18.068 Announcements

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 68.
      Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                  www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                       www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                    Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

  [1] From: Bob Scott <scottr_at_columbia.edu>
        Subject: Electronic Text Center Discussion Group at ALA

  [2] From: Frauke Zeller <fzeller_at_uni-kassel.de>
        Subject: Job at Kassel University

  [3] From: João Leite <jleite_at_di.fct.unl.pt>
        Subject: CFP: CLIMA V

  [4] From: Arun-Kumar Tripathi
<tripathi_at_amadeus.statistik.uni-dortmund.de>
        Subject: Nancy Forbes "How Biology Is Inspiring Computing"

  [5] From: "Charles Baldwin" <Charles.Baldwin_at_mail.wvu.edu>
        Subject: West Virginia motion capture / sound / image / text
                work

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------

If you are going to be at the American Library Association Annual
Convention in Orlando, I urge you to attend the meeting of the Library
Electronic Text Center Discussion Group, scheduled for Saturday, June
26, from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. in Room 223 B of the Orange County Convention
Center. (Note the shift away from our usual time slot, due to
circumstances beyond our control.)

The topic of discussion will be the Text Creation Partnership, a joint
undertaking by a large group of American and British research libraries
that represents an important new model for digital library development.
The aim of this project is a common database of fully marked-up and
searchable texts drawn from three commercial collections ProQuest's
Early English Books Online (EEBO), Readex's Evans Digital Edition, and
Thomson Gale's Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Together,
those databases mark a sea change in the development of digital library
collections, as they bring into play a vast, increasingly comprehensive
corpus of the universe of book publication in the English-speaking world
prior to 1800, a body of resources that is clearly an essential
component of a national digital library. In pursuit of its goals, the
TCP has already made significant progress in developing fruitful
collaboration between the academic and commercial publishing worlds,
fostering cooperation among publishers, implementing standards for
textual markup, and fostering the interoperability of dispersed
resources. Many new opportunities and challenges lie ahead: the prospect
of a similar treatment of 19th century resources, the possibility of
drawing in the work of other publishers, the need to ensure broader
access to these collections, and the unending need for development of
the search tools to master an increasingly large body of material.

With us to discuss these developments will be Mark Sandler, collection
development officer and Shawn Martin, project outreach librarian, and
perhaps other members of the staff. I hope that you will be able to attend.

(I also encourage you to come with suggestions for a topic for our
mid-winter discussion.)

Bob Scott
Head, Electronic Text Service
Columbia University Libraries
Telephone: 212-854-7547
Email: scottr_at_columbia.edu

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------

Ref. No. 2678

The Fachbereich 08 Anglistik/Romanistik at Kassel University offers the
post of a

Lector for English

starting 15 October 2004. The post is for an indefinite period and
remuneration is according to BAT IIa within the public service tariff.

Responsibilities:
- Teaching English at all levels with a teaching load of 16 hours per week
- Organization and evaluation of language tests and exams at all levels
- Cooperation in the improvement of our language teaching programs.

Qualifications:
- English as native language
- MA degree or equivalent diploma in a relevant field
- PhD. preferred
- Proven experience in the field of Teaching English as a Foreign
Language, preferably at university level
- very good knowledge of German
- TEFL diploma, degree in appplied linguistics, or similar qualifications.

Applications in German to be sent by July 3, 2004 (postmarked).
The University of Kassel strives for equal opportunity of employment of
men and women and for the adjustment of existing disproportions
concerning the employment of women in teaching and research positions.
Qualified women are thus encouraged to apply. Handicapped candidates
will be given preference, all else being equal. Applications with the
usual documentation should be sent before the deadline and referring to
the number stated above to the President, University of Kassel, 34109
Kassel, Germany and one copy to the Dekanat Fachbereich 08, Kassel
University, Georg-Forster-Str. 3, 34127 Kassel, Germany.

--
Dipl.-Angl. Frauke Zeller, B.A.
Universität Kassel
Georg-Forster-Str. 3
D-34127 Kassel
Tel.: +49-561-804 3346
Fax:  +49-561-804 3341
Email: fzeller_at_uni-kassel.de
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
==========================================================================
                      LAST CALL FOR PAPERS
                             CLIMA V
Fifth International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems
           September 29 and 30, 2004, Lisbon, Portugal
      http://centria.di.fct.unl.pt/~jleite/climaV/index.htm
     Submission Deadline: June 25th (abstracts due June 22nd)
                     Springer LNCS Proceedings
                     Co-located with JELIA'04
===========================================================================
CALL FOR PAPERS
Multi-agent systems are communities of problem-solving entities
that can perceive and act upon their environments to achieve their
individual goals as well as joint goals. The work on such systems
integrates many technologies and concepts in artificial
intelligence and other areas of computing. For this reason, over
recent years, the agent paradigm gained popularity in many
sub-fields of computer science. A full spectrum of multi-agent
systems applications have been and are being developed; from
search engines to educational aids to electronic commerce and
trade, e-procurement, recommendation systems, simulation and
routing, to cite only some.
Although commonly implemented by means of imperative languages,
mainly for reasons of efficiency, the agent concept has recently
increased its influence in the research and development of
computational logic based systems.
Computational logic provides a well-defined, general, and rigorous
framework for studying syntax, semantics and procedures, for
attending implementations, environments, tools, and standards, and
for linking together specification and verification of properties
of computational systems.
The purpose of this workshop is to discuss techniques, based on
computational logic, for representing, programming and reasoning
about multi-agent systems in a formal way.
Following the workshop on Multi-Agent Systems in Logic Programming
affiliated with ICLP'99, the first CLIMA workshop took place in
London, UK, affiliated with CL'2000. The 2001 edition of CLIMA,
took place in Paphos, Cyprus, affiliated with ICLP'01. CLIMA'02
took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, and was affiliated with ICLP'02
and part of FLOC'02. The fourth edition of the workshop, CLIMA IV,
took place in Fort Lauderdale, USA, and was co-located with
LPNMR-7 and SAIM'04.
We solicit unpublished papers that address formal approaches to
multi-agent systems. the approaches as well as being formal must
make a significant contribution to the practice of multi-agent
systems. relevant techniques include, but are not limited to, the
following:
* logical foundations of multi-agent systems
* knowledge and belief representation and updates in multi-agent systems
* agent and multi-agent hypothetical reasoning and learning
* extensions of logic programming for multi-agent systems
* nonmonotonic reasoning in multi-agent systems
* theory and practice of argumentation for agent reasoning and interaction
* operational semantics and execution agent models
* model checking algorithms, tools, and applications for multi-agent logics
* semantics of interaction and agent communication languages
* distributed constraint satisfaction in multi-agent systems
* temporal reasoning for multi-agent systems
* modal logic approaches to multi-agent systems
* logic based programming languages for multi-agent systems
* distributed theorem proving for multi-agent systems
* logic based implementations of multi-agent systems
* decision theory for multi-agent systems
* specification and verification of formal properties of agent systems
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS We welcome and encourage the submission of
high quality, original papers, which are not simultaneously
submitted for publication elsewhere. Please refer to the workshop
web pages for further instructions concerning the submission
procedures.
IMPORTANT DATES
* Submission of Abstracts: June 22nd, 2004
* Submission of Papers: June 25th, 2004
* Notification of Acceptance: July 30th, 2004
* Final version due: September 6th, 2004
* CLIMA IV: September 29-30th, 2004
PROCEEDINGS The post-proceedings of CLIMA will be published by
Springer-Verlag as a volume of the Lecture Notes on Artificial
Intelligence series.
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
* José Alferes, New University of Lisbon, Portugal
* Gerd Brewka, University of Leipzig, Germany
* Jürgen Dix, Technical University of Clausthal, Germany
* Klaus Fischer, DFKI, Germany
* Michael Fisher, University of Liverpool, UK
* James Harland, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia
* Katsumi Inoue, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
* Sverker Janson, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden
* João Leite, New University of Lisbon, Portugal
* Yves Lespérance, York University, Canada
* John Jules Ch. Meyer, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
* Leora Morgenstern, IBM, USA
* Wojciech Penczek, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
* Jeremy Pitt, Imperial College, UK
* Enrico Pontelli, New Mexico State University, USA
* Fariba Sadri, Imperial College, UK
* Ken Satoh, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
* Renate Schmidt, The University of Manchester, UK
* Tran Cao Son, New Mexico State University, USA
* Francesca Toni, Imperial College, UK
* Paolo Torroni, University of Bologna, Italy
* Wiebe Van Der Hoek, University of Liverpool, UK
* Makoto Yokoo, Kyushu University, Japan
* Cees Witteveen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS:
* João Leite, New University of Lisbon, Portugal (jleite_at_di.fct.unl.pt)
* Paolo Torroni, University of Bologna, Italy (ptorroni_at_deis.unibo.it)
INQUIRIES: Please send program suggestions and inquires to either
of the organizers.
--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------
 Dear Dr. McCarty.
I wanted to let you know about the following recent book from The MIT
Press.  For more information, please visit
<http://mitpress.mit.edu/0262062410/>
Imitation of Life
How Biology Is Inspiring Computing
Nancy Forbes
As computers and the tasks they perform become increasingly complex,
researchers are looking to nature--as model and as metaphor--for
inspiration.  The organization and behavior of biological organisms
present scientists with an invitation to reinvent computing for the
complex tasks of the future. In Imitation of Life Nancy Forbes surveys the
emerging field of biologically inspired computing, looking at some of the
most impressive and influential examples of this fertile synergy.
Forbes points out that the influence of biology on computing goes back to
the early days of computer science--John von Neumann, the architect of the
first digital computer, used the human brain as the model for his design.
Inspired by von Neumann and other early visionaries, as well as by her
work on the "Ultrascale Computing" project at the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Forbes describes the exciting potential
of these revolutionary new technologies. She identifies three strains of
biologically inspired computing: the use of biology as a metaphor or
inspiration for the development of algorithms; the construction of
information processing systems that use biological materials or are
modeled on biological processes, or both; and the effort to understand how
biological organisms "compute," or process information.
Forbes then shows us how current researchers are using these approaches.
In successive chapters, she looks at artificial neural networks;
evolutionary and genetic algorithms, which search for the "fittest" among
a generation of solutions; cellular automata; artificial life--not just a
simulation, but "alive" in the internal ecosystem of the computer; DNA
computation, which uses the encoding capability of DNA to devise
algorithms; self-assembly and its potential use in nanotechnology;
amorphous computing, modeled on the kind of cooperation seen in a colony
of cells or a swarm of bees; computer immune systems; bio-hardware and how
bioelectronics compares to silicon; and the "computational" properties of
cells.
Nancy Forbes works as a science and technology analyst for the federal
government. She has advanced degrees both in physics and the humanities,
and has served as a contributing editor for The Industrial Physicist and
Computing in Science and Engineering.
6 x 9, 176 pp., 48 illus., cloth, ISBN 0-262-06241-0, $25.95
______________________
David Weininger
Associate Publicist
The MIT Press
5 Cambridge Center, 4th Floor
Cambridge, MA  02142
617 253 2079
617 253 1709 fax
http://mitpress.mit.edu
--
--[5]------------------------------------------------------------------
West Virginia motion capture / sound / image / text work
http://www.clc.wvu.edu/sondheim/
Welcome to the initial results of a collaboration between the writer and
artist Alan Sondheim and two research centers at WVU, the Center for
Literary Computing (CLC)  and the Virtual Environments Lab (VEL). Sondheim
visited WVU during June and July 2004 to begin initial research on a
project entitled "World Premiere: The Phenomenology of the Virtual." We
are pleased to present some of the video, audio, and still images
resulting from this work.  Other aspects of the project include an art
installation and public discussions. This is a ongoing exploration: more
files will be added, included commentary and theoretical writings.
Sondheim produced many of these works through creative mis-use and
adaption of the motion capture technologies at the VEL. Using the
technology against the grain, Sondheim disrupted and re-distributed
built-in assumptions about the imaging and integrity of the human body and
the capture of the "real." The results are beautiful and moving, both
alien and very human, enigmatic and intimate. If these are works about the
liveness of technological codings and protocols, they equally work rooted
in a particular place - West Virginia.  Sondheim continually records his
interactions and travels in and around Morgantown, and the images and
sounds of West Virginia are integrated into this work. The project is as
much about the very real and local as it is about the virtual, and this is
its interest and intensity.
Sandy Baldwin
Assistant Professor of English/CLC Director
:::::::::::::::::::
The selection of materials includes finished work, 'miniatures' of
finished work, and raw materials. Most of the still images are 'raw,' and
resonate with me; they find their way into other pieces. There are images
of the July/August installation at the Paul Mesaros Gallery of West
Virginia University; there are also images of the motion capture equipment
at work, as well as landscape/town shots.
There are two sample .bvh files which feed into the videos through Poser 4
and Poser 5 applications.
The texts are my current writing, some of which is on motion capture and
other relevant concerns.
I wish to thank Sandy Baldwin, the two interns working with me (from the
Research Experiences for Undergraduates program), Terri Markle and Jorge
Fuentes, as well as Frances van Scoy from the Virtual Environments
Laboratory.
And thank you for looking at the materials here -
Alan Sondheim
sondheim_at_panix.com