International Federation ofClassification Societies
Newsletter

President: Iven Van Mechelen

Number 43

May, 2012
Editor:

The
International
Federation
ofClassification Societies, founded in 1985, iscomposed of:
Associação Portuguesa de Classificação 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, Greek
Society of Data Analysis, Irish Pattern
Recognition and Classification Society,Japanese Classification Society, Korean
Classification Society, Société Francophonede Classification, Società Italiana diStatistica, Statistical Society of Slovenia,
Vereniging voor Ordinatie en Classificatieand Section of Classification and Data
Analysis of the Polish Statistical Society.
The IFCS is a non-profit, non-politicalscientific organization, the aims of which
are to further classification research.
Among other activities, the IFCS organises abiennial conference, and supports the“Journal of Classification” and the journal“Advancesin
Data
Analysis
andClassification (ADAC)”.

IFCS Homepage:
http://www.classification-society.org/
Designed and maintained by David Dubin.
The website contains, among other things:
the IFCS Constitution and By-Laws, IFCS
newsletters, and links to the websites ofmember societies.

Paul McNicholas

Contents
Words from the IFCS President
News from the IFCS Publication Officer
Call for Papers, IFCS-2013: July 14-17, Tilburg
Chikio Hayashi Awards Program
IFCS-sponsored Courses: Call for Applications
News from the Japanese Classification SocietyNews from CLAD
News from ClaDAG
News from the Classification SocietyNews from SFC
SDA 2012
Joint Conference of GfKl and SFC, July 2013
MBC2 - Extended Deadline for Poster Session
Classification Society Meeting 2012
KDD-2012
Advncs. in Interactive & Visual Data Clustering

Words from the IFCS President
IFCS is facing quite a few thrilling challenges! It
is a privilege to be given the opportunity to serve
the Federation in the role of President at such atime, and I very much look forward tocollaborating with the IFCS Executive
Committee, the IFCS Council and the broad
community of researchers in classification anddata analysis to move our research andinteractions to a next level.
Of course, I would also like to take theopportunity to warmly thank my predecessor,
Geoff McLachlan, for the involvement and the
dedication with which he piloted the federation
through the past two years. I look forward tocontinuing the collaboration with him on the
Executive Committee. Otherwise, I am also most
happy that Geoff accepted to act as convener of
an IFCS thematic session at the forthcoming
Compstat conference in Limassol, Cyprus.

Thanks also go to André Hardy for his tirelessefforts to produce the IFCS Newsletter during his
two terms as IFCS Publications Officer.
Finally, I would like to convey special thanks to
Buck McMorris, who left the IFCS Executive
Committee after serving on it for six consecutive
years. However, as has already been mentioned in
the previous Newsletter, Buck will retain somelinks with the Executive Committee as he has
been co-opted to be a special advisor on the
expansion by the Federation into newmembership regions. I look very much forward toworking with Buck on this. Otherwise, during thepast few months, we received several very
enthusiastic and encouraging messages that imply
a significant expansion of the Federation inseveral directions could be feasible. I hope to beable to give you more information on this in
future issues of this Newsletter.
It is further my pleasure to congratulate Maurizio
Vichi on being elected the next IFCS President.
Maurizio has a long record of service in theFederation and on the IFCS Council, and has
been a dynamic President of SIS. The Federation
is fortunate to have him now during six years on
the Executive Committee (two years as PresidentElect, two years as President, and two years as
Past President).
Moreover, I am also very happy to welcome PaulMcNicholas on the Executive Committee upon
his election as the new IFCS Publications Officer.
In the new millennium, we will have to come up
with several new publication channels andinitiatives, and I trust that with Paul the
publication challenges facing the Federation are
in very good hands.
One of the major IFCS initiatives in the coming
two years will be the biannual conference of theFederation, IFCS-2013. I am delighted that the
Department of Methodology and Statistics ofTilburg University, in cooperation with theDutch/Flemish Classification Society (VOC), hascomposed an excellent bid for the organization ofthis conference that has been enthusiasticallyapproved by the IFCS Council. Personally, I havealready had several interactions with the localorganizers, Jeroen Vermunt and Andries van derArk, and I must say that I am most impressed by
the professionalism and sound pragmatism withwhich they are dealing with a very demanding

conference organization. In another place of thisNewsletter you will find more information about
IFCS-2013 along with a first call for papers. I
trust that you will mark the conference venue(Tilburg, The Netherlands) and the conference
dates (July 14-17, 2013) in your calendar, and I
look forward to meeting all of you in Tilburg inJuly 2013!
At the occasion of IFCS-2013, the Federation willaward again a small number of prizes (named
after the late Chikio Hayashi) to (relatively)
young, promising researchers on the basis of asolid scientific track record and impact onclassification research. The federation considers
these prizes most important, as they may givesignificant support to the winners in thedevelopment of their academic career. I am very
proud that once more a group of very
distinguished scholars has accepted to act as the
Chikio Hayashi Awards committee that will
evaluate the applications for the prizes: Edwin
Diday (University of Paris-Dauphine), Sylvia
Frühwirth-Schnatter (Vienna University of
Economics and Business), James Ramsay(McGill University), and Michel Wedel (chair;
University of Maryland). Elsewhere in thisNewsletter you will find more information on theapplication procedure. I would like to strongly
encourage all promising, young researchers in theareas of classification and data analysis to submit
an application.
Finally, I would like to point out that nowadays
new methods, algorithms, and data-analytic
devices are very often being proposed in theclassification
domainwithout
adequatecomparison with current best practices or gold
standards, and without sufficient evidence ofgood performance on benchmark data sets. This
practice is prohibitive as it hampers the buildingof a cumulative body of knowledge. The
standards within the classification domain are inthis regard somewhat inferior to those in a few
other disciplines (including medicine and parts ofthe engineering sciences) that have a moreestablished benchmarking culture. Within theFederation, we want to answer this challenge andat a meeting in Frankfurt, the IFCS Council
approved a proposal from the Executive
Committee to launch a project on this. This
project includes the establishment of abenchmarking task force, the current compositionof which is: Christophe Biernacki, Bernd Bischl,

Nema Dean (chair), Christian Hennig, Friedrich
Leisch, Geoff McLachlan, Douglas Steinley, andIven Van Mechelen. The task force has alreadymet a couple of times and I very much lookforward to seeing preliminary results during thenext
few
months.
Moreover,severalrepresentatives of the committee agreed tocontribute to an IFCS invited session on
benchmarking (scientifically sponsored by both
IFCS and IASC) at the World Statistics
Conference (ISI) in Hong Kong, August 2013.
Indeed, the Federation is facing quite a few
thrilling challenges!
Iven Van Mechelen
IFCS President
Iven.VanMechelen@ppw.kuleuven.beNews from the
IFCS Publication Officer
I would like to begin by thanking Iven Van
Mechelen for his warm words of welcome andAndré Hardy for his help with the changeover.
Thanks also to all of those who have contributed
to this newsletter.
There follow short updates on several initiatives
that are underway at this time.
• The IFCS website is undergoing somerenovation. Soon, I expect there to be a pagefor upcoming conferences and meetings. This
will be followed by further updates.
• From 2013, our newsletter will move to a
new schedule to accommodate three
newsletters per year. They will be publishedin March, July and November. We are doing
this as part of an effort to better share
information within the community.
• We expect to have book reviews in our
newsletter starting with the November 2012
issue. Please contact me if you are interested
in doing a book review.
Some colleagues contacted me earlier this year
about adding calls for comference papers to thenewsletter where the deadline was before May
31, 2012. By now, the deadlines have passed but
the conferences are nonetheless very interesting.
Therefore, I have included them as items later onin this newsletter.
Going forward, I hope to be able to add such calls

to the website within just a week or two ofreciept.
Furthermore,
conferences
withsubmission deadlines before March 31, 2013 canbe advertised in the November 2012 newsletter.
Paul McNicholas
IFCS Publication Officer
paul.mcnicholas@uoguelph.ca

Call for Papers
IFCS-2013
July 14-17, 2013
Tilburg, The Netherlands
Conference Setup
The 2013 conference of the International
Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS) will
be held at Tilburg University, The Netherlands
from July 14 to July 17, 2013. The conference
theme will be ‘United through Ordination andClassification’.
On July 14, preconference workshops will beheld. The conference itself starts on July 15 in themorning, and will close on July 17 with a full day
conference program and a conference dinner. The
conference will include a president’s invited
session and a presidential address, keynote
presentations, invited presentations, invited andcontributed symposia, and oral and poster
presentations.
The opening session will further feature thepresentation of the Chikio Hayashi Awards,
which are scientific prizes for young researcherswith promising track records in the areas ofclassification and data analysis, as a support oftheir professional career; for 2013,. The membersof the Awards Committee are: Michel Wedel(chair), Edwin Diday, Sylvia Frühwirth-Schnatter
and James Ramsay.
Tilburg
Tilburg is a lively student city - with 200,000
inhabitants of which 30,000 are students! Whenyou have finished your studies for the day, a shorttrip to the city centre takes you to theatres,
cinemas, museums, restaurants, pubs, nightclubs
and a concert hall – with enough variety for every
taste. Or if you want to go further, other cities
such as Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Cologne
are within easy reach of Tilburg. Festivals areorganized throughout the year in and around
Tilburg and the University. Tilburg is also host to
the largest funfair in the Benelux.
Tilburg has good train connections to two major
airports, Schiphol (Amsterdam) and Brussels, aswell as to the smaller “budget flights” airport of
Eindhoven. Tilburg University has its own train
station and within town there is a good public(bus) transportation system.
Conference Topics
Contributed
papersfromscholarsandpractitioners are invited on any of the topics
below as well as on related issues:
Applications in Natural Sciences, Engineering,
Medicine and Biology
Banking and FinanceBioinformatics and Biostatistics
Biomedical Data Analysis and Imaging
Business and Industry
Classification, Discriminant Analysis, andSupervised Learning
Clustering and Unsupervised Learning
Complex Event Processing
Data Analysis in Archaeology
Databionics
Exploratory Data Mining
Formal Concept Analysis
Geospatial Planning
Graphics and Vision
Image Analysis and Computer Vision
Information Retrieval and Library Science
Knowledge Discovery
Linguistics and Musicology
Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition
Marketing and Management
Medical and Health Sciences
Psychology and Educational Sciences
Social Network Analysis
Statistical Data Analysis and Models
Swarm Systems
Symbolic Data Analysis
Text Mining, Web Mining, and Ontology
Learning
Visualization
Scientific Program Committee
Jeroen Vermunt (Chair, Tilburg Uni., NL)
Carlos Cuevas (Uni. Anahúac, MX).
Rozenn Dahyot (Trinity College, Dublin, IE)
Anuška Ferligoj (University of Ljubljana, SI)
Patrick Groenen (Erasmus Uni. Rotterdam, NL)

Christian Hennig (UCL, London, UK)
Krzysztof Jajuga (Uni. of Wrocław, PL)
Tae Rim Lee (Korea National Open Uni., KR)Friedrich Leisch (Uni. Für Bodenkultur, AT)
Niel le Roux (University of Stellenbosch, ZA)
Geoff McLachlan (Uni. of Queensland, AU)
Fred R. McMorris (Illinois IT, Chicago, US)
Angelos Markos (Demo. Uni. of Thrace, GR)
Boris Mirkin (University of London, UK)
Mohamed Nadif (Uni. Paris Descartes, FR)
Rebecca Nugent (Carnegie Mellon Uni., PA, US)
Akinori Okada (Tama University, JP)
Fernanda Campos de Sousa (Uni. Porto, PT)
Iven Van Mechelen (IFCS President,
University of Leuven, BE)
Maurizio Vichi (University Rome, IT)
Claus Weihs (University Dortmund, DE)
Junjie Wu (Beihang University, Beijing, CN)
Local Organizers
Department of Methodology and Statistics,
Tilburg University in cooperation with theDutch/Flemish Classification Society (VOC).
Address:

Phone
Fax
Email
WebsiteTilburg University
Warandelaan 25037 AB, Tilburg
The Netherlands+31 13 466 2544
+31 13 466 3002
info@ifcs2013.org
http://www.ifcs2013.org

Submission of Abstracts
Titles and abstracts should be submitted anduploadedvia
deconference
websitehttp://www.ifcs2013.org before March 1, 2013.
All abstracts will be subject to a peer review
process. Notifications of acceptance will be sent
on April 15, 2013.
Important Dates
June 1, 2012
First call for Papers
March 1, 2013 Deadline abstract submission
April 15, 2013 Notification of acceptanceMay 15, 2013 Deadline standard registration
June 15, 2013 Deadline late registration
July 14, 2013
Preconference workshops
July 15-17, ‘13 IFCS 2013 conference
Publications related to the conference
Special issues linked with the conference areplanned in journals such as the Journal ofClassification, Advances in Data Analysis andClassification, and Computational Statistics andData Analysis.
Fees (which include conference materials, anextended reception, coffee breaks, and threelunches)
Registration
Preconference
Early
Late
Workshop
€250
€300
€50
Member*
*
€350
€420
€50
Non-member
€125
€150
€25
Student*

Here, ‘member’ means a member of an IFCS member
society.

Further information
Further information will be posted on theconference website www.ifcs2013.org
Please, note that IFCS 2013 is scheduled justafter the Meeting of the German Classification
Society,heldinnearbyLuxemburg(www.gfkl.org); and just before the International
Meeting of the Psychometric Society held in
nearbyArnhem,The
Netherlands(www.psychometricsociety.org).
We look forward to seeing you in Tilburg in July2013.
Jeroen Vermunt (Chair, Scientific Program
Committee)
Andries van der Ark (Chair, Local Organizing
Committee)
Iven Van Mechelen (President, IFCS)

The Chikio Hayashi award is given to young,promising researchers on the basis of theirscientific track record and impact onClassification Research. Applicants are requested
to submit a one-page statement of expertise andimpact (this form), a recent CV (pdf), and threeselected published papers (pdf). The statement ofexpertise and impact needs to refer to these
papers and include a recent dated Web-of-Sciencecitation count for each.
All candidates must be under the age of 35 years
at the time of the conference and need to beauthors of a paper to be presented at the IFCS
Conference.
All candidates will be notified the evaluation
results no later than May 30th, 2013.
Michel Wedel

IFCS-sponsored Courses:
Call for Applications
The IFCS Council has adopted a proposal fromthe IFCS Executive Committee to sponsor eachyear one course on IFCS-related topics. All
individual members of the IFCS member
societies are invited to consider submitting a
proposal. Below, one may find the rules forsponsoring as approved by the IFCS Executive
Committee.
•

Chikio Hayashi Awards Program
Researchers who want to apply for a CHA award,
for the occasion of the IFCS’13 Conference (July
14th through July 17th 2013 in Tilburg, The
Netherlands), are invited to submit theirapplication to the Chair of the Awards Committee(Dr. Michel Wedel, attention of Carol Cron email address: ccron@rhsmith.umd.edu).
The award committee consists of Edwin Diday(UniversityofParis-Dauphine),
SylviaFrühwirth-Schnatter (Vienna University of
Economics and Business), James Ramsay(McGill University) and Michel Wedel(University of Maryland).

•Eligible for sponsoring by IFCS are courses:oopen for an international audience, in
the English language, on topics within
the domains of classification and data
analysis as those may be typicallyencountered in the mainstream of
IFCS conferencesothat are supported by at least two
IFCS member societies (as madeclear by the explicit mentioning ofmembers from those societies in theorganizing committee)othat are attended by participants fromat least two IFCS member societiesothat are non-profit (in the sense thatno financial gain is aimed at by theorganizers)
Pre IFCS conference workshops are excluded
from sponsoring.

•

•

•
•

•

•

Sponsoring can only be used to cover costs
directly pertaining to the organization of thecourse(e.g.,
forlecturerooms,
announcements, travel costs, etc.), herewith
excluding financing of teachers (except for areimbursement of expenses). In addition tofinancial sponsoring, IFCS will mention thecourse on its website and in other media, if
possible. Conversely, in all announcementsof the course, IFCS has to be mentioned assponsor.
Requests for sponsoring shall be made to the
President of IFCS by the organizer of thecourse, at least 6 months before the course
starts. The request should contain:o A description of the aim of the course
o A preliminary program of the course
o A list of the IFCS member societies
involved in the organization of thecourse as well as the composition of
the organizing committee, whichshould include an IFCS Council
member from a society not involved in
the organization of the course
o A description of the size and kind of
the intended audienceo A detailed budget for the course,
including the height of the fees, and theamount requested from IFCS
Decisions on sponsoring shall be made by the
IFCS Executive Committee.
Each budgetary year, only one course can besponsored, with a maximum amount of$1000. In this respect, the dates of the course
determine with which budgetary year thecourse is associated.
If the local situation of the course organizers
allows to apply for matching funds, theorganizers are encouraged to make use of thispossibility; if needed, upon request of theorganizers, the IFCS Executive Committee
will state that IFCS sponsoring is granted
conditional upon the awarding of matchingfunds.
The sponsoring is paid after the course, uponreceipt of a report on the course (mentioningat least the topics on the program, the numberof participants and their countries ofresidence, as well as the number of days thecourse lasted), and a full financial account.
Nema Dean
IFCS Treasurer

News from JCS(I) The 30th Annual Research Meeting of
the Japanese Classification Society
The 30th Annual Research Meeting of theJapanese Classification Society was held at
Doshisha University (Kyoto) on March 8, 2012.
The speakers and the titles of their talks were as
follows:
Simultaneous
Classification
Multidimensional Scaling
Yoshikazu Terada (Osaka University)
Hiroshi Yadohisa (Doshisha University)

andA Generalization of Multi-Layer Cluster Analysis
Akinori Okada (Tama Univesity)
Satoru Yokoyama (Teikyo University)
Centrality and Overlapping Clustering for Signed
Graph
Michiharu Kitano (Doshisha University)
Hiroshi Yadohisa (Doshisha University)
The Utility of Data Analysis Focusing on the
Structure of Interrelationships among theQuestion Items
Kazufumi Manabe (Aoyama Gakuin University)
Classification of Novel written by O. Henry from
Figure-ground Relationships of Characters
Tetsuya Matsu (Kobe University)
Eugene S. Kitamura (Kobe University)
Yukio-Pegio Gunji (Kobe University)
Visualization of the Curriculum Structure of
Liberal Arts Education
Takao Ishizuka (Asia University)
Evaluation of Curds & Whey Method in Flexible
Discriminant Analysis
Toshio Shimokawa (University of Yamanashi)
Hiroki Motogaito (GREE, Inc.)
Mitsuhiro Tusuji (Kansai University)
Masashi
Goto(Biostatistical
Research
Association, NPO)
Normal mixture models for time censored data
Nagatomo
Nakamura(Sapporo
GakuinUniversity)
Takahiro Tsuchiya (Josai University)

(II) The 4th Japanese-German
Symposium on Classification (JGSC 2012)
JGSC 2012 was held on March 9th to 10th at
Doshisha University, Kyoto Japan. The
symposium was organized together with theGerman Classification Society (GfKl). The 1st
Japanese-German Symposium on Classification
was held in 2005 in Tokyo. Since then, the 2nd
German-Japanese Workshop (Berlin, 2006) andthe 3rd German-Japanese Workshop (Karlsruhe,2010) have been actively organized by German
and Japanese researchers in classification andrelated fields. The symposium included 33 talks
in eight sections in which 11 German participants
with 50 Japanese participants discussed andshared their insights of data analysis. Thissymposium aroused great interest as the research
papers of the 1st and the 2nd symposium were
published by Springer-Verlag in a book entitled'Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, andKnowledge Organization'. The research papers of
the 3rd and the 4th Symposium will also be
published by Springer-Verlag.
Atsuho Nakayama

News from CLAD
JOCLAD 2013 - Call for Participation
The XX Annual Meeting of the Associação
Portuguesa de CLassificação e Análise de Dados(CLAD), JOCLAD 2013, will be held on April
10-13 2013 at the Universidade do Minho Campus de Azurém. The web site of the meeting
will be available soon.
JOCLAD 2012
The XIX Annual Meeting of the CLAD,
JOCLAD 2012, was held on March 28-31 2012 at
the Instituto Politécnico de Tomar. About 70
participants, among researchers, students andprofessionals, attended the conference.
The JOCLAD 2012 scientific program included
four types of presentations: plenary sessions “Data Analysis and Mining of Narrative:
Supporting Search and Navigation throughPattern Recognition in Narrative” by Fionn
Murtagh (Science Foundation Ireland andDepartment of Computer Science – University of
London), “Two-mode partitioning: State of theart” by Iven Van Mechelen (Faculty ofPsychology and Educational Sciences Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), “Intuição,Realidade, Análise de Dados e Inferência”, by
Carlos Agra Coelho (Faculdade de Ciências e
Tecnologia - Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and“A combinação fixo+móvel nas sondagens
telefónicas” by Paula Vicente (ISCTE - Instituto
Universitário de Lisboa); thematic sessions –“Projectos Inovadores nas Estatísticas dos
Bancos Centrais” sponsored by the Banco dePortugal, “Desafios nas estatísticas Oficiais”
sponsored by the Instituto Nacional de Estatística;
contributed papers and posters.
A short course took place on March 28:"Introdução à Análise de Dados com R", byManuela Neves and Jorge Cadima. Moreinformation on the JOCLAD 2012 program can
be
found
at
the
websitehttp://www.joclad2012.ipt.pt/
CLAD-sponsored courses
CLAD sponsored a one day course held on
February 25 at the Faculdade de Engenharia,
Universidade do Porto. The course, entitled"Modelos com Classes Latentes", was presented
by José Gonçalves Dias (ISCTE- Instituto
Universitário de Lisboa).
CLAD- Publication
So far CLAD has mainly sponsored publications
issued from JOCLAD’s meetings or from someinternational meetings CLAD (co-)organized (e.g.
ASMDA-1999, EMPG-2001, JISS-2003, ISBIS2007, ISMRA-2007). They appeared mostly inthe form of extended abstracts books and were
published by the Instituto Nacional de Estatística(INE). During the year (hopefully in the firstsemester) of 2012 a new CLAD-Publication
containing a cluster of refereed articles whichwere presented in previous JOCLAD meetings
will be distributed. Editors are Helena BacelarNicolau, Fernanda Sousa and Carlos Ferreira.
Publisher is again the INE.
Helena Bacelar-Nicolauhbacelar@fp.ul.pt

News from ClaDAG
Seventh ClaDAG
Scientific Meeting, Report
The seventh ClaDAG scientific meeting was heldin Pavia from September 7th to 9th, 2011.
Professor Salvatore Ingrassia chaired theScientific Programme Committee and Professor
Paolo Giudici chaired the Local Organizing
Committee. The meeting registered more than
200 participants and approximately 150 talks.
Three keynote lectures were given by M.
Titterington, F. Palumbo and V. Batagelj.
A book of selected and extended papers willappear in the Springer series on Data Analysis
and Classification and it is expected by the end of
the year.
ClaDAG Scientific Council (2012-2013).
On the occasion of the last ClaDAG conference
held in Pavia, the ClaDAG has partially renewed
its Scientific Council. Professor Francesco(Federico II University of Naples) took turns withprofessor Andrea Cerioli (Univeristy of Parma) inchairing the Council. Professor Paolo Giudici(University of Pavia) has been elected as Vice
President, he will be the next President in 2013.
The Scientific Council has now the following
composition: F. Palumbo (President), P. Giudici(Vice President), members are S. Ingrassia(University of Catania), C. Rampichini(University of Florence) and D. Vicari (Sapienza
University, Rome).
Eigth ClaDAG
Scientific Meeting, Announcement
The next (8th) ClaDAG Scientific Meeting will
be held in Modena from September 18th to 20th.
The University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia
hosts the conference and the professor Tommaso
Minerva chairs the Local Organizing Committee.
During its last meeting, the ClaDAG ScientificCouncil has indicated the following colleagues
for the Scientific Programme Committee:
Francesco Palumbo, Chair, Federico II
University of Naples
Marco Alfò, Sapienza University of Rome
Stefano Campostrini, University of Padua
Maurizio Carpita, University of Brescia
Marcello Chiodi, University of Palermo
Pier Alda Ferrari, University of Milan
Leonardo Grilli, University of Florence
Salvatore Ingrassia, Univeristy of Catania
Tommaso Minerva, University of Modena andReggio Emilia
Isabella Morlini, University of Modena andReggio Emilia
Domenico Perrotta, Joint Research Centre - Ispra
Giovanna Ranalli, University of Perugia

Cinzia Viroli, University of Bologna
Other scientific events co-organized or
endorsed by the ClaDAG
Analysis and Modeling of Complex Data in
Behavioural and Social Sciences
Anacapri, September 2-3, 2012
The ClaDAG organizes the meeting on 'Analysis
and Modeling of Complex Data in Behaviouraland Social Sciences', jointly with the JapaneseClassification Society. The meeting will be heldin Anacapri on the enchanting isle of Capri,
September 2-3th. The conference will focus on
the analysis and modeling of complex data inbehavioral and social sciences. The joint meeting
aims at enhancing the scientific cooperation
between Italian and Japanese data analysts, and at
establishing new cooperation between membersof the two Societies. Donatella Vicari (Italy) andAkinori Okada (Japan) co-chair the SPC,
Giancarlo Ragozini chairs the LOC. The
conference is also a Compstat 2012 satellite
meeting; IASC members are entitled to a reduced
fee. More information is available at theconference
web
site:
http://www.jcscladag12.unina.it/.
Model Based Clustering and Classification,
September 6-7th, Catania
The International meeting ‘Model Based
Clustering and Classification’ will be held in
Catania, under the auspices of the ClaDAG.
AndreaCerioli(Italy),Salvatore Ingrassia (Italy), Angela Montanari(Italy) and Roberto Rocci (Italy) are in the
Scientific Committee. The workshop aims at
providing a focus on the state-of-the-art researchin the field of model based clustering andclassification as well as a forum of scientificdiscussions and comparisons among young andsenior researchers. More information is available
attheconference
WEB
site:
http://www.economia.unict.it/mbc2/
Francesco Palumbo

News from the Classification Society
The 2012 Distinguished Dissertation Award joint
winners are Dr. Theodoros Damoulas for his
dissertation "Probabilistic Multiple Kernel
Learning" defended at the University of Glasgow,

Scotland under the supervision of Professor Mark
Girolami and Dr. Ondrej Vencalek for his
dissertation "Weighted Data Depth and Depth
Based Discrimination" defended at the Charles
University in Prague, Czech Republic under thesupervision of Dr. Daniel Hlubinka.
In 2012 the Award totals US$500 in book
vouchers from Chapman and Hall/CRC and thewinners are invited to make a presentation in a
special plenary session at the Classification
Society’s 2012 Annual Meeting.
Nema DeanNews from SFC
The 19th meeting of the French-speaking
Classification Society (SFC) will be held at
Marseille (France) on October 29-31, 2012:
http://sfc12.centrale-marseille.fr/
The meeting will be organized by the engineer
school Centrale Marseille. The scientific program
will include sessions with invited talks andselected presentations.
The main topics of the conference are:
* Bioinformatics* Classification and discrimination* Classification in social sciences* Clustering and distance analysis* Combinatorial methods* Data mining* Hierarchical and non-hierarchical classification* Image and signal analysis* Mathematical and statistical approaches* Neural networks and genetic algorithms* Optimization approaches* Representation and vizualisation* Similarities and dissimilarities* Symbolic data analysis* Trees, graphs and lattices* Validation
Important dates:• Submission of short papers (2-4 pages):
17 June, 2012
• Notification of acceptance: July, 2012
• Camera-ready copy due: September, 2012.
Submission website:
http://sfc12.centrale-marseille.fr/node/3

Program committee: P. Bertrand; H. H. Bock; P.
Brito; F. Brucker; G. Cleuziou; J. Diatta; E.
Diday; A. Douzal; G. Drouet d'Aubigny; M.
Elloumi; A. Gély; G. Govaert; A. Guénoche; A.
Hardy; P. Kuntz; I.C. Lerman; V. Makarenkov; I.
van Mechelen; E. Mephu Nguifo; A. Napoli; R.
Nock; L. Ralaivola; G. Ritschard; F. Rossi; J.
Saracco; R. Verde
SFC 2012
The 19th meeting of the French-speaking
Classification Society (SFC) will be held at
Marseille (France) on October 29-31, 2012. The
meeting will be organized by the French engineer
school Centrale Marseille. The scientific program
will include sessions with invited talks andselected presentations. The main topics of theconference are:
* Bio-informatics* Classification and discrimination* Classification in social sciences* Clustering and distance analysis* Combinatorial methods* Data mining* Hierarchical and non-hierarchical classification* Image and signal analysis* Mathematical and statistical approaches* Neural networks and genetic algorithms* Optimization approaches* Representation and vizualisation* Similarities and dissimilarities* Symbolic data analysis* Trees, graphs and lattices* Validation
Important dates:* Submission of short papers (2-4 pages long):
June, 2012
* Notification of acceptance: July, 2012
* Camera-ready copy due: September, 2012
François Brucker

SDA 2012
The 3rd Workshop in Symbolic Data Analysis(SDA 2012) will be held in Madrid, Spain, from
November 7th to 9th, 2012. The SDA 2012
workshop follows the spirit of the previous
editions held in Vienna and Namur, respectively,
and aims to be a forum where the symbolic
community comes together to share research
results and experiences.

Aims And Scope
Symbolic Data Analysis is a relatively recent
field (less than two decades old) that focuses on
the analysis of data sets where individuals aredescribed by variables that can represent internalvariation and/or structure. Symbolic data values
can be intervals, histograms, distributions, lists ofvalues, taxonomies, etc.
The workshop presents itself as an excellent
opportunity for crossover of ideas between thecommunity members and to open the way tofuture cooperation between them.
This workshop invites oral presentations that
contain recent developments, from a theoreticalor methodological point of view, practicalapplications and new software tools. The
workshop will also include sessions for open
discussions about the recent achievements and theopen challenges in the field.
Target Audience
The workshop aims to provide a forum for thesymbolic community, the old and the new. Thus,
people who recently became interested in thesymbolic domain or who want to lay out theirview on the topic are especially encouraged toparticipate and share their experiences with therest of the community.
All the relevant information about SDA 2012 canbe found at: http://www.sda-workshop.org/
Maria Paula Brito, Javier Arroyo and Carlos Maté

Joint Conference of GfKl and SFC
July 10-13, 2013
Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg
The 2013 Joint Conference of the German
Classification Society (GfKl) and the French
Classification Society (SFC) will take place inJuly 10-13, in Luxembourg. The title of theconference will be “European Conference on
Data Analysis”. The scientific program will
include sessions with invited talks andcontributed presentations from a broad range of
topics. Special emphasis will be laid on
interdisciplinary research and the interaction oftheory and practice. Conference language isEnglish. Local organizer is Prof. Dr. Sabine
Krolak-Schwerdt (University of Luxembourg)and the Scientific Program Chair is Prof. Dr. Dirk
Van den Poel (University of Ghent, Belgium).
The broad range of relevant topics is illustrated
by the following list of intended sections.
Contributed papers from scholars and practioners
are invited to any of these as well as to related
topics: (1) Theory and Methods, including but
not limited to Multivariate Methods, Exploratory
Data Analysis, Clustering and Classification,
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning,
Visualization and Scaling Methods, Evaluation of
Methods, (2) Data Science, including Data PreProcessing, Text and Web Mining, Information
Extraction and Retrieval, Personalization andIntelligent Agents and (3) Applications,involving Marketing and Management Science,
Banking and Finance, Production, Controllingand OR, Biostatistics and Bioinformatics,
Genome and DNA Analysis, Medical and Health
Sciences,
Archaeology
andGeography,
Linguistics
andStatistical
Musicology,
Psychology and Education, Library Science.
Participants intending to present a talk are invited
to submit an abstract by email. After blind
reviewing, accepted abstracts will appear in the
pre-conference volume. After the presentations at
the conference, authors can submit full papers to
the post-conference proceedings, which will be
published in the Springer Series “Studies inClassification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge
Organisation”.
Important Dates:
Feb. 28, 2013: Deadline for abstract submission
March 30, 2013: Notification of acceptance
July 10-13, 2013: European Conference on Data
Analysis
August 30, 2013: Deadline for full paper
submissions
November 15, 2013: Notification of acceptanceof full paper submissions
January 15, 2014: Deadline for Camera readypaper submissions
Conference Location:
The conference will be hosted by the Universityof Luxembourg. Luxembourg City has beenhonoured as a UNESCO World Heritage Site,
located at the crossroads of Europe. It is one of
the three seats of the European Union’s main
institutions and a renowned financial service
center. Luxembourg City has excellent flight andtrain connections to the major cities of Europe. A
stimulating program and the attractiveness of an
exciting European capital will be worthwhile
participating in the European Conference on Data
Analysis 2013.
Sabine Krolak-Schwerdt

MBC2
Extended Deadline for Poster Session
Extended Paper Submission
As mentioned within the ClaDAG report, MBC2
is an International workshop on Model Based
Clustering and Classification that will be held in
Catania (Italy), September 6-7th, 2012.
Extended Deadline for Poster Session
The deadline for the poster session has been
extended to July 15, 2012.
Extended paper submission
After the workshop, papers can be submitted for
publication in a special peer-reviewed issue of the
Journal ADAC - Advances in Data Analysis andClassification on “Model Based Blustering andClassification” (Guest Editors: H.H. Bock, S.
Ingrassia, J. Vermunt)
Remaining Important Dates
1. June 30, 2012: Deadline for earlyregistration (120 euro). Note: space islimited to 80 people and so earlyregistration is encouraged.
2. July 15, 2012: Submission of an abstract(max 500 words) and some background
literature (max 3 papers or technicalreports) for poster session.
3. July 25, 2012: Notification of theacceptance of the papers for poster session
4. August 31, 2012: Submission of the slides(for oral presentations) or short papers(for poster session). Such documents will
be available to the participants of theworkshop.
Website: http://www.economia.unict.it/mbc2/
Salvatore Ingrassia
mbc2@unict.it

Classification Society Meeting 2012
The Classification Society 2012 meeting will beheld at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania from June 14-16, 2012. The
Keynote Speaker will be Doug Steinley from the
University of Missouri (Psychology); thePresidential Address will be given by Rebecca
Nugent from Carnegie Mellon University(Statistics). Although attendees are primarily
from the United States, there are scheduled
speakers from six countries. We will be honoring
Bob Sokal and Phipps Arabie with memorial
sessions. We will also present this year's CS
Dissertation Award to Theodoros Damoulas(Cornell University) and Ondrej Vencalek(Charles University in Prague). More details canbe found at http://cs2012.stat.cmu.edu (last year's
meeting is at http://cs2011.stat.cmu.edu).
Rebecca Nugent

KDD-2012
The 18th ACM SIGKDD Conference on
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD2012) will take place in Beijing, China from
August12-16,
2012.
Pleasesee
http://www.kdd.org/kdd2012/ for further details.
Ming Hua

Advances in Interactive andVisual Data Clustering
There will be a special session on Advances inInteractive and Visual Data Clustering withinthe
16thInternational
Conferenceon
Information Visualisation, which will take placefrom July 10-13 2012, LIRMM CNRS Univ.
Montpellier II, Montpellier, France. Further
detailsareavailableat:
http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/IV2012/
Gilles Venturini

Looking Ahead to IFCS Newsletter
Number 44
Contributions for the forthcoming issue of the
IFCS newsletter should be sent topaul.mcnicholas@uoguelph.ca
before November 16, 2012.
Please remember that calls for papers that need
to appear in the newsletter before March 31,
2013 should be in the November newsletter.
Plain text or Word files are preferred.
Thanks!
Paul McNicholas
IFCS Publication Officer