   -     Self-organization;
   -     Sequential and structured information processing;
   -     Signal and time series processing, blind source separation;
   -     Vision and image processing.
   List of Special Sessions and Organizers
   1. Complex-Valued Neural Networks
   Aizenberg, Igor; Texas A&M University-Texarkana, USA
   Hirose, Akira; University of Tokyo, Japan
   M. Zurada, Jacek; University of Louisville, USA
   2. Emotion and Attention: Empirical Findings and Neural Models
   Korsten, Nienke; King's College London, UK
   Taylor, John; King's College London, UK
   3. Meta-Learning
   Duch, Wlodzislaw; Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland
   Grabczewski, Krzysztof; Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland
   Jankowski, Norbert; Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland
   4. Understanding and Creating Cognitive Systems
   Taylor, John; King's College London, UK
   Workshops
   Workshop 1
   Cognitive Systems
   Taylor, John G.; King's College, UK
   Worshop 2
   Neural Networks in Biomedical Engineering and BioInformatics
   Cortez, Paulo; University of Minho, Portugal
   Hochreiter,Sepp; Johannes Kepler University, Linz
   Worshop 3
   What it means to communicate
   Elshaw, Mark; University of Sunderland, UK
   Gallese, Vittorio; University of Parma, It=E1lia
   Knowles, Mike; University of Sunderland, UK
   Page, Martin; University of Sunderland, UK
   Panchev, Christo; University of Sunderland, UK
   Pulvermuller, Friedemann; MRC, Cambridge, UK
   Wermter, Stefan; University of Sunderland, UK
[...]=20