OFAI

FuC LLMs 2026 -- The Future of Computational Linguistics in the Age of LLMs

2026-03-04T00:00:00+01:00

In March 2026, OFAI will host a select group of researchers discussing the future of computational linguistics in the age of AI. The discussions will include but will not be restricted to questions such as: Is computational linguistics (CL) dead, or is there still a place for CL beside LLMs? Do Transformer-based LLMs or multi-modal models bring us closer to real natural language understanding (NLU), or do we need a different architecture for true progress? Do LLMs reduce everything to a linguistic problem?

The symposium is co-organised by Brigitte Krenn (OFAI) and Stephanie Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg).

Location:

Österreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) Freyung 6/6, 1010 Wien, Austria, 3rd floor (no elevator!)

Schedule:

Wed 04.03. afternoon: positioning & goals (starting with position statements from participants)
Thu 05.03.: brainstorming & discussions (based on key questions)
Fri 06.03.: summary, position statement, action points
Sam 07.03.: informal debriefing, review of the symposium results, and next steps (who: the organizers and all participants still present and interested)

Gleichbehandlungs-Blog Beitrag zu KI-Ethik und Diskriminierungsbekämpfung

2026-01-27T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Brigitte Krenn hat mit der Gleichbehandlungsanwaltschaft im Rahmen deren Gleichbehandlungs-Blogs über die ethische Nutzung von KI sowie die Bekämpfung von Diskriminierung mithilfe von KI gesprochen und welche Rolle die Daten dabei spielen. Hier geht es zum "Ethik und Diskriminierungsbekämpfungs"-Beitrag.

Gleichbehandlungs-Blog Beitrag zu Simulation oder echte künstliche Intelligenz

2026-01-26T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Brigitte Krenn hat mit der Gleichbehandlungsanwaltschaft im Rahmen deren Gleichbehandlungs-Blogs über was ist KI eigentlich, was meinen wir, wenn wir von AI oder KI sprechen, und welche kollektiven Fehlkonzeptionen haben wir bezüglich was AI kann, was es ist, oder eben nicht kann und nicht ist. Hier geht es zum "Simulation oder echte KI"-Beitrag.

JOKER workshop at CLEF 2025

2025-10-21T00:00:00+02:00

Papers from the workshop "JOKER: Automatic Humour Analysis" have now been published in the proceedings of CLEF 2025, the 16th Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.

The JOKER workshop, co-organized by OFAI's Tristan Miller, aims to bring translators and computer scientists together to develop data and evaluation metrics for the (semi-)automatic translation of humorous language. The workshop consists of a number of shared tasks, held in the spring of 2025, followed by a series of sessions at the CLEF 2025 conference in Madrid from 9 to 12 September 2025.

A peer-reviewed overview of the entire workshop appears in Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction, a volume in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Papers describing the individual shared tasks of the workshop, as well as the participating systems, are published in Working Notes of CLEF 2025, a volume in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings series.

Full bibliographic details of the OFAI-coauthored papers are as follows:

Liana Ermakova, Ricardo Campos, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, and Tristan Miller. Overview of the CLEF 2025 JOKER lab: Humour in the machine. In Jorge Carrillo de Albornoz, Julio Gonzalo, Laura Plaza, Alba García Seco de Herrera, Josiane Mothe, Florina Piroi, Paolo Rosso, Damiano Spina, Guglielmo Faggioli, and Nicola Ferro, editors, Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction: 16th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2025, Madrid, Spain, September 9–12, 2025, Proceedings, volume 16089 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (ISSN 0302-9743), pages 315–337, Cham, Switzerland, September 2025. Springer. ISBN 978-3-032-04353-5. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-04354-2_18.
Liana Ermakova, Ricardo Campos, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, and Tristan Miller. Overview of the CLEF 2025 JOKER task 1: Humour-aware information retrieval. In Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, Paolo Rosso, and Damiano Spina, editors, CLEF 2025 Working Notes, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pages 2744–2760. CEUR-WS.org, 2025.
Liana Ermakova, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Tristan Miller, and Ricardo Campos. Overview of the CLEF 2025 JOKER task 2: Wordplay translation from English into French. In Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, Paolo Rosso, and Damiano Spina, editors, CLEF 2025 Working Notes, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pages 2761–2779. CEUR-WS.org, 2025.
Liana Ermakova, Tristan Miller, Yaël Naud, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, and Ricardo Campos.
Overview of the CLEF 2025 JOKER task 3: Onomastic wordplay translation. In Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, Paolo Rosso, and Damiano Spina, editors, CLEF 2025 Working Notes, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pages 2780–2790. CEUR-WS.org, 2025.

New Project on the Scientific Preparation of a Federal Large-Scale Language Model (Bundes-LLM)

2025-10-01T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn is starting a new R&D service project: Scientific preparation of a federal large-scale language model.

The study addresses technological and societal aspects (legal, ethical and ecological) of various cases of the implementation of a Bundes-LLM, including: foundation model training and adaptation, fine-tuning of existing LLMs (third party models or one's own base model) to the application needs of individual stakeholders, LLM-based platforms such as RAG systems, and their adaptation to the application needs of individual stakeholders. Sovereignty-First Implementations entirely based on-premises infrastructure, with all data processed and stored within national borders and Hybrid Flexibility Models where sensitive data are processed on-premises, while public services are delivered through a secure cloud environment, and Ecosystem Partnerships based on the collaboration with European AI initiatives to share resources and expertise, reducing R&D costs and accelerating capability transfer.

The outcome of the study is designed to provide a robust, lawful and ethical foundation for decision-makers regarding the development and deployment of a Bundes-LLM for public administration, also taking into account the potential for applications in industry and businesses. The study will clarify key questions and inform strategic choices regarding professional requirements engineering for diverse user groups, ensuring data and technology sovereignty through legal, sustainable and ethical integration, project development, management, and operation in the public interest, cost efficiency through opensource components. Roadmaps for the different usecases and policy implementation recommendations are provided.

For more details see the project website (in German).

Launch of the GermanDialects-AI project

2025-09-02T00:00:00+02:00

We are happy to announce the official launch of the project German Dialects: Document, Preserve and Learn with the help of AI.

The project officially kicked off with a meeting on September 2nd. This collabotative effort brings together OFAI, LMU Munich and the University of Liechtenstein, serving as lead partner.

The German Dialects AI project aims to document and preserve Upper German dialects, promoting their learning via an AI-enhanced online platform.

We look forward to the exciting developments and insights this partnership will bring!

Interspeech Paper

2025-08-19T00:00:00+02:00

INTERSPEECH 2025 took place in Rotterdam where OFAI was represented by Lorenz Gutscher and Michael Pucher. Their paper "Audio-Based Classification and Geographic Regression of Austrian Dialects" was presented at the conference and is now available in the ISCA archive.

Read the paper in the ISCA archive

Article: Austrian Dialect Classifier

2025-08-01T00:00:00+02:00

Lorenz Gutscher and Michael Pucher had an interview with Jana Wiese - a journalist for futurezone.at and Kurier. The outcome is a nice article that is easy to understand and describes what we have worked recently: An AI model that predicts the location from your dialect speech. It was printed in the newspaper Kurier and published online in an extended version at futurezone.at Link: Article: Futurezone.at

Try it out yourself and record your speech to see where the AI locates you: Link to Huggingface

Article: Austrian Dialect Classifier

2025-08-01T00:00:00+02:00

Try it out yourself and record your speech to see where the AI locates you: Link to Huggingface

Citizen Science Award

2025-04-16T00:00:00+02:00

We’re excited to announce that our project DialektDetect has been nominated for the Citizen Science Award by the OeAD!

After training an AI model to predict where in Austria a dialect recording originates, we’re turning the tables — can humans do it better? In this interactive project, school classes and youth groups are invited to listen to short audio clips of dialect speakers and guess their origin on a map. Participants will also highlight the part of the recording that influenced their decision the most.

Take part online and compete for prize money of 1,000€, 750€, or 500€! To participate with your class/youth group write an email to lorenz.gutscher@ofai.at to receive your class code, which you will need to take part in the challenge.

Link: demo.ofai.at/DialektDetect

Further information: youngscience.oead.at – DialektDetect

KI und Stimmen @ Bundes-Blindeninstitut

2025-04-11T00:00:00+02:00

While Text-to-Speech systems might seem like a convenient gadget to some, they can be life-changing for blind or visually impaired individuals.

In a recent workshop at the Bundes-Blindeninstitut Wien, we presented our ongoing work in speech synthesis. Participants also joined our Citizen Science Award project DialektDetect, where they listened to dialect recordings and guessed the speaker’s origin on a map — relying solely on audio cues.

The highlight was to test wheather the AI can correctly predict their own dialect by recording themselves.

DialektDetect @ Wiener Forschungsfest 2025

2025-03-23T00:00:00+01:00

In this citizen science project, we explore how well humans and AI can identify Austrian dialects based solely on audio. Participants placed location markers on an Austrian map, competing against the prediction of the AI.

It was impressive to see how some children instantly recognized dialects that sounded like those of their classmates or relatives from specific regions. Not only could they pinpoint the origin, but they also identified key characteristics of the dialects. For unknown regions, localization was a challenge for old and young.

The project successfully provided citizens with an accessible and practical way to engage with AI, while also demonstrating that AI is not infallible and can make mistakes.

OFAI's presentation of LEGO Audio & Braille Building Instructions at the Wiener Forschungsfest 2025 - a big success!

2025-03-23T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI presented LEGO Audio & Braille Building Instructions at the Wiener Forschungsfest 2025. In two and a half days approx. 400 visitors built small LEGO models blindfolded, only with the help of the audio instructions. Since the Forschungsfest was targeted to young people offering a wide range of experiences in the world of science, our stand was besieged by children, their parents, and interested adult visitors.

Our project LEGO Audio & Braille Building Instructions was initially targeted to blind and visually impaired LEGO fans, providing them with verbal instructions such they can build their models independently. This not only demands a much higher cognitive load, since one has to conceptualize first which brick is to be searched for and then how to precisely mount it on a given structure without seeing it. But through the lack of eye-hand coordination, significantly higher fine-motoric skills are needed as well. Some comments from visitors corroborate our ideas that the range of applications could actually much broader.

We could observe visitors (mostly kids) that did fantastically well, and others that had a real challenge, but all of them reported that it is indeed much more difficult. They moved on with an experience of the world of the blind, but also with a feeling of success that they were able to build a model without seeing it. We were also quite challenged (on Sunday, there were 6 of us, constantly setting up new builds and monitoring the progress), and we left the Forschungsfest tired, happy, and with rich experiences and insights.

OFAI is represented at the Wiener Forschungsfest 2025 with 2 contributions

2025-03-21T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI will provide 2 contributions to the Wiener Forschungsfest 2025 that takes place from March 21st -- 23rd in the localities of the Viennese townhall.

The project LEGO Audio & Braille Building Instructions is all about providing blind and visually impaired LEGO fans with verbal instructions such they can build their models independently either using audio or reading Braille text.

The Citicen Science Award OeAD project DialektDetect This project compares how spoken Austrian dialects are recognized by humans and how the process of recognition differs from that of a machine-trained model.

Can AI create humour?

2025-01-24T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI Associate Researcher Tristan Miller is interviewed for matrix - computer & neue medien, ORF Radio Ö1's weekly show on the digitalization of society. In the episode, "Kann Künstliche Intelligenz Humor?", he discusses PunCAT, a computer-assisted humour translation tool jointly developed with the University of Vienna's Centre for Translation Studies.

Peter Hallman speaks at the Workshop Cause(e/r) "The Interplay between Event Structure and Argument Realization"

2025-01-23T00:00:00+01:00

Peter Hallman spoke by invitation at the Workshop Cause(e/r): The Interplay between Event Structure and Argument Realization at the University of Cologne, January 23-24, 2025.

Organized by Haydar Batuhan Yildiz and Jens Hopperdietzel at the University of Cologne, the workshop explored the syntactic and semantic status of intermediary participants in complex causative constructions, such as causees or instruments, from a cross-linguistic perspective. Topics included argument hierarchies, (in)direct causation, agentivity, among others, as they manifest themselves in German, English, French, Arabic, Turkish and other languages.

OFAI's LEGO audio instructions at Munich school for the blind and visually impaired

2025-01-22T00:00:00+01:00

Successful test session of OFAI’s LEGO audio instructions at Munich school for the blind and visually impaired

LEGO accessibility platform manager Frederik Hansen and OFAI linguist Susanne Höfler met up in Munich to visit the Sehbehinderten- und Blindenzentrum Südbayern, an association housing schools and various day-care facilities for children and young adults with visual impairments.

The aim of the day: Putting their audio instructions for LEGO sets to the test. OFAI has been in charge of the LEGO Audio & Braille Building Instructions project since 2018, having released English instructions for over 100 models so far. That day, however, the team would test the waters with a new prototype: the first instructions in German.

A lively and eager group of seven students between the ages of 10 and 14 with varying degrees of visual impairment happily volunteered for a casual LEGO play session. After a short round of introductions, the kids split into three groups and were handed one tablet with instructions and one of three different LEGO models per group – they could pick between a green race car, a hot-dog truck and a cat playground. Most of our testers were quite experienced with building LEGO sets, but none of them had ever done so on the basis of LEGO audio instructions. Our team was eager to find out not only if the kids could smoothly build with the audio instructions but also if they would actually enjoy this new form of accessibility. The unanimous verdict after the play session was: Oh yes! And much to our delight, both fully blind children and children with considerably lower degrees of visual impairment were able to benefit from the audio instructions and engage in productive and enjoyable co-play using the different visual and auditory means provided in the instructions. The children not only helped us with providing a proof-of-concept, but they were virtually overflowing with suggestions and ideas on how to make the building experience for their target group more enjoyable. We’re very grateful for the children’s trust, time and enthusiasm and want to thank the Sehbehinderten- und Blindenzentrum Südbayern (PR and fundraising representative Stephanie Märkl in particular) as well as the children’s parents, caretakers and teachers for making this afternoon possible.

OFAI’s LEGO Audio & Braille Building Instructions project is all about providing blind and visually impaired LEGO fans with verbal instructions that can be accessed for free at legoaudioinstructions.com. The instructions come in three flavors: Users can access LEGO audio instructions directly via the website in a simple web UI (and if users need the help of a seeing person, all instructions are accompanied by the well-known LEGO images), download text instructions for Braille reader or access text instructions to be used with the screen reader of their choice.

Festveranstaltung 55 Jahre ÖSGK, 40 Jahre OFAI

2024-12-05T00:00:00+01:00

Jubiläumsveranstaltung des Österreichischen Forschungsinstituts für Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)

55 Jahre Österreichische Studiengesellschaft für Kybernetik und 40 Jahre Österreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence

Vor 40 Jahren haben sich österreichische WissenschafterInnen zusammengetan, um in einem universitätsunabhängigen Institut, dem "Österreichischen Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)" auf dem faszinierenden Gebiet der Artificial Intelligence zu forschen. Dies in zweifacher Hinsicht: Um Computer "intelligent" zu machen, damit sie unser Leben erleichtern, und um durch Computermodelle mehr über uns Menschen zu erfahren.

Das muss gefeiert werden! Die Jubiläumsveranstaltung findet statt im Festsaal in der Beletage des Palais Teuffenbach, am Donnerstag, den 5. Dezember 2024 um 16:00 Uhr.

Für Kurzentschlossene sind noch Restplätze vorhanden.

Peter Hallman receives the Mohammad bin Rashid Arabic Award

2024-11-25T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI Researcher Peter Hallman has been awarded the Mohammad bin Rashid Arabic Language Award in the category of ‘distinguished individual’ for the year 2024 at an awards ceremony in Dubai on October 10, 2024. The Mohammed Bin Rashid Arabic Language Award is the highest appreciation of the efforts of individuals and organizations for the Arabic Language, and is part of the initiatives launched by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Dubai, to celebrate the pivotal role of the Arabic language in enriching global cultural dialogues, in addition to enhancing the status of the Arabic language and encouraging those who aim to nourish it. The category ‘distinguished individual’ honors an individual who has been instrumental in bringing Arabic into the purview of art, science, or technology internationally and illuminating Arabic on the world stage. Hallman received the award for his longstanding and intensive linguistic research on the Arabic language, especially in the underrepresented area of semantics. The awards ceremony was held in the context of the 10th Annual International Arabic Language Conference, where over 2000 participants from 85 countries attended talks on Arabic education, technology, media, communication, language policy, history, linguistics, and many other topics.

How AI is changing university education

2024-10-22T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI Associate Researcher Tristan Miller is interviewed for Dimensionen, ORF Radio Ö1's daily show on science and research. In the episode, "Wie KI die Uni-Lehre verändert", he speaks about the history, limitations, and educational role of AI, as well as his recent project on computer-assisted translation of humour.

JOKER workshop at CLEF 2024

2024-09-19T00:00:00+02:00

Papers from the workshop "JOKER: Automatic Humour Analysis" have now been published in the proceedings of CLEF 2024, the 15th Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.

The JOKER workshop, co-organized by OFAI's Tristan Miller, aims to bring translators and computer scientists together to develop data and evaluation metrics for the (semi-)automatic translation of humorous language. The workshop consists of a number of shared tasks, held in the spring of 2024, followed by a series of sessions at the CLEF 2024 conference in Grenoble from 9 to 12 September, 2024.

A peer-reviewed overview of the entire workshop appears in Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction, a volume in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Papers describing the individual shared tasks of the workshop, as well as the participating systems, are published in Working Notes of CLEF 2024, a volume in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings series.

Full bibliographic details of the OFAI-coauthored papers are as follows:

Liana Ermakova, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Tristan Miller, Victor Manuel Palma Preciado, Grigori Sidorov, and Adam Jatowt. Overview of the CLEF 2024 JOKER track: Automatic humour analysis. In Lorraine Goeuriot, Philippe Mulhem, Georges Quénot, Didier Schwab, Laure Soulier, Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, Petra Galuščáková, Alba García Seco de Herrera, Guglielmo Faggioli, and Nicola Ferro, editors, Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction: Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference of the CLEF Association (CLEF 2024), volume 14959 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (ISSN 0302-9743), pages 165–182, Cham, September 2024. Springer. ISBN 978-3-031-71907-3. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-71908-0_8.
Liana Ermakova, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Tristan Miller, and Adam Jatowt. Overview of the CLEF 2024 JOKER task 1: Humour-aware information retrieval. In Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, Petra Galuščáková, and Alba García Seco de Herrera, editors, Working Notes of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2024), volume 3740 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pages 1775–1785, 2024.
Victor Manuel Palma Preciado, Grigori Sidorov, Liana Ermakova, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, and Adam Jatowt. Overview of the CLEF 2024 JOKER task 2: Humour classification according to genre and technique. In Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, Petra Galuščáková, and Alba García Seco de Herrera, editors, Working Notes of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2024), volume 3740 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pages 1786–1799, 2024.
Liana Ermakova, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Tristan Miller, and Adam Jatowt. Overview of the CLEF 2024 JOKER task 3: Translate puns from English to French. In Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, Petra Galuščáková, and Alba García Seco de Herrera, editors, Working Notes of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2024), volume 3740 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pages 1800–1810, 2024.

10 to 13 September 2024 KONVENS Conference in Vienna

2024-09-10T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI as local co-organiser is pleased to announce the KONVENS (Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache/Conference on Natural Language Processing) which will take place in Vienna, Austria from September 10 to 13, 2024.

KONVENS is an annual conference series on computational linguistics that started in 1992 and is organized under the auspices of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology, the Special Interest Group on Computational Linguistics of the German Linguistic Society, the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence and SwissText.

GerMS-Detect Workshop on Sexism Detection in German Online News Fora, at KONVENS2024 in Vienna

2024-09-10T00:00:00+02:00

We are pleased to announce the GerMS-Detect Workshop on Sexism Detection in German Online News Fora which will take place as part of the KONVENS conference, in Vienna, Austria on 10 September, 2024.

In the workshop, the results from the GermEval 2024 Shared Task 1 GerMS-Detect are presented and further discussed. The papers related to the workshop presentations will be made available from 10 September at the workshop page.

Podiumsdiskussion zu AI in der Medienproduktion

2024-09-10T00:00:00+02:00

Wir laden Sie herzlich zur Podiumsdiskussion "AI in der Medienproduktion" am 10. September 2024 um 16:30 im Bundesministerium für Klimaschutz, Umwelt, Energie, Mobilität, Innovation und Technologie (BMK) ein!

Die Teilnahme ist frei! Bitte bringen Sie einen Ausweis mit, um in den Veranstaltungssaal im BMK eingelassen zu werden!

Im Rahmen des GerMS-Detect Workshop on Sexism Detection in German Online News Fora bei der KONVENS 2024 findet am 10 September eine prominent besetzte Podiumsdiskussion zum Thema "AI in der Medienproduktion" statt. Es diskutieren Vertreter*innen von Medien, AI-Forschung und -Anwendung, sowie IT- und Medienrecht über den Einsatz von AI in der Medienproduktion, aktuelle Rahmenbedingungen und Auswirkungen, sowie Bedarfseinschätzungen und Visionen für die Zukunft. Details siehe hier (Deutsch) und hier (Englisch).

GerMS-AT Corpus Published

2024-07-31T00:00:00+02:00

The GerMS-AT (German Misogyny/Sexsim - Austria) Corpus, which has been used for the GermEval2024 GerMS-Detect shared task has now been fully released publicly under a very permissive license (CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0).

GerMS-AT Dataset

2024-07-31T00:00:00+02:00

The GerMS-AT (German Misogyny/Sexism - Austria) dataset contains user comments from an Austrian online newspaper. The comments have been annotated by 4 or more out of 11 annotators as to how strong sexism/mysogyny is present in the comment.

For each comment, the code of the annotator and the label assigned is given for all annotators which have annotated that comment. Labels represent the severity of any sexism/misogyny present in the comment from 0 (none), 1 (mild), 2 (present), 3 (strong) to 4 (severe).

The dataset contains 7984 comments. We provide the data using the same split as was used for the GermEval2024 GerMS-Detect shared task with a training set of 5998 comments and a test set of 1986 comments. No dev set is provided as the choice of dev set may be best left to the machine learning researcher/engineer.

A unique propery of this corpus is that it contains only a small portion of sexist/misogynyst remarks which use strong language, curse-words or otherwise blatantly offending terms, a large number of comments contain more subtle, indirect or at times ambiguous forms of sexism/misogyny.

Publications

Brigitte Krenn, Johann Petrak, Marina Kubina, and Christian Burger. 2024. Germs-at: A sex-ism/misogyny dataset of forum comments from an Austrian online newspaper. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 7728–7739.

New website for OSGK

2024-07-12T00:00:00+02:00

Our parent organization, the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies (OSGK), has a new website.

OFAI was established in 1984 as a special research institution of OSGK. OSGK, founded in 1969, is a non-profit organization of scientists and practitioners aiming to study the theoretical bases of cybernetics and related fields, including artificial intelligence.

Examining the sources of visual humour

2024-07-09T00:00:00+02:00

A computer-assisted study on the role of scale distortions in visual humour has been published in the European Journal of Humour Studies.

The article, "On the Use of Scale Distortion for Visual Humour: A Preliminary Analysis", examines human ratings of humour in a data set of cartoons where the size of various objects has been distorted. The analysis reveals that scenes with distorted objects are perceived to be significantly funnier than the original images.

The article is co-authored by Clara Swaboda, formerly of the University of Vienna, and OFAI associate researcher Tristan Miller.

Ibn Jinni and the origin of language

2024-07-08T00:00:00+02:00

In "Social consensus and divine inspiration", Peter Hallman looks at remarks on the origin of language by Muslim Arab linguist and philosopher Ibn Jinni. The article appears in the Summer 2024 issue of Babel: The Language Magazine.

em. O. Univ. Prof. Dr. Hubert Haider, Univ. Salzburg

2024-06-19T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI is proud to present "Multiple targets – Ambiguitäten als Kriterium für LLMs", a talk by Hubert Haider of University of Salzburg. The talk is part of OFAI's 2024 Spring Lecture Series (will be held in German).

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk online via Zoom on Wednesday, 19 June 2024 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: Laut AI-Index-Report 2024 wurde die menschliche Leistung als Baseline im Fall von Natural Language Inference bereits von LLMs überschritten. Es gibt aber einen sprachlichen Aufgabentyp, bei dem diese Systeme schlechter abschneiden. Das ist das Erkennen und Berücksichtigen syntaktischer Ambiguitäten, was der Vortrag zu zeigen sich bemühen wird.

Speaker biography: Hubert Haider ist emeritierter Prof. für Linguistik mit der Spezialisierung auf Grammatiktheorie (Syntax germanischer, romanischer und slawischer Sprachen; kognitive Evolution von Grammatiksystemen). Als Prof. an der Univ. Stuttgart engagierte er sich in den Anfängen der "maschinellen Sprachverarbeitung" im SFB 340 (Linguistic Foundations for Computational Linguistics) und als Leiter eines DFG-Graduiertenkollegs (Linguistic foundations for language processing). Mit dem Wechsel an die Univ. Salzburg wurde er Mitgründer und Mitglied des dortigen Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience.

Stephanie Gross - invited lunch lecture at the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law

2024-06-13T00:00:00+02:00

Stephanie Gross gave an invited talk on "Bias in Language Models" at the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law at the University of Vienna on June 13, 2024.

Dr. Margherita Pallottino, Univ. of Geneva / OFAI

2024-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI is proud to present "Fii uses across Arabic varieties", a talk by Margherita Pallottino of University of Geneva / OFAI. The talk is part of OFAI's 2024 Spring Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk online via Zoom on Wednesday, 05 June 2024 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: The particle fii (etymologically the preposition ‘in’, with allomorph bi-) is universally attested across Arabic varieties. Alternative uses of this element have been identified in single dialects. For instance in the Levantine dialects fii is used in existential constructions (Jarad, 2015) or as a modal (Cowell, 1964), whereas in the North African region fii is an ingredient of progressive constructions (Brahim, 2007). The existing literature gives us a picture of the multifunctionality of fii in Arabic but it does not provide any indication about the geographical distribution of these usages, nor about the possible correlations among them. The research described in this talk fills this gap surveying 11 different uses of fii previously described in the literature, across 11 different Arabic varieties extending from Morocco to Iraq. The resulting picture shows a leopard-spot distribution of certain functions of fii suggesting that other forces drive the emergence of fii usages across varieties beside the influence of geographically proximity. The main question tackled by this talk is, therefore, which factors can explain the distribution of fii functions. The validity of the competing hypotheses, historical accident or grammar driven, are evaluated with mathematical methods run on the data gathered in the study.

Bibliography: Brahim, A. (2007). Le marquage locatif de l’objet et aspect progressif en arabe et en berbère tunisien. In Morphosyntaxe et sémantique du verbe. Relations actiancielles, voix, aspect et statut grammatical en français et en arabe (p. 94‑105). CRISCO. Cowell, M. W. (1964). A reference grammar of Syrian Arabic (Based on the dialect of Damascus). Georgetown University Press. Jarad, N. I. (2015). From locative to existential: The grammaticalization of fii in the spoken Arabic of Aleppo. Romano-Arabica, XV, 235‑254.

Speaker biography: Margherita Pallottino holds a PhD in Theoretical Linguistics from the University of Geneva. Her 2020 thesis, written under the direction of Prof. Tabea Ihsane and Prof. Luigi Rizzi, investigates the case marking function of the preposition fii in Tunisian Arabic. Margherita's research focuses on interdialectal variation among Arabic Varieties. She is particularly interested in the distribution of locative prepositions and of their use in a crosslinguistic perspective. In July 2022, Margherita joined the OFAI (Österreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence - Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence) as post-doc fellow. Her fellowship is sponsored by the FNS Mobility Grant P500PH_211169/1. At the OFAI Margherita is working at the creation of a browsable linguistic atlas describing the polyfunctionality of the prepositions bi and fii across twelve Arabic Dialects, spanning from Moroccan Arabic in the west to Iraqi Arabic in the east. The aim of the research project is the identification of patterns of grammaticalization which allow single prepositional elements to perform a wealth of syntactic functions in closely related languages.

Prof. James E. Young, BSc, PhD, University of Manitoba

2024-05-29T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI is proud to present "Designing Human–Robot Interaction", a talk by Prof. James E. Young, BSc, PhD of the University of Manitoba. The talk is part of OFAI's 2024 Spring Lecture Series.

Talk abstract: How should we interact with a robot? How can we give it commands? Get information from it? Robots' real world, often collocated and autonomous presence, provides a range of new and exciting opportunities for re-envisioning interaction with technology. In this talk, Dr. Young will present his team's work on exploring novel interaction with robots through a range of projects over the last 12 years. A key focus of this work is aiming to solve HRI problems through novel interaction design rather than technological advances, re-conceptualizing problems to make them simpler. Further, Dr. Young's team explores the limits of robots' abilities to use emotion and human social interaction techniques, for example, to deceive and manipulate people. Finally. Dr. Young will introduce his lab's current projects on re-designing domestic companion robot interactions with a focus on simplicity and deployability.

Speaker biography: Jim Young is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manitoba, where he founded the Human-Robot Interaction lab in 2011, and co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Jim received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Calgary in 2010, following a BSc in Computer Science from Vancouver Island University in 2005. Jim's work broadly takes a human-centric focus and draws heavily from sociology and psychology, focusing on studying social interactions between people and robots and inventing new ways for people to work with them. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction Journal, Steering Committee co-chair for the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and is on the steering committee for the ACM International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (ACM HAI). He previously served as Program co-chair for the ACM/IEEE HRI 2017 and General co-chair for ACM/IEEE HRI 2020, as well as in many editorial roles including Senior Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction journal, PC member and sub-theme chair for the ACM/IEEE HRI conference, and Associate Editor for the Frontiers In Robotics and AI (Human-Robot Interaction) journal. The HRI Lab's work has been recognized by best paper awards at various ACM Conferences.

Paper at LREC-Coling 2024

2024-05-23T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI and derStandard have coauthored a paper "GERMS-AT: A Sexism/Misogyny Dataset of Forum Comments from an Austrian Online Newspaper" whihc was presented at THE 2024 JOINT INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS, LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION (LREC-COLING 2024), 20-25 MAY, 2024 / TORINO, ITALIA.

The paper can be downloaded from ACL anthology.

Jordan Kodner, PhD, Stony Brook University

2024-04-24T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI is proud to present "Is it Language or Task Design? Reinterpreting language models' recent successes in morphology and syntax learning", a talk by Jordan Kodner of Stony Brook University, NY. The talk is part of OFAI's 2024 Spring Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk online via Zoom on Wednesday, 24 April 2024 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: The success of neural language models (LMs) on a wide range of language-related tasks may be in part due to their ability to induce human-like representations or understanding of natural language grammars. Humans are, after all, gold-standard language learners. For the past several years, researchers pursuing this question have developed a number of methodologies for testing the grammar representations learned by LMs that have reached generally positive conclusions. I will take a critical look at such studies in this talk. While modern LMs are clearly extremely impressive, and clearly do often capture important aspects of natural language grammars, the methodologies of many popular studies have unfairly overestimated the capacities of LMs when it comes to their ability to induce human-like representations. Focusing on questions of hierarchical syntactic representations and generalization in inflectional morphology, I will discuss how unintended biases in data-splitting, artificial training or test data, overly simplistic evaluations, weak or absent baselines, and faulty interpretations, have conspired to overestimate the abilities of LMs. While the conclusions of this study are largely negative in terms of the current state-of-affairs, they are also optimistic. By employing more thorough and rigorous methodologies, we have developed a better scientific understanding of the nature of LMs and representations of the grammar. In identifying weak points for current models, we points towards research areas where greater improvements may be gained.

Speaker biography: Jordan Kodner is an Assistant Professor in the Stony Brook University Department of Linguistics and an affiliate of the Institute for Advanced Computational Science and Natural Language Processing group. His primary research revolves around computational approaches to child language acquisition and their broader implications. In particular, algorithmic models of grammar acquisition, especially morphology, how those processes drive language variation and change, what insights they provide for low-resource NLP, and what they tell us about the intersection of (low-resource) NLP and cognitive science. In 2020, he received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania Department of Linguistics, where he worked with Charles Yang and Mitch Marcus. Prior to that, he received a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science in 2018. From 2013 through 2015, he was an Associate Scientist in the Speech, Language, and Multimedia group at Raytheon BBN Technologies where he worked on defense and medical-related projects.

CfP: GermEval2024 GerMS-Detect - Sexism Detection in German Online News Fora

2024-04-19T00:00:00+02:00

We are pleased to announce the GermEval2024 GerMS-Detect shared task about Sexism Detection in German Online News Fora, to be published at KONVENS2024.

For details see the Competition Website

Robert Trappl zu Gast in der Ö1 Sendereihe IM GESPRÄCH

2024-04-19T00:00:00+02:00

Andreas Obrecht im Gespräch mit Robert Trappl über den KI-Hype seit ChatGPT; über KI-Ethik und die Tendenz in Europa in KI-Ethik zu investieren statt in KI-Entwicklung, wie z.B. in den USA oder in China; über die Möglichkeiten von KI Menschen mit Zusatzfähigkeiten auszustatten, was wir vermehrt in der aktuellen Kriegsführung sehen, aber glücklicherweise auch darin, dass Menschen KI-gestützt Bewegungsmöglichkeiten und Sinneserfahrungen (wie z.B. Sehen und Hören) wieder bekommen; und über viele Themen mehr. Nachzuhören ist das Gespräch unter IM GESPRÄCH KI-Pionier Robert Trappl.

OFAI 2024 Spring Lecture Series

2024-04-12T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI is delighted to announce its 2024 Spring Lecture Series, featuring an eclectic lineup of internal and external speakers.

The talks are intended to familiarize attendees with the latest research developments in AI and related fields, and to forge new connections with those working in other areas.

Lectures will take place at 18:30 Vienna time, usually every other Wednesday. All lectures will be held online via Zoom; in-person attendance at OFAI is also possible for certain lectures. Attendance is open to the public and free of charge. No registration is required.

Subscribe to our newsletter or our RSS feed, or bookmark this web page, to receive further details for the individual talks.

24 April 2024 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)

Jordan Kodner (Stony Brook University)

Is it Language or Task Design? Reinterpreting language models' recent successes in morphology and syntax learning

The success of neural language models (LMs) on a wide range of language-related tasks may be in part due to their ability to induce human-like representations or understanding of natural language grammars. Humans are, after all, gold-standard language learners. For the past several years, researchers pursuing this question have developed a number of methodologies for testing the grammar representations learned by LMs that have reached generally positive conclusions. I will take a critical look at such studies in this talk. While modern LMs are clearly extremely impressive, and clearly do often capture important aspects of natural language grammars, the methodologies of many popular studies have unfairly overestimated the capacities of LMs when it comes to their ability to induce human-like representations. Focusing on questions of hierarchical syntactic representations and generalization in inflectional morphology, I will discuss how unintended biases in data-splitting, artificial training or test data, overly simplistic evaluations, weak or absent baselines, and faulty interpretations, have conspired to overestimate the abilities of LMs. While the conclusions of this study are largely negative in terms of the current state-of-affairs, they are also optimistic. By employing more thorough and rigorous methodologies, we have developed a better scientific understanding of the nature of LMs and representations of the grammar. In identifying weak points for current models, we points towards research areas where greater improvements may be gained.

29 May 2024 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)

Jim Young, BSc, PhD (University of Manitoba)

Designing Human–Robot Interaction

How should we interact with a robot? How can we give it commands? Get information from it? Robots' real world, often collocated and autonomous presence, provides a range of new and exciting opportunities for re-envisioning interaction with technology. In this talk, Dr. Young will present his team's work on exploring novel interaction with robots through a range of projects over the last 12 years. A key focus of this work is aiming to solve HRI problems through novel interaction design rather than technological advances, re-conceptualizing problems to make them simpler. Further, Dr. Young's team explores the limits of robots' abilities to use emotion and human social interaction techniques, for example, to deceive and manipulate people. Finally. Dr. Young will introduce his lab's current projects on re-designing domestic companion robot interactions with a focus on simplicity and deployability.

How to attend: Attend online via Zoom (meeting ID: 842 8244 2460; passcode: 678868), or dial in by phone.

You can add this event to your calendar.

05 June 2024 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)

Dr. Margherita Pallottino (University of Geneva / OFAI)

Fii uses across Arabic varieties

The particle fii (etymologically the preposition ‘in’, with allomorph bi-) is universally attested across Arabic varieties. Alternative uses of this element have been identified in single dialects. For instance in the Levantine dialects fii is used in existential constructions (Jarad, 2015) or as a modal (Cowell, 1964), whereas in the North African region fii is an ingredient of progressive constructions (Brahim, 2007). The existing literature gives us a picture of the multifunctionality of fii in Arabic but it does not provide any indication about the geographical distribution of these usages, nor about the possible correlations among them. The research described in this talk fills this gap surveying 11 different uses of fii previously described in the literature, across 11 different Arabic varieties extending from Morocco to Iraq. The resulting picture shows a leopard-spot distribution of certain functions of fii suggesting that other forces drive the emergence of fii usages across varieties beside the influence of geographically proximity. The main question tackled by this talk is, therefore, which factors can explain the distribution of fii functions. The validity of the competing hypotheses, historical accident or grammar driven, are evaluated with mathematical methods run on the data gathered in the study.

19 June 2024 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)

em. O. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Hubert Haider (Universität Salzburg)

Multiple targets – Ambiguitäten als Kriterium für LLMs

Laut AI-Index-Report 2024 wurde die menschliche Leistung als Baseline im Fall von Natural Language Inference bereits von LLMs überschritten. Es gibt aber einen sprachlichen Aufgabentyp, bei dem diese Systeme schlechter abschneiden. Das ist das Erkennen und Berücksichtigen syntaktischer Ambiguitäten, was der Vortrag zu zeigen sich bemühen wird.

How to attend: Attend online via Zoom (meeting ID: 842 8244 2460; passcode: 678868), or dial in by phone.

Article in GLOSSA Journal of General Linguistics

2024-04-05T00:00:00+02:00

View Peter Hallman's latest article, on parallels between causative and double object constructions and what they say about the base thematic hierarchy. Be sure to check out the supplementary file comparing the the notion of VP-shells to neoconstructionism.

Paper at Nature Scientific Reports

2024-03-28T00:00:00+01:00

Marcin Skowron has coauthored the article "Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades" published in Nature Scientific Reports (open access).

JOKER workshop previewed at ECIR 2024

2024-03-20T00:00:00+01:00

JOKER-2024, an upcoming workshop and shared task on Automatic Wordplay Analysis, will be previewed next week at the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024) in Glasgow, Scotland.

The JOKER workshop series, co-organized by OFAI Associate Researcher Tristan Miller, aims to bring translators and computer scientists together to develop data and evaluation metrics for the (semi-)automatic translation of humorous language. JOKER-2023 will be held during the CLEF 2024 conference in Grenoble from 9 to 12 September, 2024.

The presentation of JOKER-2024 at ECIR 2024 is accompanied by the following paper in the conference proceedings:

Liana Ermakova, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Tristan Miller, Tremaine Thomas-Young, Victor Manuel Palma Preciado, Grigori Sidorov, and Adam Jatowt. CLEF 2024 JOKER lab: Automatic humour analysis. In Nazli Goharian, Nicola Tonellotto, Yulan He, Aldo Lipani, Graham McDonald, Craig Macdonald, and Iadh Ounis, editors, Advances in Information Retrieval: 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2024, Glasgow, UK, March 24–28, Proceedings, Part VI, volume 14613 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (ISSN 0302-9743), pages 36–43, Cham, March 2024. Springer. ISBN 978-3-031-56072-9. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-56072-9_5.

Mag. Dr. Brigitte Krenn and Mag. Dr. Stephanie Gross, MSc, OFAI

2024-03-13T00:00:00+01:00

Please note, originally this talk was scheduled for 14 February 2024 as part of OFAI's 2023 Fall Lecture Series. For this talk had to be rescheduled until Wednesday, 13 March 2024.

OFAI is proud to present "Bias in Language Models Illustrated by the Example of Gender", a talk by Brigitte Krenn and Stephanie Gross of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna) or via Zoom on Wednesday, 13 March 2024 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: Bias in language models is a widely discussed topic in AI. So far, many voices have been raised calling for baises to be prevented in training data. Which, however, is a futile endeavor in many real-world contexts. In the present talk, the speakers argue for a different strategy which can be summarized from an AI ethics point of view as "be aware of and transparent about your desired and undesired biases". The feasibility and technical viability of such an approach will be illustrated in the talk. In particular, experiments in fine-tuning pretrained language models with gender-biased data are presented and the resulting outcomes are qualitatively and quantitatively analysed.

Stephanie Gross is a research scientist at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). She has been involved as PI and Co-PI in different national and international research projects, focusing on the development, implementation, and analysis of AI-based technical systems, including quantitative as well as qualitative approaches. Her main research interests lie in the fields of natural language processing, including large language models, task-based multi-modal human-human and human-robot interaction, and language learning.

Peter Hallman invited talk at Uni Graz

2024-03-06T00:00:00+01:00

"Aspectual Composition in the Arabic Imperfective"

Peter Hallman gave an invited talk on "Aspectual Composition in the Arabic Imperfective" in the Workshop "Exploring Verbal Paradigms: Confronting Arabic and Slavic Languages in Tense and Aspect Realization", hosted at the Institute for Slavic Studies, University of Graz, on March 6, 2024.

Talk Abstract: (The slides of the talk can be accessed here.)

The Standard Arabic imperfective verb form has three “moods”, called “indicative”, “subjunctive”, and “jussive”. The indicative conveys the two meanings typically associated with imperfectivity cross-linguistically, namely the progressive and habitual aspects, but the other two moods are harder to pin down semantically. In this talk, I present evidence that the subjunctive corresponds to the English infinitive and has no meaning of its own. Rather, in the subjunctive form, the lexical aspect of the underlying verb shines through. I claim that the indicative mood also has no meaning of its own, but only applies to verb phrases that are aspectually stative. In order for an eventive verb to be put in the indicative, then, it must first be stativized by a null habitual or progressive operator, explaining the morphological uniformity of habitual and progressive aspects in Arabic and potentially cross-linguistically. I will have less to say about the jussive, but suggest that it bears a closer resemblance to the subjunctive than to the indicative and may be an allomorph of it.

Peter Hallman invited talk at University of Nova Gorica

2024-02-29T00:00:00+01:00

Peter Hallman gave an invited talk on "Reduced Clausal Comparatives in Arabic and Slavic" at the Center for Cognitive Science of Language, University of Nova Gorica, Feb. 29, 2024.

For more information see the talk abstract and the slides for the talk.

New FWF Top Citizen Science Project on "Dialect classification by human and artificial intelligence"

2024-02-06T00:00:00+01:00

The project titled “Dialect classification by human and artificial intelligence” led by Michael Pucher and Lorenz Gutscher has been approved as one of the 6 FWF Top Citizen Science Projects.

The primary objective is to develop an Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) system dedicated to dialect classification. The system will identify crucial frequency regions and features, offering transparency in its decision-making process. As part of the project, participants are encouraged to engage with a user-friendly web interface, allowing them to record and analyze their own dialect. Moreover, the citizens’ knowledge will be used to test if human classification draws attention to similar regions as an XAI system does. This gives citizens a point of contact with the current (often overwhelming) development of AI systems and connects them with scientific research.

Michael Pucher/Lorenz Gutscher: Invited Talk at University of Zürich

2024-02-01T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Michael Pucher and Lorenz Gutscher gave a talk titled "Acoustic language embeddings and phonetic typology of Austrian German varieties" at the workshop "Vowel and consonant quantity in Germanic, Indo-European and beyond" at the University of Zürich.

Assoz. Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. techn. Clemens Heitzinger, TU Wien

2024-01-31T00:00:00+01:00

Reinforcement learning has been instrumental in many advances in AI, including medicine. In such applications, statements about the reliability of the results are necessary in addition to convergence results. Research in this direction is the topic of "Reinforcement Learning and its Application in Medicine and Large Language Models", a talk by Clemens Heitzinger of TU Wien. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Fall Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna) or via Zoom on Wednesday, 31 January 2024 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: Reinforcement learning has been instrumental in many advances in AI in recent years. The most publicized is certainly the development of ChatGPT and large language models (LLM) in general; the last and crucial training step of ChatGPT is reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). Still, in order to fully solve learning problems, statements about the reliability of the results are necessary in addition to convergence results. For example, reliability and trustworthiness of AI systems is of utmost importance in medicine and other safety critical areas. In this talk, reinforcement-learning algorithms for training LLM and for calculating optimal treatments of sepsis patients are described. The questions of convergence to an optimal policy and of reliability are addressed by PAC (probably approximately correct) estimates and other approaches to policy evaluation.

Speaker biography: Clemens Heitzinger is Co-Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (CAIML) at TU Wien and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science (Informatics) at TU Wien. He received both his master's degree (Dipl.-Ing.) in applied mathematics and his PhD degree (Dr. techn.) in technical sciences with highest honors from TU Wien. He was a visiting researcher in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Arizona State University, a research associate in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, and a senior research associate in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at Cambridge University. In 2015, he returned to TU Wien as an associate professor. He is also Adjunct Professor in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at Arizona State University. He was awarded the START Prize, Austria's most prestigious award for young scientists, by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in 2013. He is author of Algorithms with Julia (Springer, 2022). His research interests are reinforcement learning and uncertainty quantification (in particular Bayesian inversion) with applications in the sciences, medicine, and engineering.

Univ.-Prof.in Dipl.-Psych. Dr.in Stefanie Höhl, University of Vienna

2024-01-17T00:00:00+01:00

In adults, the brain rhythms of interaction partners entrain to communicative rhythms, including speech, supporting mutual comprehension and communication. Whether this is also the case in the infant brain is the subject of "Social Rhythms and Biobehavioral Synchrony in Early Human Development", a talk by Stefanie Höhl of the University of Vienna. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Fall Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna) or via Zoom on Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: Caregiver-infant interactions are characterized by interpersonal rhythms at different timescales, from nursery rhymes and interactive games to daily routines. These rhythms make the social environment more predictable for young children and facilitate interpersonal biobehavioral synchrony with their caregivers. In adults, the brain rhythms of interaction partners entrain to communicative rhythms, including speech, supporting mutual comprehension and communication. I will present recent evidence that this is also the case in the infant brain, especially when babies are addressed directly by their caregiver through infant-directed speech in naturalistic interactions. Through using simultaneous measures of neural and physiological rhythms, e.g., dual-fNIRS and dual-ECG, from caregiver and infant during live face-to-face interactions, we can further deepen our understanding of early interactional dynamics and their reciprocal nature. I will present our recent research identifying factors supporting the establishment of caregiver-infant neural synchrony, such as affectionate touch and vocal turn-taking. I will further discuss the functional links and dissociations between caregiver-infant synchrony on the neural and physiological levels. I will outline potential implications of this work and point out important future directions.

Speaker biography: Stefanie Höhl is head of the Research Unit of Developmental Psychology at the University of Vienna where she leads the Wiener Kinderstudien lab. She received her PhD from the University of Leipzig and completed her Habilitation at the University of Heidelberg. From 2016 to 2019 she led the Max Planck Research Group on Early Social Cognition at the MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. Her research at the intersection of developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience focuses on social and cognitive development in early childhood. Grounded on an interactionist perspective, she applies EEG and fNIRS hyperscanning in caregiver-child and caregiver-infant interactions to study the neural dynamics of early social exchanges.

Happy Birthday Robert Trappl

2024-01-16T00:00:00+01:00

On January 16 we celebrated the 85th anniversary of Robert Trappl the founder and director of OFAI. See also the APA SCIENCE press release (in German) on the occasion of his birthday.

New Book "Introduction to Digital Humanism" now available in print and online

2024-01-12T00:00:00+01:00

The new “Introduction to Digital Humanism” with a contribution by Brigitte Krenn is now also available in print. The online version available since 22 December 2023 is already a big success with its approx. 80.000 downloads by the date of this posting.

New Book on Digital International Relations

2024-01-10T00:00:00+01:00

Brigitte Krenn at Diplomatische Akademie Wien, acting as facilitator for the book presentation „Digital International Relations: Technology, Agency and Order“ edited by Corneliu Bjola and Markus Kornprobst.

Prof. Mag. phil. Thomas Graf, MA, PhD, Stony Brook University

2023-12-20T00:00:00+01:00

Given the rapid rise of large language models, will symbolic linguistics be left in the dust, or is this actually an opportunity for meaningful synergy between symbolic and subsymbolic approaches? This question is addressed in "Linguistics and Symbolic Computation in a World of Large Language Models", a talk by Thomas Graf of Stony Brook University. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Fall Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 20 December 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: Language has always played a central role in artificial intelligence, yet AI researchers and linguists have rarely seen eye to eye on things, in particular the status of subsymbolic/neural approaches to language. After decades of debates, it looks like the subsymbolic approaches have finally emerged victorious. Not only are large language models (LLMs) succeeding in incredibly complex real-world tasks, subsymbolic models are also rapidly gaining traction in some areas of theoretical linguistics, e.g. lexical semantics. This raises the question: will symbolic linguistics be left in the dust, or is this actually an opportunity for meaningful synergy between symbolic and subsymbolic approaches?

In this talk, I argue for the latter by presenting “subregular syntax” as a concrete example of what such a synergy may look like. Subregular syntax is a symbolic approach that combines formal language theory with the Minimalist syntax framework proposed by Noam Chomsky, which grants it a large degree of empirical coverage across a wide range of typologically diverse languages. Despite that broad coverage, subregular syntax is a very simple formalism that analyzes all syntactic dependencies in terms of relativized adjacency conditions. Even though these conditions are stated over trees, they can actually be reduced to a very specific types of n-grams over strings. This opens up a new way of representing sentence structure in neural networks while bringing robust learning algorithms like stochastic gradient descent to Minimalist syntax. It also casts doubt on claims in the literature that the behavior of neural networks in specific linguistic tasks, e.g. binding or NPI-licensing, shows that they use tree structure. Instead, these findings may be indicative of a network’s ability to use fairly elaborate types of n-grams. The careful study of the symbolic approach of subregular syntax thus is an opportunity to deepen our understanding of neural networks while also harnessing their advantages for theoretical linguistics.

Speaker biography: Thomas Graf is Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Stony Brook University. He also holds an affiliate appointment in Stony Brook’s Institute for Advanced Computational Science. Before joining Stony Brook, he studied linguistics at the University of Vienna and received his PhD from UCLA in 2013. His research operates at the intersection of theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, and cognitive science, with a particular focus on syntax (sentence structure). He is the recipient of the 2014 E.W. Beth Dissertation Prize for outstanding PhD theses in logic, language, and information, and in 2019 he received an NSF CAREER award for his research on subregular syntax. He is the creator of the blog Outdex, which covers computational and theoretical linguistics, and he loves to introduce high school students to the wonders of computational linguistics during Stony Brook’s Mathematics Summer Program.

Farewell to Tristan Miller

2023-12-15T00:00:00+01:00

Today we bid a fond farewell to Tristan Miller, who joined OFAI's research team in 2019. Tristan will be moving to Winnipeg to join the faculty of the University of Manitoba Department of Computer Science, where we wish him the best of success. He will continue his relationship with OFAI as an Associate Researcher.

MEi:CogSci students visit OFAI

2023-12-14T00:00:00+01:00

Today OFAI hosted a visit from students of the Middle European Interdisciplinary Master's Programme in Cognitive Science.

OFAI director Robert Trappl and researchers Paolo Petta, Friedrich Neubarth, and Peter Hallman met with students to discuss past and ongoing research projects.

Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel, Silliman University and Neurolinx Research Institute

2023-12-13T00:00:00+01:00

It seems clear that the development and deployment of an artificial superintelligence, or ASI, would require tremendous energy requirements. Whether this poses an insurmountable barrier to the emergence of artificial general intelligence is discussed in "The Energy Challenges of Artificial Superintelligence", a talk by Klaus M. Stiefel of Silliman University and Neurolinx Research Institute. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Fall Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna) or via Zoom on Wednesday, 13 December 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: We argue here that contemporary semiconductor computing technology poses a significant if not insurmountable barrier to the emergence of any artificial general intelligence system, let alone one anticipated by many to be “superintelligent”. This limit on artificial superintelligence (ASI) emerges from the energy requirements of a system that would be more intelligent but orders of magnitude less efficient in energy use than human brains. An ASI would have to supersede not only a single brain but a large population given the effects of collective behavior on the advancement of societies, further multiplying the energy requirement. A hypothetical ASI would likely consume orders of magnitude more energy than what is available in highly-industrialized nations. We estimate the energy use of ASI with an equation we term the “Erasi equation”, for the Energy Requirement for Artificial SuperIntelligence. Additional efficiency consequences will emerge from the current unfocussed and scattered developmental trajectory of AI research. Taken together, these arguments suggest that the emergence of an ASI is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future based on current computer architectures, primarily due to energy constraints, with biomimicry or other new technologies being possible solutions.

Speaker biography: Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel did his undergraduate studies at the University of Vienna, and his doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany. He then spent time at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA, USA, at OIST in Okinawa, at the University of Western Sydney in Australia and is presently based at Silliman University in the Philippines. Klaus is interested in fish ecology & biodiversity and in computational neuroscience.

Prof. Ivan Habernal, MSc, PhD, Paderborn University

2023-12-06T00:00:00+01:00

Natural language processing has brought us enormous benefits, but with it challenges and concerns surrounding privacy. These issues are tackled in "Privacy in Natural Language Processing: Are we There yet?", a talk by Ivan Habernal of Paderborn University. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Fall Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 6 December 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: In this talk, I will explore the challenges and concerns surrounding privacy in natural language processing (NLP) and present potential solutions to address them. I will discuss the use of anonymization and differential privacy techniques to protect sensitive information while still enabling the training of accurate NLP models. Additionally, I will emphasize the importance of transparency and reproducibility when implementing privacy-preserving solutions in NLP.

Speaker biography: Ivan Habernal is an assistant professor for Natural Language Processing at Paderborn University, Germany, where he leads the Trustworthy Human Language Technologies group. His current research areas include privacy-preserving NLP, legal argument mining, and explainable and trustworthy models. His research track covers argument mining and computational argumentation, crowdsourcing, and serious games, among others.

Assoz. Prof. Mag. Dr. Dagmar Gromann, BSc, University of Vienna

2023-11-22T00:00:00+01:00

Conceptual metaphors present a powerful cognitive vehicle to transfer knowledge structures across domains. To what extent do today's pre-trained language models understand the operation of these metaphors? This question is addressed in "Do Large Language Models Grasp Metaphors?", a talk by Dagmar Gromann of the University of Vienna. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Fall Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna) or via Zoom on Wednesday, 22 November 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: Conceptual metaphors present a powerful cognitive vehicle to transfer knowledge structures from a source to a target domain, e.g. WORDS ARE WEAPONS as in "Your words pierce my heart". Prior neural approaches focus primarily on detecting whether natural language sequences are metaphoric or literal. In this talk, I will present work on probing metaphoric knowledge in pre-trained language models. The focus is on testing their capability to predict source domains given an input sentence and a target domain in English and Spanish. Several methods from fine-tuning to few-shot prompting are tested. Results show that the most common error type is the hallucination of source domains.

Speaker biography: Dagmar Gromann is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Translation Studies, University of Vienna, with prior post-doc positions at IIIA-CSIC in Barcelona, Spain and TU Dresden, Germany. Her research focuses on neural methods for knowledge extraction of cognitive and multilingual concepts as well as language technologies, including their socio-technical implications, e.g. gender bias. In terms of cognitive concepts, she is particularly interested in image schemas inspired by embodied cognition and conceptual metaphors. Furthermore, she has co-created a new master's program called Multilingual Technologies that is jointly organized by the University of Vienna and FH Campus Wien and represents the first computational linguistic program in Austria.

Tristan Miller speaks at JKU Linz

2023-11-21T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Tristan Miller made a research visit today to the Johannes Kepler University Linz Institute for Machine Learning. He delivered an invited talk, "Computational Analysis and Translation of Wordplay", as part of the Lecture Series Artificial Intelligence for first-year students in the Bachelor's in Artificial Intelligence programme.

Friedrich Neubarth invited to the "Fachtagung Spracherkennung" at the Austrian Parliament

2023-11-10T00:00:00+01:00

Friedrich Neubarth was invited to the panel discussion of the "Fachtagung Spracherkennung" at the Austrian Parliament. This workshop targeted employees of parliaments and similar institutions from German speaking countries (including Luxemburg) and focused on the topic of the potentials of and potential problems with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) as an assisting tool for generating protocols of assembly meetings in the context of fostering democracy and transparency.

For further information, click HERE

Dr. phil. Dr. tech. Dipl.-Ing. Erich Prem, MBA, University of Vienna

2023-11-08T00:00:00+01:00

The interest in the ethics of AI systems has grown significantly over the last few years. An overview of some of the key ethical issues for AI, including technical solutionism and totalitarian tendencies of AI-based norm enforcement, is presented in "Ethics of AI: Good AI Versus the Totalitarian Enforcement of Norms", a talk by Erich Prem of the University of Vienna. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Fall Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna) or via Zoom on Wednesday, 8 November 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: The interest in the ethics of AI systems has grown significantly over the last few years as evidenced by a growing literature on the topic and a mounting body of strategies, proposed regulations, standards, and technical approaches. In this talk, we provide an overview of some of the key ethical issues discussed for AI systems such as trolley problems or systems that talk back (ChatGPT). We review the related challenges as well as some of the proposed technical solutions such as model cards or rules for online discourse. The talk will focus on open issues and critically discuss technical solutionism and totalitarian tendencies of AI-based norm enforcement.

Speaker biography: Erich Prem is a researcher in the Philosophy of Technology (Ethics and Epistemology) at the University of Vienna and teaches Digital Humanism at the Technical University of Vienna. He is Director of eutema, a strategic technology consultancy in Vienna, Austria. Earlier, Erich was a researcher at the Austrian Research Institute for AI (OFAI) and the MIT AI Lab. He holds a PhD in Philosophy (Epistemology) and a PhD in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence). His research work is often interdisciplinary with a focus on digital humanism, AI ethics, RTDI strategy, and digital innovation.

Prof. Simon Penny, University of California Irvine

2023-10-23T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI is pleased to present "Skill: Know-how, Artisanal Practices and 'Higher' Cognition", a talk by Simon Penny of the University of California Irvine. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Fall Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna) or via Zoom on Monday, 23 October 2023 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: Skilled practitioners attest that in their experience of skilled practice, intelligence feels like it is happening in peripersonal space, at the fingertips, on the workbench. This paper begins from the premise that skilled embodied practices are intelligence - as much improvisation as hylomorphism (Ingold) - enacted amongst tools, materials and cognitive ecologies. As a lifelong practitioner, I seek to remain grounded in practice, while pursuing an interdisciplinary inquiry into the concept of skill, engaging philosophy, psychology, anthropology, cognitive science and neuroscience. The experience of skilled practices destabilises the (received) skill-intelligence binary, which is seen as a corollary of the mind-body binary. A dualist framework that distinguishes ‘higher' and ‘lower’ cognition and valorises abstraction, is not conducive to optimal discussion of skill. I will discuss the historical construction of this privileging of abstraction in philosophy and theorisation of cognition. A different framework will be suggested, drawing upon concepts of know-how (Ryle), the ‘performative idiom’ (Pickering), enactivism (Varela, Thompson, DiPaolo), pre-reflective awareness (Legrand), epistemic action (Kirsh), cognitive ecologies (Hutchins, Sutton). Arguments from neuroscience are then marshalled, focusing on phylogenetics and on proprioception, in order to build a non-dualist approach to neurophysiology, that provides a more balanced theoretical framework within which to discuss skill and/as cognition. If embodied practices are taken to constitute intelligence, this has ramifications for general conceptualisations of intelligence, and in turn, for rhetorics validating artificial intelligence, and claims made for interactive screen-based pedagogies.

Speaker biography: Simon Penny is an artist and theorist with a longstanding focus on emerging technologies, embodied and situated aspects of artistic practices, and critical analysis of computer culture. Much of his career has been at the intersection of engineering and art – he has developed custom immersive, sensor-based systems for embodied interaction. He published Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment in 2017 (MIT press) and directed A Body of Knowledge: Embodied Cognition and the Arts conference (2016). As part of his current book project Skill, he is working to build a non-dualistic approach to neurophysiology as a basis for a discussion of skill vis-a-vis intelligence. A current preoccupation is with ways emerging technologies constrain scientific and applied research.

Originally from Australia, Penny was Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon (1993-2000). He founded the Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) graduate program at the University of California Irvine, 2001-2012. He was Labex International Professor, University Paris8 and ENSAD in 2014, and visiting professor at Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media masters, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 2006-2013. Penny is professor of Electronic Art and Design (Dept of Art) at University of California, Irvine, with appointments in the Department of Music and in Informatics.

Taubman College group visits OFAI

2023-10-12T00:00:00+02:00

Today OFAI hosted a research visit from the Architecture and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AR2IL) of the University of Michigan's Taubman College for Architecture and Urban Planning.

OFAI researchers met with AR2IL director Matias del Campo and a large contingent of graduate students. Participants introduced their past and ongoing research projects and discussed the future use of AI in architectural and other creative domains.

Prof. Dr. Nafise Sadat Moosavi, BSc, MSc, University of Sheffield

2023-10-11T00:00:00+02:00

While models must perform reasoning to understand human language, this is mostly required for downstream applications and not as a standalone skill. The challenges of end-to-end reasoning in downstream applications, with a specific emphasis on end-to-end arithmetic reasoning, is the topic of "Challenges of End-to-End Reasoning in NLP", a talk by Nafise Sadat Moosavi of the University of Sheffield. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Fall Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 11 October 2023 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: To understand human language, language models have to perform various reasoning skills, e.g., logical reasoning, commonsense reasoning, temporal reasoning, etc. There are multiple datasets for directly evaluating each of these reasoning skills. However, these reasoning skills are mostly required for downstream applications and not as standalone skills. For instance, a model may need to perform arithmetic reasoning for answering a question or to correctly summarize a table. However, it is not clear whether a model that performs well on a dataset that is designed to evaluate arithmetic reasoning would also improve the results on a QA dataset that requires arithmetic reasoning. As a result, we should pay special attention to developing end-to-end models for downstream applications that are also capable of performing various reasoning skills. This presentation focuses on the challenges of end-to-end reasoning in downstream applications, with a specific emphasis on end-to-end arithmetic reasoning.

Speaker biography: Dr. Nafise Sadat Moosavi is a Lecturer in Natural Language Processing at the Computer Science Department of the University of Sheffield. Before joining the University of Sheffield, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Darmstadt. She works on the limitation of language models to improve their fairness, reasoning, robustness, and efficiency. She co-founded and co-organizes SustaiNLP workshops and regularly serves as a senior area chair and area chair at *ACL conferences.

JOKER workshop at CLEF 2023

2023-10-05T00:00:00+02:00

Papers from the workshop "JOKER: Automatic Wordplay Analysis" have now been published in the proceedings of CLEF 2023, the 14th Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.

The JOKER workshop, co-organized by OFAI's Tristan Miller, aims to bring translators and computer scientists together to develop data and evaluation metrics for the (semi-)automatic translation of humorous language. The workshop consists of a number of shared and unshared tasks, held in the spring of 2023, followed by a series of sessions at the CLEF 2023 conference in Thessaloniki from 18 to 21 September, 2023.

A peer-reviewed overview of the entire workshop appears in Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction, a volume in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Papers describing the individual shared tasks of the workshop, as well as the participating systems, are published in Working Notes of CLEF 2023, a volume in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings series.

Full bibliographic details of the OFAI-coauthored papers are as follows:

Liana Ermakova, Tristan Miller, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Victor Manuel Palma Preciado, Grigori Sidorov, and Adam Jatowt. Overview of JOKER – CLEF-2023 track on automatic wordplay analysis. In Avi Arampatzis, Evangelos Kanoulas, Theodora Tsikrika, Stefanos Vrochidis, Anastasia Giachanou, Dan Li, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Michalis Vlachos, Guglielmo Faggioli, and Nicola Ferro, editors, Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction: Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference of the CLEF Association (CLEF 2023), volume 14163 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (ISSN 0302-9743), pages 397–415, Cham, September 2023. Springer. ISBN 978-3-031-42448-9. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-42448-9_26.
Liana Ermakova, Tristan Miller, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Victor Manuel Palma Preciado, Grigori Sidorov, and Adam Jatowt. Overview of JOKER 2023 Automatic Wordplay Analysis Task 1 – pun detection. In Mohammad Aliannejadi, Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, and Michalis Vlachos, editors, Working Notes of CLEF 2023 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, volume 3497 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings (ISSN 1613-0073), pages 1785–1803, October 2023.
Liana Ermakova, Tristan Miller, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Victor Manuel Palma Preciado, Grigori Sidorov, and Adam Jatowt. Overview of JOKER 2023 Automatic Wordplay Analysis Task 2 – pun location and interpretation. In Mohammad Aliannejadi, Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, and Michalis Vlachos, editors, Working Notes of CLEF 2023 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, volume 3497 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings (ISSN 1613-0073), pages 1804–1817, October 2023.
Liana Ermakova, Tristan Miller, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Victor Manuel Palma Preciado, Grigori Sidorov, and Adam Jatowt. Overview of JOKER 2023 Automatic Wordplay Analysis Task 3 – pun translation. In Mohammad Aliannejadi, Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, and Michalis Vlachos, editors, Working Notes of CLEF 2023 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, volume 3497 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings (ISSN 1613-0073), pages 1818–1827, October 2023.

Robert Trappl delivers ISA 2023 keynote

2023-09-28T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI director Robert Trappl gave a keynote address at the Internet Summit Austria 2023, a technical and trade conference organized by Internet Service Providers Austria (ISPA) on 28 September 2023.

Prof. Trappl's talk was featured in the event's second session, dedicated to transferring technical advancements to human advances. The keynote address was followed by a podium discussion featuring Prof. Trappl, Florian Aigner of TU Wien, Eva Eggeling of Fraunhofer, and Mic Hirschbrich of Apollo.ai.

OFAI 2023 Fall Lecture Series

2023-09-26T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI is delighted to announce its 2023 Fall Lecture Series, featuring an eclectic lineup of internal and external speakers.

The talks are intended to familiarize attendees with the latest research developments in AI and related fields, and to forge new connections with those working in other areas. The main theme of the current series is large language models.

Subscribe to our newsletter or our RSS feed, or bookmark this web page, to receive further details for the individual talks.

11 October 2023 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)

Nafise Sadat Moosavi (University of Sheffield)

Challenges of End-to-End Reasoning in NLP

To understand human language, language models have to perform various reasoning skills, e.g., logical reasoning, commonsense reasoning, temporal reasoning, etc. There are multiple datasets for directly evaluating each of these reasoning skills. However, these reasoning skills are mostly required for downstream applications and not as standalone skills. For instance, a model may need to perform arithmetic reasoning for answering a question or to correctly summarize a table. However, it is not clear whether a model that performs well on a dataset that is designed to evaluate arithmetic reasoning would also improve the results on a QA dataset that requires arithmetic reasoning. As a result, we should pay special attention to developing end-to-end models for downstream applications that are also capable of performing various reasoning skills. This presentation focuses on the challenges of end-to-end reasoning in downstream applications, with a specific emphasis on end-to-end arithmetic reasoning.

23 October 2023 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)

Simon Penny (University of California Irvine and Nottingham Trent University)

Skill: Know-how, Artisanal Practices and 'Higher' Cognition

Skilled practitioners attest that in their experience of skilled practice, intelligence feels like it is happening in peripersonal space, at the fingertips, on the workbench. This paper begins from the premise that skilled embodied practices are intelligence - as much improvisation as hylomorphism (Ingold) - enacted amongst tools, materials and cognitive ecologies. As a lifelong practitioner, I seek to remain grounded in practice, while pursuing an interdisciplinary inquiry into the concept of skill, engaging philosophy, psychology, anthropology, cognitive science and neuroscience. The experience of skilled practices destabilises the (received) skill-intelligence binary, which is seen as a corollary of the mind-body binary. A dualist framework that distinguishes ‘higher' and ‘lower’ cognition and valorises abstraction, is not conducive to optimal discussion of skill. I will discuss the historical construction of this privileging of abstraction in philosophy and theorisation of cognition. A different framework will be suggested, drawing upon concepts of know-how (Ryle), the ‘performative idiom’ (Pickering), enactivism (Varela, Thompson, DiPaolo), pre-reflective awareness (Legrand), epistemic action (Kirsh), cognitive ecologies (Hutchins, Sutton). Arguments from neuroscience are then marshalled, focusing on phylogenetics and on proprioception, in order to build a non-dualist approach to neurophysiology, that provides a more balanced theoretical framework within which to discuss skill and/as cognition. If embodied practices are taken to constitute intelligence, this has ramifications for general conceptualisations of intelligence, and in turn, for rhetorics validating artificial intelligence, and claims made for interactive screen-based pedagogies.

8 November 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Erich Prem (University of Vienna)

Ethics of AI: Good AI Versus the Totalitarian Enforcement of Norms

The interest in the ethics of AI systems has grown significantly over the last few years as evidenced by a growing literature on the topic and a mounting body of strategies, proposed regulations, standards, and technical approaches. In this talk, we provide an overview of some of the key ethical issues discussed for AI systems such as trolley problems or systems that talk back (ChatGPT). We review the related challenges as well as some of the proposed technical solutions such as model cards or rules for online discourse. The talk will focus on open issues and critically discuss technical solutionism and totalitarian tendencies of AI-based norm enforcement.

22 November 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Dagmar Gromann (University of Vienna)

Do Large Language Models Grasp Metaphors?

Conceptual metaphors present a powerful cognitive vehicle to transfer knowledge structures from a source to a target domain, e.g. WORDS ARE WEAPONS as in "Your words pierce my heart". Prior neural approaches focus primarily on detecting whether natural language sequences are metaphoric or literal. In this talk, I will present work on probing metaphoric knowledge in pre-trained language models. The focus is on testing their capability to predict source domains given an input sentence and a target domain in English and Spanish. Several methods from fine-tuning to few-shot prompting are tested. Results show that the most common error type is the hallucination of source domains.

6 December 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Ivan Habernal (Paderborn University)

Privacy in Natural Language Processing: Are we There yet?

In this talk, I will explore the challenges and concerns surrounding privacy in natural language processing (NLP) and present potential solutions to address them. I will discuss the use of anonymization and differential privacy techniques to protect sensitive information while still enabling the training of accurate NLP models. Additionally, I will emphasize the importance of transparency and reproducibility when implementing privacy-preserving solutions in NLP.

13 December 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Klaus M. Stiefel (Silliman University and Neurolinx Research Institute)

The Energy Challenges of Artificial Superintelligence

We argue here that contemporary semiconductor computing technology poses a significant if not insurmountable barrier to the emergence of any artificial general intelligence system, let alone one anticipated by many to be “superintelligent”. This limit on artificial superintelligence (ASI) emerges from the energy requirements of a system that would be more intelligent but orders of magnitude less efficient in energy use than human brains. An ASI would have to supersede not only a single brain but a large population given the effects of collective behavior on the advancement of societies, further multiplying the energy requirement. A hypothetical ASI would likely consume orders of magnitude more energy than what is available in highly-industrialized nations. We estimate the energy use of ASI with an equation we term the “Erasi equation”, for the Energy Requirement for Artificial SuperIntelligence. Additional efficiency consequences will emerge from the current unfocussed and scattered developmental trajectory of AI research. Taken together, these arguments suggest that the emergence of an ASI is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future based on current computer architectures, primarily due to energy constraints, with biomimicry or other new technologies being possible solutions.

20 December 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Thomas Graf (Stony Brook University)

Linguistics and Symbolic Computation in a World of Large Language Models

Language has always played a central role in artificial intelligence, yet AI researchers and linguists have rarely seen eye to eye on things, in particular the status of subsymbolic/neural approaches to language. After decades of debates, it looks like the subsymbolic approaches have finally emerged victorious. Not only are large language models (LLMs) succeeding in incredibly complex real-world tasks, subsymbolic models are also rapidly gaining traction in some areas of theoretical linguistics, e.g. lexical semantics. This raises the question: will symbolic linguistics be left in the dust, or is this actually an opportunity for meaningful synergy between symbolic and subsymbolic approaches?

17 January 2024 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Stefanie Höhl (University of Vienna)

Social Rhythms and Biobehavioral Synchrony in Early Human Development

Caregiver–infant interactions are characterized by interpersonal rhythms at different timescales, from nursery rhymes and interactive games to daily routines. These rhythms make the social environment more predictable for young children and facilitate interpersonal biobehavioral synchrony with their caregivers. In adults, the brain rhythms of interaction partners entrain to communicative rhythms, including speech, supporting mutual comprehension and communication. I will present recent evidence that this is also the case in the infant brain, especially when babies are addressed directly by their caregiver through infant-directed speech in naturalistic interactions. Through using simultaneous measures of neural and physiological rhythms, e.g., dual-fNIRS and dual-ECG, from caregiver and infant during live face-to-face interactions, we can further deepen our understanding of early interactional dynamics and their reciprocal nature. I will present our recent research identifying factors supporting the establishment of caregiver–infant neural synchrony, such as affectionate touch and vocal turn-taking. I will further discuss the functional links and dissociations between caregiver–infant synchrony on the neural and physiological levels. I will outline potential implications of this work and point out important future directions.

How to attend: Attend in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna), or via Zoom (meeting ID: 842 8244 2460; passcode: 678868), or dial in by phone.

You can add this event to your calendar.

31 January 2024 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Clemens Heitzinger (TU Wien)

Reinforcement Learning and its Application in Medicine and Large Language Models

Reinforcement learning has been instrumental in many advances in AI in recent years. The most publicized is certainly the development of ChatGPT and large language models (LLM) in general; the last and crucial training step of ChatGPT is reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). Still, in order to fully solve learning problems, statements about the reliability of the results are necessary in addition to convergence results. For example, reliability and trustworthiness of AI systems is of utmost importance in medicine and other safety critical areas. In this talk, reinforcement-learning algorithms for training LLM and for calculating optimal treatments of sepsis patients are described. The questions of convergence to an optimal policy and of reliability are addressed by PAC (probably approximately correct) estimates and other approaches to policy evaluation.

How to attend: Attend in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna), or via Zoom (meeting ID: 842 8244 2460; passcode: 678868), or dial in by phone.

You can add this event to your calendar.

14 February 2024 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Brigitte Krenn and Stephanie Gross (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence)

Bias in Language Models Illustrated by the Example of Gender

Abstract TBA

How to attend: Attend in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna), or via Zoom (meeting ID: 842 8244 2460; passcode: 678868), or dial in by phone.

You can add this event to your calendar.

Brigitte Krenn interviewed on big data

2023-09-12T00:00:00+02:00

Austrian public radio (ORF Ö1) has broadcast another interview with OFAI's Brigitte Krenn, "Data Science: Eine Wissenschaft nur für Daten?". Journalist Mariann Unterluggauer speaks with Dr. Krenn about the emerging discipline of data science and the technical and ethical challenges it must address.

Tech press on Usenet revitalization

2023-08-31T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's work on Usenet has been covered in articles in The Register and TechSpot:

"USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix" by Liam Proven
"Usenet is still alive, and the Big-8 Board is managing things again" by Alfonso Maruccia

Since 2020, OFAI researcher Tristan Miller has been helping to preserve and revitalize Usenet, the Internet's oldest federated discussion network. He has been speaking regularly about this work at technical and academic events and last year co-authored a retrospective article on Usenet in the journal Internet Histories.

ORF Ö1: Brigitte Krenn on chatbots

2023-08-27T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn was interviewed by Austrian public radio (ORF Ö1). The interview and accompanying online article discuss the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence, with a focus on historical and modern-day chatbots such as Joseph Weizenbaum's Eliza and OpenAI's ChatGPT.

SIGUL talk on Austrian speech synthesis

2023-08-18T00:00:00+02:00

On 18 August 2023 Lorenz Gutscher delivered a talk at SIGUL 2023, the 2nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages.

The talk, "Neural Speech Synthesis for Austrian Dialects with Standard German Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion and Dialect Embeddings", was about dialect embeddings and how to use them to shift a speaker from standard to dialect or dialect to standard. An online demo of the technology is available to try out, and the full paper can be read on ResearchGate.

SIGUL 2023, held in Dublin from 18 to 20 August 2023, is a satellite workshop of Interspeech 2023.

MEi:CogSci internship on human–robot collaboration

2023-07-28T00:00:00+02:00

Arina Polyanskaya, a Master's student at the University of Vienna's MEI:CogSci program, has joined the OFAI for a summer internship.

Arina holds a Bachelor's degree in psychology from Florida International University (FIU) in Miami. At OFAI she is working under the supervision of Mag. Dr. Brigitte Krenn on a project that investigates the errors and miscommunications that occur during collaborative tasks between a human participant and a cobot in a mixed reality (XR) environment. In the project, Arina will extend her skills in qualitative analysis for human–robot interaction (HRI) working on annotating and analyzing recorded interaction videos. She will also gain experience in working with larger sets of data recorded from the XR environment, including working with databases and with tools and techniques from data science and machine learning.

Spanish-language chapter on interactive wordplay translation

2023-07-25T00:00:00+02:00

A chapter co-authored by Tristan Miller, "La interacción entre el hombre y la máquina en la traducción de juegos de palabras", has been published under the Creative Commons Attribution licence in the edited volume La traducción audiovisual a través de la traducción automática y la posedición: prácticas actuales y futuras.

The chapter is a Spanish-language translation of "Human–computer interaction in pun translation", which was published last year in the Routledge volume Using Technologies for Creative-Text Translation.

The chapter presents PunCAT, an interactive electronic tool for the translation of puns. Following the strategies known to be applied in pun translation, PunCAT automatically translates each sense of the pun separately; it then allows the user to explore the semantic fields of these translations in order to help construct a plausible target-language solution that maximizes the semantic correspondence to the original.

The chapter and research are joint work with Prof. Waltraud Kolb of the University of Vienna's Centre for Translation Studies. La traducción audiovisual a través de la traducción automática y la posedición is edited by Laura Mejías-Climent and Julio de los Reyes Lozano and is published by Comares.

JOKER Corpus paper at SIGIR 2023

2023-07-24T00:00:00+02:00

A paper describing the JOKER Corpus, a parallel corpus for multilingual wordplay recognition, has been published in the proceedings of SIGIR 2023, the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.

The paper, "The JOKER Corpus: English–French Parallel Data for Multilingual Wordplay Recognition", was jointly authored by Liana Ermakova of the University of Western Brittany, Anne-Gwenn Bosser of the École Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Brest, Adam Jatowt of the University of Innsbruck, and Tristan Miller of OFAI.

The JOKER Corpus was produced for use in JOKER-2023, an upcoming workshop and shared task on Automatic Wordplay Analysis. JOKER-2023 will be held during the CLEF 2023 conference in Thessaloniki from 18 to 21 September, 2023.

SIGIR 2023 will be held from 23–27 July 2023 in Taipei.

Book chapter on artificial social agents

2023-07-10T00:00:00+02:00

"The Role of Multimodal Data for Modeling Communication in Artificial Social Agents", a chapter authored by Stephanie Gross and Brigitte Krenn has been published in the edited volume Handbook of Human-Machine Systems.

The chapter presents a selection of multimodal datasets collected at OFAI to study human communication behavior in task-oriented scenarios. It also discusses the implications of the authors' findings for modelling communicative behavior in artificial social agents.

The handbook is edited by Giancarlo Fortino, David Kaber, Andreas Nürnberger, and David Mendonça, and is published by Wiley.

AI panel at the International Society for Humor Studies Conference

2023-07-06T00:00:00+02:00

Tristan Miller co-organized and spoke at the Humor and Artificial Intelligence Panel at the 2023 International Society for Humor Studies Conference (ISHS).

The annual panel, organized together with Julia Rayz of Purdue University and Christian F. Hemplemann of Texas A&M University–Commerce, provides a forum for the interdisciplinary dissemination and discussion of research in computational humour. Tristan Miller's talk, "The JOKER Corpus", presented a parallel English–French data set of wordplay that can be used to train and evaluate humour-aware applications in information retrieval and artificial intelligence.

ISHS 2023 was held at Boston University from 3 July to 7 July 2023.

OFAI at ASAI's 2023 Networking Event

2023-07-05T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI participated today in a networking event organized by the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (ASAI).

The event, intended to further connect the Austrian AI community, featured lightning talks and posters from 14 institutes, research groups, and other organizations. OFAI delegates, including Brigitte Krenn and Tristan Miller, were on hand to present the Institute's recent, ongoing, and upcoming research projects.

OFAI scientists speak at Internal Comms Forum

2023-06-20T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI research scientists Michael Pucher and Tristan Miller were featured discussion panelists at the 2023 Internal Comms Forum. The event, held on 20 June at the historic Haus der Ingenieure in Vienna, brought together an international audience of internal communication managers from a wide range of industries.

Under the theme "Bringing AI into Comms", the panelists explored the growing role of artificial intelligence in transforming internal communications practices. Joining Miller and Pucher on the panel were Thomas Lidy, Senior Director of AI & Data Science at Utopia Music, and Amelia Hernández Osorio, a digital workplace specialist at Wienerberger AG.

The Internal Comms Forum is a business conference featuring discussions, talks, and side events on the future of work, digital equality, internal and corporate communications, and how AI changes comms roles. It is organized by Advatera, a membership-based network for digital, marketing, and comms managers.

Peter Hallman speaks at Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium

2023-06-09T00:00:00+02:00

On 9 June 2023, Peter Hallman delivered a talk at the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium.

His talk, "Few ≠ Not Many", argues that differences between 'few' and 'no' support more recent analyses of 'few' as a semantically simplex degree quantifier, while an analysis along the lines of Edward S. Klima's is essentially correct for 'no'.

The Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium is a general linguistics conference held biannually at Palacký University Olomouc in Czechia.

2023 Winter/Spring Lecture Series videos

2023-06-06T00:00:00+02:00

Video recordings from OFAI's 2023 Winter/Spring Lecture Series are now available in our YouTube channel. The full playlist is also embedded on this page below.

Subscribe now to keep apprised of future videos from the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence!

Prof. Stacy Marsella, BA, MS, PhD, Northeastern University and University of Glasgow

2023-05-17T00:00:00+02:00

Computational models of human behavior are used in a wide range of artifacts. The synergy between psychology and the engineering of these artifacts is the subject of "Engineering the Impact of Emotion on Human Behavior", a talk by Stacy Marsella of Northeastern University and the University of Glasgow. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Winter/Spring Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, May 17th at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: Computational models of human behavior are used in a wide range of artifacts. At a large scale, social simulations are being used, for example, to explore people’s response to a natural disaster. At a medium-scale, models of human decision-makers are being used to study social technical systems such as the pharmaceutical drug supply networks. At the individual scale, work on human-robot and human-agent interaction seeks to facilitate interaction by giving artificial agents models of their human partners. At the extreme of modeling individual human behavior, virtual replicas of humans are being crafted, facsimiles of people that can engage people in face-to-face interactions using the same verbal and nonverbal behavior people use. The designs of these various models heavily leverage psychological theories and data. Psychology and the social sciences, in turn, use these computational artifacts as means to formulate, test, and explore theories about human behavior. In this talk, I will first give a brief overview of my group’s work in social simulation, social technical systems, HRI and virtual humans. Then I will exemplify the synergy between psychology and the engineering of these artifacts from the perspective of my group’s work on developing and applying computational models of emotion.

Speaker biography: Stacy Marsella is a professor at Northeastern University, USA, Khoury College of Computer Sciences with a joint appointment in psychology and at the University of Glasgow, UK, Centre for Social, Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience. Prior to joining Northeastern, he was a research professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and a research director at the Institute for Creative Technologies. Previously, he held positions at USC’s Information Sciences Institute and Bell Labs. Marsella’s multidisciplinary research is grounded in the computational modeling of human cognition, emotion, and social behavior, as well as the evaluation of those models. Beyond its relevance to understanding human behavior, the work has seen numerous applications, including health interventions, social skills training, and planning operations. His applied work includes frameworks for large-scale social simulations and a range of techniques and tools for creating virtual humans, facsimiles of people that can engage in face-to-face interactions.

MEi:CogSci student joins DANCR project

2023-05-12T00:00:00+02:00

Patrick Burns, a first-year Master's student at the University of Vienna's MEI:CogSci program, has joined the DANCR project under the supervision of Mag. Dr. Brigitte Krenn.

DANCR is an AI-based tool designed for the artistic community, particularly in contemporary dance, where improvisation plays a crucial role. Its purpose is to support individual artists in their dance research by expanding and refining their repertoire of improvisations. Patrick's internship contributes to the evaluation of the system in which he is part of a multidisciplinary team of professional dancers, philosophers, and computer scientists. The goal is to create an evaluation framework that can accurately assess the artistic potential of the DANCR system as an improvisation tool and gain insight into human-robot interaction in the creative domain.

Assoz. Prof. Mag. Hannes Fellner, MA, PhD, University of Vienna

2023-05-10T00:00:00+02:00

In parts of the Ancient Silk Road, the Sanskrit, Tocharian, and Saka languages were written in a little-understood script known as Tarim Brahmi. Recent efforts at making these languages and the Tarim Brahmi script digitally accessible is the subject of "Digital Advances on the Ancient Silk Road", a talk by Hannes Fellner of the University of Vienna. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Winter/Spring Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna) or via Zoom on Wednesday, 10 May 2023 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: From the 2nd century CE on, communities and monasteries developed along the trade routes of the ancient Silk Road in and around the Tarim Basin in today’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. These were centres of writing, copying, translating, and transmitting texts similar to the monasteries in medieval Europe. The old Indo-European languages Sanskrit, Tocharian, and Saka written in a Central Asian variant of the Indian Brahmi script – Tarim Brahmi – were the major languages in use in the Tarim Basin in the first millennium CE. In contrast to the writing traditions in medieval Europe, the ones on this part of the Silk Road are not well understood, mainly due to the fragmentary status of texts. I this talk, I will address recent efforts of making these languages and the Tarim Brahmi script digitally accessible and operable for philological, palaeographic, and linguistic research in the framework of the FWF-START project “The characters that shaped the Silk Road – A database and digital palaeography of Tarim Brahmi”. In the project, the text witnesses are linked to their digital facsimiles on the character level using Transkribus. All data concerning the texts is combined in an XML database and published through a web application. This allows to determine which text was written by whom, when, where, and how in order to

trace the evolution of Tarim Brahmi and its adaptation to the different languages
reveal the relationship between script types, languages, and genres
categorize countless text fragments that are so far unidentified (regarding language, provenance, date, genre etc.)
potentially (re)combine scattered fragments belonging to the same manuscript leaf
and, of course, to better understand literacy and writing culture in the Tarim Basin

Speaker biography: Hannes A. Fellner studied linguistics at the University of Vienna and received his PhD from Harvard University in 2013. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna and assistant professor at Leiden University. Since 2018 he is the principal investigator of a START-project funded by Austrian Science Fund dedicated to the research of the Central Asian variants of the Indian Brahmi script. He is currently associate professor for historical linguistics and digital philology at the University of Vienna. He is a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the director of the Austrian Institute for Research on China and Southeast Asia. His research interests include Indo-European nominal morphology, historical and comparative linguistics and philology of the Indo-European languages of the ancient Silk Road, and theoretical approaches to language change.

Lorenz Gutscher speaks at Graz–Wien Speech Workshop

2023-05-10T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Lorenz Gutscher gave a talk at the 2nd Graz–Wien Speech Workshop about "Utilizing Dialect Embeddings for Text-to-Speech Synthesis of Austrian Varieties". The workshop, held on 3–4 May 2023, was organized by the Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory at the Graz University of Technology.

OFAI hosts MEi:CogSci intern

2023-05-08T00:00:00+02:00

Klára Petrovicka joined OFAI in September 2022 to complete an internship as part of her MEi:CogSci studies at the University of Vienna. Under the supervision of Mag. Dr. Brigitte Krenn, the goal of the internship was to analyse machine learning approaches on processing text-based empathic utterances. In particular, they worked on reproducing EmoBERT model results; the code is publicly available. EmoBERT is a emotion-based variant of the BERT transformer model, which was able to learn emotion representations, and which was also fine-tuned to classify empathetic intents such as consoling and sympathising. After the initial analysis of EmoBERT's performance, including the replication of the published results, the model was then applied to another dataset and an error analysis was performed.

While the internship has now come to an end, the cooperation between Klara and OFAI to continue work on empathetic processing models continues.

Tristan Miller speaks at University of Konstanz

2023-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Tristan Miller made a research visit today to the University of Konstanz Department of Linguistics. He delivered an invited talk, "Computational Analysis and Translation of Wordplay", and met with faculty and graduate students.

Article on Arabic degree quantification

2023-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

"Equative Degree Quantification in Damascene Arabic", an article by Peter Hallman, has been published in Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXXIV.

The paper documents a degree-equative construction in contemporary Syrian Arabic, using data collected by elicitation from five native speakers from the city of Damascus.

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXXIV, edited by Mahmoud Azaz, brings together eleven peer-reviewed articles from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics held at Tucson, Arizona in 2020 .

Paolo Petta lecture postponed

2023-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had to postpone Paolo Petta's talk, originally scheduled for 26 April. A new date will be announced later. We apologize for the inconvenience and look forward to welcoming you to the next scheduled lecture on 10 May.

Journal article on superlative displacement

2023-04-24T00:00:00+02:00

"Superlative displacement in 'sandwich' scanarios", an article by Peter Hallman, has been published in volume 31 of Natural Language Semantics.

The article seeks to reconcile the ‘movement’ account of the interpretation of superlative and comparative degree quantifiers with a class of apparent counterexamples. It provide an analysis of contexts in which the unexpected interaction of degree quantifiers with other terms in their scope is a side effect of quantification over situations inherent in the degree quantifier itself.

Natural Language Semantics is a journal devoted to semantics and its interfaces in grammar, especially syntax. It is published by Springer and edited by Amy Rose Deal.

Peter Hallman delivers deadjectivals workshop keynote

2023-04-21T00:00:00+02:00

Peter Hallman was a keynote speaker at the Workshop on Deadjectival Verb Formation in Indo-European, held on 10 and 11 March 2023 in Vienna at the Austrian Academy of Sciences's Institute of Iranian Studies.

The keynote talk, "A>V in the English Passive Participles", discusses the English passive participle morpheme as a case of historical adjective-to-verb derivation by virtue of loss of function of the original adjectivizing morphology.

Federation and Moderation at LibrePlanet 2023

2023-04-19T00:00:00+02:00

Usenet, the Internet's original federated discussion network, was the subject of a talk presented at the LibrePlanet 2023 conference. Together with fellow Big-8 Management Board member Rayner Lucas, OFAI's Tristan Miller introduced the technical underpinnings of the network and discussed its influence on and relevance to the modern Internet.

A full video of the talk, "Federation and Moderation: Usenet as the Original Decentralized Social Network", is now available for streaming on PeerTube and on MediaGoblin.

The LibrePlanet series of conferences is organized by the Free Software Foundation. LibrePlanet 2023 was held online and in Boston on 18 and 19 March 2023.

Groningen students visit OFAI

2023-04-18T00:00:00+02:00

Today OFAI hosted a research visit from DSLA, the University of Groningen's Decentralized Student Association for technology law, artificial intelligence, and computer science students.

OFAI researchers met with DSLA Chairman William Cole and a large contingent of students to discuss research trends and legal issues in natural language processing, machine learning, robots, and ethical AI.

Journal article on human–robot collaboration in industry

2023-04-17T00:00:00+02:00

The International Journal of Social Robotics has published "A Communicative Perspective on Human–Robot Collaboration in Industry: Mapping Communicative Modes on Collaborative Scenarios", an article by Brigitte Krenn and Stephanie Gross.

In the article, the authors identify three types of human–robot interaction combining different collaborative industrial human–cobot scenarios with communicative modes, and identify challenges arising from an increased use of interactivity in human-cobot interaction.

Dipl.-Psych. Dr. Christoph Scheepers, University of Glasgow

2023-04-12T00:00:00+02:00

Word concepts are known to modulate sensori-motor responses, but it is less understood how sensori-motor actions influence access to word concepts in memory. This phenomenon will be explored in "The 'Crossword Effect' in Free Word Recall: A Retrieval Advantage for Words Encoded in Line with their Spatial Associations", an invited talk by Christoph Scheepers of the University of Glasgow. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 12 April 2023 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar.

Talk abstract: According to the perceptual symbol hypothesis (Barsalou, 1999), word concepts trigger mental re-enactments of perceptual states and actions. While many studies have shown how word concepts modulate sensori-motor responses, it is less well known how sensori-motor actions influence access to word concepts in memory. Here, we investigated how well English words with strong horizontal or vertical associations are retrieved from memory dependent on how they are presented during encoding (i.e., horizontally or vertically printed). Initial pre-testing of 129 candidate words yielded 43 words with a strong horizontal association (e.g., floor, beach, border, etc.) and 51 words with a strong vertical association (e.g., tree, crane, bottle, etc.). These were quasi-randomly compiled into 160 ‘crossword arrays’, each containing 5 horizontally and 5 vertically printed items drawn from the horizontal association word set, as well as 5 horizontally and 5 vertically printed items drawn from the vertical association word set. The main experiment (160 participants) was preregistered on OSF and was introduced to participants as “testing how word arrangements affect subsequent mathematical problem solving”. There were three experimental phases: (1) in the encoding phase, each participant studied a uniquely generated crossword array for ca. 2 minutes; (2) in the following distractor phase, they had to solve simple mathematical equations for 1 minute; (3) in the final (surprize) free recall phase, they were asked to write down as many words as they could remember from the encoding phase. Dependent variables were likelihood of correctly recalled words and retrieval ranks of correctly recalled words in the recall list. Results showed no appreciable effects in retrieval rank, but a clear interaction (p < .001) between word association and word presentation in the likelihood of correct word recall: vertical association words, in particular, were reliably more likely to be recalled correctly when they were presented vertically (i.e., in line with their spatial association) than when they were presented horizontally during encoding. Implications for the perceptual symbol hypothesis will be discussed.

Speaker biography: Christoph Scheepers studied Psychology, Linguistics, and Computer Science at the Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, graduating in 1991 (Diplom in Psychology). He completed his PhD at the University of Freiburg in 1997, was Post Doc in Glasgow (working with Martin Pickering and Simon Garrod) until 2000, Post-Doctoral RA in Computational Linguistics at Saarland University (2000-2003), and lecturer in Psychology at the University of Dundee (2003-2005). Since 2005, he is Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He research interests are in Psycholinguistics / Psychology of Language, syntax / sentence processing, embodied cognition, bilingualism, statistical modelling. and eye-tracking.

Slides: The “Crossword Effect” in Free Word Recall: A Retrieval Advantage for Words Encoded in Line with their Spatial Associations (PDF)

Prof. Stacy Marsella lecture posponed

2023-03-29T00:00:00+02:00

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had to postpone Stacy Marsella's talk, originally scheduled for 2023-03-29, until Wednesday, May 17 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1). We apologize for the inconvenience!

JOKER workshop previewed at ECIR 2023

2023-03-18T00:00:00+01:00

JOKER-2023, an upcoming workshop and shared task on Automatic Wordplay Analysis, will be previewed next month at the 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023) in Dublin, Ireland.

The JOKER workshop series, co-organized by OFAI's Tristan Miller, aims to bring translators and computer scientists together to develop data and evaluation metrics for the (semi-)automatic translation of humorous language. JOKER-2023 will be held during the CLEF 2023 conference in Thessaloniki from 18 to 21 September, 2023.

The presentation of JOKER-2023 at ECIR 2023 is accompanied by the following paper in the conference proceedings:

Liana Ermakova, Tristan Miller, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Victor Manuel Palma Preciado, Grigori Sidorov, and Adam Jatowt. Science for fun: the CLEF 2023 JOKER track on automatic wordplay analysis. In Jaap Kamps, Lorraine Goeuriot, Fabio Crestani, Maria Maistro, Hideo Joho, Brian Davis, Cathal Gurrin, Udo Kruschwitz, and Annalina Caputo, editors, Advances in Information Retrieval: 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2023, Dublin, Ireland, April 2–6, Proceedings, Part III, volume 13982 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (ISSN 0302-9743), pages 546–556, Berlin, Heidelberg, April 2023. Springer. ISBN 978-3-031-28241-6. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-28241-6_63.

Prof. Dr. Niels Taatgen, University of Groningen

2023-03-15T00:00:00+01:00

Humans are capable of performing many novel tasks with little or no instruction, contrary to machines. A possible solution – modelling a set of cognitive skills that can be recombined to carry out tasks – is the topic of "The Skill-based Method of Modeling Human Intelligent Behavior", a talk by Niels Taatgen of the University of Groningen. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Winter/Spring Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 15 March at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: Humans are capable of performing many novel tasks with little or no instruction, contrary to machines. Unfortunately, research in cognitive science and psychology pays very little attention to this. Because of this, many cognitive models focus on exhaustively explaining data from single experiments, but ignore the question where that knowledge originates from, and how it can be reused in other contexts. A possible solution is to assume people have a set of cognitive skills that they can recombine to carry out tasks. The idea is analogous to the idea that words in a language can be combined in many different ways to create new meaning. I will demonstrate this idea using the PRIMs cognitive architecture, which is derived from the ACT-R architecture, for example with the Attentional Blink task. The model of that task only consists of skills taken from models of other tasks.

Speaker biography: Niels A. Taatgen is a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Groningen. He holds degrees in computer science and psychology, and has published in the areas of psychology and cognitive science. Until recently, he worked as a research psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, collaborating with John Anderson and others on the ACT-R cognitive architecture project.

Prof. Mag. Phil. Winfried Lechner, PhD, University of Athens

2023-03-08T00:00:00+01:00

Applying methods of formal linguistics to the study of music has exposed homologies between the two systems, though meaning-related aspects of music have remained understudied. This frontier is explored in "Natural Language Semantics and Music", a talk by Winfried Lechner of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Winter/Spring Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 8 March at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: Both human language and music can be modeled as discrete, combinatorial systems. Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) demonstrated that applying the methods of formal linguistics to the study of (tonal) music provides a strategy for exposing homologies between these two systems. But while syntactic properties of music have attracted a considerable amount of interest (Rohrmeier 2011; Granroth-Wilding and Steedman 2014; see Rohrmeier & Pearce 2018 for an survey), meaning-related aspects have by and large remained understudied (an exception is Schlenker 2019, 2022). In part, this might be due to the widely held belief that unlike natural language, music neither has a lexicon of atomic form-meaning pairs (Katz and Pesetsky 2011) nor employs compositional mechanisms to recursively derive complex meanings. I will explore some consequences of these two assumptions by making explicit what they entail for the study of music from a linguistic perspective.

Speaker biography: Winfried Lechner is Professor of Theoretical Linguistics (and German Linguistics) at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His primary academic interests are located in the areas of formal semantics, syntax, the syntax-semantic interface and allied fields. Undergraduate education at the University of Vienna (Magister in linguistics and Japanese); graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (PhD in linguistics, 1999); research and/or teaching positions in Tübingen, Vienna, Stuttgart, Nicosia and at MIT. Recent research projects have addressed the logical syntax of scope and reconstruction; ellipsis; reflexivization; comparatives; the cross-linguistic typology of same/different; additive and scalar focus particles; and generally issues related to the architecture of grammar.

Priv.-Doz. Mag. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Michael Pucher, OFAI

2023-03-01T00:00:00+01:00

Statistical parametric speech synthesis has significantly improved the quality and flexibility of speech synthesis systems. Its uses in dialect interpolation, singing synthesis, and other application areas is the subject of "Synthesizing Dialects, Faces, Singing Voices, Songbirds, and Famous Dead Actors", a talk by Michael Pucher of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Winter/Spring Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna) or via Zoom on Wednesday, 1 March at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: During the last decades statistical parametric speech synthesis has significantly improved the quality and flexibility of speech synthesis systems. This development started with hidden Markov models (HMM) and then another big step of improvement in acoustic modeling and vocoding was made with deep neural networks (DNN). In this talk I will present a range of applications of statistical parametric speech synthesis that we have investigated. In the field of acoustic speech synthesis I will show how dialect interpolation can be realized, which allows for the generation of in-between language varieties. In audio-visual speech synthesis joint audio-visual modeling and visual control will be presented. In singing speech I will describe our work towards an opera style singing synthesis system that is trained on high quality opera singing data. A model for synthesis of singing birds will be presented that can control bird songs by symbolic input sequences. Finally, I will present a DNN-based synthesizer of a famous Austrian actor that we have built from audio book data, and that was used in a theater play. I will conclude my talk with an outlook on the future of speech synthesis technologies, remaining technical and possible societal challenges.

Speaker biography: Michael Pucher is Senior Researcher at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) and Senior Speech Technologist at Recognosco, Vienna, Austria. He obtained his doctoral degree (Dr.techn.) in Electrical and Information Engineering from Graz University of Technology in 2007. In 2017 he received the venia docendi in Speech Communication at Graz University of Technology with a habilitation thesis on Speech Processing for Multimodal and Adaptive Systems. His research interests are acoustic modeling for speech recognition, semantic language modeling, speech synthesis for language varieties, persona design for speech-based systems, multimodal and spoken dialog systems, audio-visual speech synthesis, synthesis of singing, synthesis of animal vocalisations, digital phonetics, and sociophonetics. He has also made significant contributions in the area of speaker verification spoofing, where we showed how adaptive synthesizers can spoof a speaker verification system.

Irony is very difficult

2023-02-16T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI director Robert Trappl is interviewed in the Austrian news magazine profil about computational humour, ChatGPT, and explainable machine learning. The interview by Alwin Schönberger appears in the 12 February 2023 print edition and was posted on the profil website on 16 February.

Prof. Benjamin Mako Hill, BA, MSc, PhD, University of Washington

2023-02-15T00:00:00+01:00

The Wikimedia Foundation has developed a set of ML/AI systems that have been shaping editing behaviour on Wikipedia. How these tools have impacted the efficiency and fairness of moderation work will be discussed in "Balancing Open Participation and Information Quality in Wikipedia Using Machine Learning", a talk by Benjamin Mako Hill of the University of Washington. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Winter/Spring Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 15 February at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: Peer produced information goods like free/open source software and Wikipedia are both increasingly important and increasingly under threat. This talk will describe how Wikipedia has sought to balance its commitment to open editing and its desire to allow participation from unvetted and anonymous users with its need to maintain high information quality in its articles. I will focus on the way that a set of ML/AI systems developed by the Wikimedia Foundation allow scholars to measure the value of contributions from anonymous users and the surprising way that these systems can also be used by the Wikipedia community to shape editing behavior. I will argue that use of these ML/AI systems can both improve the efficiency of moderation work while also making moderation actions more fair to anonymous contributors who are the source of substantial vandalism by reducing reliance on social signals and making norm violations by everyone else more visible.

Speaker biography: Benjamin Mako Hill is an Associate Professor in the University of Washington Department of Communication and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Human-Centered Design & Engineering, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and the Information School. He is a member of Community Data Science Collective which he founded with Aaron Shaw. At UW, he is also Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, the eScience Institute, and the "Design Use Build" (DUB) group that supports research on on human computer interaction. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard.

Winfried Lechner lecture postponed

2023-02-01T00:00:00+01:00

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had to postpone Winfried Lechner's talk, originally scheduled for 1 February, until Wednesday, 8 March at 18:30 CET (UTC+1). We apologize for the inconvenience!

OFAI 2023 Winter/Spring Lecture Series

2023-01-18T23:59:00+01:00

OFAI is delighted to announce its 2023 Winter/Spring Lecture Series, featuring an eclectic lineup of internal and external speakers.

The talks are intended to familiarize attendees with the latest research developments in AI and related fields, and to forge new connections with those working in other areas.

Lectures will take place on Wednesdays at 18:30 Vienna time. All lectures will be held online via Zoom; in-person attendance at OFAI is also possible for certain lectures. Attendance is open to the public and free of charge. No registration is required.

Subscribe to our newsletter or our RSS feed, or bookmark this web page, to receive further details for the individual talks.

18 January 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Martin Trapp (Aalto University)

Leveraging Connections Between Deep Architectures and Bayesian Nonparametrics

Deep architectures have become an integral part of modern AI systems. However, despite their computational benefits, concerns about their robustness and missing interpretability often limit their applicability in scenarios where trustworthiness is of importance. This motivates the Bayesian approach to deep learning, which aims to encode prior knowledge into the model. However, defining Bayesian priors for deep architecture is often challenging. In this talk, I will discuss how drawing connections to Bayesian nonparametric priors can help in (i) encoding conservative behaviour into deep learning models, (ii) understanding priors over deep tractable models, and (iii) developing tools for uncertainty quantification in computer vision tasks.

1 February 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had to postpone Winfried Lechner's talk, originally scheduled for 1 February 2023, until Wednesday, 8 March at 18:30 CET (UTC+1). See the new entry below for the talk details.

15 February 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington)

Balancing Open Participation and Information Quality in Wikipedia Using Machine Learning

Peer produced information goods like free/open source software and Wikipedia are both increasingly important and increasingly under threat. This talk will describe how Wikipedia has sought to balance its commitment to open editing and its desire to allow participation from unvetted and anonymous users with its need to maintain high information quality in its articles. I will focus on the way that a set of ML/AI systems developed by the Wikimedia Foundation allow scholars to measure the value of contributions from anonymous users and the surprising way that these systems can also be used by the Wikipedia community to shape editing behavior. I will argue that use of these ML/AI systems can both improve the efficiency of moderation work while also making moderation actions more fair to anonymous contributors who are the source of substantial vandalism by reducing reliance on social signals and making norm violations by everyone else more visible.

1 March 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Michael Pucher (OFAI)

Synthesizing Dialects, Faces, Singing Voices, Songbirds, and Famous Dead Actors

During the last decades statistical parametric speech synthesis has significantly improved the quality and flexibility of speech synthesis systems. This development started with hidden Markov models (HMM) and then another big step of improvement in acoustic modeling and vocoding was made with deep neural networks (DNN). In this talk I will present a range of applications of statistical parametric speech synthesis that we have investigated. In the field of acoustic speech synthesis I will show how dialect interpolation can be realized, which allows for the generation of in-between language varieties. In audio-visual speech synthesis joint audio-visual modeling and visual control will be presented. In singing speech I will describe our work towards an opera style singing synthesis system that is trained on high quality opera singing data. A model for synthesis of singing birds will be presented that can control bird songs by symbolic input sequences. Finally, I will present a DNN-based synthesizer of a famous Austrian actor that we have built from audio book data, and that was used in a theater play. I will conclude my talk with an outlook on the future of speech synthesis technologies, remaining technical and possible societal challenges.

8 March 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Winfried Lechner (University of Athens)

Natural Language Semantics and Music

Both human language and music can be modeled as discrete, combinatorial systems. Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) demonstrated that applying the methods of formal linguistics to the study of (tonal) music provides a strategy for exposing homologies between these two systems. But while syntactic properties of music have attracted a considerable amount of interest (Rohrmeier 2011; Granroth-Wilding and Steedman 2014; see Rohrmeier & Pearce 2018 for an survey), meaning-related aspects have by and large remained understudied (an exception is Schlenker 2019, 2022). In part, this might be due to the widely held belief that unlike natural language, music neither has a lexicon of atomic form-meaning pairs (Katz and Pesetsky 2011) nor employs compositional mechanisms to recursively derive complex meanings. I will explore some consequences of these two assumptions by making explicit what they entail for the study of music from a linguistic perspective.

15 March 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1)

Niels Taatgen (University of Groningen)

The Skill-based Method of Modeling Human Intelligent Behavior

Humans are capable of performing many novel tasks with little or no instruction, contrary to machines. Unfortunately, research in cognitive science and psychology pays very little attention to this. Because of this, many cognitive models focus on exhaustively explaining data from single experiments, but ignore the question where that knowledge originates from, and how it can be reused in other contexts. A possible solution is to assume people have a set of cognitive skills that they can recombine to carry out tasks. The idea is analogous to the idea that words in a language can be combined in many different ways to create new meaning. I will demonstrate this idea using the PRIMs cognitive architecture, which is derived from the ACT-R architecture, for example with the Attentional Blink task. The model of that task only consists of skills taken from models of other tasks.

29 March 2023 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)

Due to illness, we have had to postpone Stacy Marsella's talk, originally scheduled for 29 March 2023, until Wednesday, 17 May at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2). See the new entry below for the talk details.

12 April 2023 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)

Christoph Scheepers (University of Glasgow)

The “Crossword Effect” in Free Word Recall: A Retrieval Advantage for Words Encoded in Line with their Spatial Associations

According to the perceptual symbol hypothesis (Barsalou, 1999), word concepts trigger mental re-enactments of perceptual states and actions. While many studies have shown how word concepts modulate sensori-motor responses, it is less well known how sensori-motor actions influence access to word concepts in memory. Here, we investigated how well English words with strong horizontal or vertical associations are retrieved from memory dependent on how they are presented during encoding (i.e., horizontally or vertically printed). Initial pre-testing of 129 candidate words yielded 43 words with a strong horizontal association (e.g., floor, beach, border, etc.) and 51 words with a strong vertical association (e.g., tree, crane, bottle, etc.). These were quasi-randomly compiled into 160 ‘crossword arrays’, each containing 5 horizontally and 5 vertically printed items drawn from the horizontal association word set, as well as 5 horizontally and 5 vertically printed items drawn from the vertical association word set. The main experiment (160 participants) was preregistered on OSF and was introduced to participants as “testing how word arrangements affect subsequent mathematical problem solving”. There were three experimental phases: (1) in the encoding phase, each participant studied a uniquely generated crossword array for ca. 2 minutes; (2) in the following distractor phase, they had to solve simple mathematical equations for 1 minute; (3) in the final (surprize) free recall phase, they were asked to write down as many words as they could remember from the encoding phase. Dependent variables were likelihood of correctly recalled words and retrieval ranks of correctly recalled words in the recall list. Results showed no appreciable effects in retrieval rank, but a clear interaction (p < .001) between word association and word presentation in the likelihood of correct word recall: vertical association words, in particular, were reliably more likely to be recalled correctly when they were presented vertically (i.e., in line with their spatial association) than when they were presented horizontally during encoding. Implications for the perceptual symbol hypothesis will be discussed.

26 April 2023 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)

Paolo Petta (OFAI)

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had to postpone Paolo Petta's talk, originally scheduled for 26 April 2023. A new date will be announced later.

10 May 2023 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)

Hannes Fellner (University of Vienna)

Digital Advances on the Ancient Silk Road

From the 2nd century CE on, communities and monasteries developed along the trade routes of the ancient Silk Road in and around the Tarim Basin in today’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. These were centres of writing, copying, translating, and transmitting texts similar to the monasteries in medieval Europe. The old Indo-European languages Sanskrit, Tocharian, and Saka written in a Central Asian variant of the Indian Brahmi script – Tarim Brahmi – were the major languages in use in the Tarim Basin in the first millennium CE. In contrast to the writing traditions in medieval Europe, the ones on this part of the Silk Road are not well understood, mainly due to the fragmentary status of texts. I this talk, I will address recent efforts of making these languages and the Tarim Brahmi script digitally accessible and operable for philological, palaeographic, and linguistic research in the framework of the FWF-START project “The characters that shaped the Silk Road – A database and digital palaeography of Tarim Brahmi”. In the project, the text witnesses are linked to their digital facsimiles on the character level using Transkribus. All data concerning the texts is combined in an XML database and published through a web application. This allows to determine which text was written by whom, when, where, and how in order to

trace the evolution of Tarim Brahmi and its adaptation to the different languages
reveal the relationship between script types, languages, and genres
categorize countless text fragments that are so far unidentified (regarding language, provenance, date, genre etc.)
potentially (re)combine scattered fragments belonging to the same manuscript leaf
and, of course, to better understand literacy and writing culture in the Tarim Basin

17 May 2023 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)

Stacy Marsella (Northeastern University and University of Glasgow)

Engineering the Impact of Emotion on Human Behavior

Computational models of human behavior are used in a wide range of artifacts. At a large scale, social simulations are being used, for example, to explore people’s response to a natural disaster. At a medium-scale, models of human decision-makers are being used to study social technical systems such as the pharmaceutical drug supply networks. At the individual scale, work on human-robot and human-agent interaction seeks to facilitate interaction by giving artificial agents models of their human partners. At the extreme of modeling individual human behavior, virtual replicas of humans are being crafted, facsimiles of people that can engage people in face-to-face interactions using the same verbal and nonverbal behavior people use. The designs of these various models heavily leverage psychological theories and data. Psychology and the social sciences, in turn, use these computational artifacts as means to formulate, test, and explore theories about human behavior. In this talk, I will first give a brief overview of my group’s work in social simulation, social technical systems, HRI and virtual humans. Then I will exemplify the synergy between psychology and the engineering of these artifacts from the perspective of my group’s work on developing and applying computational models of emotion.

Dipl.-Ing. Martin Trapp, PhD, Aalto University

2023-01-18T00:00:00+01:00

The Bayesian approach to deep learning aims to encode prior knowledge into models, but defining priors is often challenging. These challenges are discussed in "Leveraging Connections Between Deep Architectures and Bayesian Nonparametrics", a talk by Martin Trapp of Aalto University. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Winter/Spring Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 18 January at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: Deep architectures have become an integral part of modern AI systems. However, despite their computational benefits, concerns about their robustness and missing interpretability often limit their applicability in scenarios where trustworthiness is of importance. This motivates the Bayesian approach to deep learning, which aims to encode prior knowledge into the model. However, defining Bayesian priors for deep architecture is often challenging. In this talk, I will discuss how drawing connections to Bayesian nonparametric priors can help in (i) encoding conservative behaviour into deep learning models, (ii) understanding priors over deep tractable models, and (iii) developing tools for uncertainty quantification in computer vision tasks.

Speaker biography: Martin Trapp is an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University, Finland. Previously, Martin was a postdoctoral researcher working with Arno Solin at Aalto University and finished his PhD at the Graz University of Technology under Franz Pernkopf and Robert Peharz. During his PhD, Martin worked as a researcher at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence and was a visiting researcher at the Computational and Biological Learning Lab at the University of Cambridge. His main research interests are in the intersection of deep learning, probabilistic circuits, probabilistic programming, and Bayesian nonparametrics, with the goal of building systems that are computationally efficient, reliable, and can adjust their complexity to the data distribution.

Article on derStandard CommunityBlog introducing the misogyny classifier

2022-12-01T00:00:00+01:00

Brigitte Krenn and Johann Petrak have co-authored an article on the misogyny classifier in derStandard CommunityBlog (German).

Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn. Bernhard Pfahringer, University of Waikato

2022-11-16T00:00:00+01:00

Machine learning assumes data to be independently and identically sampled from a distribution, though in the real world this assumption rarely holds. Data stream mining, a way of tackling data streams that change over time, is introduced in "Everything Changes, but Your ML Models Stay the Same?", a talk by Bernhard Pfahringer of the University of Waikato. The talk is part of OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 16 November at 19:30 CET (UTC+1):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

(Note that this talk has been rescheduled from its originally announced slot of Wednesday, 9 November at 18:30 CET.)

Talk abstract: Most Machine Learning assumes i.i.d. data, data that is independently and identically sampled from a distribution. Thus training on a sample and then applying to new samples is a sound procedure. Unfortunately, in the real world, data is almost never i.i.d. This presentation will introduce data stream mining as a way of tackling data streams that change over time. I will in particular highlight opportunities that this scenario offers, that are not present in the static i.i.d. train-then-test setup.

Speaker biography: Bernhard Pfahringer is a professor with the Computer Science Department at the University of Waikato, and also a co-director for its new AI Institute.

Medienlöwe award for OFAI's misogyny classifier

2022-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

The misogyny classifier developed by OFAI together with derStandard.at won the renowned Austrian media prize "Medienlöwe". See the corresponding press note (in German). For background information on the classifier development see the OFAI project page.

Mag. Dr. Stephanie Gross, MSc, OFAI

2022-11-02T00:00:00+01:00

Humans and robots are increasingly working together at home and in the workplace, and successful interaction depends on the robot picking up on the human's cues and communicating according to social norms. The associated challenges are discussed in this talk, "Multimodal Human–Robot Interaction in Situated Task Descriptions", by Stephanie Gross of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). The talk is part of OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk on Wednesday, 2 November at 18:30 CET (UTC+1). Attendance is possible in person at OFAI Headquarters (Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna); note that it is recommended to wear an FFP2 mask while on the premises. Alternatively, you may attend online via Zoom:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: Application areas in which robots and humans work together are rapidly growing, for example in private households or in industry. In these areas, a major communication context is situated task descriptions, where humans naturally use verbal as well as non-verbal channels to transmit information to their interlocutor. Therefore to successfully interact with humans, robots need to (1) share representations of concepts with their communication partner, (2) identify human communicative cues and extract and merge information transmitted via different channels, and (3) generate multimodal communicative behavior which is understandable for humans and complies with social norms. In this talk, I will discuss several challenges on the way, including the type of data used for modelling multimodal HRI, generating non-verbal social signals, or multimodal reference resolution in situated tasks.

Speaker biography: Stephanie Gross is a research scientist at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). She has been involved as PI and Co-PI in different national and international research projects. Her main research interests lie in the field of task-based human-human and human-robot interaction, including the identification and interpretation of relevant human multimodal signals in situated interaction and generating relevant multimodal signals on robots, as well as modelling robotic learning language through the interaction with humans.

Dr. Peter Hallman, MA, BA, OFAI

2022-10-25T00:00:00+02:00

Syrian Arabic, like English, has a syntactic constraint on the formation of clauses that describe standards of comparison. But unlike in English, the scope of the comparative and the derivation of the degree clause are syntactically uniform. This difference in scope is discussed in "Comparatives in Arabic", a talk by Peter Hallman of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). The talk is part of OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Tuesday, 25 October at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2):

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: In this talk, I show firstly that English and Syrian Arabic (which is typical of the contemporary Arabic dialects in the relevant respects) share a syntactic constraint on the formation of ‘degree clauses’, the clauses that describe the standard of comparison that in English are introduced by ‘than’, i.e., the bracketed part in ‘Clyde is taller [than Miriam is]’. Secondly, I show that in Syrian Arabic but not English, the relevant restriction also constrains the scope of the comparative itself, effecting the repertoire of possible interpretations for comparative constructions in that language. Consequently, the scope of the comparative and the derivation of the degree clause are syntactically uniform in Arabic but not in English. I offer some speculations on the source of the unexpected non-uniformity of English, which is probably related to differences in the structure of noun phrases between the two languages.

Speaker biography: Peter Hallman is a theoretical linguist at the Austrian Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) with specializations in syntax, semantics and morphology, and language area specializations in Arabic, German and English.

Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Benjamin Roth, BSc, MSc, University of Vienna

2022-10-19T00:00:00+02:00

While behavioural tests capture human prior knowledge and insights, there has been little exploration on how to leverage them for model training and development. This question is explored in "Evaluation and Learning with Structured Test Sets", an invited talk by Benjamin Roth of the University of Vienna which represents joint work with Pedro Henrique Luz de Araujo. The talk is part of OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk on Wednesday, 19 October at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2). Attendance is possible in person at OFAI Headquarters (Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna); note that it is recommended to wear an FFP2 mask while on the premises. Alternatively, you may attend online via Zoom:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: Behavioural testing – verifying system capabilities by validating human-designed input-output pairs – is an alternative evaluation method of natural language processing systems proposed to address the shortcomings of the standard approach: computing metrics on held-out data. While behavioural tests capture human prior knowledge and insights, there has been little exploration on how to leverage them for model training and development. With this in mind, we explore behaviour-aware learning by examining several fine-tuning schemes using HateCheck, a suite of functional tests for hate speech detection systems. To address potential pitfalls of training on data originally intended for evaluation, we train and evaluate models on different configurations of HateCheck by holding out categories of test cases, which enables us to estimate performance on potentially overlooked system properties. The fine-tuning procedure led to improvements in the classification accuracy of held-out functionalities and identity groups, suggesting that models can potentially generalise to overlooked functionalities. However, performance on held-out functionality classes and i.i.d. hate speech detection data decreased, which indicates that generalisation occurs mostly across functionalities from the same class and that the procedure led to overfitting to the HateCheck data distribution.

Speaker biography: Benjamin Roth is a professor in the area of deep learning & statistical NLP, leading the WWTF Vienna Research Group for Young Investigators "Knowledge-Infused Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing". Prior to this, he was an interim professor at LMU Munich. He obtained his PhD from Saarland University and did a postdoc at UMass, Amherst. His research interests are the extraction of knowledge from text with statistical methods and knowledge-supervised learning.

Ass.-Prof. Dr. Karën Fort, Sorbonne Université / LORIA

2022-10-12T00:00:00+02:00

Commercial applications of natural language processing have now invaded our daily lives, with consequences that raise difficult ethical questions. These questions will be discussed in "Ethics and NLP: What we Talk About, What we Don't Talk About Anymore, What we Never Talked About", an invited talk by Karën Fort of Sorbonne Université / LORIA. The talk is part of OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 12 October 2022 at 18:30 CEST:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: In recent years, ethics has become a recognized subject in the fields of AI and more particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This recent development is due to several factors, including the fact that NLP has become commercially attractive enough to leave research laboratories and invade our daily lives, with immediately visible consequences for the general public. I will return in this presentation to the evolution of the subject over the last decade, which has seen certain issues become obvious (such as the remuneration of click workers) and no longer be discussed, while others (notably the biases in language models) take center stage, obscuring the most difficult questions.

Speaker biography: Karën Fort is Associate Professor at Sorbonne Université and does her research at the LORIA laboratory in Nancy. Her primary research interest is manual annotation for natural language processing (NLP), which she extended to crowdsourcing annotation, in particular using Games With A Purpose (GWAPs). She also developed an interest in ethics in NLP and organized the first colloquium on the subject in 2014, in France, followed by a national workshop (ETeRNAL) and a special issue of the TAL journal in 2016. She initiated the ethics and NLP French blog as well as the survey on ethics in NLP (Fort & Couillault, 2016). She was co-chair of the first two ethics committees in the field (EMNLP 2020 and NAACL 2021) and is co-chair of the ethics committee of the association for computational linguistics (ACL).

Taubman College group visits OFAI

2022-10-12T00:00:00+02:00

Today OFAI hosted a research visit from the Architecture and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AR2IL) of the University of Michigan's Taubman College for Architecture and Urban Planning.

OFAI at the Laura Bassi 4.0 Network Forum

2022-10-07T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn co-presented the results of on online survey on digital inclusion and participation at the 5th Laura Bassi 4.0 Network Forum on Digitalization and Equal Opportunity.

The Forum, held on 7 October 2022, addressed the relationship between digital inclusion and justice, as well as strategic considerations on how more digital inclusion can be achieved.

Dipl.-Psych. Dr. Christoph Scheepers, University of Glasgow

2022-10-05T00:00:00+02:00

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 5 October 2022 at 18:30 CEST:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

OFAI at European Researchers' Night

2022-09-30T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI’s interactive demo of its LEGO Audio Building Instructions for the vision-impaired at European Researchers' Night was again a great success. From 15:00 to 23:00 on 30 September 2022 children and their parents enjoyed the experience of building LEGO models while blindfolded. For the full list of LEGO audio models, see LEGO's instruction library.

Science Café on Digital Extended Reality

2022-09-30T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn was an invited AI expert at the Science Café on Digital Extended Reality, organized by the Science Center Netzwerk in the context of the European Project TECHETHOS – Ethics for Technologies with High Socio-Economic Impact.

The event took place on 30 September 2022 at the Viennese makerspace HAPPYLAB. The participants particularly profited from Brigitte Krenn's expertise in natural language processing, as well as her longstanding experience in the development of chatbots and other interactive systems such as robots and cobots, including the recent VR/XR human cobot interaction project CoBot Studio.

Dr. Raphael Deimel, BSc, MSc, TU Wien

2022-09-28T00:00:00+02:00

Watching humans hand over things, the skill seems trivial. But the smoothness and the ease of interaction is deceiving, as complex, fast and nonverbal communication takes place continuously to negotiate shared information. How robots can competently participate in this nonverbal negotiation "dance" is the subject of "Fluent and Intuitive Human–robot Object Handover", an invited talk by Raphael Deimel of the TU Wien. The talk is part of OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk on Wednesday, 28 September 2022 at 18:30 CEST. Attendance is possible in person at OFAI Headquarters (Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna); note that it is recommended to wear an FFP2 mask while on the premises. Alternatively, you may attend online via Zoom:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: Watching humans hand over things, the skill seems trivial. But the smoothness and the ease of interaction is deceiving, as complex, fast and nonverbal communication takes place continuously to negotiate shared information such as exactly when and where to hand over the thing, which handover type to use, who initiates the interaction and who assumes the socially dominant role. All those aspects are influenced by subjective preferences, circumstances and cultural norms. If a robot wants to participate, it too has to perform this interactive, continuous and nonverbal negotiation "dance" competently. It needs to be able to propose courses of action, to acknowledge proposals by affirmative action, to signal the need for more negotiation, to recognize incompatible courses of action and to revert them. Discrete state machines are ill suited to handle the nuances, ambiguity and continuity inherent to communication via body motion, whereas continuous controllers fail to break the problem into easier substeps. Phase-State machines solve this dichotomy: they encode temporal progress, allow for ambiguity and support gradual decision making processes but they also encode arbitrary state graphs.

Speaker biography: Dr. Raphael Deimel was born 1980 in Vienna and works in the field of Soft Robotics, Autonomous Manipulation, and physical Human-Robot Interaction. Educated in control engineering, computer science, and cognitive sciences, he pioneered novel actuation and control concepts in autonomous and mobile manipulation for robots at the Robotics and Biology Lab of TU Berlin, culminating in the award-winning "RBO Soft Hand 2" which is a highly deformable hand made of silicone rubber and capable of most human grasps. He co-authored and participated the EU Horizon 2020 project "Soft Manipulation", investigating grasp strategies that exploit constraints to motion latent in the environment. From 2017 onward, Dr. Raphael Deimel led MTI-engAge, an interdisciplinary research group on human-robot interaction at TU Berlin, investigating the interdependent social, technical and behavioral challenges of handing over objects intuitively, fluently and quickly between humans and robots. Since 2020, his research at the ACIN institute of TU Vienna focuses on hybrid hard-soft robots, and how robot systems need to be structured to learn and enact fast and reliable manipulation skills.

OFAI hosts student intern

2022-09-26T00:00:00+02:00

Lukas Kornprobst, a local Gymnasium (secondary school) student, joins OFAI this week on a work experience program. OFAI scientific staff will be meeting with him throughout the week to introduce him to our institute's recent and ongoing projects and to involve him in the research process.

Michael Pucher joins OFAI

2022-09-23T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI welcomes Michael Pucher, who will be project manager of the Vokquant project where methods for dialect speech synthesis will be investigated.

Michael Pucher is currently also Senior Speech Technologist at Recognosco and Adjunct Professor (Priv.-Doz.) at Graz University of Technology.

His broad research interests include many topics of speech communication such as acoustic modeling for speech recognition, semantic language modeling, speech synthesis for language varieties, persona design for speech-based systems, multimodal and spoken dialog systems, audio-visual speech synthesis, synthesis of singing, synthesis of animal vocalisations, digital phonetics, and sociophonetics. He has also made significant contributions in the area of speaker verification spoofing, where he showed how adaptive synthesizers can spoof a speaker verification system.

Recently Michael Pucher also developed a synthetic voice of a famous deceased Austrian actor ("Othmar Wörner") for the Burgtheater Wien production Keine Menschenseele.

Remembering "Netizens" in Internet Histories

2022-09-22T00:00:00+02:00

The 25th anniversary of Netizens, the influential book about Usenet and the Internet, has been commemorated in an article in the journal Internet Histories.

Netizens, co-authored by Michael and Ronda Hauben, first appeared in print in 1997. It remains one of the most highly cited and highly regarded books on the development of Usenet and Internet communities.

To mark its anniversary, Camille Paloque-Bergès (Conservatoire national des arts et métiers), Avery Dame-Griff (Gonzaga University), and Tristan Miller (OFAI) present an interview with Netizens co-author Ronda Hauben, along with a six-page introduction on the history and impact of the book. The article, "Remembering Netizens: An interview with Ronda Hauben, co-author of Netizens: On the history and impact of Usenet and the Internet (1997)", is now available (and free to read for a limited time) in the Taylor & Francis journal Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society.

OFAI at European Researchers' Night

2022-09-21T00:00:00+02:00

Join OFAI at this year's European Researchers' Night, a multi-city festival for science and research!

OFAI will be on hand to host an interactive demo of its Lego Audio Building Instructions for the vision-impaired. Families and children are especially welcome to take part!

The demo will take place at the University of Applied Arts (Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, A-1030 Vienna, Austria) from 15:00 to 24:00 on Friday, 30 September 2022.

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. techn. Roman Pflugfelder, TU München / Technion

2022-09-21T00:00:00+02:00

Computer vision algorithms are stymied by occlusion, the result of information loss when a three-dimensional scene is projected onto a two-dimensional image. A new video processing approach that tackles the problem of fragmented occlusion will be introduced in "Fragmented Occlusion in Computer Vision", an invited talk by Roman Pflugfelder of TU München and Technion. The talk is part of OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 21 September 2022 at 18:30 CEST:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: Occlusion is an important and persistent problem in computer vision. Most of the modern, visual recognition algorithms suffer from occlusion. Making algorithms robust to occlusion is challenging, as occlusion is the result of an information loss that emerges from the projection of a three dimensional world onto a two dimensional image. This lecture will introduce fragmented or dynamic occlusion which appears when looking through foliage or when looking through a fence while walking. The problem is known in cognitive science but mostly ignored in computer vision. The current results in cognitive science tell us the importance of the temporal dimension in vision which introduces important clues for visual recognition under fragmented occlusion. Concepts such as the spatiotemporal form integration rely on motion percepts. Inspired by these psychological results, I will introduce a new video processing approach which is named video deocclusion. This approach is able to deocclude a fragmentally occluded, unknown object of interest in a sequence of images. I will also present results of a new algorithm based on deep learning which is able to localise persons behind trees where state-of-the-art object detection algorithms fail. This research is fruitful for a better understanding of the astonishing capabilities of human vision under dynamic occlusion. It is also useful for future applications of computer vision in natural environments.

Speaker biography: Roman Pflugfelder is a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich and the Technion, Israel, Scientist at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and lecturer at TU Wien. He received in 2002 a MSc degree in Informatics at TU Wien and in 2008 a PhD in Telematics at the TU Graz, Austria. In 2001, he received the Kurt Gödel stipend from TU Wien for an academic visit to the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. His research aims at visual motion analysis, tracking, recognition, and learning applied to automated video surveillance. Roman contributed with 60+ papers and patents to research fields such as camera calibration, object detection, object tracking, event recognition. Roman co-organised the Visual Object Tracking Challenges VOT'13-14 and VOT'16-22 and was program chair of AVSS'15. Currently he is steering committee member of AVSS. He is regular reviewer for major computer vision and machine learning conferences and journals. He received in 2008 a national WWTF Career Grant, in 2014 the WACV Best Paper Award, in 2019 the CVPR Outstanding Reviewer award and 2021 a Marie Curie Fellowship.

Prof. Antti Arppe, MSc, PhD, University of Alberta

2022-09-14T00:00:00+02:00

Machine learning for language technology requires an amount of training data that simply does not exist for many languages. Can we exploit existing models for high-resource languages to provide tools and resources for low-resource ones? This topic will be addressed in "Finding Words that Aren't There: Using Word Embeddings to Improve Dictionary Search for Low-resource Languages", an invited talk by Antti Arppe of the University of Alberta. The talk is part of OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 14 September 2022 at 18:30 CEST:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: Modern machine learning techniques have produced many impressive results in language technology, but these techniques generally require an amount of training data that is many orders of magnitude greater than what exists for low-resource languages in general, and endangered ones in particular. However, dictionary definitions in a comparatively much more well-resourced majority language can provide a link between low-resource languages and machine learning models trained on massive amounts of majority-language data. By leveraging a pre-trained English word embedding to compute sentence embeddings for definitions in a Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) dictionary, we have obtained promising results for dictionary search. Not only are the search results in the majority language of the definitions more relevant, but they can be semantically relevant in ways not achievable with classic information retrieval techniques: users can perform successful searches for words that do not occur at all in the dictionary. These techniques are directly applicable to any bilingual dictionary providing translations between a high- and low-resource language.

Speaker biography: Dr. Antti Arppe received his Ph.D in General Linguistics from the University of Helsinki in 2009. Prior to his graduate studies in linguistics, he had completed in 1995 his M.Sc. in Industrial Management at the former Helsinki University of Technology (now part of Aalto University), after which he worked in the late 1990s on supervising the development of proofing tools for the majority Nordic languages at Lingsoft, a small language technology company based on Helsinki, Finland. He is currently an Associate Professor of Quantitative Linguistics in the University of Alberta, having been a faculty member since 2012, and the Founding Director of Alberta Language Technology Laboratory (ALTLab) since 2013. His research interests include lexical semantics, corpus linguistics, statistical and computational methods, as well as exploiting multiple methods and sources of evidence. More recently he has started work in language documentation and developing language technological tools and applications for Indigenous languages to support their revitalization, in particular for Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) but also other languages in the Algonquian, Dene, and other Indigenous language families spoken in North America (e.g. https://itwewina.altlab.app and https://speech-db.altlab.app). In this vein, he is the Project Director for the research and development Partnership "21st Century Tools for Indigenous Languages" funded during 2019-2026 by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, involving some 30 researchers and language community members in over 10 academic and non-academic partner organizations (universities, First Nations, and non-governmental organizations) in Canada, the US, and Norway. Furthermore, he is Founding and current President of SIGEL, the Special Interest Group for Endangered Languages under the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL).

Ekip project enters second phase

2022-09-14T00:00:00+02:00

The project Ekip: A Platform for Ethical AI Applications has entered its second research phase, where findings from philosophical ethical research will be transferred to and implemented in a technical platform.

Ekip is an FFG-funded research project which addresses questions of what it means to develop good and trustworthy AI applications. The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) collaborates on the project with Gradient Zero SoftwareentwicklungsGmbH and Prof. Mark Coeckelbergh of the University of Vienna.

OFAI launches YouTube channel

2022-09-13T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI is pleased to announce the launch of its own YouTube channel. There you will be able to watch past talks from our Lecture Series and (in the future) research demos, project presentations, and other videos about our work.

Subscribe now to keep apprised of new videos!

OFAI welcomes visiting researchers

2022-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI welcomes Lorenz Gutscher and Victor García, who will be serving as visiting researchers on the Vokquant project, coordinated by Felicitas Kleber (Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Munich), Michael Pucher (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence) and Stephan Schmid (Phonetics Laboratory, University of Zurich).

Lorenz Gutscher joins us from the Acoustics Research Institute (ÖAW), where he started his PhD in the field of speech synthesis with a special emphasis on Standard Austrian German and Austrian Dialects. The Vokquant project moved to OFAI in August, together with Michael Pucher and Lorenz Gutscher. Lorenz Gutscher is currently building a synthetic voice of Austrian Varieties including a Viennese Dialect and is investigating speaker embeddings as well as interpolations between regional standard varieties from Austria, Germany, and Swiss.

Victor García is currently pursuing his PhD studies in the field of speech synthesis at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). His role at Vokquant project is building a multilingual synthesizer which includes, among others, the Austrian varieties. He will explore the use of speaker embeddings and style tokens to improve the training efficiency and the scalability of current methodologies.

Prof. Dr. (i.V.) Steffen Eger, Bielefeld University

2022-09-07T00:00:00+02:00

Can computers learn to write poetry in particular styles, or to summarize historical documents using more modern language? These and other subjects will be discussed in "Text Generation for the Humanities", an invited talk by Steffen Eger of Bielefeld University. The talk is part of OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 7 September 2022 at 18:30 CEST:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: In this talk, I will discuss our current work in the context of deep learning based text generation for the humanities. In particular, I will talk about (i) style-conditioned poetry generation, (ii) abstract-to-title generation (considering humorousness as one generation criterion), and (iii) cross-lingual cross-temporal summarization where the goal is to summarize a historical document in another modern language. Time permitting, I will also talk about evaluation metrics for text generation systems.

Speaker biography: Steffen Eger is currently stand-in professor at Bielefeld University. Previously, he was a PostDoc and group leader at TU Darmstadt and a PostDoc at Goethe University, Frankfurt. He holds a prestigious Heisenberg grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG). His research interests are natural language processing (NLP) and in particular evaluation metrics for text generation systems as well as topics at the intersection of NLP, the computational social sciences and the digital humanities.

CoBot Studio @ Ars Electronica

2022-09-05T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn will co-present the CoBot Studio project as part of the Ars Electronica 2022 Festival for Art, Technology & Society in Linz on Thursday, 8 September 2022 from 14:30 to 15:00. The English-language presentation will take place at the Deep Space 8K exhibition of the Ars Electronica Center. Online tickets are available.

New project on Arabic noun phrase structure

2022-09-01T00:00:00+02:00

Peter Hallman is starting a new four-year research project, Aspects of Noun Phrase Structure in Arabic.

The project, to be carried out together with Niko Wahl of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, deals broadly with problems in the analysis of the way in which quantificational material is integrated with non-quantificational material in noun phrases in natural language. It studies these interactions with particular reference to the behavior of the comparative and superlative and quantificational adjectives ('much/little'), and with particular reference to Arabic, which has cross-linguistically rare properties that shed new light on the these issues.

Aspects of Noun Phrase Structure in Arabic is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under its Stand-Alone Projects program.

JOKER papers published

2022-08-25T00:00:00+02:00

Papers from the workshop "JOKER: Automatic Pun and Humour Translation" have now been published in the proceedings of CLEF 2022, the 13th Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.

The JOKER workshop, co-organized by OFAI's Tristan Miller, aims to bring translators and computer scientists together to develop data and evaluation metrics for the (semi-)automatic translation of humorous language. The workshop consists of a number of shared and unshared tasks, held in the spring of 2022, followed by a series of sessions at the CLEF 2022 conference in Bologna from 5 to 8 September, 2022.

A peer-reviewed overview of the entire workshop appears in Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction, a volume in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Papers describing the individual shared tasks of the workshop, as well as the participating systems, are published in Working Notes of CLEF 2022, a volume in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings series.

Full bibliographic details of the OFAI-coauthored papers are as follows:

Liana Ermakova, Tristan Miller, Fabio Regattin, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Claudine Borg, Élise Mathurin, Gaëlle Le Corre, Sílvia Araújo, Radia Hannachi, Julien Boccou, Albin Digue, Aurianne Damoy, and Benoît Jeanjean. Overview of JOKER@CLEF 2022: Automatic wordplay and humour translation workshop. In Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Giovanni Da San Martino, Mirko Degli Esposti, Fabrizio Sebastiani, Craig Macdonald, Gabriella Pasi, Allan Hanbury, Martin Potthast, Guglielmo Faggioli, and Nicola Ferro, editors, Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference of the CLEF Association (CLEF 2022), volume 13390 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (ISSN 0302-9743), pages 447--469, Cham, 2022. Springer. ISBN 978-3-031-13642-9. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-13643-6_27.
Liana Ermakova, Fabio Regattin, Tristan Miller, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Sílvia Araújo, Claudine Borg, Gaëlle Le Corre, Julien Boccou, Albin Digue, Aurianne Damoy, Paul Campen, and Orlane Puchalski. Overview of the CLEF 2022 JOKER Task 1: Classify and explain instances of wordplay. In Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, Allan Hanbury, and Martin Potthast, editors, Proceedings of the Working Notes of CLEF 2022 -- Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, Bologna, Italy, September 5th to 8th, 2022, volume 3180 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings (ISSN 1613-0073), pages 1641--1665, August 2022.
Liana Ermakova, Tristan Miller, Julien Boccou, Albin Digue, Aurianne Damoy, and Paul Campen. Overview of the CLEF 2022 JOKER Task 2: Translate wordplay in named entities. In Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, Allan Hanbury, and Martin Potthast, editors, Proceedings of the Working Notes of CLEF 2022 -- Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, Bologna, Italy, September 5th to 8th, 2022, volume 3180 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings (ISSN 1613-0073), pages 1666--1680, August 2022.
Liana Ermakova, Fabio Regattin, Tristan Miller, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Claudine Borg, Benoît Jeanjean, Élise Mathurin, Gaëlle Le Corre, Radia Hannachi, Sílvia Araújo, Julien Boccou, Albin Digue, and Aurianne Damoy. Overview of the CLEF 2022 JOKER Task 3: Pun translation from English into French. In Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, Allan Hanbury, and Martin Potthast, editors, Proceedings of the Working Notes of CLEF 2022 -- Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, Bologna, Italy, September 5th to 8th, 2022, volume 3180 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings (ISSN 1613-0073), pages 1681--1700, August 2022.

Journal article on split scope in Arabic

2022-08-20T00:00:00+02:00

"Scope splitting in Syrian Arabic", an article by Peter Hallman, has been published in volume 30 of Natural Language Semantics.

Sentences like Mary needs to make the fewest mistakes on the upcoming test have a ‘split scope’ reading roughly paraphrasable as ‘Mary exceeds all others in terms of how many mistakes she must not make’; that is, her situation is the most precarious. The structural approach to this phenomenon attributes to such sentences a logical form resembling this paraphrase, in which the superlative component of the meaning of fewest scopes above the modal need to and the negative component scopes below it. Peter Hallman's paper investigates analogous structures in Syrian Arabic, a language in which superlatives may appear at a distance from their scalar associates in the surface order.

Natural Language Semantics is a journal devoted to semantics and its interfaces in grammar, especially syntax. It is published by Springer and edited by Amy Rose Deal.

Book chapter on interactive wordplay translation

2022-08-04T00:00:00+02:00

"Human–computer interaction in pun translation", a chapter co-authored by Tristan Miller, has been published as Open Access in the edited volume Using Technologies for Creative-Text Translation.

The chapter and research are joint work with Prof. Waltraud Kolb of the University of Vienna's Centre for Translation Studies. Using Technologies for Creative-Text Translation is edited by James Hadley, Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, Carlos S. C. Teixeira, and Antonio Toral, and is published by Routledge.

Prof. Dr. Katrien Beuls, MSc, MA, University of Namur, Belgium

2022-07-27T00:00:00+02:00

Advances in AI have led to tremendous progress in many domains, but the communication systems used by artificial agents are still far removed from exhibiting the expressiveness, flexibility and adaptivity that is found in human languages. Katrien Beuls of the University of Namur addresses this gap in her talk, "Unravelling the Computational Mechanisms Underlying the Emergence of Human-like Communication Systems in Populations of Autonomous Agents", part of OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk on Wednesday, 27 July at 18:30 CEST. Attendance is possible in person at OFAI Headquarters (Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna); note that attendees must wear a face covering while on the premises. Alternatively, you may attend online via Zoom:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: Over the last two decades, important advances in the field of artificial intelligence have led to tremendous progress in many tasks and application domains, including computer vision, robotics and natural language processing. Yet, the communication systems that are used by artificial agents for human-agent and agent-agent communication today are still far removed from exhibiting the expressiveness, flexibility and adaptivity that is found in human languages. This gap may mostly be ascribed to the fact that current communication systems are learned by extracting frequently occurring patterns from huge amounts of annotated data, limiting their applicability to predefined tasks set in stable environments. In this talk, I will present my long-term research programme which takes a radically different approach with the goal of building truly intelligent systems that are capable of adapting to unforeseeable changes in their tasks and environment. Rather than extracting patterns from annotated data, we equip populations of autonomous agents with computational mechanisms that allow them to self-organise an emergent conceptual and linguistic system through communicative interactions. By means of multi-agent experiments, we investigate the mechanisms that are needed for inventing, adopting and aligning transparent languages based on novel compositions of atomic cognitive capabilities that are mastered by the agents. These methodological innovations have the potential to lead to a paradigm shift in the way in which explainable human-agent and agent-agent communication is modelled, both in emergent communication experiments and real-world applications. Such applications include safety assistants (communicating with humans), self-driving vehicles (communicating with each other) and distributed smart devices in a home environment (communicating with humans and each other).

Speaker biography: Katrien Beuls received her MSc in Speech and Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh in 2009 and her MA in Linguistics from the University of Leuven in 2008. She defended her PhD in Computer Science in 2013 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel on a new framework for computer-assisted language learning that combines the language game methodology and computational construction grammar. Since April 2022, she is assistant professor in computer science at the University of Namur. She has been involved as PI and co-PI in numerous European research projects, including the H2020 MUHAI project, the H2020 ODYCCEUS project, the AI4EU platform and the Marie Curie initial training network ESSENCE. Her main research interests lie in the applications of evolutionary and hybrid AI in diverse tasks that require advanced perception, reasoning and learning skills.

OFAI at ASAI's IJCAI 2022 Satellite Event

2022-07-25T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI participated today in a networking event organized by the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (ASAI).

The event, intended to further connect the Austrian AI community, was co-located with the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI 2022) in Vienna. OFAI delegates were on hand to present the Institute's recent, ongoing, and upcoming research program.

(Re)subscribe to OFAI's newsletter!

2022-07-25T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's e-mail newsletter has moved to a new communications platform! (Re)subscribe now to keep informed about our lectures, seminars, conferences, and other events.

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Dr.-Ing. Tristan Miller, BSc Hons, MSc, OFAI

2022-07-20T00:00:00+02:00

What makes a pun funny? This talk by Tristan Miller, entitled "What's in a Pun?", investigates the semantic and phonological factors underlying punning humour. The talk is the fourth instalment in the OFAI 2022 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 20 July at 18:30 CEST:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: Puns are a form of humorous wordplay based on semantic ambiguity between two phonologically similar words. By using and extending a large annotated corpus of punning jokes, we quantify the phonological and semantic distance between the two words of a pun and assess possible correlations with funniness ratings of the joke. Statistical analyses reveal a significant negative correlation between phonological distance and perceived funniness, which is in line with a longstanding conjecture in humour studies. Interestingly, none of the semantic distance measures we applied showed significant correlations with funniness ratings. We discuss other factors, such as situational context or cultural norms, which may influence the perception of funniness of punning jokes, with a view to guiding future research on this topic.

Speaker biography: Tristan Miller is a research scientist at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) and an Associate Faculty Member at the Ontological Semantic Technology Laboratory of Texas A&M University–Commerce. His research interests lie mainly in computational semantics, including word sense disambiguation, computational argumentation, and the construction and manipulation of lexical-semantic resources. Computational humour has been a particular research focus of his since 2014.

Co-author Anna Palmann, BSc, BA, MSc recently graduated from the Middle European Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Cognitive Science (MEi:CogSci) at the University of Vienna.

Mag. Dr. Brigitte Krenn, OFAI

2022-07-13T00:00:00+02:00

As soon as humans encounter other agents, we cannot help but act socially and interpret our vis-à-vis as a social agent too. This OFAI 2022 Lecture Series talk by our own Brigitte Krenn, entitled "Robots as Social Agents: Between Construct and Reality", will address this phenomenon from the perspective of human communication. Dr. Krenn will present examples from a selection of robotics research projects at OFAI, studying human–robot interaction in different application contexts.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 13 July at 18:30 CEST:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: As soon as we humans encounter other agents, be it our pet animals or robots we collaborate with, we cannot help but act socially and interpret our vis-à-vis as social agents. This is because we are trained as social beings from the beginning of our lifes. We have learned to interpret nonverbal signals sent by our fellow humans as communicative cues, including facial expressions, gestures and body postures, the direction of eye gaze, as well as proximity relations. Being who we are, we tend to overestimate and misinterpret current robots and AI systems regarding their communicative intents. The talk will address this phenomenon from a perspective of human communication and present examples from a selection of OFAI's robotics research projects, studying human–robot interaction in different application contexts.

Speaker biography: Brigitte Krenn is Deputy Director of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). She has worked in natural language processing and AI since 1990. Her overall research interest lies in understanding and computationally modelling human language capability. On the one hand, she focuses on the development and application of core language technology combining linguistic analysis with state-of-the-art deep learning and data science based approaches to text and speech processing. On the other hand, she works on understanding and modelling multi-modal behaviour of communicating agents (humans and artificial agents), including language learning and understanding on robots inspired by results from research on human cognition. She is board member of the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (ASAI) where she heads the Working Group on Natural Language Processing.

Here come the robots

2022-07-13T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI director Robert Trappl is interviewed in today's episode of Dimensionen, ORF Radio Ö1's daily show on science and research. In the episode, "Die Roboter kommen: Zur Beziehungsgeschichte von Mensch und Maschine", Prof. Trappl speaks about the history of the relationship between robots and humans.

Pamela Breda, University of Applied Arts Vienna

2022-07-06T00:00:00+02:00

Pamela Breda, artist and researcher at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, will speak about "The Unexpected", an artistic research project exploring the impact of AI on daily life. The talk, entitled "Feeling for Nonexistent Beings", is the second in OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 6 July at 18:30 CEST:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: “The Unexpected” is an artistic research project exploring the impact of Artificial Intelligences (AIs), interfaces and digital assistants, on users’ daily life through theoretical research and practice-based field analysis. The constant growth of AI softwares and virtual assistants employed to enhance wellbeing and overcome mental health issues is creating new dimensions of social and ethical questions about human emotional responses to artificial intelligence. While Microsoft is studying the implementation of AI companions with an emotional connection to satisfy the human need for communication and affection, chatbots and digital avatars are designed in order to support users in overcoming anxiety, loneliness and other stress-related situations. But what are the emotional responses to such interactions? Do we still perceive the AIs as “others” or do we empathise with them as they would with humans? Using an interdisciplinary approach the research will analyze the practical impact of human interactions with digital assistants through the development of a written essay and extensive audio-visual documentation edited in the form of an experimental film.

Speaker biography: Pamela Breda is an artist and filmmaker living between Milan and Vienna. She was recipient of several art awards and fellowships, including Italian Council Award (MibaC, IT), Kingston University Phd Scholarship (Kingston, UK), Moving’Up funding scheme (Turn, IT), Italian Institute of Culture (Moscow, RU). Her films have been screened internationally and presented at festivals and art venues such as: Sheffield docFest (UK), “ECRA Film Festival” (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), “Revolutions Per Minute Festival” (Boston, USA), “Digital Film Library”, Clermont- Ferrand Film Festival (Clermont-Ferrand, F), Cite Internatinale Des Arts, (Paris, F), “Vision Du Reel” Film Festival, Media Library (Nyon, CH), “Hazel Eye Film Festival” (Tennesse, USA), “The Bomb Art Factory Film Festival” (London, UK), Sohonya Art Center (Bangalore, I), Francesco Fabbri Foundation for Contemporary Art (Pieve di Soligo, IT), Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation (Venice, IT).

Panels on verbal aggression, humour & AI

2022-06-30T00:00:00+02:00

Tristan Miller will be co-chairing and presenting at two panels of the 2022 International Society for Humor Studies Conference (ISHS).

The first panel, held on 30 June, is the Reinhold Aman Memorial Panel on Abusive and Aggressive Humor. Tristan Miller opens the panel with a retrospective of Maledicta editor Reinhold Aman's life and work.

The second panel, held on 1 July, is the annual Humor and Artificial Intelligence Panel. Tristan Miller will be presenting joint work with his student, Anna Palmann, on assessing the relationship between phonological and semantic distance and perceived funniness of punning jokes.

ISHS 2022 will be held in Bertinoro, Italy from 29 June to 2 July 2022.

Scott Patterson, M.A.I.S., McGill University, Canada

2022-06-29T00:00:00+02:00

The rise of wealth inequality is well-documented, yet robust calls for redistribution have yet to emerge from within the UN system. How can this be? This is the question to be addressed by Scott Patterson of McGill University, who kicks off OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series with his talk, "Domesticating Wealth Inequality: Hybrid Discourse Analysis of UN General Assembly Speeches, 1971–2018".

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 29 June at 18:30 CEST:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Talk abstract: The rise of wealth inequality is well-documented, yet robust calls for redistribution have yet to emerge from within the UN system. How can this be? We argue that discourse on wealth inequality has been gradually, but pervasively, "domesticated" in diplomatic venues. We advance this argument through a hybrid discourse analysis of UN General Assembly speeches that adopts complementary machine learning and interpretive techniques. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of hybrid discourse analysis for several tasks in time-series text analysis. First, we use a multiclass Support Vector Machine to discover rhetorical "eras" that emerge in debates over time. Second, we use Concept Mover Distance – a distributed, pre-trained language model – to estimate the extent of engagement with rhetorical tropes that are relevant to wealth inequality. These tropes were selected through an interpretive analysis of exemplary external texts. Third, we cluster states based on patterns of engagement with key tropes, illustrating changes to the rhetorical topography over time. Beyond our substantive contribution, we aim to close the gap between interpretive and computational text analysis and to demonstrate the advantage of placing these approaches on an even footing.

Speaker biography: Scott Robert Patterson is a PhD candidate in Political Science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His research focus is at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and International Relations – where Artificial Intelligence is treated as both a political phenomenon and a research methodology. Prior to his studies at McGill, Scott received training in Natural Language Processing at the OFAI Language Technology Lab and completed a Master's of Advanced International Studies (M.A.I.S.) at the Diplomatische Akademie Wien.

Co-author Vincent Pouliot is James McGill Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. He is the author, among others, of International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

OFAI 2022 Lecture Series

2022-06-21T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI is delighted to announce its 2022 Lecture Series, featuring an eclectic lineup of internal and external speakers.

The talks are intended to familiarize attendees with the latest research developments in AI and related fields, and to forge new connections with those working in other areas.

Most lectures (see prospective schedule below) will take place on Wednesdays at 18:30 Central European (Summer) Time. All lectures will be held online via Zoom; in-person attendance at OFAI is also possible for certain lectures. Talks typically last from 30 to 50 minutes and are followed by up to 30 minutes for questions.

Attendance is open to the public and free of charge. No registration is required.

Subscribe to our newsletter or our RSS feed, or bookmark this web page, to receive connection details for the individual talks.

29 June 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Scott Patterson (McGill University)

Domesticating Wealth Inequality: Hybrid Discourse Analysis of UN General Assembly Speeches, 1971–2018

The rise of wealth inequality is well-documented, yet robust calls for redistribution have yet to emerge from within the UN system. How can this be? We argue that discourse on wealth inequality has been gradually, but pervasively, "domesticated" in diplomatic venues. We advance this argument through a hybrid discourse analysis of UN General Assembly speeches that adopts complementary machine learning and interpretive techniques. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of hybrid discourse analysis for several tasks in time-series text analysis. First, we use a multiclass Support Vector Machine to discover rhetorical "eras" that emerge in debates over time. Second, we use Concept Mover Distance - a distributed, pre-trained language model - to estimate the extent of engagement with rhetorical tropes that are relevant to wealth inequality. These tropes were selected through an interpretive analysis of exemplary external texts. Third, we cluster states based on patterns of engagement with key tropes, illustrating changes to the rhetorical topography over time. Beyond our substantive contribution, we aim to close the gap between interpretive and computational text analysis and to demonstrate the advantage of placing these approaches on an even footing.

6 July 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Pamela Breda (University of Applied Arts Vienna)

Feeling for Nonexistent Beings

“The Unexpected” is an artistic research project exploring the impact of Artificial Intelligences (AIs), interfaces and digital assistants, on users’ daily life through theoretical research and practice-based field analysis. The constant growth of AI softwares and virtual assistants employed to enhance wellbeing and overcome mental health issues is creating new dimensions of social and ethical questions about human emotional responses to artificial intelligence. While Microsoft is studying the implementation of AI companions with an emotional connection to satisfy the human need for communication and affection, chatbots and digital avatars are designed in order to support users in overcoming anxiety, loneliness and other stress-related situations. But what are the emotional responses to such interactions? Do we still perceive the AIs as “others” or do we empathise with them as they would with humans? Using an interdisciplinary approach the research will analyze the practical impact of human interactions with digital assistants through the development of a written essay and extensive audio-visual documentation edited in the form of an experimental film.

13 July 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Brigitte Krenn (OFAI)

Robots as Social Agents: Between Construct and Reality

As soon as we humans encounter other agents, be it our pet animals or robots we collaborate with, we cannot help but act socially and interpret our vis-à-vis as social agents. This is because we are trained as social beings from the beginning of our life. We have learned to interpret nonverbal signals sent by our fellow humans as communicative cues, including facial expressions, gestures and body postures, the direction of eye gaze, as well as proximity relations. Being who we are, we tend to overestimate and misinterpret current robots and AI systems regarding their communicative intents. The talk will address this phenomenon from a perspective of human communication and present examples from a selection of robotics research projects, studying human-robot interaction in different application contexts.

20 July 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Tristan Miller (OFAI)

What's in a Pun? Assessing the Relationship Between Phonological and Semantic Distance and Perceived Funniness of Punning Jokes

Puns are a form of humorous wordplay based on semantic ambiguity between two phonologically similar words. By using and extending a large annotated corpus of punning jokes, we quantify the phonological and semantic distance between the two words of a pun and assess possible correlations with funniness ratings of the joke. Statistical analyses reveal a significant negative correlation between phonological distance and perceived funniness, which is in line with a longstanding conjecture in humour studies. Interestingly, none of the semantic distance measures we applied showed significant correlations with funniness ratings. We discuss other factors, such as situational context or cultural norms, which may influence the perception of funniness of punning jokes, with a view to guiding future research on this topic.

27 July 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Katrien Beuls (University of Namur)

Unravelling the Computational Mechanisms Underlying the Emergence of Human-like Communication Systems in Populations of Autonomous Agents

Over the last two decades, important advances in the field of artificial intelligence have led to tremendous progress in many tasks and application domains, including computer vision, robotics and natural language processing. Yet, the communication systems that are used by artificial agents for human-agent and agent-agent communication today are still far removed from exhibiting the expressiveness, flexibility and adaptivity that is found in human languages. This gap may mostly be ascribed to the fact that current communication systems are learned by extracting frequently occurring patterns from huge amounts of annotated data, limiting their applicability to predefined tasks set in stable environments. In this talk, I will present my long-term research programme which takes a radically different approach with the goal of building truly intelligent systems that are capable of adapting to unforeseeable changes in their tasks and environment. Rather than extracting patterns from annotated data, we equip populations of autonomous agents with computational mechanisms that allow them to self-organise an emergent conceptual and linguistic system through communicative interactions. By means of multi-agent experiments, we investigate the mechanisms that are needed for inventing, adopting and aligning transparent languages based on novel compositions of atomic cognitive capabilities that are mastered by the agents. These methodological innovations have the potential to lead to a paradigm shift in the way in which explainable human-agent and agent-agent communication is modelled, both in emergent communication experiments and real-world applications. Such applications include safety assistants (communicating with humans), self-driving vehicles (communicating with each other) and distributed smart devices in a home environment (communicating with humans and each other).

7 September 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Steffen Eger (Bielefeld University)

Text Generation for the Humanities

In this talk, I will discuss our current work in the context of deep learning based text generation for the humanities. In particular, I will talk about (i) style-conditioned poetry generation, (ii) abstract-to-title generation (considering humorousness as one generation criterion), and (iii) cross-lingual cross-temporal summarization where the goal is to summarize a historical document in another modern language. Time permitting, I will also talk about evaluation metrics for text generation systems.

14 September 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Antti Arppe (University of Alberta)

Finding Words that Aren't There: Using Word Embeddings to Improve Dictionary Search for Low-resource Languages

Modern machine learning techniques have produced many impressive results in language technology, but these techniques generally require an amount of training data that is many orders of magnitude greater than what exists for low-resource languages in general, and endangered ones in particular. However, dictionary definitions in a comparatively much more well-resourced majority language can provide a link between low-resource languages and machine learning models trained on massive amounts of majority-language data. By leveraging a pre-trained English word embedding to compute sentence embeddings for definitions in a Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) dictionary, we have obtained promising results for dictionary search. Not only are the search results in the majority language of the definitions more relevant, but they can be semantically relevant in ways not achievable with classic information retrieval techniques: users can perform successful searches for words that do not occur at all in the dictionary. These techniques are directly applicable to any bilingual dictionary providing translations between a high- and low-resource language.

21 September 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Roman Pflugfelder (TU München / Technion)

Fragmented Occlusion in Computer Vision

Occlusion is an important and persistent problem in computer vision. Most of the modern, visual recognition algorithms suffer from occlusion. Making algorithms robust to occlusion is challenging, as occlusion is the result of an information loss that emerges from the projection of a three dimensional world onto a two dimensional image. This lecture will introduce fragmented or dynamic occlusion which appears when looking through foliage or when looking through a fence while walking. The problem is known in cognitive science but mostly ignored in computer vision. The current results in cognitive science tell us the importance of the temporal dimension in vision which introduces important clues for visual recognition under fragmented occlusion. Concepts such as the spatiotemporal form integration rely on motion percepts. Inspired by these psychological results, I will introduce a new video processing approach which is named video deocclusion. This approach is able to deocclude a fragmentally occluded, unknown object of interest in a sequence of images. I will also present results of a new algorithm based on deep learning which is able to localise persons behind trees where state-of-the-art object detection algorithms fail. This research is fruitful for a better understanding of the astonishing capabilities of human vision under dynamic occlusion. It is also useful for future applications of computer vision in natural environments.

28 September 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Raphael Deimel (TU Wien)

Fluent and Intuitive Human–robot Object Handover

Watching humans hand over things, the skill seems trivial. But the smoothness and the ease of interaction is deceiving, as complex, fast and nonverbal communication takes place continuously to negotiate shared information such as exactly when and where to hand over the thing, which handover type to use, who initiates the interaction and who assumes the socially dominant role. All those aspects are influenced by subjective preferences, circumstances and cultural norms. If a robot wants to participate, it too has to perform this interactive, continuos and nonverbal negotiation "dance" competently. It needs to be able to propose courses of action, to acknowledge proposals by affirmative action, to signal the need for more negotiation, to recognize incompatible courses of action and to revert them. Discrete state machines are ill suited to handle the nuances, ambiguity and continuity inherent to communication via body motion, whereas continuous controllers fail to break the problem into easier substeps. Phase-State machines solve this dichotomy: they encode temporal progress, allow for ambiguity and support gradual decision making processes but they also encode arbitrary state graphs.

5 October 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Christoph Scheepers (University of Glasgow)

The “Crossword Effect” in Free Word Recall: A Retrieval Advantage for Words Encoded in Line with their Spatial Associations

12 October 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Karën Fort (Sorbonne Université / LORIA)

Ethics and NLP: What we Talk About, What we Don't Talk About Anymore, What we Never Talked About

In recent years, ethics has become a recognized subject in the fields of AI and more particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This recent development is due to several factors, including the fact that NLP has become commercially attractive enough to leave research laboratories and invade our daily lives, with immediately visible consequences for the general public. I will return in this presentation to the evolution of the subject over the last decade, which has seen certain issues become obvious (such as the remuneration of click workers) and no longer be discussed, while others (notably the biases in language models) take center stage, obscuring the most difficult questions.

19 October 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Benjamin Roth (University of Vienna)

Evaluation and Learning with Structured Test Sets

Behavioural testing – verifying system capabilities by validating human-designed input-output pairs – is an alternative evaluation method of natural language processing systems proposed to address the shortcomings of the standard approach: computing metrics on held-out data. While behavioural tests capture human prior knowledge and insights, there has been little exploration on how to leverage them for model training and development. With this in mind, we explore behaviour-aware learning by examining several fine-tuning schemes using HateCheck, a suite of functional tests for hate speech detection systems. To address potential pitfalls of training on data originally intended for evaluation, we train and evaluate models on different configurations of HateCheck by holding out categories of test cases, which enables us to estimate performance on potentially overlooked system properties. The fine-tuning procedure led to improvements in the classification accuracy of held-out functionalities and identity groups, suggesting that models can potentially generalise to overlooked functionalities. However, performance on held-out functionality classes and i.i.d. hate speech detection data decreased, which indicates that generalisation occurs mostly across functionalities from the same class and that the procedure led to overfitting to the HateCheck data distribution.

25 October 2022 @ 18:30 CEST

Peter Hallman (OFAI)

Comparatives in Arabic

In this talk, I show firstly that English and Syrian Arabic (which is typical of the contemporary Arabic dialects in the relevant respects) share a syntactic constraint on the formation of ‘degree clauses’, the clauses that describe the standard of comparison that in English are introduced by ‘than’, i.e., the bracketed part in ‘Clyde is taller [than Miriam is]’. Secondly, I show that in Syrian Arabic but not English, the relevant restriction also constrains the scope of the comparative itself, effecting the repertoire of possible interpretations for comparative constructions in that language. Consequently, the scope of the comparative and the derivation of the degree clause are syntactically uniform in Arabic but not in English. I offer some speculations on the source of the unexpected non-uniformity of English, which is probably related to differences in the structure of noun phrases between the two languages.

2 November 2022 @ 18:30 CET

Stephanie Gross (OFAI)

Multimodal Human–Robot Interaction in Situated Task Descriptions

Application areas in which robots and humans work together are rapidly growing, for example in private households or in industry. In these areas, a major communication context is situated task descriptions, where humans naturally use verbal as well as non-verbal channels to transmit information to their interlocutor. Therefore to successfully interact with humans, robots need to (1) share representations of concepts with their communication partner, (2) identify human communicative cues and extract and merge information transmitted via different channels, and (3) generate multimodal communicative behavior which is understandable for humans and complies with social norms. In this talk, I will discuss several challenges on the way, including the type of data used for modelling multimodal HRI, generating non-verbal social signals, or multimodal reference resolution in situated tasks.

16 November 2022 @ 19:30 CET

Bernhard Pfahringer (University of Waikato)

Everything Changes, but Your ML Models Stay the Same?

Most Machine Learning assumes i.i.d. data, data that is independently and identically sampled from a distribution. Thus training on a sample and then applying to new samples is a sound procedure. Unfortunately, in the real world, data is almost never i.i.d. This presentation will introduce data stream mining as a way of tackling data streams that change over time. I will in particular highlight opportunities that this scenario offers, that are not present in the static i.i.d. train-then-test setup.

23 November 2022 @ 18:30 CET

Robert Trappl (OFAI)

Postponed until 2023

Date to be announced

Paolo Petta (OFAI)

Title and abstract to be announced.

How to attend: To be announced

OFAI at Lange Nacht der Forschung 2022

2022-05-17T00:00:00+02:00

Join OFAI at this year's Lange Nacht der Forschung, Austria's public festival for science and research!

OFAI will be on hand to host an interactive demo of its Lego Audio Building Instructions for the vision-impaired. Families and children are especially welcome to take part! For a more authentic experience, please bring your own blindfold.

The demo will take place at the Forschung im Zentrum pavilion at Vienna's Maria-Theresien-Platz (Burgring 5, 1010 Wien) from 17:00 to 23:00 on Friday, 20 May 2022.

JOKER workshop previewed at ECIR 2022

2022-04-12T00:00:00+02:00

JOKER, an upcoming workshop on Automatic Pun and Humour Translation, was previewed today at the 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022) in Stavanger, Norway.

The JOKER workshop, co-organized by OFAI's Tristan Miller, aims to bring translators and computer scientists together to develop data and evaluation metrics for the (semi-)automatic translation of humorous language. It will be held during the CLEF 2022 conference in Bologna from 5 to 8 September, 2022.

Arabic Linguistics Society keynote by Peter Hallman

2022-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

Peter Hallman gave a keynote address at the 35th Annual Arabic Linguistics Symposium, held at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. The talk presented results from the FWF-funded research project Arabic Degree Semantics (P30409).

The Symposium, held on 25–27 March 2022, was organized by the Arabic Linguistics Society together with the Georgetown University's Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies.

Revitalizing Usenet at LibrePlanet 2022

2022-04-03T00:00:00+02:00

Usenet, a 42-year-old online discussion system, was the subject of a talk presented at the LibrePlanet 2022 conference. OFAI's Tristan Miller traced the social and technical history of the network and described recent efforts to revitalize it.

A full video of the talk is now available for streaming on PeerTube and on MediaGoblin.

The LibrePlanet series of conferences is organized by the Free Software Foundation. LibrePlanet 2022 was held online on 19 and 20 March 2022.

Brigitte Krenn speaks at DIGHUM-2022

2022-03-03T00:00:00+01:00

Brigitte Krenn will give a talk entitled "NLP for Social Media Content Analysis – Spotlight on Sexisim Classification" at the 4th Workshop on Digital Humanism (DIGHUM-2022). The workshop will be held as a hybrid event, held on-site at the Boecklsaal at TU Wien and online on 3 and 4 March 2022.

farm-tools

2022-02-26T00:00:00+01:00

A library and a set of commands to simplify transformer-based machine learning experimentation.

The following commands are provided:

farm-estimate: perform crossvalidation or holdout-estimation. This supports stratified sampling for both the dev set and the training/test sets.
farm-hsearch: perform hyperparameter search via iterated estimation
farm-train: train a model on a training set
farm-apply: apply a trained model to new data

All the training/estimation commands automatically create per-run directories with detailed logs and data about the experiment so that all information is available later. Hyperparameters and other configuration data can be provided via command line arguments or in configuration files.

Dagstuhl Seminar abstracts published

2022-02-21T00:00:00+01:00

Abstracts from the working groups at Dagstuhl Seminar 21362, "Structure and Learning", have now been published in Volume 11, Issue 8 of Dagstuhl Reports.

Many of the abstracts, co-authored by OFAI's Tristan Miller, concern the application of artificial intelligence and natural language processing to the representation of meaning in verbal humour.

Full bibliographic details are available in the Publications section of the OFAI website.

Dagstuhl Seminar 21362 was held online and at Schloss Dagstuhl from 5 to 10 September, 2021.

Prof. Liana Ermakova, University of Western Brittany, France

2022-02-15T00:00:00+01:00

Laughter is a non-verbal social signal which is omnipresent in our everyday interactions. Nevertheless, current spoken dialogue systems are not equipped to understand and express the contextual variety of meanings associated with it. In this OFAI guest lecture, Prof. Liana Ermakova of the University of Western Brittany will discuss her recent studies aimed at achieving this goal. In the first part of her talk, she will focus on the role of laughter in meaning construction and attribution of communicative intents, showing how different dialogue acts are characterised by specific laughter patterns. In the second part, she will look at the particular instances of laughs in task-oriented dialogue and propose a formal account for dealing with them in a dialogue management component of spoken dialogue systems.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend Prof. Ermakova's talk, "JOKER: Towards Automation of Wordplay Translation", via Zoom on Tuesday, 15 February at 18:30 CET:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85178563906?pwd=Ui9iR0RIM0wxd1BXWktGV1FUcTJCQT09
Meeting ID: 851 7856 3906
Passcode: 101127

Liana Ermakova has been an associate professor at the University of Western Brittany (Brest, France) since 2017. After obtaining her PhD in computer science in 2016 in Toulouse, she was a post-doc at the interdisciplinary research laboratory LISIS in Paris. Her primary area of research is information retrieval, natural language processing and artificial intelligence. Dr Ermakova has worked on evaluation metrics, information distortion analysis, multi-document summarisation, text simplification (project SimpleText), scientometrics. She leads the project JOKER: Interculturality and Localization of Humor and Puns, which aims to build a parallel corpus of wordplay (2021–2022). She has participated in the organisation of various conferences, workshops and evaluation campaigns, including CLEF tracks, and is a member of the competition division of the French Association for Artificial Intelligence. She teaches Pre- and post-editing, Computer aided translation, website localization, NLP to the Master in Translation students and AI to the students of the École nationale d'ingénieurs de Brest.

PunCAT at Audiovisual Translation Week

2021-12-16T00:00:00+01:00

PunCAT, an OFAI-developed tool for the translation of wordplay, was presented at the 13th Audiovisual Translation Week (XIII Setmana de la Traducció Audiovisual) in Castellón, Spain on 16 December 2021.

OFAI's Tristan Miller gave his invited talk on PunCAT to an international audience of translation studies researchers and professional translators.

The Audiovisual Translation Week series of conferences is organized by the Translation and Communication in Audiovisual Media Group at Universitat Jaume I.

Brigitte Krenn speaks at Digital Future Talk

2021-12-09T00:00:00+01:00

Brigitte Krenn was guest speaker at the DIGITAL FUTURE TALK: Artificial intelligence (AI).

This was the third meeting in the Digital Future Talks cycle devoted to visions of future focussing on artificial intelligence (AI). We will be discussing both the opportunities offered by technological advancement, and the dangers it brings. In particular, we are going to be focusing on how issues related to the development of artificial intelligence are represented in art and culture, and examining to what extent artificial intelligence can be treated as an artistic medium. The starting point for our discussion with experts are going to be two exhibitions devoted to the AI phenomenon: “Sztuczna Patointeligencja” at TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin, and “UNCANNY VALUES: Artificial Intelligence & You) at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna.

A video recording of the event is available on Facebook.

Generating poetry by example

2021-11-05T00:00:00+01:00

Can computers learn to write poetry in particular styles? This is the research question addressed in "End-to-end Style-conditioned Poetry Generation", a paper published today in the proceedings of the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature.

This joint work between OFAI's Tristan Miller and colleagues at Technische Universität Darmstadt and the University of Göttingen presents an end-to-end model for poetry generation based on conditioned recurrent neural network (RNN) language models. The goal is to learn stylistic features, including some associated with humorous poetry, from examples alone.

The LaTeCH-CLfL workshop, colocated with the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), will be held on November 11, 2021 online and also live in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.

steirischer herbst Ausstellung "nothing more human than humanoid"

2021-09-22T00:00:00+02:00

steirischer herbst 2021: Ausstellungseröffnung nothing more human than humanoid

Brigitte Krenn hält den Eröffnungsvortrag "Roboter als soziale Wesen -- Konstrukt und Wirklichkeit" am 25.9.2021, um 12:00, im esc medien kunst labor, Bürgergasse 5, 8010 Graz.

Johanneum Research Robotics visit

2021-09-16T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn and Stephanie Gross attended the consortial meeting of the CoBot Studio project at Joanneum Research Robotics in Klagenfurt, Carinthia on 16 September 2021. The photo shown here from the lab visit shows Brigitte Krenn interacting with the UR10 robot, which reacts to her hand movements.

CoBot Studio @ Ars Electronica

2021-09-08T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn will co-present the CoBot Studio project as part of the Ars Electronica Festival for AI and Robots in Linz on Friday, 10 September 2021 from 14:00 to 14:30. The English-language presentation will take place at the Deep Space 8K exhibition of the Ars Electronica Center. Online tickets are available.

Public panel on gender-fair MT

2021-09-08T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Tristan Miller will serve as a panelist in a public discussion on non-binary and gender-fair language technology. The discussion, which will be moderated by ORF journalist Romana Beer, will take place on 17 September 2021 at 19:00 at the Conference Center of Erste Campus in Vienna. The other panelists include Ulrike Alker, Head of Gender & Diversity Management at FH Campus Wien; Bettina Schreibmaier-Clasen, Secretary General of UNIVERSITAS Austria; Rhonda D'Vine of Association Non-binary (VENIB); and Tinou Ponzer of the Austrian National Association of Intersex People (VIMÖ). Registration for on-site attendance is open until 10 September.

The public discussion concludes the GenderFairMT workshop, which will be held from 15 to 17 September 2021 at TU Wien.

PunCAT

2021-08-02T00:00:00+02:00

PunCAT is an interactive prototype tool for the computer-assisted translation of puns. While it can be relatively easily adapted to work with any pair of languages for which wordnets are available, it currently supports only translation from English into German.

Publications

To refer to PunCAT in a scholarly work, please cite either or both of the following publications:

Waltraud Kolb and Tristan Miller. "Human–computer interaction in pun translation." In James Hadley, Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, Carlos S. C. Teixeira, and Antonio Toral, editors, Using Technologies for Creative-Text Translation. Routledge, 2022. To appear.
Tristan Miller. "The punster's amanuensis: The proper place of humans and machines in the translation of wordplay." In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Тechnology (HiT-IT 2019), pages 57–64, September 2019. DOI: 10.26615/issn.2683-0078.2019_007.

Dipl. Vladislav Maraev, M.A., University of Gothenburg, Sweden

2021-07-28T00:00:00+02:00

Vladislav Maraev of the University of Gothenburg will present a research talk at OFAI entitled, "What does laughter mean for a dialogue system?" Members of the public are cordially invited to attend via Zoom on Wednesday, 28 July at 18:30 CEST:

URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88202206376?pwd=eU5GT1RtR1VXaW5EU0lYbkR4SlFaZz09
Meeting ID: 882 0220 6376
Passcode: 942782

Dipl. Vladislav Maraev, M.A. is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability (CLASP), Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Talk abstract: Laughter is a non-verbal social signal which is omnipresent in our everyday interactions. Nevertheless, current spoken dialogue systems are not equipped to understand and express the contextual variety of meanings associated with it. In this talk I will discuss our recent studies aimed at achieving this goal. In the first part of my talk, I focus on the role of laughter in meaning construction and attribution of communicative intents, showing how different dialogue acts are characterised by specific laughter patterns. In the second part, I will look at the particular instances of laughs in task-oriented dialogue and propose a formal account for dealing with them in a dialogue management component of spoken dialogue systems.

Abkhaz State University visit

2021-06-29T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Tristan Miller has made a research visit to Abkhaz State University in Sukhumi. He delivered an invited talk ("Человеко-компьютерное взаимодействие при переводе игры слов", in English and Russian) and met with research and teaching staff to discuss the development and application of language technology for the Abkhaz language.

Further information about the visit (in Abkhaz) is available from the Abkhaz State University press office: ААУ даҭааит австриатәи аҵарауаҩ

Was ist Intelligenz?

2021-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

Der Kybernetiker, Pionier für künstliche Intelligenz und OFAI-Begründer Robert Trappl spricht mit dem Ö1 Abendjournal.

MEi:CogSci 2021 plenary talk

2021-06-17T00:00:00+02:00

Stephanie Gross gave an invited plenary talk on multimodal human–robot interaction in situated task descriptions at the 2021 Conference of the Middle European Interdisciplinary Master's Programme in Cognitive Science (MEi:CogSci Conference 2021).

Projektpräsentation: Dust and Data

2021-06-03T00:00:00+02:00

Dust and Data ist ein künstlerisches Forschungsprojekt, dass sich kritisch mit der Rolle von AI in Museen beschäftigt und am OFAI initiiert wurde. Die abschließende Projektpräsentation wird kommenden Dienstag, den 8. Juni um 19h im Volkskundemuseum Wien eröffnet. Für den Zoom-Link zum Live-Stream bitte registrieren.

Programming for Peace

2021-05-20T00:00:00+02:00

Tonight's instalment of the ÖFG Peaceful Change Lecture Series features OFAI director Robert Trappl. His online lecture is entitled "Programming for Peace: Computer-aided Methods for International Conflict Resolution and Prevention".

The event is moderated by Markus Kornprobst, Professor of International Relations at the Vienna School of International Studies.

Automatisiert KI jetzt auch die Jobs von Comedians weg?

2021-05-11T00:00:00+02:00

Zusammen mit OFAIs Computerlinguisten Tristan Miller geht das Online-Magazin 1E9 der Frage auf den Grund, ob eine Künstliche Intelligenz genauso gut wie „echte“ Stand-Up-Comedians sein kann.

Hallo, spricht hier ein Bot?

2021-04-23T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Stephanie Gross is interviewed on tonight's episode of matrix, ORF Radio Ö1's weekly show on new technologies. The episode, entitled "Hallo, spricht hier ein Bot?", investigates the role of voice assistants and what goes on under the hood.

Embodied and Extended Sensing

2021-04-22T00:00:00+02:00

In the Panel "Embodied and Extended Sensing" of the Peek Project "Co-Corporeality" at the University of Applied Arts Robert Trappl acted as one of the three international panelists.

Humour and AI webinar

2021-04-21T00:00:00+02:00

The International Society for Humor Studies is holding a free webinar on Humor and Artificial Intelligence on 21 May 2021 from 19:00 to 21:00 CEST. The webinar, co-organized by OFAI's Tristan Miller, will present an overview of past and current approaches to generating and analyzing humour computationally, a demo of a tool for the computer-assisted translation of wordplay, and a talk on the roles humour plays in commonsense reasoning and neuro-symbolic integration. The webinar will conclude with a roundtable discussion with the audience on the ethics of humour and AI. Further details and registration instructions are available on the ISHS website.

Mots/Machines invited talk

2021-03-01T00:00:00+01:00

Can computers translate jokes, or at least help humans to do so? OFAI's Tristan Miller discusses this question in his invited talk at the Mots/Machines #3 workshop, to be held on Friday, 5 March at 09:45 CET at the University of Western Brittany. Online or in-person participation is free with advance registration.

University of Huddersfield invited talk

2021-01-26T00:00:00+01:00

On 27 January, OFAI's Tristan Miller will be giving an invited research seminar at the University of Huddersfield's Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages. His talk will cover challenges of and technological solutions to the translation of humorous wordplay in literary texts. The seminar will be held online via Zoom; attendance is free with advance registration.

Artificial Intelligence: Past, Presence, Potential Impacts

2020-10-29T00:00:00+01:00

At the International Conference "Artificial Intelligence and Human Enhancement", organised by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Robert Trappl gave one of the two Keynotes, with the title "Artificial Intelligence: Past, Presence, Potential Impacts"

Mag. Susanne Hoefler und Dr. Friedrich Neubarth, OFAI, Wien

2020-10-28T00:00:00+01:00

LEGO stellt auf Anregung eines Blinden, Matthew Shrifrin, nun seit einem Jahr sprachliche Bauanleitungen zur Verfuegung, damit auch Blinde und Sehbehinderte an der Welt der LEGO Modelle aktiv teilhaben koennen. Entwickelt wurde dieses Projekt gemeinsam mit LEGO am Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) in Wien.

Die Informationen, die LEGO bereitstellen kann, beinhalten unter anderem Daten über einzelne Steine, Namen der Steine, 3D-Daten zu den Modellen, sowie eine strukturierte Hierarchie von einzelnen aufeinander abfolgenden Schritten, die den Bildern der graphischen Bauanleitungen entsprechen. Die Herausforderung besteht nun darin, diese Informationen in sprachliche Anweisungen zu uebersetzen. Auch wenn zur Zeit die sprachlichen Anweisungen nur zum Teil vollstaendig automatisch generiert werden, so ist die vom OFAI entwickelte Software in der Lage, mittels GUI die Struktur der Bauschritte, die dazugehoerigen Textbausteine, sowie die Bilder der urspruenglichen Bauanleitungen so darzustellen, dass eine manuelle Erweiterung oder Korrektur leicht zu bewerkstelligen ist.

In diesem Vortrag werden wir einerseits über unsere Erfahrungen waehrend der Entwicklung des Projektes berichten, wie man denn solche Bauanleitungen für Blinde optimal formuliert, um das Erlebnis des Bauens positiv zu gestalten, andererseits die implementierten Loesungsansaetze aus Perspektive der Sprachtechnologie beleuchten.

Zeit: Mittwoch, 28. Oktober 2020, 16:30 Uhr puenktlich via Zoom

Bitte um Anmeldung per Email an sec@ofai.at bis spaetestens Mittwoch, 28.10.2020, 12:00 Uhr, der Link wird vor dem Vortrag zugesandt.

Was müssen soziale Maschinen können?

2020-10-01T00:00:00+02:00

At the "Digital Days" of the Municipality of Vienna Robert Trappl held an invited lecture on the topic "Was müssen soziale Maschinen können?"

GPP: The Generic Preprocessor

2020-07-29T00:00:00+02:00

Thought macro processors were dead? Think again. An article on the generic preprocessor GPP, co-authored by OFAI's Tristan Miller and Harvard's Denis Auroux, has just been published in the Journal of Open Source Software. A powerful and versatile tool, GPP has already seen widespread adoption in everything from Prolog compilers to electronic microcontrollers to astronomical research cameras.

GPP

2020-07-27T00:00:00+02:00

GPP is a general-purpose preprocessor with customizable syntax, suitable for a wide range of preprocessing tasks. Its independence from any one programming language makes it much more versatile than the C preprocessor (cpp), while its syntax is lighter and more flexible than that of GNU m4. There are built-in macros for use with C/C++, LaTeX, HTML, XHTML, and Prolog files.

Publications

To refer to GPP in a publication, please use the following citation:

Tristan Miller and Denis Auroux. GPP, the generic preprocessor. Journal of Open Source Software, 5(51), July 2020. ISSN 2475-9066. DOI: 10.21105/joss.02400.

Dr. Arthur Flexer, OFAI, Wien

2020-06-24T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Arthur Flexer will give a semi-virtual lecture on “Discovering X Degrees of Keyword Separation in a Fine Arts Collection” at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). The presented work is inspired by the project ‘X Degrees of Separation’ by ‘Google Arts and Culture’, which explores the “hidden paths through culture” by analyzing visual features of artworks to find pathways between any two artifacts through a chain of artworks. In his work, Arthur Flexer is more interested in finding pathways of the semantic meaning of works of art rather than just their visual features. Therefore he used word embedding (Mikolov et al 2013), which encodes semantic similarities between words by modelling the context to their neighboring words in a large training text corpus. This is used to embed keywords of Belvedere's online fine arts collection and obtain pathways through the resulting semantic space.

Tristan Miller delivers NLP4RE keynote

2020-06-22T00:00:00+02:00

Tomorrow OFAI's Tristan Miller will be giving the keynote presentation at NLP4RE'20, the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Requirements Engineering. His talk will cover requirements and constraints for the manual and machine translation of humour and wordplay.

Summer internship in language technology

2020-06-02T00:00:00+02:00

The Language and Interaction Technologies Group of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) in Vienna is seeking a student intern for programming tasks in the field of natural language processing.

The successful applicant will be responsible for helping to program the front and back ends of an interactive, graphical tool for computer-assisted translation of creative language. The work will be carried out in close cooperation with the project leader, within the framework of the FWF-funded project Computational Pun-derstanding.

The position is a fixed-term one-month contract for 20 hours per week, with the possibility to extend the contract for additional months, subject to project requirements and satisfactory job performance. Remuneration will be in accordance with the standard student assistant salary for FWF projects.

Requirements

Applicants must demonstrate:

Good knowledge of English and German
Good programming skills in Java (or less preferably in Python)
Permission to work in Austria
Interest in linguistics, language technology, and/or natural language processing

Previous experience in developing graphical user interfaces is a big plus.

Application procedure

Applications, including a cover letter and a CV detailing previous academic work and programming experience, should be submitted via e-mail to Tristan Miller: tristan.miller@ofai.at

Applications should be submitted by 15 June 2020. Applications received after this deadline will be considered if the position remains unfilled.

LKG-Corpus – Linguistic, Kinematic and Gaze Information in Task Descriptions

2020-05-11T00:00:00+02:00

The LKG Corpus comprises multimodal recordings from 22 persons performing pick and place (take, put, push) actions, using eye tracking, motion capture, and recordings of the self-explaining utterances made while the actions are performed. The motivation for recording this kind of dataset was to study potential correlations between visible motor activities, eye gaze and linguistic structuring.

The data are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This license allows you to use the data free of charge for non-commercial purposes. You may modify and redistribute the data as long as you keep the attribution to the original in all the files, publish your work under the same licencse and cite the LREC 2020 paper listed below.

The dataset consists of the following information:

manual orthographic transcriptions of speech (conducted in Praat)
a video from the participants perspective, automatically overlaid with a circle indicating the target of the participants’ gaze by SMI software
schematics of the gaze vector every 5 frames (see Reinboth et al. 2020, Fig. 4), also compiled into an animation of gaze behaviour
information on gaze behaviours, for example whether a participant is looking at/close to an object (manually annotated)
information on whether the user’s dominant hand touches an object (manually annotated)
information on when an object is being moved
information on when participants are looking at the point they will next move an object to (manually annotated)
information on when participants’ gaze was stable on one point in space, indicating a visual ‘fixation’

Publications

Tim Reinboth, Stephanie Gross, Laura Bishop, Brigitte Krenn. "Linguistic, Kinematic and Gaze Information in Task descriptions. The LKG-Corpus." LREC 2020.

Acknowledgments

Data collection was conducted at the Performance Science Lab of the Department of Music Acoustics – Wiener Klangstil, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw).

Prof. Bob Sturm, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

2020-02-27T00:00:00+01:00

A "horse" is a system that is not actually addressing the problem it appears to be solving. The inspiration for the metaphor is the real-life example of Clever Hans, a horse that appeared to have great skill in mathematics but had actually learned to respond to a prosaic cue confounded with the correct answer. Similarly, a model created through the statistical treatment of a large dataset and wielded by an engineer can also appear successful for solving a complex problem, but actually not be. In this talk, I take a critical look at past applications of machine learning - exemplifying contemporary practices - and identify where issues arise that affect the validity of conclusions. I argue that the onus is on the engineer to not stop at describing how well a model performs on a given dataset (no matter how big it may be), but to go further and explain what they with their models are actually doing.

Time: Thursday, 27th of February 2020, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

Prof. Bob Sturm, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

2020-02-26T00:00:00+01:00

In this talk/musical performance, I will recount how a bit of Saturday morning humor turned into an ERC Consolidator Grant four years later. It’s a story of an engineer with an artistic bent meeting a machine learning algorithm through a blog. One part of the story involves the naive misappropriation of music data without consideration of its provenance and significance. Another part involves the serious contemplation of such transgressions, and then endeavors taken to redress them. A variety of interesting perspectives and questions have arisen out of this story, which will be subject to study in the project, Music at the Frontiers of Artificial Creativity and Criticism (MUSAiC, ERC-2019-COG No. 864189).

Time: Wednesday, 26th of February 2020, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

scikit-hubness in JOSS

2020-01-17T00:00:00+01:00

New journal paper published co-authored by OFAI's Arthur Flexer: Feldbauer R., Rattei T., Flexer A.: scikit-hubness: Hubness Reduction and Approximate Neighbor Search, Journal of Open Source Software, 5(45), 1957, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01957

Arthur Flexer speaks at Sound:Frame

2020-01-16T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Arthur Flexer discusses "Sound Art and Curating – Machine Learning and Limits of Control" with Thomas Grill (ELAK, MDW Vienna) in the context of the Sound:Frame conference.

Tristan Miller on ORF Ö1

2020-01-15T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Tristan Miller was interviewed by Austrian public radio (ORF Ö1) about the challenges for machine translation of puns.

Tristan Miller speaks at the 2nd Comedy and AI Conference

2019-12-07T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Tristan Miller delivered an invited lecture at the the Second Comedy and Artificial Intelligence conference at St. Peter's College, Oxford, UK.

OFAI helps LEGO

2019-08-28T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI helps LEGO create building instructions for blind people (press articles: futurezone.at, Washington Post, LEGO Group) More info...

Dr. Sallam Abualhaija, University of Luxembourg

2019-08-26T00:00:00+02:00

Natural language (NL) is prevalent in the Requirements Engineering (RE) field (a major subfield in Software Engineering). RE is embedded within a diverse organizational context, where engineers may have to interact with people from different domains and backgrounds such as legal experts, bank managers, system analysts, software developers, etc. While using NL creates a common understanding among those stakeholders, it comes with the cost of having to process a considerable amount of text spanning over hundreds of pages. To alleviate this problem, engineers may use NLP tools to extract and categorize useful information automatically. The question is, then, to what extent are current NLP off-the-shelf tools usable?

In this talk, I will discuss two different project scopes where requirements engineers need NLP technologies: (i) early quality assurance of critical systems in order to avoid serious implications that might be caused by ambiguous, inconsistent or incomplete requirements; (ii) readability level and compliance verification of legal artifacts (e.g., privacy policies) according to international regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enforced in Europe.

Time: Monday, 26th of August 2019, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

Dr. Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto

2019-07-03T00:00:00+02:00

It is important for public health planning and resource allocation for authorities to have statistics on the varying causes of death in each region. But in developing countries, where people are more likely to die at home than in a hospital and where there are insufficient resources for physical autopsies, the cause of a person's death is frequently never formally established by a physician. To mitigate this problem, the family of the deceased may be interviewed about the circumstances of death, resulting in a so called "verbal autopsy" which will be subsequently coded by physicians with their judgement as to the cause of death. We aim to develop automated text-analysis methods assist in this.

Current automated methods primarily use structured data from the verbal autopsies to assign a cause-of-death category, but the results have been poor. We present a neural-net-based classification method based on textual features to automatically classify cause-of-death categories from free-text verbal autopsy narratives alone. Features used, in addition to lexical cues, include events, temporal sequences, and symptom words. We are presently porting the system from English to Hindi.

Time: Wednesday, 3rd of July 2019, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

2019-07-01

2019-07-01T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Arthur Flexer is starting a new two year arts-based research project (FWF PEEK): “Dust and Data. The Art of Curating in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (together with Niko Wahl, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria)

2019-06-24…29

2019-06-24T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Tristan Miller serves as co-convener of the Panel on Humor and Artificial Intelligence at ISHS 2019, the 31st International Society for Humor Studies Conference, Austin TX, USA.

Dr. Tristan Miller, OFAI, Wien

2019-06-13T00:00:00+02:00

How do computers determine the meaning of individual words in a text, and what challenges do they face with deliberately ambiguous usages such as puns?

Machine learning approaches to word sense disambiguation (WSD) depend on the availability of large numbers of training examples, which can be expensive or impractical to obtain. This is a particular problem for processing the sort of lexical-semantic anomalies employed for deliberate effect in humour and wordplay. In contrast to machine learning systems are knowledge-based techniques, which rely only on pre-existing lexical-semantic resources (LSRs) such as dictionaries and thesauri. In this talk, we treat the task of improving the performance and applicability of knowledge-based WSD, both generally and for the particular case of wordplay. In the first part of the talk, we present two approaches for bridging the "lexical gap" problem and thereby improving WSD coverage and accuracy. In the first approach, we supplement the word's context and the LSR's sense descriptions with entries from a distributional thesaurus. The second approach enriches an LSR's sense information by aligning and clustering the senses to those of other, complementary LSRs. In the second part of the talk, we describe how these techniques, along with evaluation methodologies from traditional WSD, can be adapted for the "disambiguation" of puns, or rather for the automatic identification of their double meanings. We conclude with a sketch of how this and other techniques from computational semantics could be used to help translate puns from one language to another.

Time: Thursday, 13th of June 2019, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

Dr. Klaus Stiefel, Quezon City, Philippines

2019-05-15T00:00:00+02:00

With the advent of powerful parallel computers, efforts have commenced to simulate complete mammalian brains. However, so far none of these efforts has produced outcomes close to explaining even the behavioral complexities of animals.

In this talk, we suggest four challenges that ground this shortcoming. First, we discuss the connection between hypothesis testing and simulations. Typically, efforts to simulate complete mammalian brains lack a clear hypothesis. Second, we treat complications related to a lack of parameter constraints for large-scale simulations. To demonstrate the severity of this issue, we review work on two small- cale neural systems, the crustacean stomatogastric ganglion and the Caenorhabditis elegans nervous system. Both of these small nervous systems are very thoroughly, but not completely understood, mainly due to issues with variable and plastic parameters. Third, we discuss the hierarchical structure of neural systems as a principled obstacle to whole-brain simulations. Different organizational levels imply qualitative differences not only in structure, but in choice and appropriateness of investigative technique and perspective. The challenge of reconciling different levels also undergirds the challenge of simulating and hypothesis testing, as modeling a system is not the same thing as simulating it. Fourth, we point out that animal brains are information processing systems tailored very specifically for the ecological niches the respective animals live in.

Time: Wednesday, 15th of May 2019, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Freyung 6, Stiege 6, Tuer 7, 1010 Wien

2019-05-07

2019-05-07T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Stephanie Gross and Arthur Flexer are giving public science lectures on “Wenn Roboter von Menschen lernen” and “Wie Computer Musik empfehlen” as part of the Wissensdurst festival.

Dr. Tristan Miller, OFAI, Wien

2019-05-07T00:00:00+02:00

The translation of wordplay is one of the most extensively researched problems in translation studies, but it has attracted little attention in the fields of natural language processing and machine translation. This is because today's language technologies treat anomalies and ambiguities in the input as things that must be resolved in favour of a single "correct" interpretation, rather than preserved and interpreted in their own right. But if computers cannot yet process creative language on their own, can they at least provide specialized support to translation professionals? In this talk, I survey the state of the art in computational processing of humorous wordplay and put forth a vision of how existing solutions could be adapted and extended to support interactive, computer-assisted translation.

Time: Tuesday, 7th of May 2019, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

2019-05-02

2019-05-02T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Arthur Flexer is starting a new project (FWF): “On Valid and Reliable Experiments in Music Information Retrieval” (VALMIR)

Dr. Carlos Eduardo Cancino Chacon, OFAI, Wien

2019-01-28T00:00:00+01:00

This talk gives an overview of the Basis Function Models (BMs), a family of computational models of expressive music performance. The motivation for this work is to model the complex relationship between properties and structure of a given composition, and musically plausible ways of playing the piece expressively. In this way, we can learn more about this complex art.

The basic idea in the BM framework is that structural properties of a musical piece (given as a score), which are believed to be relevant for performance decisions, can be modeled in a simple and uniform way via so-called basis functions: numeric features that capture specific aspects of a musical note and its surroundings. A predictive model of performance can then predict appropriate patterns for expressive performance dimensions such as tempo, timing, dynamics and articulation from these basis functions.

A central methodological principle in this work is to take a data-driven approach: the model is not constructed manually, based on musical knowledge or hypotheses, but is learned from a large collection of real human performances, via state-of-the-art linear and non-linear machine learning algorithms. In this way it is the empirical data that dictates what the models look like, and an analysis of the learned models can provide interesting insights into the complex relation between score and performance. In addition, I present recent developments towards integrating the BM framework into a reactive, real-time accompaniment system.

Time: Monday, 28th of January 2019, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

2019-01-14

2019-01-14T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Paolo Petta co-organizes with Federico Bergenti and Stefania Monica of the University of Parma the Third Edition of the Symposium on Social Interactions in Complex Intelligent Systems (SICIS), at the AISB Convention 2019 (Falmouth University, UK, April 16-18, 2019).

Dipl.-Ing. Martin Trapp, OFAI Wien und TU Graz

2018-12-10T00:00:00+01:00

Probabilistic programming promises to simplify and democratize probabilistic machine learning, but successful probabilistic programming systems require flexible, generic and efficient inference engines. In this talk I will present the probabilistic programming language called Turing which is under constant development together with the University of Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Oxford. Turing has a very simple syntax and makes full use of the numerical capabilities in the Julia programming language, including all implemented probability distributions and automatic differentiation. Moreover, Turing supports a wide range of popular Monte Carlo algorithms including several Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithms and various particle MCMC (PMCMC) samplers. Most importantly, Turing inference is composable: it combines MCMC operations on subsets of variables, for example using a combination of an HMC engine and a particle Gibbs (PG) engine.

Time: Monday, 10th of December 2018, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

2018-12-07

2018-12-07T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Jan Schlüter comments on how Google DeepMind's AlphaZero is able to play world class chess to an Austrian news portal.

Dr. Aggelos Gkiokas, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

2018-12-03T00:00:00+01:00

                           V O R T R A G
                      **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6/7, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Aggelos Gkiokas
Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain


TOWARDS RICHER ONLINE MUSIC PUBLIC-DOMAIN ARCHIVES


This talk will present the basic aspects of the TROMPA Project 
(Towards Richer Online Music Public-domain Archives), a recently funded
EU project for enriching public domain classical music archives.
Classical music is one of the greatest treasures of Europeâs cultural
heritage, which is continually (re)interpreted and revitalised through
musical performance. Today, most of the classical repertoire is in the
public domain; massive numbers of scores and recordings are now
available in online community-contributed repositories actively used by
scholars and musicians. Technology offers ways to enrich and
contextualise this repertoire, so that users might better understand and
appreciate it. However, due to varying data quality and scale, this does
not happen automatically for public-domain resources. Amidst a deluge of
data, relevant associations across repositories and modalities (e.g.
from scores to recordings) still have to be made manually, while
insights by previous users are not explicitly stored for future users to
learn from. It is thus impossible to get comprehensive insight into the
full wealth of our musical cultural heritage. TROMPA will change this by
massively enriching and democratising our publicly available musical
heritage through a user-centred co-creation setup. For analysing and
linking music data at scale, the project will employ and improve state-
f-the-art technology. Music-loving citizens (including the large scene
of amateur performers) will cooperate with the technology, giving
feedback on algorithmic results, and annotating the data according to
their personal expertise. Following an open innovation philosophy, all
knowledge derived will be released back to the community in reusable
ways. This enables many uses in applications which directly benefit
crowd contributors and further audiences.

*********

Time: Monday, 3rd of December 2018, 10:00 a.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

2018-11-28

2018-11-28T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Arthur Flexer has been granted two new national projects (FWF): “On Valid and Reliable Experiments in Music Information Retrieval” and “Dust and Data. The Art of Curating in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (together with Niko Wahl, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria).

Dr. Johannes Jaeger, CSH Vienna und CRI Paris

2018-11-28T00:00:00+01:00

                           V O R T R A G
                      **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6/7, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Johannes Jaeger
Complexity Science Hub (CSH), Vienna
Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires (CRI), Paris


THE ONTOLOGY OF DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS


Ever since Zeno's paradox of the arrow, the nature of change has been
a deep, puzzling mystery. Even though Leibniz and Newton seem to have
demystified the problem, major questions remain and modern process
ontologies struggle to find a rigorous and coherent definition of the
concept of change. I will use the mathematical tools of dynamical and
general systems theory (in an accessible and non-technical way) to
illustrate that the view of change we get from differential calculus
is highly specialised and abstracted. I will introduce a more
generalised notion of flow, based on work by Mesarovic and Takahara in
the 1970s. The derivation of this notion implies that any coherent
concept of change must be diachronic, i.e. extended in time. In other
words, change requires some sort of mapping or morphism forward in
time. I will discuss constraints on this morphism that are required
for consistent causal dynamics. Change as an extended mapping suggests
the radical notion that instantaneous moments, or instants, do not
exist. I will showâ-using the tool of pointless geometryâ-that theories
based on the abstraction of the infinitesimal differential still apply
to solve many practical problems, but that they do not precisely
represent the time-extended diachronic ontological status of change.

*********

Time: Wednesday, 28th November 2018, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

Dr. Jan Schlueter, OFAI/Universite de Toulon

2018-11-07T00:00:00+01:00

                          V O R T R A G
                      **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6/7, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Jan Schlueter
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Universite de Toulon

DEEP LEARNING FOR ACOUSTIC BIRD DETECTION AND SPECIES IDENTIFICATION

Biodiversity, the variety of life on Earth, is constantly reduced by
human influences. Monitoring this loss is vital to understand and
control it.
In the applied research project aMOBY (https://amoby.ofai.at), we
explored how well current methods of artificial intelligence may help to
monitor biodiversity from audio recordings, supporting or complementing
human observations.
This talk will give an overview of our findings. Using artificial neural
networks, we were able to automatically detect bird calls in field
recordings, as well as identify the species to some extend, reaching
top results in two scientific competitions. I will present the technical
solutions in detail, discuss shortcomings, and finish with an outlook on
applying the same methodology to underwater recordings of whales.

*********

Time: Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 4:00 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

2018-10-16

2018-10-16T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Stephanie Gross and Brigitte Krenn co-organise the Workshop on Cognitive Architectures for Situated Multimodal Human Robot Language Interaction at the 20th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2018) in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

2018-09-23

2018-09-23T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Arthur Flexer is giving a tutorial on Statistical Analysis of Results in Music Information Retrieval: Why and How together with Julian Urbano at ISMIR 2018.

2018-09-01

2018-09-01T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's project on acoustic monitoring of biodiversity - aMOBY - has been covered in the WIENWISSEN 1/18 magazine.

2018-05-24

2018-05-24T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Arthur Flexer is giving a talk on "Objectifying the subjective and learning of prejudice by machines" at the Workshop "Im Netz der Sinne" in Graz, Austria.

EU-Datenschutz-Grundverordnung (DSGVO)

2018-05-24T00:00:00+02:00

         E U-D A T E N S C H U T Z-G R U N D V E R O R D N U N G 


Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

da am 25. Mai 2018 die neue EU-Datenschutz-Grundverordnung (DSGVO) in
Kraft tritt, moechten wir Sie darueber informieren, dass das OFAI Ihre
Daten (Name und Email-Adresse) verwendet und selbstverstaendlich nicht
an Dritte weitergibt.

Falls Sie unsere Aussendungen nicht mehr erhalten wollen, dann senden
Sie uns bitte eine Email an sec@ofai.at mit dem Betreff REMOVE und Ihre
Daten werden gelöscht.

Andernfalls freuen wir uns, dass wir Sie weiterhin ueber Vortraege und
Veranstaltungen informieren duerfen!

Mit herzlichen Gruessen

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl
***********************************************************************
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, 

this is to comply with new European and Austrian data protection and
privacy regulations starting 25 May 2018. We send you occasionally
e-mails to inform you about our lecture activities.

In order to do this we process and store your data (name and e-mail
address) in a secure way. We do not provide data for third parties.
If you do not want to receive messages from our side please send a note
to sec@ofai.at with REMOVE stated in the subject line and we will delete
these data.

Otherwise we look forward to informing you about our lectures and
events! 

Best regards

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl, OFAI, Wien

2018-05-15T00:00:00+02:00

                        V I D E O S E R I E
                     *************************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

ROBERT TRAPPL: EINFUEHRUNG IN DIE KUENSTLICHE INTELLIGENZ

EINE VIDEOSERIE, 1987 PRODUZIERT, 2018 WIEDER PRAESENTIERT UND DISKUTIERT.

Um einen Ueberblick ueber die Kuenstliche Intelligenz zu geben, wurde
unter der Leitung von Robert Trappl in den Jahren 1986 und 1987 mit
Unterstuetzung des Bundesministeriums fuer Wissenschaft und Forschung,
des Jubilaeumsfonds der Oesterreichischen Nationalbank und des
Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstituts fuer Artificial Intelligence bei
Synchro Video in Wien eine Videoserie von 8 Folgen zu je 14â30â
produziert. Diese Serie erwies sich als ein Erfolg, da ÃŒber 4000 VHS-
Kassetten an Privatpersonen und an Schulen und andere
Bildungseinrichtungen in Deutschland, Oesterreich und der Schweiz
verkauft wurden. In den letzten Jahren waren nur mehr einige abgespielte
VHS-Kassetten mit groeberen technischen Maengeln greifbar.

2018 wurden durch einen Gluecksfall die originalen, professionellen
Betacam SP (Superior Performance) Magnetbaender gefunden, von der Firma
Listo Mediaservices Cine GmbH in Wien digitalisiert und koennen nunmehr
wieder vorgefuehrt werden.

An drei Abenden werden jeweils 2, bzw. 3 Folgen der Serie gezeigt und
kurz kommentiert, mit anschlieÃender Diskussion im Vergleich zu 2018:
Was an den vorgestellten Grundlagen und Methoden hat heute unveraendert
Bestand? Welche KI-Systeme haben sich ueberholt, welche neuen
Entwicklungen sind an ihre Stelle getreten? Welche Anwendungen von KI
sehen wir heute, die vor 30 Jahren noch nicht vermutet werden konnten?
Und gibt es Auswirkungen, die uns 2018 erfreulicher oder bedrohlicher
erscheinen?

Die einzelnen Folgen werden an drei Abenden um jeweils 18:30 Uhr
gezeigt, kommentiert und anschlieÃend diskutiert:

Dienstag, 15. Mai 2018:
Herausforderung und Abenteuer
Darstellung von Wissen
Problemloesen, Suchen, Planen

Dienstag, 22. Mai 2018:
Expertensysteme
Natuerlichsprachige Systeme 1
Natuerlichsprachige Systeme 2

Dienstag, 29. Mai 2018:
Roboter, Lernen, Non-Vons
Zukunft und Auswirkungen

Die Praesentationen finden im Seminarraum des Oesterreichischen
Forschungsinstituts fÃŒr Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) in 1010 Wien,
Freyung 6, Stiege 6 statt. Die Teilnahme ist wie immer kostenlos, wegen
der beschraenkten Platzzahl ist eine Anmeldung jeweils spaetestens 4
Tage vor dem jeweiligen Termin unter sec@ofai.at erforderlich.

                             *********

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

                             *********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

2018-05-10

2018-05-10T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Brigitte Krenn presents a multimodal data set for grounded language learning -- The Action Verb Corpus -- at LREC, Miyazaki, Japan.

2018-05-03

2018-05-03T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's project on acoustic monitoring of biodiversity - aMOBY - has been covered in the HEUREKA 2/18 magazine of the weekly newspaper "Der Falter".

Extension to the Action Verb Corpus (AVCext)

2018-04-30T00:00:00+02:00

The extension to the Action Verb Corpus consists of 41 recordings conducted by 2 users experienced with the system performing the same three actions as in AVC — take (208 instances), put (208 instances), and push (91 instances). The actions were performed without any instructions. The focus of the extension is to facilitate visual action recognition.

Publications

Details about the collected data can be found in Matthias Hirschmanner, Stephanie Gross, Brigitte Krenn, Friedrich Neubarth, Martin Trapp, Michael Zillich and Markus Vincze: Extension of the Action Verb Corpus for Supervised Learning. ARW 2018.

2018-04-13

2018-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

Friedrich Neubarth represents OFAI at Lange Nacht der Forschung, Station: Roboter zähmen leicht gemacht.

2018-04-11

2018-04-11T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Brigitte Krenn and Friedrich Neubarth present work on "Lexicon Learning from Modality Rich Input" at the CHIST-ERA Projects Seminar in Paris, France.

2018-04-10

2018-04-10T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Brigitte Krenn and Friedrich Neubarth give a lecture on "Multimodal corpora for crossmodal grounded language learning" at the CHIST-ERA HLU Master Class on Human Language Understanding in Paris, France.

2018-04-06

2018-04-06T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Paolo Petta is signatory of the international open letter to the President of KAIST, an initiative supporting KAIST to comply with ethical standards, regarding the opening of a "Research Center for the Convergence of National Defense and Artificial Intelligence".

Update 2018-04-10: We wish to thank and congratulate Prof. Sung-Chul Shin, President of KAIST, for his swift and affirmative action and look forward to KAIST's contributions in this crucial matter.

Dr. Stefania MONICA, Univ. degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy

2018-03-12T00:00:00+01:00

                          V O R T R A G
                     **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Stefania Monica 
Researcher and Lecturer
Dipartimento di Scienze Matematiche, Fisiche e Informatiche
UniversitÃ  degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy
stefania.monica@unipr.it

KTMAS: Analytic Modelling of the Dynamics of Multi-agent Systems

Multi-agents systems (MAS) have been introduced in the field
of artificial intelligence (AI) to denote a set of entities which act
and interact in intelligent (i.e., often: rational) ways. Beyond AI,
the application of results concerning MAS involves various other
scientific disciplines, such as: biology; sociology; finance; and
economics.

In the literature, a large number of models have been proposed
to describe the dynamics of MAS. Most of these are based on
simulations, limiting their validity to the particular scenarios
considered and to the specific choice of simulation parameters: In
order to derive more robust results, it is of interest to identify
viable analytic approaches.

Our framework is inspired by mathematical kinetic theories,
with the aim to obtain analytic results on the dynamics of MAS
from the description of the effects of single interactions among
agents. KTMAS can incorporate different types of interactions, and it
can be used to describe the dynamics of different features of MAS.

We present our research in the scope of the new disciplines
of econophysics, which can be used to model wealth evolution,
and sociophysics, which can be adopted to characterise opinion evolution.

*********

Time: Monday, 12th March 2018, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

2018-03-05

2018-03-05T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Stefania Monica of the Università di Parma, is visiting Paolo Petta at OFAI until the end of the month. She will also deliver a public lecture at OFAI and an invited seminar unit at the Complexity Science Hub covering her work on KTMAS, an analytic model of the dynamics of multi-agent systems based on kinetic theory.

Action Verb Corpus (AVC)

2018-01-31T00:00:00+01:00

The Action Verb Corpus comprises multimodal data of 46 episodes (recordings) conducted by 12 humans with in total 390 instances of simple actions — take, put, and push. Recorded are audio, video and motion data (hand and arm) while participants perform an action and describe what they do.

Publications

Details about the full data set and how the data was collected can be found in Stephanie Gross, Matthias Hirschmanner, Brigitte Krenn, Friedrich Neubarth, Michael Zillich: Action Verb Corpus. LREC 2018.

2017-12-13

2017-12-13T00:00:00+01:00

Paolo Petta serves as co-chair at the 2nd Symposium on Social Interactions in Complex Intelligent Systems (SICIS) to be held at the 2018 AISB Convention in Liverpool, UK, 4th-6th April 2018.

2017-12-05

2017-12-05T00:00:00+01:00

Paolo Petta represents OFAI at the The European Artificial Intelligence-on-demand-platform information day and brokerage event in Brussels.

2017-12-01

2017-12-01T00:00:00+01:00

Martin Trapp is visiting the machine learning group of Zoubin Gharamani at the University of Cambridge for two month and gives an invited talk on „advances in learning sum-product networks". His research visit he will be supported by the Österreichische Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Dr. Jan Schlüter, OFAI, Wien

2017-11-21T00:00:00+01:00

                          V O R T R A G
                     **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Jan SchlÃŒter
Intelligent Music Processing and Machine Learning Group
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)


"DEEP LEARNING FOR EVENT DETECTION, SEQUENCE LABELLING AND 
SIMILARITY ESTIMATION IN MUSIC SIGNALS" 


Within the field of machine listening, music recordings provide an
interesting test bed: they are very complex, with many different sound
sources occurring at once as well as intricate long-term dependencies,
all produced under controlled circumstances. For my PhD thesis, I
addressed five different music perception tasks with deep neural
networks: music and speech detection, note onset detection, music
segmentation, singing voice detection, and accelerating music similarity
estimation.
This talk will give a rudimentary crash course on audio processing with
neural networks and then cover the main results of my thesis, showing
how to apply deep learning to each task, evaluating its performance, and
investigating how the learned solutions work. The networks show
interesting similarities to hand-designed methods, but combine many
minor variations that are extensively tuned, surpassing the state of the
art in each task. However, as I will also demonstrate, none of the
solutions is perfect, leaving ample room for future research.


*********

Time: Tuesday, 21st November 2017, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

2017-11-15

2017-11-15T00:00:00+01:00

Stephanie Gross and Brigitte Krenn receive the Best Paper Award at the 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2017) in Glasgow, Scotland.

2017-11-09

2017-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

Brigitte Krenn is panellist at future zone day discussing „Was Computer heute können und morgen lernen” (“What robots know today and will be capable of tomorrow”), Semperdepot, Vienna, Austria.

2017-11-02

2017-11-02T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Language and Interaction Technologies Group contributes to Episode 2 ALIEN INTROSPECTION -- Xenofeminism, Robotics and Machinic Promiscuity at the Vermögen Festival in Vienna.

Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel, Marine Science Institute, University of the Philippines

2017-10-24T00:00:00+02:00

                          V O R T R A G
                     **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel
Neurolinx Research Institute
www.neurolinx.org 
Marine Science Institute
University of the Philippines



"SEA-URCHINS, AND URCHIN INSPIRED ROBOTS" 


Sea urchins are marine grazers with skin covered in spines and miniature
claws. Despite their placid appearance, they display a number of
interesting behaviors.
I will first review the biology of sea urchins, then present our work on
the covering behavior of sea urchins: Several phylogenetically unrelated
urchins pick up marine debris and place it on their bodies. The animals
use debris for camouflage, weighing themselves down, UV protection and
possibly food storage. Different species select different types of
debris for these purposes. We analyzed this behavior with field studies,
lab experiments and video analysis of the collecting process.
In the last part of my presentation I will outline how I think sea
urchins can inspire the design of new and interesting robots, namely by
designing a robotic surface made up of semi-independent sensory-motor
units. This type of distributed problem solving is effective, relatively
easy to implement, and very distinct from human intelligence.

*********

Time: Tuesday, 24th October 2017, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

2017-09-11-15

2017-09-11T00:00:00+02:00

Arthur Flexer is co-organizing (together with Monika Dörfler) a workshop on "Systematic approaches to deep learning methods for audio", 11.-15. September 2017, Erwin Schrödinger Institute, University of Vienna, Austria.

2017-09-01

2017-09-01T00:00:00+02:00

Arthur Flexer is starting a new project on acoustic monitoring of biodiversity - aMOBY

2017-08-23…26

2017-08-23T00:00:00+02:00

MATES 2017, the 15th German Conference on Multiagent System Technology, was successfully held at Leipzig University, with Paolo Petta general co-chair.

One Million Posts Corpus

2017-08-01T00:00:00+02:00

The “One Million Posts” corpus is an annotated data set consisting of user comments posted to an Austrian newspaper website (in German language). The dataset comprises approx. one million posts approx. 11K of which are manually annotated with the following categories: sentiment (negative/neutral/positive), off-Topic (yes/no), inappropriate (yes/no), discriminating (yes/no), feedback to the article author (yes/no), user personal stories (yes/no), arguments used (yes/no).

Publications

Dietmar Schabus, Marcin Skowron, Martin Trapp. "One Million Posts: A Data Set of German Online Discussions." In Proceedings of the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), pp. 1241-1244. Tokyo, Japan, August 2017. DOI: 10.1145/3077136.3080711. [Preprint]
Dietmar Schabus and Marcin Skowron. "Academic-Industrial Perspective on the Development and Deployment of a Moderation System for a Newspaper Website." In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), pp. 1602-1605. Miyazaki, Japan, May 2018.

ImPulsTanz 2017 Workshop: \"Artificial Intelligence Dance\"

2017-07-17T00:00:00+02:00

ImPulsTanz 2017 Workshop: "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DANCE"

Der Organisator der Workshops von ImPulsTanz hat mich dieses Jahr
gefragt, ob ich als langjaehriger Teilnehmer von ImPulsTanz nicht selbst
einen Workshop halten moechte. Ich habâ ihm einen Vorschlag geschickt,
er hat ihm sehr gut gefallen (âgeilâ), und das Ergebnis meiner
Ueberlegungen ist ausnahmsweise kein Vortrag, kein Artikel, kein
Buchbeitrag, etc.,sondern dieses Workshop:

Artificial Intelligence Dance, Mo 17.7. â Fr 21.7.2017, 
tgl. 15:20 â 17:20 Uhr, Arsenal 3
Programm: https://www.impulstanz.com/workshops/2017/id3552/

Gibtâs auch auf Englisch:
https://www.impulstanz.com/en/workshops/2017/id3552/

Haben Sie/hast du Lust daran teilzunehmen? Vielleicht kennen Sie/kennst
du auch Menschen, die gerne daran teilnehmen moechten â dann bin ich
dankbar for spreading the news! 

Bis vielleicht im Juli im Workshopraum 3 im Arsenal,
Ihr/dein Robert (Trappl)

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Ankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

ECONOMY IN TRANSITION, MAK – Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Wien

2017-06-23T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

SYMPOSIUM "ECONOMY IN TRANSITION"
Wie gestalten wir den wirtschaftlichen
und gesellschaftlichen Wandel?

23. Juni 2017, 9:00 â 14:00 Uhr
MAK â Museum fÃŒr Angewandte Kunst, Wien

Sehr geehrte Dame, sehr geehrter Herr,

vor etwas ÃŒber 3 Jahren hat sich auf Initiative des US-amerikanischen,
in Wien lebenden Physikers und Oekonomen William Price ein âCouncil fuer
a 21st Century Progressive Economyâ gebildet, welches mindestens zweimal
im Jahr abwechselnd in der Oesterreichischen Nationalbank unter dem
Vorsitz von Praesident Dr. Claus Raidl und im Oesterreichischen
Gewerkschaftsbund unter dem Vorsitz von Praesident Erich Foglar getagt
hat. Dabei wurden die aufgrund des rasant wachsenden Einsatzes von
Artificial Intelligence Systemen und von Robotern zu erwartenden
oekonomischen und gesellschaftlichen Konsequenzen ausfuehrlich
diskutiert und deren Ergebnisse in mehreren Vorschlaegen fÃŒr Aktionen
zusammengefasst.

Bei diesem Symposium im MAK, sollen diese Ergebnisse nun der
Oeffentlichkeit vorgestellt und mit den TeilnehmerInnen dieses
Symposiums diskutiert werden, um zu einer Resolution oder zumindest zu
einem Resolutionsentwurf zu gelangen.
Als Forschungsinstitut, das die Konsequenzen seiner Arbeit immer im Auge
hat, haben wir diese Veranstaltung gemeinsam mit dem Verband der
Oesterreichischen Gewerkschaftlichen Bildungseinrichtungen (VOEGB) organisiert.

Als Mitglied auch des Councils wuerde ich mich ÃŒber Ihre Teilnahme sehr
freuen. Bei Interesse und Zeit â im Juni meist das noch seltenere â 
ersuche ich Sie um Anmeldung unter www.21stcentury-economy.org oder
unter bildung@oegb.at. 

Mit herzlichen GrÃŒÃen,
Robert Trappl

PROGRAMM

09:00 Registrierung

09.30 Eroeffnung
Bill Price, Sprecher des Council for a Progressive Economy
Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Generaldirektor des MAK

09:45 Podiumsdiskussion: Wie sieht die Arbeit der Zukunft aus und wie
finanzieren wir unsere Gesellschaft?
Mitglieder des Councils und ExpertInnen

11:00 Feedback zur Resolution und Diskussion aus EU-Perspektive
Michel Servoz, Generaldirektor der GD BeschÃ€ftigung,
Soziales und Integration der EU

11:30 Pause

12:00 Kuenstliche Intelligenz: Wissenschaft, Praxis und Zukunftsperspektiven
Robert Trappl, Leiter des Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstituts fÃŒr
Artificial Intelligence, OFAI

12:30 Podiumsdiskussion: Wie kann ein gutes Zusammenspiel von Mensch
und Maschine gestaltet sein und welche Bildungskonzepte
kÃ¶nnen dies unterstÃŒtzen?
Mitglieder des Councils und ExpertInnen

13:45 Zusammenfassung und Ausblick
Bill Price, Sprecher des Council for a Progressive Economy
Claus Raidl, Praesident der Oesterreichischen Nationalbank und Mitglied des Council

14:00 Buffet und freier Eintritt zur MAK-Ausstellung
âHello, Robot. Design zwischen Mensch und Maschineâ
(inkl. Fuehrung durch die Ausstellung)

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Ankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

2017-06-22

2017-06-22T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn moderates the reflection group “Human-Robot Relations” at the Symposium “Economy in Transition – The Economics of 2030 and Beyond” organized by the Council for a 21st Century Progressive Economy, VÖGB Zentrale, Vienna, Austria.

Dr. Brigitte Krenn, OFAI, Wien

2017-06-13T00:00:00+02:00

                         V O R T R A G
                     **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Brigitte Krenn
Language and Interaction Technologies Group
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)


"THE ROBOT AS SITUATED COGNIZER" 


Human communication is inherently multi-modal, comprising not only the
linguistic utterance but also signals transmitted via the visual channel
including amongst others gaze, gesture and object manipulations. When
robots are to interact with humans in real-world environments, within
concrete task-specific situations, it is essential to endow robots with
capabilities for multi-modal natural language processing and
understanding.

Based on the analysis of human-human communication in task-oriented
scenarios, we will discuss the natural language processing capabilities
and related mechanisms a robot should be equipped with. This talk gives
insights into current basic research in multi-modal natural language
understanding and related challenges.

*********

Time: Tuesday, 13th June 2017, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

2017-04-24 talk

2017-04-24T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn talks at Erste Campus about “Information is the new currency! How natural language processing can support various information needs”, Vienna, Austria.

2017-04-01

2017-04-01T00:00:00+02:00

Start of the Pro²Future (Products and Production Systems of the Future) FFG COMET Competence Center.

2017-03-21

2017-03-21T00:00:00+01:00

Universitaet Wien und Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) kooperieren verstaerkt. (Pressemitteilung 21.03.2017)

2017-02-03

2017-02-03T00:00:00+01:00

Thomas Grill scored first place in the QMUL Bird Audio Detection challenge.

Dr. Matija Marolt, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana

2017-01-18T00:00:00+01:00

                          V O R T R A G
                     **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Matija Marolt
Assistant Professor and Head of Laboratory of Computer Graphics and
Multimedia at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science,
University of Ljubljana

"ANZEL, ARE YOU ALIVE OR DEAD?"
Or why folk music is interesting(for computers)

Folk music is an integral part of a nationâs cultural heritage, and
represents a memory of past lives, customs and traditions. As in the
modern world it has all but disappeared, but its preservation,
accessibility and promotion are an important part of national (and
European) identity.
In our talk, weâll present our research in MIR techniques for analysis
of folk music and discuss why specialized methods are needed for
analyzing this type of music. Weâll focus on analysis of
ethnomusicological field recordings, which, from the beginnings of the
20th century to the present, represent documents of folk music
performances stored in ethnomusicological archives, nowadays
increasingly digitized and made available on the web. As the name
suggests,these recordings are made in the field (as opposed to studio
environments), with all the imperfections brought by degradation of
media, environmental noises and quality of performance. Our objective
therefore is to develop robust algorithms for the analysis of folk music
recordings that will expose them to a wider audience and also aid
ethnomusicologists perform their studies on large collections, which
became available with the digitization of archives, compared to small
numbers of hand-annotated recordings â the prevailing practice so far.
We will focus on our recent work on segmentation and transcription of
field recordings and shortly present EtnoFletno (www.etnofletno.si),
a recently finished project dedicated to the promotion of Slovenian folk
music.

*********

Time: Wednesday, 18th January 2017, 3:00 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

Matevz Pesek, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana

2017-01-18T00:00:00+01:00

                          V O R T R A G
                     **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Matevz Pesek
Member of the Laboratory of Computer Graphics and Multimedia at the
Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana


"THE COMPOSITIONAL HIERARCHICAL MODEL AS AN ALTERNATIVE DEEP ARCHITECTURE" 


Recently, deep learning has been successfully introduced to the field
of music information retrieval. Several deep learning models have been
applied to different MIR tasks, such as deep neural networks,
convolutional neural networks, and deep belief networks. As an
alternative, we recently proposed the compositional hierarchical model
(CHM). To overcome some of the limitations by other deep approaches
(need for large datasets, black-box approaches), the CHM proposes a
transparent structure in a form of a generative model. Its main
features are unsupervised learning of a hierarchical representation of
input data, transparency, which allows for insights into the learned
representation, the ability to extract knowledge from a small dataset,
and robustness and speed.
The model consists of multiple layers, each composed of a number of
parts, unsupervisedly learned from the music input. Parts in each layer
are compositions of parts from previous layers based on statistical
co-occurrences as the driving force of the learning process.
In this talk, we will present how the CHM has been applied to three
different music information retrieval tasks: polyphonic music
transcription, chord estimation and melodic pattern discovery.
We will also show possible applications of the CHM to other tasks and
domains and elaborate on connecting the CHM to other ML approaches.


*********

Time: Wednesday, 18th January 2017, 4:00 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

Prof. Dr. Wai Kiang (Albert) Yeap, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand

2016-12-20T00:00:00+01:00

                          V O R T R A G
                     **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Prof. Dr. Wai Kiang (Albert) Yeap
Director for the Centre of Artificial Intelligence Research
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand


"WHAT IS A COGNITIVE MAP? - UNRAVELING ITS MYSTERY USING ROBOTS"


The theory of cognitive mapping in spatial cognition posits that many
different species learn a map of its environment. However, in recent
years, the theory has been seriously challenged while a noble prize has
been awarded for the discovery of the neural substrate for such a map.
In this talk, I hope to unravel the mystery of cognitive mapping using
robots. First, I present a novel parsimonious view-based model of
cognitive mapping and second, empowering a robot with it, I show what
is computed is not a single global metric map which is problematic but
rather a series of disjointed global maps. The resulting process bears
many aspects of cognitive mapping and provides insights into how
cognitive mapping could have evolved in different species, from insects
to humans, and why our perception of the world is stable.

*********

Time: Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

Paolo Petta co-chairs MATES 2017

2016-12-19T00:00:00+01:00

Paolo Petta is general co-chair of MATES 2017, the 15th German Conference on Multiagent System Technology, to take place at Leipzig University.

2016-12-19

2016-12-19T00:00:00+01:00

Martin Trapp is invited panelist at the Practical Bayesian Nonparametrics workshop at NIPS 2016 discussing challenges in the development of software systems for Bayesian nonparametrics …

2016-11-10

2016-11-10T00:00:00+01:00

Brigitte Krenn gives an invited talk on "AI for mining text content" at the Annual conference of the Austrian Institute of Historical Research (Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, IÖG), Vienna, Austria.

2016-09-22

2016-09-22T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn is plenary speaker at the conference "Experimental Approaches to the Perception and Production of Language Variation" (ExAPP 2016), Vienna, Austria.

2016-09-05 to 09

2016-09-05T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn coteaches a course on "Evolutionary semantics on real robots" at the "Lake Como School of Advanced Studies" on "Creativity and Evolution. Games, language, robots, life, art", Como, Italy.

Workshop on Prosodic Annotation, Anna Bruggeman, M.phil., Uni Koeln

2016-06-20T00:00:00+02:00

 Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fÃŒr Artificial Intelligence
                      is pleased to announce the

                "WORKSHOP ON PROSODIC ANNOTATION"

                  held by  Anna Bruggeman 
          (Universitaet zu KÃ¶ln, Institut fÃŒr Phonetik)


date:     20 - 21 June 2016 
time:     9:00 - 13:00  
location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fÃŒr Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


The workshop will focus on DIMA(http://dima.uni-koeln.de/wp-content
uploads/2015/05/DIMA-Annotationsrichtlinien.V2.0.pdf), a recently
developed consensus annotation scheme for prosodic annotation of
German. DIMA's primary aim is to provide the tools for a phonetically
informed phonological transcription that can be used and interpreted by
researchers with different backgrounds.

The goal of the workshop is to introduce newcomers to the prosodic
annotation of speech data and will help interested researchers master
their own annotation projects. Following an introduction into computer
aided annotation of prosody in speech and or multimodal corpora, and a
general introduction into ToBI annotation systems (http://www.ling.ohio-
tate.edu/~tobi/), the DIMA annotation system will be presented. The
rest of the workshop will focus on gaining hands-on experience with
DIMA annotation and solving practical annotation issues. If possible,
bring your laptop.

As the number of participants is limited, please, state your interest
to participate by sending an e-mail to brigitte.krenn@ofai.at no later
than 16th June. (Available places will be assigned on a first come
first serve basis.)

The workshop is supported by the CHIST-ERA HLU Project "Artificial
Language Understanding in Robots ATLANTIS".

2016-06-01

2016-06-01T00:00:00+02:00

Start of the WWTF Project RALLI (Robotic Action-Language Learning through Interaction) carried out by Stephanie Gross (project leader) and Brigitte Krenn at OFAI, project partners are Michael Zillich at the Technical University of Vienna and Matthias Scheutz at Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA.

John M. Prager, PhD, IBM T. J. Watson Research Ctr. & IBM Watson Health, NY, USA

2016-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

                          V O R T R A G
                     **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

JOHN M. PRAGER, PhD
IBM T.J. Watson Research Ctr. & IBM Watson Health, NY, USA


"WATSON AFTER JEOPARDY!:
QUESTION-ANSWERING IN THE HEALTHCARE DOMAIN & BEYOND"


In February of 2011, IBMâs computer system called Watson participated
in the US game show Jeopardy! on national television against two former
champions - and won. Jeopardy! is a question-answering challenge,
which, despite including elements of speed and betting, is at its core
about finding answers to questions and having a good confidence
estimate about those answers. Watson was built by a team of IBM
scientists and engineers who went on to apply the technology to other
domains, in particular healthcare. This talk will look at how Watson
was built, at some of its more interesting capabilities and
limitations, and some of the ways it is being applied to address
challenges in the field of healthcare.

John M. Prager has been working in technical fields related directly or
indirectly to Question Answering for most of his professional career.
Most recently, while at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center he has been
part of the Watson project, a system that played (and won) the
Jeopardy! TV quiz-show game.  He has been involved in both the
algorithms area, concentrating on question analysis and wordplay, and
strategy. He is still involved with Watson, as it is being adapted to
clinical decision support in the healthcare domain.

*********

Time: Tuesday, 31st May 2016, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

OFAI Multi-Modal Task Description (MMTD) Corpus

2016-05-13T00:00:00+02:00

Publications

Details about the full data set and how the data was collected can be found in Stephanie Gross & Brigitte Krenn: The OFAI Multimodal Task Description Corpus. LREC 2016.

Prof. David Temperley, Eastman School of Music, Rochester, USA

2016-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

                          V O R T R A G
                     **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

DAVID TEMPERLEY
Professor of Music Theory
Eastman School of Music, Rochester, USA


"INFORMATION FLOW IN MUSIC"


Recent research in psycholinguistics has shown that language processing
is optimal when information is conveyed at a moderate, uniform rate â
a principle known as Uniform Information Density (UID). (Here I use
âinformationâ in the statistical sense, meaning the negative log of
probability: low-probability events are high in information.) In this
talk I will suggest that UID has great explanatory value with regard to
music as well.

Three predictions follow from UID:
1) low-probability events should be lengthened and spaced out in time;
2) an event that is low in probability in one dimension should be high
in probability in other dimensions;
3) an event that is low in probability should be used in the context of
other high-probability events.

I will demonstrate the validity of these predictions with regard to a
variety of musical phenomena: rules of Renaissance counterpoint, the
construction of classical themes, and phenomena of expressive
performance.

*********

Time: Wednesday, 4th May 2016, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

2016-02-18

2016-02-18T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Brigitte Krenn gives an invited talk on "E-Recruiting -- How to find the right personnel" at Vienna HR-Brunch, Vienna, Austria.

2016-01-01

2016-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the EU-ERC Advanced Grant Project Con Espressione carried out by Gerhard Widmer, contributors are Martin Gasser and Thassilo Gadermaier.

EU CHISTERA starts

2015-12-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the EU CHISTERA Project ATLANTIS with OFAI's Brigitte Krenn as project leader.

2015-12-01

2015-12-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the FFG-Project updatemi: Summarization for news texts with OFAI's Brigitte Krenn as project leader.

Prof. Selmer Bringsjord, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, New York

2015-11-26T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

SELMER BRINGSJORD, PhD
Professor of Cognitive Science
Professor of Computer Science
Professor of Logic and Philosophy
Professor of Management & Technology
Chair, Dept of Cog Sci
Director, Rensselaer AI & Reasoning (RAIR) Lab
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)


"ON CREATIVE SELF-DRIVING CARS"


Artists are typically assumed to be creative.  The same goes for great
scientists.  In general, we can say that, in the human case, certain
roles often call for creativity.  The flip side is that it's generally
assumed that certain roles do not call for creativity in the human
sphere.  For example, most people don't associate creativity with the
human role of driver.  A taxi/Uber/Lyft driver is not what first comes
to mind when one is asked to supply examples of even MacGyveresque
creativity, let alone of what, say, a Mozart could muster.  Given this
background, it would seem to be safe to infer that self-driving cars
don't need to be creative.  
I explain why this inference is fallacious. Drawing then on work in AI
and creativity (including some of my own research in this area), and on
real-life examples of human-driver creativity, I lay out preliminary
steps toward the engineering of a creative self-driving car.


*********

Time: Thursday, 26th November 2015, 6:30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********


Sollten Sie in Zukunft keine weiteren Vortragsankuendigungen wuenschen,
senden Sie bitte ein Mail mit dem Betreff "REMOVE" an: sec@ofai.at.

2015-11-03

2015-11-03T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI's Robert Trappl gives a Keynote Speech at the symposium "CREATION AT THE NEXUS OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND ART" jointly organised by La Biennale di Venezia and the European Commission-Directorate General CONNECT in Venice, Italy.

2015-10-30

2015-10-30T00:00:00+01:00

The paper REAL-TIME MUSIC TRACKING USING MULTIPLE PERFORMANCES AS A REFERENCE by Andreas Arzt, Gerhard Widmer, received the Best Paper Award at the ISMIR 2015 Conference.

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Robert Peharz, Medical University, Graz

2015-10-30T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Robert Peharz
Medical University of Graz
Institute of Physiology / Interdisciplinary Developmental Neuroscience
BioTechMed-Graz


"SUM-PRODUCT NETWORKS FOR PROBABILISTIC MODELING"


Sum-Product networks (SPNs) are a new avenue for probabilistic
modeling. Using a deep network structure, they are able to represent
highly complex variable dependencies, while at the same time many
inference scenarios can be solved with computational costs linear in
the representation size of the SPN.
In this talk, an overview of SPNs is given, following their evolution
in literature. First we define SPNs for discrete random variables and
introduce the notions of completeness, consistency, decomposability and
network polynomials. Then we generalize SPNs to continuous random
variables and present some recent theoretical insights, in order to
draw a clearer picture of representational properties of SPNs. We
further discuss tractable inference mechanisms in SPNs, including
marginalization, the so-called differential approach to inference and
most-probable-explanation. Finally, an overview of existing learning
algorithms is given and results of SPNs applied to computer vision and
speech modeling are presented.


*********

Time: Friday, 30th October 2015, 3:00 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Prof. Dr. Mark Coeckelbergh, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

2015-10-21T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Prof. Dr. Mark Coeckelbergh
Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK


"THE ETHICS OF SELF-DRIVING CARS: THE PROBLEM OF CO-DRIVING 
AND THE PROBLEM OF OTHER CARS"


Should we develop and use fully automated, intelligent self-driving
cars rather than human drivers? Can such cars ever be safe? Can they be
ethical? Are such cars a threat to humanity or is removing humans from
the picture the solution? This talk discusses the ethics of
self-driving cars by considering the scenario of human/non-human
co-driving: what does this mean for the experience of driving and what
problems could arise? First the talk addresses problems regarding
attention, disengagement, and responsibility in cases when there is
hybrid or alternating human/non-human agency. Then the moral-social
experience of the humans is further explored by focusing on car driving
as a social practice. There is for instance what we could call the
problem of "other cars": when a car is perceived there may be
uncertainty about its status (human or non-human), which may create
difficulties for forming social expectations. And if it is clear that
it is a self-driving car, its "mind" and "intentions" might not be
clear. In addition there could be problems related to cultural
differences: if driving habits are different in different societies and
cultures, how can the design of such autonomous systems deal with this?

*********

Time: Wednesday, 21st October 2015, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Dr. Andre Holzapfel, OFAI, Wien

2015-10-14T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Andre Holzapfel
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)


"A CORPUS STUDY ON RHYTHMIC MODES IN TURKISH MAKAM MUSIC AND 
THEIR INTERACTION WITH METER"


The rhythmic framework for composition in Turkish makam music is based
upon a set of patterns of left and right hand strokes, referred to as
usul. A stroke pattern of an usul is assigned a length by counting the
number of beats within the slowest regular sequence that coincides with
each stroke of the usul.  Educational practice in Turkish makam music
emphasizes the importance of internalization of the usually
non-isochronous stroke patterns of an usul for the understanding of a
piece. On the other hand, counting the regular beat sequence that
determines the length of the usul plays no role at all. For these
reasons it is an interesting question how the note onsets and durations
within these compositions are related to the stroke patterns of the
usul. To this end, I conducted a study on a large corpus of notated
songs of Turkish makam music. This enables me to explore differences
between the ways Turkish makam music and Eurogenetic music shape meter,
and to investigate rhythmic style in Turkish makam music for changes
between historical periods. 

This talk will be an extended version of a presentation given 
at the Jahreskongress der Gesellschaft fÃŒr Musiktheorie, Berlin,Germany.

*********

Time: Wednesday, 14th October 2015, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Prof. Stefano Ceri, Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria Politecnico di Milano

2015-10-13T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Prof. Stefano Ceri
Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria 
Politecnico di Milano


"DATA-DRIVEN GENOMIC COMPUTING"


Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is a technology for reading the DNA
that is changing biological research and will change medical practice;
thanks to the availability of millions of whole genome sequences,
genomic data management may soon become the biggest and most important
big data problem of mankind.
In this exciting framework, I will describe a new paradigm for raising
the level of abstraction in NGS data management, by introducing a 
genomic data model (GDM) which supports both genomic regions and
metadata, a genomic query language (GMQL) which provides  high-level
operations upon GDM, and by showing how GDM and GQL are supported by
GenData 2020, a cloud-based system for genomic data management.

Stefano Ceri is Professor of Database Systems at the Dipartimento di
Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB)of Politecnico di
Milano. He was visiting professor at the Computer Science Department of
Stanford University (1983-1990).
His research work covers about four decades (1976-2014) and has been
generally concerned with extending database technology in order to
incorporate new features: distribution, object-orientation, rules,
streaming data; with the advent of the Web, his research has been
targeted towards the engineering of Web-based applications and search
systems. In 2008 he has been awarded an advanced ERC Advanced Grant on
Search Computing. He is currently leading GenData 2020, a national
project focused on building query and analysis systems for genomic
data. He is the recipient of the ACM-SIGMOD "Edward T. Codd Innovation
Award"(2013), an ACM Fellow and member of the Academia Europaea.


*********

Time: Tuesday, 13th October 2015, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

2015-06-02

2015-06-02T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's Brigitte Krenn leads the discussion panel on 'Critical Engineering or critical thinking?' at the net:25 | net:future conference , University of Vienna, Austria.

Sander Dieleman, Ghent University, Belgium

2015-05-28T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Sander Dieleman, Reservoir Lab, Ghent University, Belgium

"DEEP LEARNING FOR MUSIC, GALAXIES AND PLANKTON"

Abstract: In recent years, deep learning has become a popular approach
for speech and image recognition, and its application has substantially
improved recognition systems in these domains. In this talk we'll
explore three different applications of deep learning: audio-based
music recommendation, galaxy morphology classification and plankton
species classification. We'll take a closer look at solutions for these
problems based on convolutional neural networks, two of which have been
used to win Kaggle competitions.

Biography: Sander Dieleman is a PhD student in the research group
Reservoir Lab at Ghent University in Belgium. His research focuses on
feature learning and deep learning techniques for learning hierarchical
representations of musical audio signals, aimed at automatic music
classification and recommendation. In the summer of 2014, he interned
at Spotify in New York City.


*********

Time: Thursday, 28th May 2015, 3.00 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

2015-05-04

2015-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

Gerhard Widmer receives an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC):€ 2.3 million for the project Con Espressione

2015-04-01

2015-04-01T00:00:00+02:00

Arthur Flexer is starting two new projects: Semantic Annotation by Learned Structured and Adaptive Signal Representations and Evolution and Function of the Environmental Protein Sequence Universe.

Dr. Laura Bishop, Ass.-Prof. Dr. Werner Goebl, OFAI, MDW, Wien

2015-03-23T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Laura Bishop, Ass.-Prof. Dr. Werner Goebl
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
Institute of Music Acoustics, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

"MIND READING IN MUSIC ENSEMBLES; QUANTIFYING INTERPERSONAL
COMMUNICATION AND COORDINATION"

Interpersonal communication and the coordination of actions are
fundamental human capacities and central to success on tasks such as
driving a car, playing sports, or playing music as part of an ensemble.
Music ensemble performance is a particularly interesting context for
studying communication and coordination, since the communication is
largely nonverbal and the coordination has to be so precise. We present
two studies aimed at investigating the nonverbal auditory and visual
signals that musicians exchange during ensemble performance to
communicate their intentions and coordinate their actions. In the first
study, pianists performed duets with either violinists or other
pianists as the presence and absence of incoming auditory and visual
signals were manipulated. Participant pianists were found to rely
primarily on the presence of incoming audio signals in order to
synchronize with their duet partners, but also made use of visual
signals â especially at entry and re-entry points in the music,
following long pauses. In the second study, piano-piano, piano-violin,
and violin-violin duos performed passages drawn from the beginnings of
Western classical music pieces, under different 'leader' and 'follower'
assignments. Performers' head movements and violinists' bow hand
movements were tracked using Kinect sensors and accelerometers. We
present preliminary data for this study, which is currently ongoing.
Performers in the 'leader' role are expected to show similar patterns
of head acceleration across pieces during the interval preceeding their
first note onset. Both pianists and violinists are expected to use
head-nodding gestures, and the duration of cueing gestures is expected
to relate to the tempo of the piece. Similar motion patterns may be
found in conductors' gestures and across a range of other instruments.

*********

Time: Monday, 23rd March 2015, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

2015-03-13

2015-03-13T00:00:00+01:00

Sabine Payr is co-organiser of the session on "Robots as Helpers and Companions for Assisted Living" at the European Robotics Forum 2015 in Vienna.

2015-03-12

2015-03-12T00:00:00+01:00

Paolo Petta is invited participant at the Cognitive Robotics in future manufacturing scenarios Open Fishbowl organised by PROFACTOR at the European Robotics Forum 2015 in Vienna.

Priv.-Doz. Dr. Florian Röhrbein, Technical University, Munich

2015-03-10T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Priv.-Doz. Dr. Florian RÃ¶hrbein
Robotics and Embedded Systems
Technical University, Munich, Germany

"NEUROROBOTICS AND THE HUMAN BRAIN PROJECT"

The HBP is one of two European Flagship projects dedicated to long-term
basic research with a planned funding of 1 billion â¬ over 10 years. The
ultimate goal is to gain profound insights into brain functions,
develop new treatments for brain diseases and build entirely new
computing technologies. HBP has three research areas â Neuroscience,
Medicine and Future Computing â and will develop six ICT platforms,
dedicated to Neuroinformatics, Brain Simulation, High Performance
Computing, Medical Informatics, Neuromorphic Computing and
Neurorobotics. HBP is completely open, i.e., these platforms will be
made available to all interested research communities worldwide,
enabling them to profit from each other. Our vision is that interactive
supercomputing, driven by the needs of brain simulation, will impact
many industries. Devices and systems, modelled after the brain, are to
overcome current limits on the energy-efficiency, reliability and
programmability, clearing the road for systems with brain-like
intelligence. The Neurorobotics Platform will offer scientists and
technology developers a software and hardware infrastructure allowing
them to connect prevalidated brain models to detailed simulations of
robot bodies and environments and to use the resulting neurorobotic
systems in in-silico experiments as well as technology development. 

In this talk, I will give an overview of the HBP, outline the goals of
the Neurorobotics subproject, and report on our results achieved in the
first year of the project.

*********

Time: Tuesday, 10th March 2015, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

2015-03-01

2015-03-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the FWF-Project "CHARMinG: Character Mining and Generation" with Robert Trappl as project leader, principle investigators Sabine Payr and Marcin Skowron.

Dr. Lars Kindermann, Alfred Wegener Institut, Bremerhaven

2015-02-19T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Lars Kindermann
Alfred Wegener Institut fÃŒr Polar und Meeresforschung in Bremerhaven.
Mehrere Expeditionen in die Arktis und Antarktis.
PI des Akustik Observatoriums der Neumayer Station, Antarktis.

"UNDERWATER ACOUSTICS IN ANTARCTICA - RECORDING, PROCESSING AND
UNDERSTANDING A DECADE OF CONTINUOUS AUDIO DATA"

The Southern Ocean hosts one of the most diverse underwater soundscapes
of earth. The dynamics of the cryosphere i.e. sea ice, glaciers and
icebergs provide unique acoustic conditions. During polar winter, the
snow covered sea ice shields the ocean from atmospheric influences,
suppresses the creation of waves and resembles an almost perfect
acoustic absorber, thus creating one of the quietest environments of all
oceans. On the other hand, large table icebergs, calved from the
enormous ice sheet of the Antarctic continent, are the largest moving
objects on earth and can accumulate kinetic energy in the terajoule
range when driven by circumpolar currents. This energy is eventually
released when these giants collide - events that create some of the
loudest sounds on earth which can be detected thousands of kilometres
away. However, these are singular events. Typically, the acoustic
environment is dominated by the vocalizations of about 10 species of
seals and whales.

From 2005 till 2014 the autonomous PALAOA observatory on the EckstrÃ¶m
ice shelf, an acoustic hydrophone array deployed through bore holes into
the ocean under a 100m thick ice sheet produced almost a decade of
continuous underwater audio recordings. They are collected in the
PANGAEA data centre of the Alfred Wegener Institute and are published
under open access license.

Most remarkable, a permanent chorus of blue whales represents the
dominant peak of the whole acoustic spectrum, audible during every
single minute of the year. The second largest source of acoustic energy
has just recently been identified by us as Antarctic Minke whales -
which became famous as the main target of todayâs controversially
discussed "scientific whaling". The PALAOA recordings in fact contain
tenth of thousands of hours of the strange vocalizations of these
elusive animals.

Very little is known about their ecology yet, even estimates of their
population size differ between 300.000 and 1.2 million. The current
"research", based on killing annually about 800 of these animals, did
not produce many significant results yet. Our hope is that the acoustic
records contain a wealth of information about the whales, possibly
allowing to study sensory physiology, behaviour, communication and
migration patterns - without even having to look at them. So we aim to
develop methods based on machine learning and automated reasoning to
explore this enormous amount of data.


*********


Time: Thursday, 19th February 2015, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

OFAI/OSGK anniversary celebration

2014-12-16T00:00:00+01:00

Celebration event of the 30 years anniversary of OFAI and the 45 years anniversary of OSGK at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on 2014-12-16. The programme is available as PDF document .

OFAI/OSGK anniversary celebration

2014-12-16T00:00:00+01:00

Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos; wegen der beschraenkten Platzzahl wird um umgehende Anmeldung
an Tel.: 0043 (1) 5336112-17 oder Email: sec@ofai.at gebeten.

EINLADUNG ZUR FESTVERANSTALTUNG
-------------------------------

anlaesslich des 30. Geburtstages des Oesterr. Forschungsinstituts fÃŒr Artificial Intelligence
und des 45. Jahrestages der Gruendung der Oesterr. Studiengesellschaft fÃŒr Kybernetik
am Dienstag, den 16. Dezember 2014 um 14:00 Uhr
im historischen Festsaal der Oesterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Wien 1., Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2.

PROGRAMM

14:00 Uhr âHer" Film von Spike Jonze, Oscar-Preistraeger 2014 fÃŒr Drehbuch

14:05 Uhr Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl
Leiter des Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstituts fÃŒr
Artificial Intelligence (OFAI):
Eine dreissigjaehrige Erfolgsgeschichte

14:25 Uhr Priv.-Doz. Mag. Dr. Sabine Payr, OFAI:
OFAI und das lange Leben

14:40 Uhr Mag. Dr. Friedrich Neubarth, OFAI,
Mag. Dr. Barbara Haider:
Barockmusik fÃŒr Blockfloeten

14:45 Uhr Jan Schlueter, MSc, OFAI:
Kuenstliches Musikverstehen: von der Forschungsfrage zum
Bestseller

15:00 Uhr Mag. Dr. Arthur Flexer, OFAI:
My Big Fat Data

15:15 Uhr Univ.-Prof. Dr. Gerhard Widmer, OFAI und Johannes
Kepler Universitaet, Linz
DI Andreas Arzt, OFAI und Johannes Kepler Universitaet,
Linz
Ass.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Werner Goebl, OFAI und Universitaet
fÃŒr Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Wien:
Artificial Intelligence im Concertgebouw

15:50 Uhr Kaffeepause

16:10 Uhr Mag. Dr. Brigitte Krenn, OFAI:
Sprachtechnologie: auch fÃŒr Start-ups

16:25 Uhr Mag. Dr. Marcin Skowron, OFAI:
Emotions in Cyberspace

16:40 Uhr Mag. Dr. Friedrich Neubarth, OFAI,
Mag. Dr. Barbara Haider:
Renaissancemusik fÃŒr Blockfloeten

16:45 Uhr DI Dr. Paolo Petta, OFAI:
Softwareagenten: Emotional und praktisch

17:00 Uhr Tamas Madl, MSc, OFAI:
Spatial Memory in Brains and Robots

17:15 Uhr Carlos Eduardo Cancino ChacÃ³n, MSc, OFAI:
Klavier

17.20 Uhr Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl, OFAI:
New Answers for No Questions

17:50 Uhr Tanz

17:55 Uhr Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl, OFAI:
Zusammenfassung und Ausblick

18:00 Uhr Buffetempfang in der Aula der Akademie

Luis Jure, Lic, Universidad de la República, Uruguay

2014-12-12T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Luis Jure, Lic
Full Professor
Escuela Universitaria de MÃºsica
Universidad de la RepÃºblica, Uruguay
http://www.eumus.edu.uy/eme/
https://iie.fing.edu.uy/investigacion/grupos/gpa/

"TOOLS FOR DETECTION AND CLASSIFICATION OF PIANO DRUM PATTERNS
FROM CANDOMBE RECORDINGS"

The African-rooted Candombe drumming is one of the most characteristic
traits of Uruguayan culture, and its complex rhythm can sound difficult
to decode for unfamiliar listeners. In this talk we present tools for
detailed analysis of the rhythmic patterns of each type of drum found in
Candombe performances. Given a recording with annotated metrical
structures, the first tool constructs a map of bar-length patterns that
enables the inspection of their evolution over time; the second tool
clusters those patterns, and maps the result onto a low dimensional
space for visualization. Several tests were applied to the analysis of
real piano drum performances as a case study, and the obtained clusters
match characteristic patterns of the instrument, also revealing
differences and similarities among schools or personal styles. The
output of this investigation is an interactive software tool for the
analysis of Candombe recordings oriented towards the study of the
underlying structures and rules governing performance styles and
improvisation.


*********


Time: Friday, 12th December 2014, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2014-10-01

2014-10-01T00:00:00+02:00

Start of the FWF-Project "HIGHDIM - High-dimensional data analysis in music information retrieval", with Arthur Flexer as project leader.

2014-09-12

2014-09-12T00:00:00+02:00

Best Poster Award for "Design Pattern Canvas: Towards Co-Creation Of Unified Serious Game Design Patterns" by Gregor Žavcer, Simon Mayr and Paolo Petta (Intelligent Software Agents and New Media Group) at the Sixth International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications held at the University of Malta.

2014-09-01

2014-09-01T00:00:00+02:00

Start of the FFG-Project potenziAAL - Potential and Limits of Present-Day Robotics in Ambient Assisted Living, supported by the BMVIT, with project leader and principle investigator Sabine Payr at OFAI and Franz Werner, principle investigator at our cooperating partner RALTEC, Vienna.

2014-07-16

2014-07-16T00:00:00+02:00

Start of the project Cognitive-Emotive Robotics for Supporting Autobiographic Storytelling with Robert Trappl as project leader, principle investigator Sabine Payr and senior researcher Marcin Skowron …

Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel, University of Western Sydney

2014-07-10T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel
The MARCS Institute
University of Western Sydney

"THE CLAUSTRUM'S PROPOSED ROLE IN CONSCIOUSNESS" 

We bring together three findings and ideas relevant for the
understanding of human consciousness: (I) Crickâs and Kochâs theory
that the claustrum is a "conductor of consciousness" crucial for
subjective conscious experience. (II) Subjective reports of the
consciousness-altering effects of the plant Salvia divinorum, whose
primary active ingredient is salvinorin A, a Îº-opioid receptor agonist.
(III) The high density of Îº-opioid receptors in the claustrum. Fact III
suggests that the consciousness-altering effects of
S. divinorum/salvinorin A (II) are due to a Îº-opioid receptor mediated
inhibition of primarily the claustrum and, additionally, the deep
layers of the cortex, mainly in prefrontal areas. Consistent with Crick
and Kochâs theory that the claustrum plays a key role in consciousness
(I), the subjective effects of S. divinorum indicate that salvia
disrupts certain facets of consciousness much more than the largely
serotonergic hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Based on
this data and on the relevant literature, we suggest that the claustrum
does indeed serve as a conductor for certain aspects of higher-order
integration of brain activity, while integration of auditory and visual
signals relies more on coordination by other areas including parietal
cortex and the pulvinar.


*********


Time: Thursday, 10th July 2014, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2014-05-22

2014-05-22T00:00:00+02:00

Robert Trappl gives the Keynote Speech at the Official Foundation of the Austrian Robotics Platform at the University of Linz, Austria.

2014-04-25

2014-04-25T00:00:00+02:00

Robert Trappl is re-elected President of the International Academy of Systems and Cybernetic Sciences (IASCYS) for a four year period. The elected Vice-Presidents are Ranulph Glanville (England), Jifa Gu (China) and Matjaz Mulej (Slovenia); Secretary-General is Pierre Bricage (France).

Prof. Mario Bunge, PhD, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

2014-04-24T00:00:00+02:00

                                V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
in cooperation with 
the Middle European interdisciplinary Joint Master Program in Cognitive
Science, University of Vienna, and 
the Cognitive Science Research Platform, University of Vienna, and
the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, Vienna

Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

PLEASE REGISTER YOUR ATTENDANCE IN ADVANCE AT sec@ofai.at!
THE ATTENDANCE IS FREE OF CHARGE.

PROF. MARIO BUNGE, PHD, FRSC
Professor Emeritus in Philosophy
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

"THE PERSISTENCE OF THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM"

The mind-body problem has been discussed for three millennia.
At least five answers to it have been proposed: (a) mind is immaterial
and rules over matter; (b) mental processes are brain processes;
(c) mind and matter have separate existences and are parallel
to one another; (d) mind and brain are separate but interact with one
another; (e) there is only one kind of entity, which is neither
material nor spiritual but neutral.

I submit that (a) each of the above theses should be examined along
with the ontological (metaphysical) system they belong to, rather than
in isolation; and (b) each doctrine on the nature of he mental should
be evaluated by its heuristic value.

I also suggest that the materialist thesis first proposed by Alcmaeon
is the one inherent in cognitive neuroscience, whereas the view that
the mind is a set of computer programs is a version of Platonism and
moreover incapable of explaining spontaneity and creativity, as well 
as devoid of interest to the mental health professionals. I also claim
that this thesis is not to be confused with eliminative materialism,
the thesis that there are no mental processes. Finally, I argue that
the contemporary science of the mind is not a chapter of biology, but 
a result of the fusion of several sciences: that it is psycho-neuro-
immuno-endocrino-sociology.

*********
Time: Thursday, 24th April 2014, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl
*********

2014-03-26

2014-03-26T00:00:00+01:00

CP&OFAI Score-Performance Alignment Technology integrated into Issue # 5 (on Beethoven's 3rd Symphony) of the e-magazine RCO Editions (iPad-based e-magazine by the world-famous Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam).

Joscha Bach, PhD, MIT Media Lab

2014-03-20T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Joscha Bach, PhD
MIT Media Lab
joscha@mit.edu

"THE MACHINE OF DESIRE: HOW TO CONSTRUCT A MOTIVATIONAL SYSTEM" 

Computational models of cognition usually focus on goal directed
problem solving, representations and learning. But human cognition is
not just concerned with reaching goals: humans are goal-finding
systems, too. What mechanisms can give rise to the multitude of
different behaviors and trajectories of a mind? Universally applicable
intelligence is closely tied to criteria for universal
goal-identification and decision making. Let us discuss some of the
requirements for a minimal solution to the problem of universal motivation.

Short biography:

Joscha studied computer science and philosophy at Berlin's Humboldt
University and Waikato University (New Zealand), and obtained his PhD
from the Institute of Cognitive Science in OsnabrÃŒck. He is interested
in using artificial intelligence as a tool to understand the mind, and
his work is mostly concerned with modeling representation, motivation
and affect in the cognitive architecture MicroPsi.

*********

Time: Thursday, 20th March 2014, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2013-12-01

2013-12-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the FFG Project "ACCIA -- Automated Coding and Categorizing of Innovation Areas", in cooperation with winnovation consulting gmbh, Gertraud Leimüller, with Brigitte Krenn as project leader.

Luis Jure, Lic, Universidad de la República, Uruguay

2013-11-19T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Luis Jure, Lic
Full Professor
Escuela Universitaria de MÃºsica
Universidad de la RepÃºblica, Uruguay
http://www.eumus.edu.uy/eme/
https://iie.fing.edu.uy/investigacion/grupos/gpa/

"RHYTHMIC PATTERN ANALYSIS: THE URUGUAYAN CANDOMBE DRUMMING AS A CASE STUDY"

Computational analysis of the rhythmic/metrical structure of music
from audio signals is a well-known and important research topic in
music information retrieval. Most existing automatic methods follow a
bottom-up approach with little prior knowledge about the genre of the
music under analysis. Therefore, their attainable performance is
limited: they are typically unable to cope with music outside the
western music tradition, exhibiting for instance syncopation or
polyrhythmics. In this work, the Uruguayan Candombe drumming, an
afro-rooted rhythm from Latin America, is considered as a case study.
The characteristics that make it troublesome for typical algorithmic
approaches are analysed and its repetitive rhythmic patterns are
described. Then a supervised scheme for rhythmic pattern tracking
aiming at finding the metric structure from an audio signal, including
the phase of the beat, is proposed to tackle the Candombe analysis.
The performance of the method is evaluated and compared with those of
other beat tracking algorithms through a set of experiments involving
synthetic sample-based audio signals as well as excerpts from real
music recordings. The results of this work highlight the need for
style-specific techniques for music analysis, particularly for
non-western genres, and point out some directions for future research. 

*********

Time: Tuesday, 19th November 2013, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl, OFAI, Wien

2013-11-12T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)

"ETHIK FUER ROBOTER - EIN BRISANTES FORSCHUNGSGEBIET"

Wenn Roboter Partner am Arbeitsplatz werden oder wenn sie fuer laengere
Zeit mit aelteren Menschen oder Menschen mit speziellen Beduerfnissen
zusammenleben werden, um ihnen ein selbstbestimmtes Leben in ihren
eigenen Raeumen zu ermoeglichen, werden durch diese komplexen sozialen
Situationen immer haeufiger ethische Fragen und deren Beantwortung eine
Rolle spielen.

Ende September 2013 sind daher auf Einladung des Oesterreichischen
Forschungsinstituts fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) auf diesem
Gebiet arbeitende Wissenschafter/innen aus Frankreich, den
Niederlanden, Oesterreich, Portugal, Ungarn und den USA in Wien
zusammengekommen, um Voraussetzungen, Methoden, Implementierungen und
Tests fÃŒr ein Entwicklungshandbuch fÃŒr ethische Systeme fÃŒr Roboter zu
diskutieren.

In diesem Vortrag wird zunaechst eine Einfuehrung in dieses
Forschungsgebiet gegeben und dann sollen erste Ergebnisse praesentiert werden. 


*********

Zeit: Dienstag, 12. November 2013, 18:30 pktl.

Ort:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

Bob L. Sturm, Ph.D., Aalborg University Copenhagen

2013-10-30T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Bob L. Sturm, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Audio Analysis Lab, AD:MT
Aalborg University Copenhagen
http://media.aau.dk/null_space_pursuits/

"THE CRISIS OF EVALUATION IN MIR"

I critically address the "crisis of evaluation" in music information
retrieval (MIR), with particular emphasis paid to music genre recognition,
music mood recognition, and autotagging. I demonstrate four things: 
1) many published results unknowingly use datasets with faults that
render them meaningless; 2) state-of-the-art ("high classification
accuracy") systems are fooled by irrelevant factors; 3) most published
results are based upon an invalid evaluation design; and 4) a lot of
work has unknowingly built, tuned, tested, compared and advertised
"horses" instead of solutions. (The example of the horse Clever Hans
provides an appropriate illustration.) 
I argue these problems occur because: 1) many researchers assume a
dataset is a good dataset because many others use it; 2)many researchers
assume evaluation that is standard in machine learning or
information retrieval are useful and relevant for MIR; 3) many
researchers mistake systematic, rigorous, and standardized evaluation
for being scientific evaluation; and 4) problems and success criteria
remain ill-defined, and thus evaluation poor, because researchers do
not define appropriate use cases. I show how this "crisis of evaluation"
can be addressed by formalizing evaluation in MIR to make clear its
aims, parts, design, execution, interpretation, and assumptions. I also
present several alternative evaluation approaches that can separate
horses from solutions. 


*********

Time: Wednesday, 30th October 2013, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

Aggelos Gkiokas, MSc, Athena Research Center, Athens, Greece

2013-10-21T00:00:00+02:00

                                V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Aggelos Gkiokas, MSc
Institute for Language and Speech Processing
Athena Research Center, Athens, Greece 

"APPLYING RHYTHMIC FEATURES TO MUSIC INFORMATION RETRIEVAL:
TEMPO, BEAT AND MOVING BEYOND"

Most of the effort in automated rhythm analysis of music has been
concentrated on the tempo estimation and beat tracking tasks. Although
tempo and beat per se have a very important role in the MIR field, there
is a wealth of information from the intermediate stages that can be
explored in other problems. In particular, intermediate level
characteristics of the tempo and beat prove to be valuable descriptors,
which can be deployed to tackle higher level of abstraction problems,
such as music segmentation, rhythm similarity, genre classification and
meter extraction.

The talk will be organized in three sections. The first section involves
a detailed presentation of block-level computations for the estimation
of these intermediate features. Next, we present methods for the
estimation of tempo and beat that are based on these features. The third
section is concentrated on the exploitation of these descriptors to
tackle other higher level problems mentioned above.

*********

Time: Monday, 21st October 2013, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

2013-10-01

2013-10-01T00:00:00+02:00

Start of the EU-Project "Learning to Create" (Lrn2Cre8) lead by Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, GB, OFAI's contribution as partner carried out by Gerhard Widmer, Maarten Grachten, Stefan Lattner and Carlos Cancino Chacon.

2013-08-29 - 31

2013-08-29T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn is co-chair of the 13th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA2013, Edinburgh,UK). See call for papers.

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl, OFAI, Wien

2013-08-12T00:00:00+02:00

                    B U C H P R A E S E N T A T I O N
                   ***********************************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at


"IHR KUENSTLICHER BUTLER"
Die Vorstellung eines neuen Buches


In den meisten Zukunftsszenarien von Haushalten ist ein kuenstlicher
Butler anzutreffen, entweder in Form eines komplexen Programmes in
einem Computer oder als Roboter. Einfache autonome Butler gibt es ja
schon, etwa Staubsaugerroboter oder Roboter, die Schwimmbecken
algenfrei halten. Wie sieht aber der Weg von der Gegenwart zu "echten"
kuenstlichen Butlern aus, die geeignet waeren, nicht nur aelteren Menschen
ein selbstaendiges Leben in ihrer gewohnten Umgebung zu ermoeglichen
sondern unser aller Leben und das zukuenftiger Generationen wesentlich
zu erleichtern?

Ein neues Buch beschaeftigt sich mit diesem Thema: "Your Virtual Butler.
The Making-of", erschienen 2013 im Springer-Verlag, Berlin und
Heidelberg.

Der Herausgeber des Buches, Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl, stellt
die in diesem Buch praesentierten Forschungsergebnisse und -ueberlegungen
vor und freut sich, Fragen zu beantworten.


*********

Zeit: Montag, 12. August 2013, 18:30 pktl.

Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Dr. Stefan Scherer, Playa Vista, California, USA

2013-07-16T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Stefan Scherer
USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Playa Vista, California, USA
http://ict.usc.edu/profile/stefan-scherer/

"AUTOMATIC AUDIOVISUAL BEHAVIOR DESCRIPTORS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDER
ANALYSIS WITHIN VIRTUAL HUMAN INTERACTIONS"

We investigate the capabilities of automatic nonverbal behavior
analysis to identify indicators of psychological disorders such as
depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. We seek to
confirm and enrich present state of the art, predominantly based on
qualitative manual annotations, with automatic quantitative behavior
descriptors. We propose nonverbal behavior descriptors that can be
automatically estimated from audiovisual signals, including facial
expressions, gestures, and acoustic characteristics.


We introduce a new dataset called the Distress Assessment Interview Corpus
(DAIC) which comprises 100+ interactions between a virtual human designed
for psychological screening and a participant. Our evaluation on this
dataset shows correlation of automatic behavior descriptors with specific
psychological disorders as well as a generic distress measure. We
investigate the capability of automatic algorithms to classify distressed
behaviors in speaker-independent experiments. Additionally, we examine the
impact of the posed questions' affective polarity, as motivated by
findings in the literature on positive stimulus attenuation and negative
stimulus potentiation in emotional reactivity of psychologically
distressed participants.

*********

Time: Tuesday, 16th July 2013, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

2013-06-26

2013-06-26T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn is invited to contribute to the Workshop "Wearing a Sound Perfume" exploring the relationships between fashion and new technologies at MAK Fashion Lab …

Prof. Dr. Miroslav Kubat, University of Miami, U. S. A.

2013-06-18T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Prof.Dr. Miroslav Kubat 
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering 
University of Miami, U.S.A.

"MULTI-LABEL HIERARCHICAL CLASSIFICATION"

Perhaps the most common machine-learning task is induction of
classifiers from pre-classified training examples described by vectors
or attribute values. The classifier's task is then to label a future
object with the (single) class it belongs to. In many realistic
domains, however, such object belongs to several classes at the same
time; moreover there can be thousands of different classes, and they
are often inter-related in ways captured by generalization trees or DAG
graphs. What we need, then, is a Multi-Label Hierarchical Classifier.
This, however, brings about certain difficulties that need to be
understood. 
The talk discusses the problem of performance evaluation in
domains of this kind, and then describes a novel system based on the
now-popular support-vector machines. Experiments with real-world
domains from the field of gene-function prediction then illustrate
diverse aspects of this tool. 

*********

Time: Tuesday, 18th June 2013, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

gateplugin-AppDoc

2013-05-16T00:00:00+02:00

NOTE: this is the GitHub repo for a plugin that was originally on Google Code https://code.google.com/archive/p/gateplugin-appdoc/ and has been last updated in 2013!

This is a plugin for the GATE language technology framework that makes it easy to document GATE controllers and processing resources:

In the GATE Developer GUI, adds a new visual resource for controllers and processing resources which allows to add author, version and comment information for the resource.
In the GATE Developer GUI, adds a new visual resource for controllers that allows to configure and initiate the documentation generation
Provides a command that can be used to generate documentation for an existing pipeline file outside of the GATE GUI.
Extracts JapeDoc from JAPE files in way similar to how JavaDoc is extracted from Java programs.
Generates all documentation with the help of arbitrary templates that can be extended or created by the user. The template approach can be used to generate the documentation in any textual format.
Comes with basic example templates for generating documentation in HTML, LaTeX, and RTF format.

Als die Kuenstliche Intelligenz laufen lernte

2013-04-09T00:00:00+02:00

                                V I D E O
                         **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

"ALS DIE KUENSTLICHE INTELLIGENZ LAUFEN LERNTE"

Eine Produktion der Extrafilm
Regie und Konzept: Nadja Seelich
Kamera: Bernd Neuburger
Schnitt: Kirk van Heflin
Musik: Zdenek Merta

Gefoerdert von Medienservice, bm:ukk und VAM

Dauer: ca. eine Stunde

Ein allgemeinverstaendlicher Ueberblick ueber einige Gebiete der Artificial
Intelligence anhand von Projekten, praesentiert u.a. von WissenschafterInnen
aus Wien, vor allem aus dem OFAI und der TU Wien.


*********

Zeit: Dienstag, 9. April 2013, 18:30 pktl.

Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl, MBA

*********

2013-04-01

2013-04-01T00:00:00+02:00

Start of the FWF Project "Spatial Memory and Navigation Ability in a Physically Embodied Cognitive Architecture" with Robert Trappl as project leader, Thomas Madl as main researcher and Paolo Petta as cooperating scientist.

Feasibility Studie: Use of Language Technology for Targeting Innovation

2013-04-01T00:00:00+02:00

Start of the FFG Project "Feasibility Studie: Use of Language Technology for Targeting Innovation" with Brigitte Krenn as project leader.

2013-03-20

2013-03-20T00:00:00+01:00

The book "Your Virtual Butler. The Making-of", edited by Robert Trappl, is published by Springer Publishers Heidelberg and Berlin, with contributions by several international researchers among them Sabine Payr, Stefan Rank and the Editor, all members of OFAI.

Nenad Tomasev, Jozef Stefan Institute Ljubljana, Slovenia

2013-02-28T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Nenad Tomasev
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Jozef Stefan Institute
Ljubljana, Slovenia 

"THE ROLE OF HUBS IN HIGH-DIMENSIONAL DATA ANALYSIS"

Many important data types are inherently high-dimensional, as they
require many features to be properly represented. This includes, but
is not limited to: text, images, sensor data, music/audio files, etc.
Analyzing such high-dimensional data is known to be difficult, for
many reasons. Sparsity might be the most obvious problem, though there
are other, more subtle issues at hand. Inherently high-dimensional
data gives rise to hubs, very influential points in the k-nearest
neighbor topology. Hub-points are retrieved very often during
similarity search, while most other points receive little to no
attention during the learning process. This skewed distribution of
influence affects many data mining methods, often in very negative
ways.  We will show some initial steps that we have been taking
towards designing hubness-aware data mining and machine learning
methods. This includes classification, clustering and metric learning.


*********

Time: Thursday, 28th February 2013, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl, MBA


*********

The Development of Behavior- and Action-Maxims for Robots in Social Environments

2013-02-18T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the Project "The Development of Behavior- and Action-Maxims for Robots in Social Environments", supported by the BMVIT, with Robert Trappl as project leader …

2013-02-18

2013-02-18T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the Project "The Development of Behavior- and Action-Maxims for Robots in Social Environments", supported by the BMVIT, with Robert Trappl as project leader …

Bob L. Sturm, Ph.D., Aalborg University Copenhagen

2013-02-14T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Bob L. Sturm, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Audio Analysis Lab, AD:MT
Aalborg University Copenhagen
http://media.aau.dk/null_space_pursuits/

"SPARSE APPROXIMATION IN SIGNAL PROCESSING AND MACHINE LEARNING"

I provide a broad overview of sparse approximation, and a variety of
its applications to signal processing and machine learning with a focus
on sound and music. In one sense, sparse approximation allows a
flexibility in the decomposition of signals. One can define a
dictionary of several types of functions with which to linearly express
any signal. This has application in, for example, compression,
visualization, and source separation. In another sense, sparse
approximation allows a flexibility in the description of signals. This
technique has applications in, for example, music transcription, source
identification, and music genre recognition. Finally, I end with a
public service announcement of reproducible research.


*********

Time: Thursday, 14th February 2013, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl, MBA


*********

Start of Project Automatic Segmentation, Labelling, and Characterisation of Audio Streams

2013-02-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the FWF Project Automatic Segmentation, Labelling, and Characterisation of Audio Streams with Gerhard Widmer as project leader and Thomas Grill and Jan Schlüter as main researchers.

2013-02-01

2013-02-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the EU-Project Performances as Highly Enriched and Interactive Concert Experiences (PHENICX) lead by Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, OFAI's contribution as partner carried out by Gerhard Widmer, Maarten Grachten and Martin Gasser.

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl, OFAI, Wien

2013-01-31T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI) der OSGK
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)

"THE HUMAN BRAIN PROJECT"
Ein Ueberblick ÃŒber das soeben bewilligte FET Flagship der Europaeischen Union,
seine Entwicklung und seine wahrscheinliche Zukunft

Ziel: "Das Ziel des HBP ist die Entwicklung einer voellig neuen
IKT-Infrastruktur fÃŒr die zukuenftigen Neurowissenschaften, die
zukuenftige Medizin und die Zukunft des Computings, die als Katalysator
fuer eine globale Zusammenarbeit zum Verstaendnis des menschlichen
Gehirns und seiner Krankheiten dienen und letztlich zur Nachbildung
seiner computationalen Faehigkeiten fuehren soll."

In diesem Vortrag wird ueber das heute, den 28. JÃ€nner 2013, von der
zustaendigen EU-Kommissarin Neelie Kroes als einen der beiden Gewinner
der Ausschreibung fuer ein 10 Jahre Laufzeit und 500 Mio Euro Foerderung
der EC vorgestellte FET Flagship naeher informiert:

Im ersten Teil ÃŒber Struktur des Projektes, Ziele wie z.B. die
Modellierung der Vielebenen-Organisation des Gehirns der Maus und der des 
Menschen, Methoden, insbesondere die IKT-basierten
Forschungsplattformen, und Plaene zur Erreichung dieser Ziele sowie
Einwaende und Probleme.

Im zweiten Teil soll ausfuehrlicher auf den Bereich der Neurorobotik und,
falls Zeit bleibt, auf den der kognitiven Strukturen eingegangen werden.

Der Vortragende ist einer der vier Professoren aus Oesterreich, die an
der Ausarbeitung des Projektantrages beteiligt waren. Neben Robert
Trappl vom OFAI/OSGK, der am "Pillar Neurorobotics" mitgearbeitet hat,
sind dies Peter Jonas vom IST-Austria, Wolfgang Maass von der TU Graz,
und Alois Saria von der Med. Uni Innsbruck.



*********

Zeit: Donnerstag, 31. Jaenner 2013, 18:30 pktl.

Ort:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl, MBA


*********

Human Brain Project accepted

2013-01-28T00:00:00+01:00

The ten year "Human Brain Project" Flagship Proposal is accepted by the European Commission, with Robert Trappl and OFAI as Consortium member.

2012-11-28

2012-11-28T00:00:00+01:00

Robert Trappl's Graduation to "Master of Business Administration (MBA)" after the successful completion of a four semester master study program.

2012-11-01

2012-11-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the FWF Project Performing Together: Synchronisation and Communication in Music Ensembles with Werner Goebl as project leader and Laura Bishop and Gerald Golka as main researchers.

perl-GATE

2012-10-29T00:00:00+01:00

This library was created as part of the SEMPRE project.

This module makes it possible to create, read, modify, and write GATE documents from within perl and use the abstractions for document content, document annotation sets, annotations, and annotation features in a way very similar to the JAVA API.

Here is an overview of the current features and limitations:

Create a GATE document from a string
De-serialize the XML representation of GATE documents
Create a XML serialization of a GATE document
Handle annotation sets, annotations, annotation spans, and features
Only supports documents and feature values encoded in UTF8
Only supports feature values of type java.lang.String.
Features and offsets are stored directly with annotations, not in separate data structures (nodes, feature sets)

Dr. Thomas Grill, OFAI, Wien

2012-10-23T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Thomas Grill
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)

"WAHRNEHMUNGSORIENTIERTE ORGANISATION VON TEXTURKLAENGEN"

Dieser Vortrag praesentiert grundlegende Forschung ueber die
praxisorientierte Organisation von digitalen Klaengen, in Bezug auf
Charakterisierung, Modellierung und Visualisierung. Zentral ist die
Orientierung dieser Techniken an der menschlichen Wahrnehmung. Der
Fokus liegt auf texturhaften Klaengen, die einen bedeutenden Stellenwert
in der elektroakustischen Komposition bzw. "sound-based music" haben.

Drei wesentliche Fragestellungen werden behandelt:
- Welche Charakteristika texturhafter Klaenge sind fuer deren
  Beschreibung bzw. Unterscheidung relevant?
- Wie koennen diese charakteristischen Eigenschaften gemessen werden?
- Wie koennen Texturklaenge (bzw. Sammlungen davon) visuell
  repraesentiert werden?

Als Anwendungsbeispiel wird ein prototypischer Klang-Browser demonstriert.
Intuitive Interfaces zum Zugriff auf Klangsammlungen basierend auf den
praesentierten Forschungsergebnissen koennen wesentlich zu neuartigen
elektronischen Musikinstrumenten oder Kompositionstools beitragen.


*********

Zeit: Dienstag, 23. Oktober 2012, 18:30 pktl.

Ort:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2012-10-12

2012-10-12T00:00:00+02:00

The paper A MIREX Meta-analysis of Hubness in Audio Music Similarity by Flexer, Schnitzer, Schlüter received the Best Paper Award at the ISMIR 2012 Conference …

2012-10-01

2012-10-01T00:00:00+02:00

Start of the FEMtech FTI Project FemSMA -- Automatisierte, gendersensible Verfahren zum Ausbau von Social Media Analysen als EDV-gestützte Forschungsmethodik.

Elaine Raybourn, Ph.D., Sandia National Laboratories, Orlando, Florida, USA

2012-09-25T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Elaine Raybourn, Ph.D.
Sandia National Laboratories, and Advanced Distributed Learning
Initiative, Orlando, Florida, USA

"TRANSMEDIA APPROACHES TO NEXT GENERATION LEARNER RESEARCH"

This presentation will describe the Next Generation Learner research
program of the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative. Our research
employs transmedia storytelling principles as a unifying construct for
projects investigating cognitive adaptability, intelligent tutoring,
serious games, and virtual worlds. Dr. Raybourn will discuss these
projects and provide a practical framework for incorporating
transmedia into training and education.

Dr. Elaine Raybourn has led award-winning computer game research in
multi-role experiential learning, social simulations, and designing
training systems that stimulate intercultural communication competence,
and adaptive thinking.

Currently Elaine is on assignment from Sandia National Labs to the
Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative which is part of the Office of
the Deputy Secretary of Defense (Readiness) where she leads research
teams investigating next generation learners' cognitive adaptability
and interactions with future learning technology.

*********

Zeit: Tuesday, 25th September 2012, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Ort:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2012-09-21

2012-09-21T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI hosts the First International Workshop on Language Technology for Historical Text(s) LThist 2012.

2012-09-19 - 21

2012-09-19T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI supports the 11th Conference on Natural Language Processing (Konvens 2012, Vienna, Austria).

Prof. Chihab Hanachi, Toulouse 1 University, France

2012-09-06T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Prof. Chihab HANACHI
Toulouse 1 University and IRIT Laboratory, France

"BUSINESS PROCESS FLEXIBILITY: VISITING NEW TRENDS AND OPEN ISSUES"

Workflow Systems (WSs) aim at automating business processes modeled
through three complementary and interconnected models: behavioral,
organizational and informational. WSs used to be limited to support
well-structured administrative procedures, involving simple interactions
between participants (e.g. delegation) within a single organization.
Nowadays, workflow systems and approaches (also called Business Process
Management, BPM) coordinate inter-organizational processes, have to be
coupled to other technologies (CLOUDS, SOA, ...), and are applied to a
variety of fields such as medical protocols, electronic institutions, or
crisis management. In these new dynamic and distributed environments,
new requirements have to be met to support changes, uncertainty and
exceptional situations. Notably, they should support process
adaptiveness and flexibility and high-level interactions between
participants, both at design time and run time.

This presentation visits existing solutions to meet these requirements
and discuss some open issues. More precisely, we will present:

- A brief overview of the principles of workflow and BPM;
- Flexibility in workflow design: from procedural workflows to emerging
  ones. How can agent technology help?
- Deontic processes to express permissions, obligations and prohibitions.
- Flexibility in workflow enactment: case handling, deviation, versioning, ...
- Inter-leaving processes and interaction protocols for social BPM.
- Process Mining to adapt BPM models.


*********

Zeit: Thursday, 6th September 2012, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Ort:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

Lisa Szugfil, MSc, OFAI, Wien

2012-07-04T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Lisa Szugfil, MSc
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)

"INTERAKTIVES ENTERTAINMENT AELTERER MENSCHEN MITTELS INTELLIGENTER
 UND EMOTIONALER SOFTWAREAGENTEN"

In den meisten Aufzaehlungen der Vorzuege von virtuellen Butler oder
anderen technischen Begleitern für aeltere Personen fehlt ein Aspekt:
Spiele. Spiele koennen auf jeden Fall zwei Aufgaben erfuellen: Erstens,
sie koennen diese Personen unterhalten, sie koennen sie amuesieren und
diese Personen koennen dadurch gluecklicher werden. Zweitens, koennen
Spiele emotionale und kognitive Faehigkeiten trainieren.
Wir haben daher ein interaktives Spiel mit einem emotionalen
Softwareagenten entwickelt. Die Entwicklung dieses Spiels sowie die
Ergebnisse der Interaktion mit aelteren Menschen werden praesentiert.


*********

Zeit: Mittwoch, 4. Juli 2012, 18:30 pktl.

Ort:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2012-06-21

2012-06-21T00:00:00+02:00

Thomas Grill defends his dissertation (with distinction) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.

2012-05-22

2012-05-22T00:00:00+02:00

Start of the Project "Self-Awareness und User-Awareness durch TOM und Empathie" with Robert Trappl as project leader.

Wolperdinger article

2012-05-14T00:00:00+02:00

ORF Online article on the "Wolperdinger" large scale music recommendation prototype developed by Dominik Schnitzer. A radio interview on "Wolperdinger" was aired on ORF OE1 …

2012-05-14 - 15

2012-05-14T00:00:00+02:00

Paolo Petta contributes to the Human-Computer Confluence Research Challenges (HC² VISIONS) research agenda solicitation action workshop.

2012-05-11

2012-05-11T00:00:00+02:00

nature.com publishes the scientific report article, Emotional persistence in online chatting communities, co-authored by Marcin Skowron in the context of the CYBEREMOTIONS EU FET project.

Dr. Dominik Schnitzer, OFAI, Wien

2012-05-02T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Dominik Schnitzer
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)

"Dealing with the Music of the World - Automatische Musikempfehlung in
Millionen von Musikstuecken"

Im Vortrag wird ein voll einsatzfaehiges automatisches
Musikempfehlungssystem demonstriert. Der vorgestellte Prototyp ist in
der Lage innerhalb von Sekundenbruchteilen Musikempfehlungen in sehr
großen Sammlungen (> 1 Million) zu generieren. Bei der Suche nach
Empfehlungen wird vom Computer nur das Audiosignal der Musikstuecke
betrachtet, es wird dabei keine weitere Information verwendet.

Zur Entwicklung des Systems mussten drei Probleme geloest werden:
 * Wie kann man die nicht-vektoriellen Musikaehnlichkeitsmodelle mit
ihren nicht-metrischen Divergenzen korrekt in Algorithmen verwenden,
die den Zentroiden berechnen?

 * Wie kann man das "Hub"-Problem der verwendeten Algorithmen
verringern? Hubs sind spezielle Objekte in einem Empfehlungssystem,
die aufgrund eines mathematischen Problems ungewoehnlich oft empfohlen
werden. Durch ihr haeufiges Auftreten in den Empfehlungen verringern
sie die Qualitaet des Systems.

 * Wie kann man die Musikempfehlungsberechnung beschleunigen, sodass
sie auf Datenbanken mit Millionen von Musikstuecken verwendet werden
kann?

Drei Loesungen werden vorgestellt und im entwickelten Prototypen
verwendet. Der Prototyp ("Wolperdinger") arbeitet zur Zeit auf einer
Sammlung von 2.3 Millionen Musikstuecken und ist imstande Empfehlungen
im Bruchteil einer Sekunde zu berechnen.

*********

Zeit: Mittwoch, 2. Mai 2012, 18:30 pktl.

Ort:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2012-04-25

2012-04-25T00:00:00+02:00

Paolo Petta presents the results of the FP7 EU Project "Learning for Security (L4S)" at the 2nd KIRAS Symposium ("2. KIRAS Fachtagung") of the Austrian national security research programme KIRAS.

SentiStrength_DE

2012-04-18T00:00:00+02:00

A collection of German lexicon files to be used for sentiment classification with SentiStrength from the University of Wolverhampton

2012-04-12

2012-04-12T00:00:00+02:00

Robert Trappl is elected President of the International Academy of Systems and Cybernetic Sciences (IASCYS). The elected Vice-Presidents are Ranulph Glaville (England), Jifa Gu (China) and Matjaz Mulej (Slovenia); Secretary-General Pierre Bricage (France).

2012-04-11

2012-04-11T00:00:00+02:00

Paolo Petta co-organises the Fourth International Symposium on Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABModSim-4), held at the 21st European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2012) (2012-04-10 - 13) on the Campus of the University of Vienna.

2012-02-22 - 23

2012-02-22T00:00:00+01:00

OFAI, together with TU Vienna, co-organizes the 5th International Conference on Cognitive Systems (CogSys2012).

DI Ferdinand Fuhrmann, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

2012-02-08T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

DI Ferdinand Fuhrmann
Music Technology Group
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona 


"Die automatische Erkennung von Musikinstrumenten aus den Audiosignalen
von Musikstuecken"


Wir praesentieren eine generelle Methode für die automatische Erkennung
von Musikinstrumenten aus den Audiosignalen von Musikstuecken. Im
Gegensatz zu vielen vergleichbaren Ansaetzen vermeidet unsere
spezifische Konzeption vor allem Einschraenkungen in Bezug auf das
algorithmische Design der Methode, die Eingabedaten oder den
speziellen Anwendungsbereich. Die entwickelte Methode modelliert 12
Musikinstrumente, harmonische und perkussive Instrumente sowie die
menschliche Singstimme, welche hauptsaechlich in der Musik der
westlichen Welt Verwendung finden. Um der Komplexitaet des
Eingangssignals zu entsprechen, begrenzen wir den grundlegenden Prozess
der Methode auf die Erkennung des vorherrschenden Musikinstruments aus
einem kurzen Audiofragment. Die Anwendung von statistischen
Mustererkennungstechniken in Zusammenhang mit dementsprechend
gestalteten, umfangreichen Datenbanken ermöglicht uns die Erkennung
einer einzigen Quelle aus dem analysierten komplexen Gesamtklang und
vermeidet dabei die Trennung des Signals in die Einzelquellen. Als
Kompensation dieser Einschraenkung integrieren wir zusaetzliche
Informationen aus einer hierarchischen Musikanalyse in den
Erkennungsprozess: erstens benuetzen wir den musikalischen Kontext des
analysierten Signals um aus der zeitlichen Abfolge der
Modellpraediktionen die entsprechenden Instrumentennamen zu bestimmen.
Zweitens kombiniert die Methode Informationen über strukturelle Aspekte
des Musikstuecks und bindet letztendlich Assoziationen zwischen
musikalischen Genres und Instrumentierungen in den Algorithmus ein.

*********


Zeit: Mittwoch, 8. Februar 2012, 18:30 pktl.

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2012-02-01

2012-02-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the FWF-Project "Preventing Hubness in Music Information Retrieval (Hubology)" with Arthur Flexer as project leader.

2012-01-31

2012-01-31T00:00:00+01:00

Dominik Schnitzer receives his PhD (with distinction) from the Johannes Kepler University Linz.

gateplugin-VirtualDocuments

2012-01-31T00:00:00+01:00

NOTE: this is the Git version of a plugin original hosted on Google Code here https://code.google.com/archive/p/gateplugin-virtualdocuments/ and which has last been updated in 2012!

A plugin for the GATE (http://gate.ac.uk) language technology framework that provides a number of processing resources and an API that allows the construction of a new (on the fly) document from a mix of various annotation types and features in a source document. Optionally, original annotations from the source document can be mapped forward into the new "virtual" document and annotations created for the new virtual document can be mapped back into the original document.

This plugin provides the following processing resources:

Indirect Language Analyser PR: this PR will run another PR on a virtual document created from the original document according to a annotation specification list and map the annotations created back to the original document. This can be used to run any PR on a "virtual view" of some document and create annotations on the original document according to which parts of the original correspond to the virtual document.
Annotation by Specification PR: use an annotation specification list to pick annotations and create a new output annotation. This basically implements an annotation matching processes where priority is more important than match length.
Export Contained Annotations PR: a simple PR which will export the content of an annotationtype.feature to textual documents for each input document
Copy Virtual Document PR: created from an annotation specification list to a new corpus. This uses an annotation specification list to define which annotations, features etc to pick from the original document to create a new virtual document.
Replace By Virtual Document PR: this replaces each document in a corpus by the virtual document created according to an annotation specification list.

NOTE: this plugin is still in a beta stage and not all planned functionality has been implemented. Check the documentation of the individual processing resources for what is still missing or buggy.

Dr. Marta Sabou, MODUL University Vienna

2012-01-30T00:00:00+01:00

                              V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Marta Sabou
Department of New Media Technology 
MODUL University Vienna


"Building Knowledge Intensive Applications by Reusing Online Ontologies"

While formally represented world knowledge plays an important role in
many AI and language technology applications, its acquisition on a
sufficiently large scale remains problematic. We aim to overcome this
knowledge acquisition bottleneck by reusing ontologies that are freely
available online as a result of research in the Semantic Web area.
Relying on this reuse-based paradigm, we have built several knowledge
intensive applications addressing tasks as varied as improving search
in folksonomies or open domain question answering. In this talk I will
describe these applications and I will share our conclusions about the
characteristics of online ontologies when used as a knowledge resource.


*********


Time: Monday, 30th January 2012, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2012-01-01

2012-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the ZIT "From Science to Products" project quiew - Entwicklung eines multidomainfähigen Online-Bewertungs- und Feedbacksystems with Brigitte Krenn and Johannes Matiasek as scientific collaborators …

2011-12-31

2011-12-31T00:00:00+01:00

Flagship Projects of the EU: OFAI scientists involved in the preparation of three flaghsips: Robert Trappl in "Human Brain Project (HBP)", Neurorobotics Pillar, at present leader of three workpackage tasks; "Robots as Companions (RoboCom)" with Paolo Petta leading the sub-group on "Emotion and Personality" of the "Mind" working group, plus Brigitte Krenn and Sabine Payr; "Future ICT (FutureICT)" with Marcin Skowron in the preparatory group.

2011-12-01

2011-12-01T00:00:00+01:00

"Fourth International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) in Vancouver, Canada: Paolo Petta co-organised the ICIDS 2011 Workshop: "Sharing IDS technologies"; short paper: Szilas N., Boggini T., Axelrad M., Petta P., Rank S.: Specification of an Open Architecture for Interactive Storytelling.

2011-10-22

2011-10-22T00:00:00+02:00

TEDx Vienna: Presentation "Are we sheep when we dream of electric androids?" by Robert Trappl

2011-10-01

2011-10-01T00:00:00+02:00

Start of the EU-Project "Roadmap for Music Information Research (MIRES)", Coordination and Support Action, lead by Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, OFAI's contribution carried out by Gerhard Widmer and Arthur Flexer

Prof. Michael Beetz, PhD, Technische Universitaet Muenchen

2011-09-22T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Prof. Michael Beetz, PhD
Department of Informatics, Computer Science
Technische Universitaet Muenchen

"Cognition-enabled Everyday Manipulation"

In recent years we have seen tremendous advances in the mechatronic,
sensing and computational infrastructure of robots, enabling them to
act faster, stronger and more accurately than humans do. Yet, when it
comes to accomplishing manipulation tasks in everyday settings, robots
often do not even reach the sophistication and performance of young
children. Housework is an activity domain where the superiority of the
human cognitive mechanisms and their role in competent activity
control is particularly evident.

In this talk I will present our ongoing research, in which we investigate
cognitive mechanisms that are to enable autonomous robots to produce flexible,
reliable and high-performance behavior for everyday manipulation activities. 
The talk will concentrate on our framework for cognition-enabled control and 
the naturalistic specification of manipulation actions and what it takes
to execute these specifications competently.


*********


Time: Thursday, 22nd September 2011, 3.00 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2011-09-14

2011-09-14T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn gives the talk "Speak to me and I tell you who you are! A language-attitude study in a cultural-heritage application" at the workshop "Culturally Motivated Virtual Characters" co-locted with IVA2011

2011-08-31

2011-08-31T00:00:00+02:00

FFG-Project "Computers for UserInnen (C4U)" with Brigitte Krenn as leader and cooperating scientists Stephanie Schreitter, Gregor Sieber and Sabine Payr successfully completed.

2011-07-31

2011-07-31T00:00:00+02:00

EU-Project "Learning for Security (L4S)" with Paolo Petta as activity leader, Sabine Payr, Bernhard Jung, Christoph Hermann, Laszlo Kiraly, Ali Nikrang-Mofad and Heiner Micko as cooperating scientists successfully completed.

2011-07-14-15

2011-07-14T00:00:00+02:00

Brgitte Krenn gives the invited talk "Social Companions" at the "RoboCom Body and Tools Workshop" in Munich.

Dr. Paolo Petta, OFAI, Wien; Dr. Christian Flachberger, FREQUENTIS AG

2011-07-04T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Paolo Petta
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)

Dr. Christian Flachberger
FREQUENTIS AG

"RECKON&CHOOSE! - eine Lernerfahrung im taktischen Krisenmanagement"
EU FP7 Projekt "L4S: Learning for Security" (IST FP7 225634)
http://www.ofai.at/research/agents/projects/l4s.html

Im Rahmen des zweijährigen EU FP7 Projektes "Learning for Security" - L4S
wurden technologiegestützte Lernerfahrungen mit dem Ziel entwickelt, Kompetenzen
des Europäischen Krisenmanagements im Transportwesen - genauer: der Luft- und
Schifffahrt - zu verbessern.
RECKON&CHOOSE! ist der Beitrag einer vom OFAI geleiteten Arbeitsgruppe von sechs
Projektpartnern: eine gut vierstündige Lernerfahrung, die auf einer interaktiven
Simulation einer Notfallsituation an einem Flughafen aufbaut. Darin übernimmt
jede TeilnehmerIn die Verantwortungen und Abhängigkeiten je einer idealtypischen
Rolle des taktischen Krisenmanagements und muss sich den Herausforderungen von
Informationsmanagement und Entscheidungsfindung in Echtzeit und der Spannung
zwischen organisationsinternen und übergreifenden Perspektiven stellen. In diesem
dynamischen Umfeld wirken soziale Fähigkeiten und Fertigkeiten wie Offenheit und
Verhaltenskohärenz wesentlich auf die Gesamtperformanz des Krisenmanagements.

Das OFAI steuerte wesentliche Beiträge zur technischen Infrastruktur und der
Ausgestaltung des Simulationsszenarios bei. In enger Zusammenarbeit mit
dem zweiten Österreichischen Projektpartner FREQUENTIS AG sowie der Università
Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Mailand erfolgte die Erarbeitung der theoretischen
Grundlagen, die im von der FREQUENTIS AG und dem OFAI redigierten "Countrybook"
von RECKON&CHOOSE! Niederschlag finden. Die FREQUENTIS AG leistete darüber hinaus
wesentliche Beiträge zur Evaluierung und Verbesserung der Lernerfahrung.

Dieses Forschungsprojekt wurde aus dem 7. Europäischen Rahmenprogramm
unter Vertrag IST FP7 225634 und dem EU Ko-Finanzierungsprogramm des
Österreichischen Bundesministeriums für Wissenschaft und Forschung
gefördert. Diese EU Ko-Finanzierung wurde allen Instituten von der
damaligen Bundesministerin Dr. Beatrix Karl mit 01.01.2011 ersatzlos
gestrichen.


*********


Time: Monday, 4th July 2011, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2011-07-01

2011-07-01T00:00:00+02:00

"Social Engagement with Robots and Agents": Special Issue of "Applied Artificial Intelligence: An International Journal" edited by Sabine Payr published.

2011-06-09 - 10

2011-06-09T00:00:00+02:00

Brigitte Krenn delivers an invited talk on "Virtual Butlers, Artificial Companions, Robot Collaborators" at the Round Table Research Retreat "Implanted Smart Technologies" in Prague, Czech Republic

Sandra Manninger, MSc, SPAN architecture & design, Vienna

2011-06-07T00:00:00+02:00

                              V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-5336112-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Sandra Manninger, MSc
Principal, SPAN architecture & design, Vienna

"Sensible Bodies - architecture, geometry, and desire"

SPAN architecture & design, the architects of the Austrian Pavilion
at the Shanghai World Expo 2010, is constructing an epistemological
framework from practice and procedures that are based on the newly
acquired knowledge that we increasingly dominate through science and
technology. The result does not come from a formal effort, but rather
as a consequence of a union of evolutionary attempts based on very
rigid design procedures. These involve a software approach that goes
beyond the tool itself, leaving space for a true ecology of digital
thinking: an achievement that dispels techno-enthusiasm and opens the
door to something that might really become a certainty in the future.

What we can expect is an environment where affection, obsession,
opulence and romanticism are the outputs of an advanced system that
puts together biological behavior, environmental pressures and rigid
procedures of computational design.

SPAN architecture & designs research highlights how to go beyond
beautiful data to discover something that could be defined voluptuous
data. This coagulation of numbers, algorithms, procedures and programs
uses the forces of thriving nature and, passing through the calculation
of a multi-core processor, knits them with human desire.

Sabina Barcucci, digimag 64

*********


Time: Tuesday, 7th June 2011, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

Mag. Dr. Arthur Flexer, OFAI, Wien

2011-05-10T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel: +43-1-533611-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Mag. Dr. Arthur Flexer
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)

"Wenn Computer Musik empfehlen"

Vor noch zehn oder zwanzig Jahren haben Musikliebhaber vielleicht 
wenige Hundert oder Tausend Vinyl- oder CD-Alben besessen. Ein lokales
Musikgeschaeft war der Hauptanbieter von Musikmedien. Heutzutage sind
ueber das Internet Millionen von Musikstuecken zu einem sehr geringen
Preis oder ueberhaupt gratis beziehbar. Die Frage ist, wie
Musikinteressierte in diesem zunehmend unueberschaubaren Angebot fuer
sie relevante Musik finden koennen. "Music Information Retrieval" ist
eine immer noch junge interdisziplinäre Wissenschaft mit dem Anspruch,
Computern das Musikhoeren zu ermoeglichen. Wenn so ein
"Musikverstaendnis" in ausreichendem Maße menschliche Musikwahrnehmung
imitiert, dann koennen Computer Menschen Musik empfehlen und zur
Orientierung im staendig wachsenden Angebot an digitalen Musikmedien
beitragen. Der Vortrag motiviert, warum Musikempfehlung durch Computer
sinnvoll ist und erklaert, wie Computer Musik "hoeren" anhand des
www.soundpark.at, eines Musikempfehlungsservice, welches das OFAI fuer
den Oesterreichischen Jugendradiosender FM4 entwickelt hat.

*********

Zeit: Dienstag, 10. Mai 2011, 18:30 pktl.

Ort:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2011-04-11

2011-04-11T00:00:00+02:00

"Cognition for Technical Systems (CoTeSys)" Workshop at the Technical University of Munich, Invited Presentation "Cognitive Agents and Robots: Also Emotional and Social?" by Robert Trappl …

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Thomas Pock, Graz University of Technology

2011-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-533611-17,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Thomas Pock
Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision, Graz University of Technology

"A first-order primal-dual algorithm with applications to convex
optimization problems in computer vision"

Variational methods have proven to be particularly useful to solve a number of 
ill-posed inverse imaging problems. In particular variational methods
incorporating total variation regularization have become very popular for a
number of applications. Unfortunately, these methods are difficult to minimize
due to the non-smoothness of the total variation. The aim of this work is
therefore to provide a flexible algorithm which is particularly suitable for
non-smooth convex optimization problems in imaging. In particular, we study a
first-order primal-dual algorithm for non-smooth convex optimization problems
with known saddle-point structure. We prove convergence to a saddle-point with
rate O(1/N) in finite dimensions for the complete class of problems. We
further show accelerations of the proposed algorithm to yield improved rates
on problems with some degree of smoothness. Indeed, we show that we can
achieve O(1/N2) convergence on problems, where the primal or the dual
objective is uniformly convex, and we can show linear convergence on smooth
problems. The wide applicability of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated on 
several imaging problems such as image denoising, image deconvolution, image 
inpainting, motion estimation and multi-label image segmentation.

*********


Time: Monday, 4th April 2011, 6.30 p.m. sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

Dr. Marcin Skowron, OFAI, Wien

2011-03-15T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-533611-19,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Dr. Marcin Skowron
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)

"No peanuts! Affective Cues for the Virtual Bartender"

Emotionally driven online behavior is traceable in a wide range of
human communication processes on the Internet. Here the sum of
individual emotions of a large number of users, with their
interconnectivity and complex dynamics influence formation, evolution
and breaking-up of online communities. Our research concentrates on
the basic communication process between two conversants. Such
interactions constitute a fundament for the modeling of more complex,
multi-agents communication processes. Using artificial conversational
entities - dialog systems, we investigate the role of emotions in
online, real-time, natural language based communication.

In this talk, we present methods for the detection of affective states
in text and the usage of such affective cues in a dialog system - the
Affect Bartender. We discuss also a concept of  affective profile
(i.e., positive, negative, neutral) of conversants and its influence
on the communication processes. The dialog systems are evaluated in
two experimental environments: a virtual reality and an online,
text-based interaction settings. The experimental results show that
user ratings for the conversational agent match those
obtained in a Wizard of Oz setting. The results also demonstrate that
the affective profile to a large extent determines the assessment of
users' emotional connection and enjoyment from the interaction while
it does not significantly influence the perception of core
capabilities of the dialog systems.

This research was undertaken as part of the EU-Project "Collective
Emotions in Cyberspace (CyberEmotions)", Project Coordinator: 
Prof.Dr. Janusz Holyst, Warsaw, University of Technology, of which 
OFAI is a partner.

*********


Time: Tuesday, 15th March 2011, 18:30 sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2011-03-05

2011-03-05T00:00:00+01:00

Robert Trappl elected Full Member of the "European Academy for Sciences and Arts".

2011-02-28

2011-02-28T00:00:00+01:00

EU-Project "Social Engagement with Robots and Agents (SERA)" with Sabine Payr as coordinator and Stefan Rank, Paolo Petta, Brigitte Krenn and Gregor Sieber as cooperating scientists, all of OFAI, sucessfully completed.

2011-01-26

2011-01-26T00:00:00+01:00

Brigitte Krenn presented the talk "Vitalmonitoring mit VitaSmart: Eine Erweiterung zu Beko's. HOMEBUTLER" at the 4. Deutscher AAL-Kongress, Berlin, 25.-26. 1. 2011.

Prof. Arvid Kappas, PhD, Jacobs University Bremen

2011-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

                             VORTRAG
                            *********

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-5336112-19, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,
Email: sec@ofai.at

Prof. Arvid Kappas, PhD
Jacobs University Bremen

"Much Ado about Nothing: Are Emotions Really Important?"

The scientific study of emotion has seen ups and downs. 
At the outset of the second decade of the third 
millennium, it is definitely en vogue to study emotion; 
it is common wisdom that affect had been neglected by 
fields as far apart as artificial intelligence and 
economics that finally might understand its importance. 

But as researchers try to get to terms with emotions, 
unexpected hurdles loom large. Separating constructs
such as emotion, cognition, and motivation becomes 
increasingly difficult in the light of experimental 
research and evidence from the neurosciences. 
Similarly, it is now apparent that emotional
components, such as subjective experience, expression, 
and physiological activation have only low cohesion.

What to do? We could pretend that life is simple and 
that every smile expresses happiness, that there are 
only seven emotions, that we always know 
when to show what to whom, and that all emotions are
individual in nature. Or we could defect to the behaviorists 
of a century ago  or the neo-behaviorists of a decade 
ago and throw emotions out with the bath water. 

Arvid Kappas will discuss  some of the (current) 
challenges and promises of emotion research.


*********

Time: Tuesday, 25th January 2011, 18:30 sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Thomas Grill MA, OFAI, Wien

2011-01-24T00:00:00+01:00

                               V O R T R A G
                          **********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-53361119,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Thomas Grill, MA
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
und Institut für Komposition und Elektroakustik, Universitaet für Musik
und darstellende Kunst Wien

"Expressivere und intuitivere elektronische Musikinstrumente 
durch die Integration von Machine-Listening-Konzepten"

Elektronische Musikinstrumente sind durch die Vielfalt ihrer
klanglichen Moeglichkeiten aus dem zeitgenoessischen Musikschaffen 
nicht mehr wegzudenken. Der gewaltige Moeglichkeitsraum 
bezueglich klanglicher und struktureller Gestaltung, insbesondere 
durch die Einbeziehung aufgenommenen Klangmaterials, verlangt 
vor allem im Live-Einsatz nach Strategien, die es Spielern 
ermoeglichen, die Klang erzeugenden Materialien und 
Prozesse zielgerichtet handhaben und nachvollziehen zu koennen.
Der gegenstaendliche Vortrag beschaeftigt sich mit grundlegenden
Fragestellungen der musikalischen Performance mit aufgenommenen
Klaengen (aka "Samples"). Mit Beispielen aus persoenlicher
kuenstlerischer Praxis werden Problemstellungen demonstriert und
moegliche Loesungskonzepte diskutiert, bei denen Anwendungen der
Forschungsbereiche von Machine Listening und Machine Learning,
Wahrnehmungspsychologie und Embodied Interaction ineinander 
greifen.

Wir erlauben uns noch, auf einen Auftritt von Thomas Grill hinzuweisen:

DVD-Praesentation @ MAK nite
Low Frequency Orchestra plays Robert Lettner: "Das Spiel vom 
Kommen und Gehen"
18. Jaenner 2011, 20:00
MAK, Stubenring 5, 1010 Wien

http://grrrr.org/2010/12/23/lfo-kug-maknite/ 

*********


Time: Monday, 24th January 2011, 18:30 sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


*********

2011-01-21

2011-01-21T00:00:00+01:00

The Language Technology group of OFAI organizes the First Workshop on Modelling of Dialects and Language Varieties, to be held in conjunction with the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) in Edinburgh, UK on July 31, 2011.

2011-01-01

2011-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the project "Machine Learning Techniques for Modeling of Language Varieties", in cooperation with the University of Edinburgh and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, sponsored by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF).

Dr. Christoph Lampert, I. S. T. Austria

2010-11-24T00:00:00+01:00

                             VORTRAG
                            *********

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-5336112-19, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,
Email: sec@ofai.at


Dr. Christoph Lampert 
Institute of Science and Technology (I.S.T.) Austria,
Lampert-Group
Klosterneuburg 


"Structured Learning and Prediction in Computer Visionï¿œ  


Powerful statistical models that can be learned 
efficiently from large amounts of data are currently 
revolutionizing computer vision. These models possess 
rich internal structure reflecting task-specific
relations and constraints. 

In the first part of my talk I will introduce the most 
popular classes of structured models in computer vision:
conditional random fields and structured output support 
vector machines. 
Illustrating their similarities and differences I will
explain the most relevant algorithms for probabilistic 
inference and maximum-a-posteriori prediction, and then 
give more details about the aspect of efficient 
parameter learning from training data. 

A second part of my talk will illustrate exemplary 
applications of structured models in computer vision,
in particular for the tasks of object localization in 
natural images and image segmentation with topological
constraints.

*********


Time: Wednesday, 24 November 2010, 18:30 sharp

Location:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

2010-11-18

2010-11-18T00:00:00+01:00

Robert Trappl elected Vice-President of the Science Conference Austria, for a two-year period

Miha Ciglar MSc., IRZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia

2010-11-12T00:00:00+01:00

                                 VORTRAG
                              *************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-5336112-19, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at

Miha Ciglar, MSc. 
Institute for Sonic Arts Research
IRZU, www.irzu.org
Ljubljana, Slovenia


"TACTILE SOUND"  


Miha Ciglar, graduate of IEM (Institute for Electronic
Music and Acoustics) Graz, founder of the research centre
IRZU (Ljubljana), and experimental sound and performance 
artist will give an insight into his latest developments 
and ongoing research concerning new interfaces for musical 
expression. 

The presentation will give an overview of the Institute for 
Sonic Arts Research (IRZU) from Ljubljana, Slovenia and
its projects. 
A particular focus will be put on one of the most recently 
developed interface prototypes named "Syntact" (referring 
to Tactile Synthesis). Syntact is a "hands free" instrument,
utilizing a non-contact tactile feedback method based on 
airborne ultrasound. The three main elements/components of 
the interface that will be discussed are: 

1. Generation of audible sound by self-demodulation of an 
ultrasound signal during its propagation through air 

2.The condensation of the ultrasound energy in one spatial 
point generating a precise tactile reproduction
of the audible sound (its temporal and harmonic texture) 

3. The feed-forward method enables a real-time intervention 
of the musician, by shaping the tactile (ultra)sound directly 
with his hands. 

In addition to the presentation, the interface functionality 
will also be practically demonstrated.

*********

Time: Friday, 12th November 2010, 15:00 sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, A-1010 Vienna.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof.Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

2010-11-10

2010-11-10T00:00:00+01:00

Brigitte Krenn invited guest speaker on engineering of intelligent artefacts at the Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) Conference at the European Parliament on "Making Perfect Life. Bio-engineering in the 21st century"

Prof. F. Pernkopf, Graz University of Technology

2010-11-10T00:00:00+01:00

                              VORTRAG
                             *********

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)                   
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-5336112-19, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at


Prof. Dr. Franz Pernkopf
Signal Proc. & Speech Communication Lab
Graz University of Technology


"Discriminative Learning of Bayesian Network Classifiers"


We present a maximum margin parameter learning algorithm 
for Bayesian network classifiers using the conjugate gradient
algorithm for optimization. Unlike previous approaches, we 
maintain the normalization constraint of the conditional 
probabilities during optimization and the probabilistic 
interpretation is not lost. 
This enables marginalization over missing features in our 
discriminatively optimized Bayesian network, a case where 
generative classifiers have an advantage over discriminative 
classifiers. 

In the experiments, we show that maximizing the margin 
dominates the conditional likelihood approach with respect 
to classification performance and is superior to generative
maximum likelihood estimation. 

Furthermore, empirical results are provided for the missing 
feature case.


*********

Time: Wednesday, 10th November 2010, 18:30 sharp

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

2010-09-14

2010-09-14T00:00:00+02:00

Sabine Payr presents a paper, resulting from the EU-project "Social Engagement with Robots and Agents (SERA)" which she coordinates, at the 19th IEEE International Symposium in Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) in Viareggio, Italy

2010-09-10

2010-09-10T00:00:00+02:00

Gregor Sieber and Brigitte Krenn present a paper on "Towards an episodic memory for companion dialogue" at the 10th International Intelligent Virtual Agents Conference (IVA) in Philadelphia, USA

2010-08-09

2010-08-09T00:00:00+02:00

Robert Trappl appointed Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC)

Dr. Uwe Haass, Technical University, Munich

2010-08-09T00:00:00+02:00

                              VORTRAG
                        ********************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artifial Intelligence (OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-5336112-19, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at


Dr. Uwe Haass
General Manager
Cluster of Excellence
"Cognition for Technical Systems (CoTeSyS)"
Technical University,
Munich, Germany


"THE CLUSTER OF EXCELLENCE "COGNITION FOR TECHNICAL SYSTEMS (CoTeSys)"


The CoTeSys cluster of excellence investigates cognition for technical
systems. Cognitive technical systems are equipped with artificial
sensors and actuators, integrated and embedded into physical systems,
and act in a physical world. They differ from other technical systems as
they perform cognitive control and have cognitive capabilities.

Cognitive control orchestrates reflexive and habitual behavior in accord
with longterm intentions. Cognitive capabilities such as perception,
reasoning, learning, and planning turn technical systems into systems
that "know what they are doing". The cognitive capabilities will result
in systems of higher reliability, flexibility, adaptivity, and better
performance. They will be easier to interact and cooperate with.

The CoTeSys cluster combines the research competence in neuroscience,
natural sciences, engineering, computer science, and humanities to
design, implement, and analyze the information processing mechanisms
needed for cognitive technical systems.

Dr. Haass will give an overview of the research in the different
research areas, tasks already accomplished, and future goals. 

                            *********

Time: Mon 9 August 2010, 18:30 sharp 

Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
für Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, A-1010 Vienna. 

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT 
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof.Dr. Robert Trappl

                            *********

Falls sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken 
Sie uns bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Betreff "unsubscribe" 
an sec@ofai.at

Prof. Dr. E. Williams, Princeton University

2010-07-01T00:00:00+02:00

                           V O R T R A G
                       **********************
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-533611-20,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vortragender:

Prof. Edwin Williams
Princeton University

               "A Model of Certain Subsystems of Natural
                        Language Syntax/Morphosyntax"

A highly restricted combinatoric system (called "CAT") seems to be a
reasonable candidate model of certain subsystems of natural language
syntax/morphosyntax, such as inflectional morphology and verb
clustering, but not other aspects of syntactic form, such as long
distance movement. Inflectional morphology and verb clustering are
notorious for having surface forms that are mirrors, but imperfect
ones, of the underlying structure of the concepts that they represent.
CAT is meant to be a theory of the narrowly canalized deviations in
these systems from perfect faithfulness to underlying structures.

                             *********

  Zeit: Donnerstag, 1. Juli 2010, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
        fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
        Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

  Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Prof. Dr. J. Fuernkranz, TU Darmstadt, Deutschland

2010-05-10T00:00:00+02:00

                            V O R T R A G
                        **********************
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-533611-20,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vortragender:

Prof. Dr. Johannes Fuernkranz
Knowledge Engineering Group, 
Technische Universitaet Darmstadt
Deutschland


                "Lernen durch Modellieren von Praeferenzen"

Praeferenz-Lernen ist ein relativ junges Lern-Szenario, das als eine
Verallgemeinerung herkoemmlicher Problemstellungen, wie z.B.
Klassifikation, Multi-Label-Klassifikation und Label Ranking,
betrachtet werden kann. Dieser Vortrag wird eine kurze Einfuehrung in
dieses Gebiet geben, um dann konkret auf einen Loesungsansatz, nämlich
der expliziten Modellierung paarweiser Praeferenzen, einzugehen.
Hierbei wird fuer jedes moegliche Label-Paar eine Relation gelernt, die
entscheidet, welches der beiden Label praeferiert wird. Die
Hauptvorteile dieses Ansatzes liegen in der Einfachheit der paarweisen
Entscheidungsgrenzen und der sich daraus ergebenden leichteren
Lernbarkeit der individuellen paarweisen Theorien, sowie in der
Moeglichkeit zur flexiblen Kombination der paarweisen Theorien, die es
erlaubt, unterschiedliche Verlustfunktionen zu minimieren, ohne dass
dabei ein Neutraining der gelernten Theorien erforderlich wird. Auf
den ersten Blick scheint ein Nachteil dieses Ansatzes in der
quadratischen Anzahl der zu lernenden Klassifizierer zu liegen (einen
fuer jedes Label-Paar), jedoch laesst sich hier zeigen, dass die
tatsaechliche Zeit-Komplexitaet fuer Training und Test nur linear in der
Anzahl der Labels sein muss.


                              *********

   Zeit: Montag, 10 Mai 2010, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

   Ort:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
         fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
         Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


   OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
   FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

   Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

                               *********
  Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns
     bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an
                          sec@ofai.at.

2010-05-01

2010-05-01T00:00:00+02:00

Start of 2 projects: "Expert Seeking Support System (ExpertSeek), in cooperation with ATC Consultants GmbH (ATC) and partially sponsored by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), and "Ontology-based Information Extraction and Search (OREX)" in cooperation with Web Integration IT Service GmbH and partially funded by the Bridge Program of FFG and FWF

2010-04-06 - 09

2010-04-06T00:00:00+02:00

20th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research at the University of Vienna (EMCSR 2010), with papers by 212 authors from 30 countries, worldwide, organised by OFAI and chaired by Robert Trappl. Among the 13 Symposia were four of them chaired or co-chaired by Ernst Buchberger, Gerhard Chroust, Brigitte Krenn, Paolo Petta, and Sabine Payr, all of OFAI

20th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2010)

2010-04-06T00:00:00+02:00

Cybernetics - "the study of communication and control in the animal and the machine" (N.Wiener) - has recently returned to the forefront, not only in cyberspace and cyberpunk, but, even more important, contributing to the corroboration of various scientific theories. Additionally, an ever increasing number of research areas, including social and economic theories, theoretical biology, ecology, computer science, and robotics draw on ideas from second order cybernetics. Artificial intelligence, evolved directly from cybernetics, has not only technological and economic, but also important social impacts. With a marked trend towards interdisciplinary cooperation and global perspectives, this important role of cybernetics is expected to be further strengthened over the next years.

Since 1972, the biennial European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR) have served as a forum for discussion of converging ideas and new aspects of different scientific disciplines. As on previous occasions, a number of sessions providing wide coverage of the rapid developments will be arranged, complemented with daily plenary meetings, where eminent speakers will present latest research results.

Please visit the conference website for further information.

A. Holzapfel, T. E. I. Crete, Greece

2010-03-29T00:00:00+02:00

V O R T R A G

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-533611-20, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Presenter:

Andre Holzapfel
Technical Educational Institute of Crete
Department of Music Technology & Acoustics
Greece

"Similarity methods for computational ethnomusicology"

In this presentation, we will focus on music of the Eastern Mediterranean, and specifically
on traditional music of Greece and Turkey. We will approach the task: Given a polyphonic
recording of a piece of Cretan traditional dance music, find a recording that is similar to it.
For handling this task, a morphological analysis system is proposed that is adapted to the
repetitive structure of this music. For this system, aspects of rhythm and melody will be
considered, with the focus being characteristics of rhythm. We will describe onset detection,
beat tracking and rhythmic similarity methods that are adequate for this music. For melody,
state-of-the-art approaches for cover song detection and fundamental frequency estimation
from polyphonic signals have been combined. A morphological analysis framework that uses
both rhythm and melody is proposed.

*********

Zeit: Montag, 29 Maerz 2010, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

Wir sind uns dessen bewusst, dass dieser Vortrag in der Karwoche stattfindet, doch ist der
Vortragende nur zu dieser Zeit in Wien.

Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns bitte eine Antwort-Email
mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an sec@ofai.at.

Univ.-Prof. V. Widrich, Vienna, Austria

2010-03-15T00:00:00+01:00

V O R T R A G
***************

Presenter:

Virgil Widrich
Univ.-Prof. für digitale Kunst an der Universität für angewandte Kunst,
Wien

***Drehbuchsoftware***

Sollen Drehbuchautoren ihren Computer nur als bessere Schreibmaschine nutzen? Oder soll der Computer das Drehbuch
gleich selber schreiben? Zwei sehr unterschiedliche Softwarepakete, welche die Erstellung von Themen, Charakteren
oder des dramaturgischen Aufbaus Schritt für Schritt unterstützen. Vorstellung der Möglichkeiten und Unmöglichkeiten
von »Dramatica« und »StoryLine Pro«.

1.) »StoryLine Pro« The 22 building blocks of every great story
© der Theorie by John Truby

Was sind die 22 building blocks?
Die 22 building blocks sind die Grammatik jeder Geschichte und unterstützen das Strukturieren von Stories.
Diese Stufen entsprechen der Abfolge des menschlichen Handelns. Vergleich von Alfred Hitchcocks »Vertigo«
mit Steven Spielbergs »E.T.« aus der Sicht der 22 building blocks.

2.) Dramatica A New Theory of Story
© der Theorie by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley

Ziel von Dramatica
Dramatica will Geschichten holistisch abbilden, um Autoren bei jenen »blinden Flecken« zu helfen,
wo sie von ihrem Instinkt verlassen werden, weil sie nicht hineinsehen können. Dramatica ist genre
und mediumunabhängig und ermöglicht die Betrachtung einer Geschichte von vielen möglichen Blickwinkeln
(z. B. Genre, Charaktere, Plot, Thema). Für den Autor mögen die Einzelteile einer Geschichte scheinbar
funktionieren, da dieser oft die Charaktere von einem Blickwinkel aus betrachtet, und die Geschichte
von einem anderen. Das Publikum hat aber nur einen einzigen Blickwinkel: seinen.
Dramatica hilft, Prioritäten zu setzen, damit die Einzelteile zusammenpassen, und warnt, wenn Bauteile nicht
in dieselbe Geschichte gehören.

Wie funktioniert die Software?
Dramatica ist eine Art Zauberwürfel des Geschichtenerzählens. Die story engine beinhaltet alle Beziehungen
zwischen Plot, Charakteren, Thema und Genre. Man kann die Geschichte von den vier Seiten Plot, Charaktere,
Thema und Genre betrachten. Dreht man an einem Element, verschieben sich auch die anderen Teile.
Autoren machen das üblicherweise intuitiv, aber dort, wo die Intuition versagt, beginnen Teile auseinanderzufallen.
Der Zauberwürfel wird durch die Beantwortung von nur 12 Fragen in die passende Stellung gedreht.

**********

Zeit: Montag, 15. März 2010, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

***********

Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns
bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an sec@ofai.at.

2010-02-22

2010-02-22T00:00:00+01:00

Robert Trappl is invited speaker at the Festsymposium in Honor of the 90th Birthday of Prof. Dr. Heinz Zemanek at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, with the presentation "From Cybernetic Machines to Emotional and Social Robots"

2010-01-01

2010-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of two projects: "Audiominer - Mathematical Signal Analysis and Modeling for Manipulation of Sound Objects", sponsered by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), and "Feasibility Study: Interactive Entertainment of Elder Persons with Intelligent and Emotional Personality Agents", partially sponsored by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT)

OFAI/OSGK anniversary celebration

2009-12-14T00:00:00+01:00

A celebration event of the 25 years anniversary of OFAI and the 40 years anniversary of OSGK at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on 2009-12-14. The programme is available.

Prof. Dr. Christa Sommerer, University of Art and Design, Linz

2009-11-23T00:00:00+01:00

VORTRAG
***************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-533611-20, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vortragende:

Prof. Dr. Christa Sommerer
Head of Interface Cultures Department
Institute for Media
University of Art and Design, Linz, Austria
http://www.interface.ufg.ac.at/christa-laurent

"Interaction Revisited"

Interaction and interface design have not only had their roots in human computer
interaction engineering but have also seen parallel developments in performance art,
media art and specifically in the interactive arts. With products of interactive
technologies increasingly spreading into our private and professional lives,
it is interesting to see where early notions of interactivity came from and how artists
and designers over the past 40 or more years have already looked at the merits of
interaction in their artistic and conceptual work.

As human-computer interaction is becoming more and more embedded into daily products and
services, we also observe that creativity, once mostly reserved for artists, has now
reached the masses. Or as Peter Weibel states: Artists, in the age of Youtube.com,
Flickr.com, MySpace.com, and Second Life, lose their monopoly on creativity.
Using contemporary media everyone can be artistically creative.

In this lecture artistic and social notions of interactivity will be addressed and the general
question on how art and science can merge in the area of interface culture will be discussed.
Projects by the authors from their new artist monography - Gerfried Stocker, Christa Sommerer,
Laurent Mignonneau (Eds.) Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau - Interactive Art Research, 2009.
Springer Verlag Vienna/New York - as well as their students will be introduced to illustrate
these points.

*********

Zeit: Montag, 23. November 2009, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem
Subject "unsubscribe" an sec@ofai.at

2009-11-13

2009-11-13T00:00:00+01:00

Stefan Rank, Researcher at OFAI since 2004, graduates to Dr. techn. in the Presence of the Federal President of the Republic of Austria ("promotio sub auspiciis praesidentis rei publicae"). This special graduation where also a special ring is given to the new Dr. techn. by the President, is awarded to students who passed all exams with the best possible marks.

Dr. Lawrence Cayton, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen

2009-10-29T00:00:00+01:00

                              V O R T R A G
                                *********

                  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
                   fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)                   
                        Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-533611-20,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------


Dr. Lawrence Cayton
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen

"Fast similarity search for Bregman divergences"


Nearest neighbor (NN) search is a core ingredient in many algorithms for
machine learning, information retrieval, and elsewhere.  Reducing the
complexity of NN search has been extensively studied for decades;
however, most of the research applied only to standard Euclidean
distance or, more generally, metrics.  In many modern applications,
including text and image analysis, non-metrics notions of distance have
become popular; for instance, documents are often modeled as probability
distributions, and hence a natural notion of distance is the
KL-divergence (relative entropy).

In this talk, I'll present the first techniques for efficient similarity
search when the notion of distance is given by a Bregman divergence.
Bregman divergences are a broad class of distance-like functions that
have attracted much attention in machine learning in recent years.  They
present a challenge for efficient similarity search because they can
behave quite exotically; for example, they can be asymmetric and the
triangle inequality need not hold.  These techniques rely heavily on
geometric properties of Bregman divergences which we developed with
convex analysis tools.

                            *********

        Zeit: Donnerstag, 29. Oktober 2009, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

            Ort:  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
                   fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
                    Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


               OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
                   FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

                 Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

                            *********

  Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns
     bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an
                           sec@ofai.at.

2009-10-19

2009-10-19T00:00:00+02:00

Gerhard Widmer is awarded the "Wittgenstein-Preis", the most prestigious scientific award in Austria. The sum of 1.5 Mio Euro for research during the next 5 years comes with this award. Gerhard Widmer is head of OFAI's Intelligent Music Processing and Machine Learning Group and professor at the University of Linz, Austria.

Elaine Raybourn, Sandia National Laboratories, USA

2009-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

V O R T R A G
*********

Presenter:

Elaine Raybourn, Ph.D.
Sandia National Laboratories
USA

"Serious Games for honing Adaptive Thinking and Meta-cognitive "

Short summary:

Elaine Raybourn, Ph.D. in Intercultural Communication brings expertise
in understanding culture and communication to the design of serious games,
simulations, and interactive learning systems. Her research and design efforts
include real-time in-game assessment and debriefing techniques, and designing
experiential training systems that stimulate intercultural awareness and
cognitive agility. Elaine will present an overview of her research program
on adaptive thinking (metacognitive agility) and intercultural communication
game-based, team training systems.

*********

Zeit: Mittwoch, 09. September 2009, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns
bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an sec@ofai.at.

2009-09-01

2009-09-01T00:00:00+02:00

"Companions für Userinnen (C4U)", a FEMtech FTI project, funded by the Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation, and Technology, starts at OFAI.

2009-07-01

2009-07-01T00:00:00+02:00

"Learning for Security (L4S)", a multinational project, supported by the EC, begins at OFAI.

Joanna Bryson, University of Bath, UK

2009-05-11T00:00:00+02:00

VORTRAG
***************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vortragende:

Joanna Bryson
University of Bath
http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~jjb/

"Time for AI"

Many have held hopes that AI will fix the ludicrous flaws in human intelligence,
bringing us a new age of reason based on the assistance of artificial cognitive systems.
In fact, machine intelligence faces the same fundamental constraints as humans
and all real computation: time and space. In this talk, I focus on time. I show how
human memory and action-selection systems have evolved to compensate for the problems of
combinatorial explosion, and discuss how artificial cognitive systems can be built
to exploit similar strategies.

This talk reviews relatively recent work in my group, including:
* The Dynamic Emotion Representation (DER), done with Emmanuel Tanguy;
* Flexible latching of goals or drives, done with Philipp Rohlfshagen;
* Behavior Oriented Design (my thesis work) as extended for humanoid
game characters (work done with Partington, Brom, Drugogowitsch and
others); and finally (if there's time)
* A discussion of robot consciousness.

Joanna Bryson holds degrees in behavioural science, psychology and artificial intelligence from Chicago (BA),
Edinburgh (MSc and MPhil), and MIT (PhD). Since 2002 she has been a lecturer (assistant professor)
at the University of Bath where she founded Artificial Models of Natural Intelligence
(http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/ai/AmonI.html) She has sixty peer-reviewed publications in AI, Biology,
Cognitive Science and Philosophy. She is currently on sabbatical from Bath,
as the Hans Przibram Fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution & Cognition Research
in Altenberg, Austria. She is also a visiting research fellow at the University of Nottingham's
Methods & Data Institute, and serves as en expert consultant on Cognitive Systems for the European Commission.

This talk is presented in cooperation with the Middle European interdisciplinary master programme
in Cognitive Science MEi:CogSci.

Zeit: Montag, 11. Mai 2009, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

"Future and Emerging Technologies (FET09)" Prag

2009-04-28T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                            ***************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)                   
                        Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
  Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



               "Future and Emerging Technologies (FET09)"
                Konferenz der Europaeischen Kommission 
                  vom 21. - 23. April 2009 in Prag

Ein Kurzbericht mit Videos von Plenarvortraegen, Workshops und Projekten. 
Mit anschliessender Diskussion.

                              **********

   Zeit:  Dienstag, 28. April 2009, 17:30 Uhr pktl.

   Ort:   Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.

   OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
   FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



   Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

2009-03-04

2009-03-04T00:00:00+01:00

MAGNIFICENT is awarded the prize for the best proposal of the 2008 FIT-IT Semantic Systems call. [pictures of the ceremony]

2009-03-01

2009-03-01T00:00:00+01:00

MAGNIFICENT ("Multifaceted Analysis of News Articles for Intelligent User- and Context-Sensitive Presentation"), a joint research project with Bronner Online AG, supported by FIT-IT, starts at OFAI.

Dr. Martin V. Butz, Universitaet Wuerzburg, D

2009-02-20T00:00:00+01:00

VORTRAG
*************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-5336112-0, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Martin V. Butz
Universitaet Wuerzburg
http://www.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/i3pages/butz/

"Learning and Adapting Flexible, Autonomous, Intrinsically Motivated,
Goal-directed Behavioral Control"

Human and animal behavior exhibits an immense behavioral flexibility,
which cannot be achieved by state-of-the-art robotic systems.
Particularly, redundant behavioral alternatives are flexibly and
efficiently employed to satisfy current goals considering bodily and
environmental circumstances. Neuroscientific studies show that this
flexibility is realized by the means of modular, sensorimotor bodyspace
representations. In the COBOSLAB (COgnitive BOdySpaces: Learning And Behavior)
laboratory we study how such bodyspaces can be learned and adapted in ways
maximally suitable for the realization of flexible, goal-directed behavioral control.

Studies in robot arm control with redundant degrees of freedom show that
distributed population codes can yield highly effective, flexibly adjustable,
kinematic behavior. Also dynamic plants can be controlled when coupling
the resulting kinematic control routines with adaptive PD mechanisms.
Similar principles apply for autonomous robot vehicle control.
Finally, we show how motivations can be easily included, so that the resulting
system is able to self-activate the currently most relevant goal-directed behavior
in a self-motivated manner.
*********

Zeit: Freitag, 20. Februar 2009, 11:15 Uhr pktl.

Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

2009-02-01

2009-02-01T00:00:00+01:00

"Collective Emotions in Cyberspace (CYBER-EMOTIONS)", another multinational project, supported by the EC, begins at OFAI.

2009-01-01

2009-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Two multinational projects in the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission begin at OFAI: "Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling (IRIS)" and "Social Engagement with Robots and Agents (SERA)", SERA being coordinated by OFAI's Sabine Payr.

Prof. E. Buchberger, IMKAI, MUV

2008-12-09T00:00:00+01:00

VORTRAG
***************

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vortragender:

Ass.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Ernst Buchberger
Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence (IMKAI)
Zentrum fuer Hirnforschung
Medizinische Universitaet Wien

Sprachen lernen mit Sprachtechnologie

Forschung auf dem Gebiet der Sprachtechnologie findet mittlerweile Anwendung in unterschiedlichen
Bereichen des Alltags- und Geschaeftslebens, wie zahlreiche Applikationen beweisen, die von Diktiersystemen
ueber Systeme zur Informationsklassifikation bis zu Erleichterungen fuer Menschen mit Behinderungen
(Vorlesesysteme fuer Blinde, Textpraediktionssysteme fuer kommunikationsbehinderte Menschen) reichen.

Naheliegend waere eine Anwendung auch im Bereich des Sprachenlernens, nichtsdestotrotz sind die meisten
dafuer verfuegbaren Werkzeuge technologisch eher einfach gehalten und bieten nur eingeschraenkte Unterstuetzung an.
In diesem Vortrag wird nun ein System vorgestellt, das sich den Fortschritt auf dem Gebiet verfuegbarer
Sprachtechnologie-Ressourcen zunutze macht. Dabei wird davon ausgegangen, dass sich der/die Lernende
die zu lernende Sprache in Kursen oder autodidaktisch aneignet, der Software kommt Unterstuetzungsfunktion zu,
sie erzeugt abwechslungsreich gestaltete Uebungsbeispiele. Dem/der Lernenden fallen dabei
zwei Rollen zu: Erstellung der Grundstruktur von Aufgaben ("Lehrer-Modus") und Loesung von vom Computer
generierten Aufgaben ("Uebungs-Modus").

Am Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence (ZHF, Med.Universitaet Wien)
wurde der Prototyp "Cica" entwickelt, der beide Modi realisiert. Zielsprache des Prototyps ist Ungarisch,
das System ist aber vom Prinzip her auch fuer andere Sprachen einsetzbar. Waehrend Cica Morphologie
und Syntax gut abdeckt, ergeben sich Probleme hinsichtlich semantischer Aspekte. Eine vor kurzem fertig
gestellte vom Vortragenden betreute Diplomarbeit (Pitschmann, 2008) widmet sich diesen semantischen Fragen.

*********

Zeit: Dienstag, 9. Dezember 2008, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

2008-11-21

2008-11-21T00:00:00+01:00

Robert Trappl receives the Wiener-Schmidt-Award 2008 of the German Society of Cybernetics, Berlin.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Fuerstner, bwin Interactive Entertainment AG

2008-10-09T00:00:00+02:00

                                 VORTRAG
                                *********

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)                   
                        Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
  Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vortragender:

Prof. Dr. Thomas Fuerstner
bwin Interactive Entertainment AG
Director Research and Development

"Lambda at bwin!" 

Short summary:

Im Jahr 2006 richtete der Online-Sportwettenanbieter bwin eine
Forschungs- und Entwicklungsabteilung ein. Das geschah aus der
Notwendigkeit heraus, die Softwareentwicklung insgesamt zu
beschleunigen und um ueber Prototypen potentielle Produktadaptionen und
Neuprodukte fruehzeitig auf Marktakzeptanz testen zu koennen. Zu diesem
Zeitpunkt lag die durchnittliche Entwicklungsdauer für
Softwareloesungen bereits bei zwei Jahren. Eine Projektdauer, die sich
vor allem aus der Komplexitaet des bestehenden Systems ergibt, in die
jede Neuentwicklung eingebettet werden muß, ohne den Regelbetrieb der
Website und aller zugehoerigen Services zu gefaehrden.
Um diese - für ein "web-getriebenes" Unternehmen außergwoehnliche
Entwicklungsdauer zu verkuerzen und innovative Entwicklungen ueberhaupt
erst wieder sinnvoll moeglich zu machen, entwickelte die R&D-Abteilung
einen universell einsetzbaren abstrakten Softwarelayer auf das gesamte
Backend von bwin; mit Erfolg. Von besonderem Interesse ist dabei, dass
die ausschließlich in Scriptsprachen wie Ruby, Lua und Javascript
entwickelte und letztlich auch implementierte Software ihre
Leistungsfaehigkeit der Verknuepfung einer Agententechnologie mit
Algorithmen der klassischen AI verdankt. Spezifische Projekte und
interessante Codebeispiele sollen im Vortrag gezeigt und besprochen
werden.


                               *********

   Zeit:   Donnerstag, 09. Oktober 2008, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

   Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
           fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
           Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.



   OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
   FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



   Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


                               *********

  Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns
     bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an
                          sec@ofai.at.Vortragstitel:

2008-09-27

2008-09-27T00:00:00+02:00

Two-day Workshop "Your Virtual Butler: Prerequisites for its Development" held at OFAI, with participants from Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the USA

Dr. Rainer Typke, OFAI, Vienna, AUSTRIA

2008-08-19T00:00:00+02:00

VORTRAG
*********

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vortragender:

Dr. Rainer Typke
http://www.ofai.at/~rainer.typke

"Schnelle Musiksuche mit Vantage Indexing"

Um große Datenbanken mit Melodien schnell nach musikalisch aehnlichem Material
zu durchsuchen, sollte man vermeiden, die gesuchte Melodie mit jeder einzelnen
Melodie in der Datenbank zu vergleichen. Eine Moeglichkeit, die aehnlichsten Melodien
auf effizientere Weise zu finden, ist Vantage Indexing. Die Grundidee ist dabei,
im voraus fuer jeden Datenbankeintrag den Abstand zu einigen wenigen "Vantage-Objekten"
zu berechnen, und dann Datenbank-Suchen auf die Eintraege zu beschraenken,
deren Abstaende zu den Vantage-Objekten aehnlich groß sind wie die Abstaende
zwischen den Vantage-Objekten und der gesuchten Melodie.

Musipedia, eine webbasierte kollaborative Melodiesammlung, verwendet Vantage
Indexing zu genau diesem Zweck. Das dabei verwendete Abstandsmaß fuer Melodien
und/oder Rhythmen ist keine Metrik. Das bedeutet, dass, im Gegensatz zu Abstandsmaßen,
die wir aus dem taeglichen Leben kennen, die Dreiecksungleichung nicht gilt.
Der direkte Weg von A nach B ist also nicht immer die kuerzeste Verbindung;
ein Umweg ueber einen Punkt C kann kuerzer sein. Im Fall von Musipedia liegt das daran,
dass das Abstandsmaß manchmal nur Teile der Melodien vergleicht. Das ist z. B. nuetzlich,
wenn eine kurze Suchanfrage in einem laengeren Datenbankeintrag enthalten ist,
oder umgekehrt.

In diesem Vortrag wird vorgestellt, wie man fuer bestimmte Metriken das Vantage
Indexing optimal gestaltet. Das heißt, es wird garantiert, dass eine Suche
immer alle gesuchten Eintraege findet, obwohl nur ein Bruchteil der Datenbank
durchsucht wird, und dass außerdem der durchsuchte Teil der Datenbank optimal klein ist.
Zweitens zeigen wir, wie man darauf aufbauend fuer Nicht-Metriken
wie z. B. das Rhythmus-Aehnlichkeitsmaß von Musipedia Vantage Indexing so einsetzen kann,
dass auch ohne Gueltigkeit der Dreiecksungleichung alle gesuchten Eintraege immer
gefunden werden, und dass der durchsuchte Teil der Datenbank zwar nicht mehr
optimal klein ist, aber nicht viel groeßer.

*********

Zeit: Dienstag, 19. August 2008, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

*********

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bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an
sec@ofai.at.

2008-03-25

2008-03-25T00:00:00+01:00

until 2008-03-28: 19th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2008), organised by OSGK and held at the University of Vienna, Austria, with 112 paper presentations by 208 authors from 29 countries.

19th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2008)

2008-03-25T00:00:00+01:00

Please visit the conference website for further information.

2008-03-19

2008-03-19T00:00:00+01:00

Publication of "Cybernetics and Systems 2008", 2 vols., 676 pages, edited by Robert Trappl, published by the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies (OSGK), Vienna.

German support verb constructions and figurative expressions (German_PNV_Krenn)

2008-02-01T00:00:00+01:00

This is a gold standard of 21796 German combinations of governing verb and prepositional phrase, represented by the preposition and head noun of the PP. The PP-verb pairs were manually annotated as lexical collocations or non-collocational. A distinction is made between two subtypes of lexical collocations, support-verb constructions (Funktionsverbgefüge) and figurative expressions.

Prof. Joseph Emonds

2008-01-30T00:00:00+01:00

                                 VORTRAG
                                *********

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)                   
                        Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
  Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Presenter:

Prof. Joseph Emonds
http://sils.shoin.ac.jp/~jeemonds/

"The Grammatical Lexicon: the fundamental tool for constructing
convergent numerations." 

Short summary:

Current versions of Chomskyan syntax take for granted that syntactic
derivations depend on prior specification of complete numerations 
of lexical items, which then combine according to the principles of
syntax. However, competence models have provided no ways to choose
such numerations; they are either chosen randomly or based on the
intuition of (ultimately native) speakers. In neither case is there
any scientific characterization of these objects, and so syntactic
derivations lose their status as a scientific model. This essay
claims that numerations in a plausible formal model of language
can be conceived as random (or, formally equivalently, pragmatically
determined) only if syntactic derivations can supplement them in a
highly constrained way: by adding to them items from a special lexical
subcomponent of purely grammatical or closed class items. Items from
this subcomponent, dubbed the Syntacticon in some recent work,
seem to have precisely the grammatical properties (insertion into
already processed structures, possibly null phonology) needed to make
the otherwise randomly selected numerations converge to well formed
Logical Forms.
In this talk, I will be relating the idea of a numeration of lexical
items to a corresponding syntactic derivation. An initial definition of
a convergent numeration (throughout, a c-numeration) is a set of all
and only the lexical items that appear in a well-formed syntactic
structure.

                               *********

   Zeit:   Mittwoch, 30. Jänner 2008, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

   Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
           fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
           Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.



   OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
   FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



   Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


                               *********

  Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns
     bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an
                          sec@ofai.at.

Complex Cooperative Personality Agents with Higher Neuroticism Factor

2008-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of a new research project "Complex Cooperative Personality Agents with Higher Neuroticism Factor".

Prerequisites of the Development of a Personalised Virtual Butler

2008-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of a new research project "Prerequisites of the Development of a Personalised Virtual Butler".

Dr. Paolo Petta et al., OFAI, Vienna, Austria

2007-12-13T00:00:00+01:00

                                 VORTRAG
                                *********

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)                   
                        Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
  Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Presenters:

DI Dr. Paolo Petta, Doz. Dr. Sabine Payr, DI Bernhard Jung and
MSc Juan Martinez Miranda, members of the Intelligent Software
Agents and New Media group of OFAI.
http://www.ofai.at/research/agents 

            LEARNING TO COLLABORATE (L2C)- A PROGRESS REPORT 

Short summary:

In this presentation, we will provide an overview of progress in the
EU FP6 Project, "Learning to Collaborate" (L2C, www.l2c.info). This
two-year project with 13 partners (academia/research organisations,
SMEs, and industrial target users) aims at providing a portfolio of
simulation based learning experiences for the middle and high
management. These workshops address organisation, group, and
interpersonal collaboration traps in a blended learning framework,
where a shared methodology is supported by a range of simulation
game prototypes currently under development. Each of these simulation
games realises a different small world simulation scenario, in which
the players/learners experience directly a variety of collaboration
challenges that form a shared reference for subsequent facilitated
reflective analysis.


                               *********

   Zeit:   Donnerstag, 13. Dezember 2007, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

   Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
           fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
           Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.



   OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
   FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



   Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


                                *********

  Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns
     bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an
                          sec@ofai.at.

Dr. G. Weiss, SCCH GmbH, Hagenberg

2007-11-19T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Dr. Gerhard Weiß
  SCCH GmbH
  Softwarepark 21
  4232 Hagenberg, Österreich


        AUTONOMIE ALS EIGENSCHAFT WISSENSBASIERTER SYSTEME


In den vergangenen Jahren hat sich Autonomie (als Systemeigenschaft)
als ein zentrales Konzept in der Informatik und Informationstechnik etabliert.
Dieser Vortrag beleuchtet dieses Konzept aus dem Blickwinkel von
wissensbasierten Systemen. Nach einer einführenden Motivation und
Einordnung des Vortragsthemas wird unter Bezug auf den aktuellen
Forschungsstand eine allgemeine Charakterisierung von (computationaler)
Autonomie vorgenommen sowie ein formales Schema zur expliziten
Spezifikation von autonomen Systemverhalten vorgestellt. Dieses Schema,
das durch Arbeiten im Bereich der Agententechnologie inspiriert ist,
zeichnet sich durch ein besonders hohes Maß an Expressivität und Präzision
aus.

                           *********

  Zeit:   Montag, 19. November 2007, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.



  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



  Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


                            *********

 Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns
    bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an
                         sec@ofai.at.

2007-09-23

2007-09-23T00:00:00+02:00

until 2007-09-27: 8th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2007), co-organised by OFAI and held at the Vienna University of Technology.

Prof. Araki, Hokkaido University, Japan

2007-07-13T00:00:00+02:00

                                 VORTRAG
                                *********
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)                   
                        Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
  Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

   Prof. Kenji Araki
   Hokkaido University, Japan 

              RESEARCH AT THE LANGUAGE MEDIA LABORATORY

I will give an overview of the research topics of the language media
laboratory of Hokkaido University in Japan. The general focus of our
research is natural languages. The ultimate goal is the practical
realization of the linguistic capability of an adult and and its
application to engineering. As a first step towards this goal, 
we aim to realize the innate capability of language acquisition
displayed by an infant.

Our research projects cover a wide range of natural language
processing tasks. They include topics such as language acquisition,
machine translation, dialogue processing, automatic proof-reading,
text mining and knowledge acquisition using the Web. 




                            *********

   Zeit:   Freitag, 13. Juli, 17:00 Uhr pktl.

   Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
           fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
           Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.



   OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
   FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



   o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


                             *********

  Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns
     bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an
                          sec@ofai.at.

Call for Papers: EMCSR 2008

2007-06-12T00:00:00+02:00

                      NINETEENTH EUROPEAN MEETING

                                  ON

                   CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH

                             (EMCSR 2008)

                         March 25 - 28, 2008

                         UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA


         organized by the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies
                          in cooperation with the
      Institute of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence,
         Center for Brain Research, Medical University of Vienna
                                  and the
               International Federation for Systems Research


                               * * * * *

 An electronic version of this CfP (and further information
 whenever it becomes available) can be found at

                       http://www.osgk.ac.at/emcsr/


                               * * * * *

 The international support of the European Meetings on Cybernetics
 and Systems Research held in Austria in 1972, 1974, 1976, 1978,
 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000,
 2002, 2004 and 2006 (when 500 scientists from more than 40
 countries from all continents, except the Antarctica, met to
 present, hear and discuss 137 papers) encouraged the Council
 of the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies (OSGK) to organize
 a similar meeting in 2008 to keep pace with continued rapid
 developments in related fields.



                               * * * * *

 Symposia

 A  Systems Science
      R.Belohlavek, USA, and P.Prautsch, Czech Republic
 B  Mathematical Methods in Cybernetics and Systems Theory
      Y.Rav, France, and J.Scharinger, Austria
 C  The Cybernetics of Cybernetics: Cybernetics, Interaction
    and Conversation
      R.Glanville, UK
 D  Living Systems Theory
      G.A.Swanson, USA
 E  Biocybernetics and Mathematical Biology
      L.M.Ricciardi, Italy
 F  Cultural Systems
      M.Fischer, UK, and D.Read, USA
 G  Cognitive Rationality, Relativity and Clarity
      I.Ezhkova, Belgium
 H  Management, Organizational Change, and Innovation
      M.Mulej, Slovenia
 I  Socio-technical Systems: Design and Use
      G.Chroust, Austria, and S.Payr, Austria
 J  Neural Computation and Neuroinformatics
      G.Dorffner, Austria
 K  ACE 2008: Agent Construction and Emotions
      J.Gratch, USA, and P.Petta, Austria
 L  Agent-Based Modeling & Simulation
      S.Bandini, Italy, and G.Vizzari, Italy
 M  Natural Language Processing
      E.Buchberger, Austria, and K.Oliva, Czech Republic
 N  Theory and Applications of Artificial Intelligence
      V.Marik, Czech Republic, and O.Stepankova, Czech Republic
 O  Systems Movement and Systems Organisations -
    Challenges, Visions and Roadmaps
      G.Chroust, Austria, and M.Mulej, Slovenia


                       *************************


Submission Guidelines

Acceptance of contributions will be determined on the basis of
Draft Final Papers. Each paper must explain clearly

     - what problem it is trying to address,
     - what has been tried before and why it isn't good enough,
     - WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND WHY IT IS BETTER,
     - some proof that your method is sound (or reference to it),
     - how it will help others/apply to other problems,
     - some results/proof it works.

Draft Final Papers must not exceed 6 pages (10-point,
double column, for style sheet see website), in English. They have
to contain the final text to be submitted, including graphs and
pictures.

They must carry title, author(s) name(s), and affiliation
(incl. e-mail address) in this order, and must include an
abstract.

Please specify clearly the symposium you would like to submit 
your paper to. Each scientist shall submit only ONE paper.

Authors should submit their manuscripts in electronic form by
email addressed to

sec@ofai.at

Please send your paper as attachment in .PDF format only!  Please
use the following  subject header for your email: "EM08_letter
of the Symposium you want to submit your paper to _Name of
corresponding author", e.g. "EM08_A_Meyer". This should also be the
filename of the manuscript. Thank you.

                      *************************

Deadline for submission

                          November 4, 2007

Submissions received after the deadline cannot be considered.

Authors will be notified about acceptance or rejection no later
than December 16, 2007.


                       ************************


Final Papers

Electronic camera-ready copies of the final paper will be due by
January 30, 2008. Acceptance of the final paper will be based on
compliance with the reviewers' comments.


                      *************************

Presentation

It is understood that each accepted paper is to be presented
personally at the Meeting by one of its authors.


                      *************************          

Conference Fee

EUR 250,-- if received before January 30, 2008
EUR 300,-- if received later (only participants without paper
contribution)
EUR 350,-- if paid at the conference desk (only participants without
paper contribution)

The Final Paper must be accompanied by the payment of the
Conference Fee.

The Conference Fee includes participation in the Nineteenth
European Meeting, attendance at the official reception, coffee
during breaks, and the volumes of the proceedings available at the
Meeting. Please send cheque, or transfer the amount (free of
charges for beneficiary) to the account no. 0026-34400/00 of the
Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies at Bank Austria
Creditanstalt, Vienna
bank routing number: 12000,
IBAN: AT11 1100 0002 6344 0000,
SWIFT/BIC Code: BKAUATWW

Please state your name clearly.

                       *************************

Hotel Accommodation

will be handled by

AUSTROPA INTERCONVENTION,
Friedrichstrasse 7
A-1010 Vienna
phone +43-1-58800-514
fax +43-1-58800-520.

                      *************************

Scholarships

The International Federation for Systems Research is willing to
provide a limited number of scholarships covering the registration
fee for the conference for colleagues from weak currency countries.
Applications should be sent to the Conference Secretariat
***before*** November 4, 2007 under all circumstances.

                      *************************

Insurance

The conference organizers can accept no liability for personal
injuries, or for loss or damage to property belonging to
conference participants, either during or as a result of the
conference. Please check the validity of your personal insurance.

                      *************************

Chairman of the Meeting

Robert Trappl, President
Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies

Secretariat

I. Ghobrial-Willmann and U. Schulz
Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies
A-1010 Vienna 1, Freyung 6/6 (Austria)
Phone: +43-1-5336112-60
Fax: +43-1-5336112-77
E-mail: sec@ofai.at


Programme Committee

 P. Ballonoff (USA)              K. Oliva (Czech Republic)
 S. Bandini (Italy)              S. Payr (Austria)
 R. Belohlavek (USA)             P. Petta (Austria)
 E. Buchberger (Austria)         P. Prautsch (Czech Republic)
 G. Chroust (Austria)            Y. Rav (France)
 G. Dorffner (Austria)           D. Read (USA)
 I. Ezhkova (Belgium)            L. M. Ricciardi (Italy)
 M. Fischer (UK)                 J. Scharinger (Austria)
 R. Glanville (UK)               O. Stepankova (Czech Republic)
 J. Gratch (USA)                 G.A. Swanson (USA)
 V. Marik (Czech Republic)       R. Trappl (Austria)
 M. Mulej (Slovenia)             G. Vizzari (Italy)


Organizing Committee

  E. Buchberger             F. Kintzler
  G. Chroust                J. Matiasek
  I. Ghobrial-Willmann      P. Petta
  W. Horn                   U. Schulz
  J. Irran                  R. Trappl



              ********************************************
              PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE: November 4, 2007
              ********************************************


------------------------------------------------------------------------

EMCSR 2008   19TH EUROPEAN MEETING ON CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH



  REGISTRATION:

  Electronic registration is possible via

                   http://www.osgk.ac.at/emcsr/

Doz. Dr. Sabine Payr, OFAI, Wien

2007-05-24T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                               *********

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Doz.Dr. Sabine Payr
  OFAI


      SOZIALE IDENTITAETEN IN DER MENSCH-MASCHINE-KOMMUNIKATION

 Interaktive virtuelle Charaktere werden bereits in einigen Gebieten
 eingesetzt: virtuelle Rezeptionistinnen oder Verkaeufer im Internet
 sollen Kundentreue und -zufriedenheit steigern, sie sollen als
 Auskunftspersonen in Call-Centern Fragen beantworten, oder in
 Simulationsspielen verschiedene Rollen uebernehmen, an und mit denen
 Lernende soziale Kompetenzen trainieren koennen. Die Herausforderung
 fuer die Forschung und Entwicklung besteht daher darin, ECAs (Embodied
 Conversational Agents) und Roboter zu kreieren, die sich in der
 Interaktion auch sozial - und nicht nur inhaltlich - angemessen
 verhalten. Der hohe Anteil unzufriedener oder sogar veraergerter
 Benutzer(innen) bereits eingesetzter derartiger Systeme deutet darauf
 hin, dass der Weg bis dahin noch weit ist.

 Um diese Herausforderung anzunehmen, ist es notwendig, die Sicht des
 Dialogs als Informationsaustausch zu ïŒberwinden und diesen als den
 zentralen Schauplatz der (Re)Konstruktion sozialer Identitaet zu
 begreifen. Konversationsanalyse und kritische Diskursanalyse sind die
 Methoden, mit denen Gespraeche detailgenau analysiert werden koennen
 und die einen Blick auf Einstellungen und Handlungen der Sprechenden
 selbst ermoeglichen. Im Vergleich von Mensch-Mensch- und
 Mensch-Maschine-Konversationen wird in diesem Vortrag vor allem der
 Frage nach den Asymmetrien (Initiative, Dominanz) und den "Techniken"
 von Aushandlung, Bestaetigung und Widerstand nachgegangen.


                           *********

  Zeit:   Donnerstag, 24. Mai, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.



  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

2007-05-22

2007-05-22T00:00:00+02:00

Stefan Rank receives a 2006 Acknowledgement Award of the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence for his excellent Diploma Thesis.

2007-03-30

2007-03-30T00:00:00+02:00

Sabine Payr completes "Habilitation" (= post-doctoral lecturing qualification) at the University of Art and Industrial Design Linz and therefore becomes "Dozent für Interface Culture".

Dr. Pfahringer, Univ. of Waikato, New Zealand

2006-11-16T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Dr. Bernhard Pfahringer, Senior Lecturer,
  Department of Computer Science,
  University of Waikato,
  Hamilton, New Zealand


                      LIFE AFTER WEKA


  After a very brief introduction to the Waikato Machine Learning
  group this talk will present details of a few current research
  directions at Waikato including semi-supervised learning,
  learning from data streams, and random rules.


                           *********

  Zeit:   Donnerstag, 16. November 2006, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.



  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


                            *********

 Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns
    bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an
                         sec@ofai.at.

Dr. Michael Ben-Eli, New York

2006-09-29T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

        OESTERREICHISCHE STUDIENGESELLSCHAFT FUER KYBERNETIK
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Dr. Michael U. Ben-Eli
 The Cybertec Consulting Group, Inc.
 New York, N.Y.
 U.S.A.


               THE FIVE CORE SUSTAINABILITY PRINCIPLES
                          A New Framework

 Transforming the world's economy to a sustainable basis presents the
 most significant challenge to the 21st century. This challenge is
 unprecedented in scope. It requires a fundamental shift in
 consciousness as well as in action. It calls for a fresh vision,
 a new dream and new approaches for shaping an evolving new reality.

 If we are serious about ensuring a sustainable future, we need to be
 guided by a set of rigorous principles which underlie sustainability
 as an enduring state. The set of principle offered in this presentation
 was developed for this purpose. They are expressed in relation to five
 fundamental domains.

 The result is a set of five core principles, each with its own derived
 policy and operational implications. The set is fundamentally systemic
 in nature, meaning, that each principle affects all the others and is
 affected by each in return.


                                *********

  Zeit:   Freitag, 29. September 2006, 17:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHE STUDIENGESELLSCHAFT
  FUER KYBERNETIK



  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


                               *********

  Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns
     bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an
                              sec@ofai.at.

Klaus Stiefel, PhD, La Jolla, California, USA

2006-09-07T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

        Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Klaus Stiefel, PhD,
  Computational Neurobiology Lab,
  Salk Institute for Biological Studies,
  La Jolla, California, USA


                NONLINEAR DYNAMICS IN NEURAL FUNCTION


  Neurons display a wide variety of different non-linerar dynamics,
  such as action potential firing, sub-threshold oscillations
  and the non-linear integration of synaptic inputs. We have used
  in-vitro patch clamp recordings in slices of the mouse visual cortex
  and biophysical simulations to investigate some of these phenomena.
  In particular, we investigated the irregularity of spike trains in
  pyramidal neurons and interneurons, the effect of the neuromodulator
  acetylcholine on the spike phase-reset curves of neurons and the
  interaction of sub-threshold oscillations with inhibitory synaptic
  potentials. A framework derived from dynamical-systems theory
  unifying these phenomena is presented.

                                *********

  Zeit:   Donnerstag, 7. September 2006, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHE STUDIENGESELLSCHAFT
  FUER KYBERNETIK



  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


                                *********

  Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns
     bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an
                              sec@ofai.at.

2006-08-30

2006-08-30T00:00:00+02:00

Gerhard Widmer appointed ECCAI Fellow for outstanding contributions over many years to the European Artificial Intelligence Community

Dr. P. Wallis, Sheffield University, England

2006-08-24T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Dr. Peter Wallis
  Natural Language Processing Research Group
  Department of Computer Science
  Sheffield University


        BDI AS FOLK PSYCHOLOGY: A MORE REALISTIC APPROACH
           TO PLANNING BASED ON GOAL TAGGED ACTIVITIES


 The Beliefs, Desires and Intention (BDI) architecture was initially
 designed to balance reactive and deliberative behaviour in autonomous
 agents. It has also found an important role as a basis for modeling
 human behaviour. Based on folk psychology, BDI agents do what they
 believe is in their interests. This is common sense to us humans -
 something computers don't normally have - and something we simply
 expect when dealing with apparently rational agents. As such, BDI
 provides an excellent basis for synthetic characters in computer games
 (Black & White) for "pucksters" in military training (Goss et al) and
 actors in social simulations (Norling). BDI provides a system with
 intentional behaviour, but there is more to our folk understanding of
 other people. Norling and Ritter extend the model to include
 attention and timing constraints, de Rossis has included emotion with
 the BDI&E model, and models of sensing and representation have been
 added (Norling). In this talk I discuss a further improvement that
 provides a better model of human planning. In the classic GOFAI
 approach, planning "bottoms out" at atomic actions. When playing
 chess, a primitive action is to move a piece. In playing snooker,
 a primitive action is to strike the white ball with the cue. In the
 case of riding a bicycle however, the model breaks down. Riding a bike
 is more like the interaction of a diesel engine and it's governor - to
 view it as sensing and acting is to miss the time-extended nature of
 the process. The robotics community has generally embraced a behaviour
 based model in which behaviours "just happen". Rather than using
 GOFAI plans in a BDI plan library, I advocate using a library of
 "activities" tagged with the goals they might achieve. These
 activities can be quite high level, and indeed can be social. The
 proposal is that chatting with the priest, a policeman, or mates in
 the pub, are all activities we "just do" with minimal planning.
 An open question is whether this cognitive architecture can provide
 the bridge between the working of human minds and the reality of human
 behaviour in a social environment.

 Dr. Wallis is currently visiting OFAI in the framework of the Network
 of Excellence HUMAINE (Human Machine Interaction on Emotions), funded
 by the European Commission.


                                *********

  Zeit:   Donnerstag, 24. August 2006, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl


                                *********

Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns 
bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" an 
sec@ofai.at.

2006-06-13

2006-06-13T00:00:00+02:00

Robert Trappl receives in a ceremony the Felber Medal, 1st Class, from the Technical University of Prague.

Dr. P. Wallis, Sheffield University, England

2006-06-08T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Dr. Peter Wallis
  Natural Language Processing Research Group
  Department of Computer Science
  Sheffield University


        BDI AS FOLK PSYCHOLOGY: A MORE REALISTIC APPROACH
           TO PLANNING BASED ON GOAL TAGGED ACTIVITIES


 The Beliefs, Desires and Intention (BDI) architecture was initially
 designed to balance reactive and deliberative behaviour in autonomous
 agents. It has also found an important role as a basis for modeling
 human behaviour. Based on folk psychology, BDI agents do what they
 believe is in their interests. This is common sense to us humans -
 something computers don't normally have - and something we simply
 expect when dealing with apparently rational agents. As such, BDI
 provides an excellent basis for synthetic characters in computer games
 (Black & White) for "pucksters" in military training (Goss et al) and
 actors in social simulations (Norling). BDI provides a system with
 intentional behaviour, but there is more to our folk understanding of
 other people. Norling and Ritter extend the model to include
 attention and timing constraints, de Rossis has included emotion with
 the BDI&E model, and models of sensing and representation have been
 added (Norling). In this talk I discuss a further improvement that
 provides a better model of human planning. In the classic GOFAI
 approach, planning "bottoms out" at atomic actions. When playing
 chess, a primitive action is to move a piece. In playing snooker,
 a primitive action is to strike the white ball with the cue. In the
 case of riding a bicycle however, the model breaks down. Riding a bike
 is more like the interaction of a diesel engine and it's governor - to
 view it as sensing and acting is to miss the time-extended nature of
 the process. The robotics community has generally embraced a behaviour
 based model in which behaviours "just happen". Rather than using
 GOFAI plans in a BDI plan library, I advocate using a library of
 "activities" tagged with the goals they might achieve. These
 activities can be quite high level, and indeed can be social. The
 proposal is that chatting with the priest, a policeman, or mates in
 the pub, are all activities we "just do" with minimal planning.
 An open question is whether this cognitive architecture can provide
 the bridge between the working of human minds and the reality of human
 behaviour in a social environment.

 Dr. Wallis is currently visiting OFAI in the framework of the Network
 of Excellence HUMAINE (Human Machine Interaction on Emotions), funded
 by the European Commission.


                                *********

  Zeit:   Donnerstag, 8. Juni 2006, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. P. Wallis, England: ABGESAGT!

2006-06-08T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


Dr. Wallis teilte uns soeben mit, dass er seine Reise nach Wien auf Juli
2006 verschieben musste. Daher entfaellt zu unserem grossen Bedauern der
fuer heute Abend, 08.06.2006 im OFAI angesetzte Vortrag (BDI AS FOLK
PSYCHOLOGY: A MORE REALISTIC APPROACH TO PLANNING BASED ON GOAL TAGGED
ACTIVITIES).


                               *********


    Falls Sie keine weiteren Zusendungen wuenschen, schicken Sie uns 
    bitte eine Antwort-Email mit dem Subject "unsubscribe" zurueck.

Dr. M. Skowron, OFAI, Vienna

2006-05-29T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Dr. Marcin Skowron
 OFAI


           A WEB BASED APPROACH TO FACTOID AND COMMONSENSE
                        KNOWLEDGE RETRIEVAL

 In recent years, the amount of machine readable resources has been
 rapidly increasing, including the textual content of the WWW. Although,
 new generations of the Internet search engines employed much more
 sophisticated methods and took the advantage of the constantly
 increasing computer processing power for many Internet users,
 especially for those who do not possess sufficient knowledge or
 experience with using the currently available solutions, the problem
 of accessing relevant and reliable information in a timely manner
 awaits for its proper solution. Since language along with its
 communication function is used to represent knowledge and human beings'
 recognition of the world, one can also perceive the growing size of
 textual resources as an asset usable for providing commonsense and
 general knowledge to computer systems. Without such knowledge machines
 cannot reason in a way similar to human beings, which slows down the
 spread of AI systems.

 The talk attempts to addresses the challenges and opportunities that
 appeared along with the growth of the machine readable textual
 resources by introducing methods for factoid and commonsense knowledge
 retrieval from the WWW. These include the Interactive Clustering-Driven
 Approach to Question Answering, the query formation method based on the
 Query Generation Patterns, Support Vector Machines based question
 classification with the extended set of features, as well as the
 extensive utilization of the question category information in the
 documents retrieval, answer candidates extraction and verification
 processes of the Question Answering System. The presentation
 discusses also the method for the automatic retrieval of commonsense
 and general knowledge concepts from the WWW, usable by the computer
 systems. The methods were applied and evaluated in the Web Based
 Question Answering, Interactive Clustering-Driven Question Answering
 and Web Based Knowledge Retrieval Systems.


                                *********

  Zeit:   Montag, 29. Mai 2006, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

2006-05-01

2006-05-01T00:00:00+02:00

Start of the "Competence Network for Advanced Speech Technology (COAST)" in the Knet Program of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economy and Labour. Duration 4 years, OFAI's contribution led by Harald Trost.

18th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2006)

2006-04-18T00:00:00+02:00

Please visit the conference website for further information.

2006-03-01

2006-03-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the STREP (Specific targeted research project) "Learning to Cooperate (L2C)", supported by the EC. Duration 2 years, OFAI's contributions led by Paolo Petta and Sabine Payr.

2006-02-01

2006-02-01T00:00:00+01:00

Publication of "Programming for Peace. Computer-Aided Methods for International Conflict Resolution and Prevention", edited by Robert Trappl, Springer Publishers, Dorderecht, NL (the table of contents and chapter 1 of the book are available online).

Dr. M. Gelautz, Wien und S. Zillner, Muenchen

2006-01-17T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence(IMKAI)
  des Zentrums fuer Hirnforschung der Medizinischen Universitaet Wien
                      Freyung 6/2, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-4277 631-01,                    Email:sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Ao.Univ.-Prof. DI. Mag. Dr. Margrit Gelautz
 Interactive and Multimedia Systems Group
 TU Wien und
 Dipl.-Math. Dr. Sonja Zillner,
 Siemens AG, Muenchen


                  A VIDEO-BASED CHOREOGRAPHY TOOL

 In diesem Vortrag beschreiben wir ein Konzept zur videogestuetzten
 Aufnahme, Analyse und Annotation von Tanzsequenzen, mit dem Ziel, die
 Archivierung bestehender Choreografien und deren spaetere Wieder-
 verwendung zu unterstuetzen. Wir besprechen einige spezielle
 Herausforderungen, die sich auf Grund der Schnelligkeit und
 Komplexitaet der Tanzbewegung fuer die Videoverarbeitungsalgorithmen
 (z.B. Optisches Tracking) ergeben, und zeigen Beispiele zugehoeriger
 Hochgeschwindigkeitsaufnahmen. Eine Grundlage fuer die formale
 Beschreibung der Bewegung bietet die Labannotation, benannt nach dem
 oesterreichischen Choreografen Rudolph Laban (1879-1958). Die
 Praesentation schliesst mit einem kurzen Ausblick auf derzeit
 laufende internationale Forschungsarbeiten zur computergestuetzten
 Analyse und Interpretation von Tanz.


                                *********

  Zeit:   Dienstag, 17. Jaenner 2006, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

2006-01-01

2006-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Start of the Specific Targeted Research Project "Responsive Artificial Situated Cognitive Agents that Live and Learn on the Internet (RASCALLI)", supported by the EC. Duration 3 years, OFAI's contributions led by Brigitte Krenn.

Prof. A. Linninger, Illinois, USA

2005-12-19T00:00:00+01:00

Wir erlauben uns auf den Vortrag von Prof. Andreas A. Linninger
am IMKAI hinzuweisen:

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence(IMKAI)
  des Zentrums fuer Hirnforschung der Medizinischen Universitaet Wien
                      Freyung 6/2, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-4277 631-01,                    Email:sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Ass.Prof. Dr. Andreas A. Linninger,
 University of Illinois, Chicago, IL


                TRANSPORT PROCESSES IN THE BRAIN

  Pertinent transport mechanisms of blood, cerebrospinal fluid or
  large proteins (e.g. drugs) inside the human brain and the
  central nervous system (CNS) are still poorly understood. The
  aim of our interdisciplinary research is to quantify intracranial
  transport and metabolic reaction phenomena. Our systems approach
  admits only fundamental principles of fluid mechanics and
  elasto-dynamics for relating the distensible vascular system to
  the pulsatile CSF motion. The new model quantifies deformations of
  the distensible blood vessels, brain tissue strains, pressure
  gradients inside the brains gray and white and three-dimensional
  CSF flow fields. We introduce a novel problem inversion technique
  to determine transport or metabolic parameters from advanced
  imaging data in vivo. The findings permit the optimal design of
  drug delivery options for diseases of the central nervous system
  and explain shortcomings in existing treatments. The examples taken
  from biomedicine demonstrate the role of first principles
  mathematical models as a versatile knowledge acquisition tool.


                                *********

  Zeit:   Montag, 19. Dezember 2005, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Inst. f. Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence
          d. Zentrums f. Hirnforschung der Med. Universitaet Wien,
          Wien 1, Freyung 6, Stg.2 (Schottenhof), Tel. 4277-63101
          www.ai.univie.ac.at/imkai

Dr. M. Goto, AIST, Japan

2005-11-25T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


  Dr. Masataka Goto (AIST, Japan)
  http://staff.aist.go.jp/m.goto/


            MUSIC SCENE DESCRIPTION AND ITS APPLICATIONS

  Our research project "music scene description" aims to achieve
  an understanding of musical audio signals at the level of
  untrained listeners. This contrasts with most studies in the
  past that aimed to achieve it at the level of trained musicians
  by identifying all musical notes forming a musical score or
  obtaining segregated signals from sound mixtures. Music scene
  description features the description of "scenes" that occur
  within a musical performance such as hierarchical beat structure,
  melody line, bass line, repeated sections, and chorus sections.
  In this talk, I introduce our real-time methods for obtaining
  descriptions of such scenes.  Several applications we developed
  by using those methods are also described, including a beat-driven
  computer graphics dancer "Cindy" and a music listening station
  with chorus-search function "SmartMusicKIOSK".


                                *********

  Zeit:   Freitag, 25. November 2005, 14:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. Anton Batliner, Univ. Erlangen-Nuernberg

2005-10-07T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


  Dr. Anton Batliner,
  Lehrstuhl fuer Mustererkennung,
  Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg


              EMOTION, INTERAKTION UND ERKENNUNGSRATEN


  In einem Wizard-of-Oz-Experiment mussten Kinder dem Roboterhund
  AIBO von Sony Aufgaben stellen. Der vom Wizard gesteuerte AIBO
  verhielt sich aber oft ungehorsam. Die Sprachdaten (51 Kinder,
  9.2 Stunden Sprache) wurden nach Emotion und Interaktion annotiert
  und klassifiziert.

  Ich werde mich im Vortrag auf zwei Hauptaspekte konzentrieren:
  zum einen zeigt sich, dass in realistischen, natuerlichen Szenarien
  die bekannten, prototypischen Emotionen selten, partnerzentrierte
  Interaktionen aber haeufiger vorkommen. Zum anderen zeigt sich, dass
  die fuer geschauspielerte Emotionen erzielten Erkennungsraten fuer
  "echte" Daten illusorisch sind; Moeglichkeiten, legitime und
  halb-legitime Verbesserungen der Erkennungsraten zu erzielen, sowie
  sinnvolle und weniger sinnvolle Anwendungszenarien werden diskutiert.


                                *********

  Zeit:   Freitag, 7. Oktober 2005, 16:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

2005-09-12

2005-09-12T00:00:00+02:00

Best Poster Award at the ISMIR2005, London, for the paper: "MATCH: A Music Alignment Tool Chest" by Simon Dixon and Gerhard Widmer.

Dipl.-Inf. Dr. Elmar Noeth, Univ. Erlangen-Nuernberg

2005-08-29T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@ofai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


 Wir erlauben uns, auf folgenden Vortrag am IMKAI hinzuweisen:


  Dipl.-Inf. Dr. Elmar Noeth,
  Lehrstuhl fuer Mustererkennung (Informatik 5),
  Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg

              SPRACHGESTEUERTE 3D-ANGIOGRAPHIE - DIE SOFTWARE
                       FOLGT DEM ARZT AUF'S WORT

  In diesem Vortrag werden die Moeglichkeiten der Steuerung von Geraeten
  mittels natuerlicher Sprache am Beispiel eines sprachgesteuerten
  3D-Gefaeßanalysesystems vorgestellt. Das System versteht ganze Saetze
  und erkennt selbstaendig, ob eine Aeusserung an das System gerichtet
  ist oder an eine andere Person. Die Sprachsteuerung wurde am Lehrstuhl
  fuer Mustererkennung der Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg in
  Zusammenarbeit mit der Firma  Sympalog Voice Solutions GmbH fuer
  ein Geraet zur Stenosenvermessung der Firma Siemens Medical Solutions
  (Leonardo Workstation) entwickelt und kuerzlich erfolgreich einer
  klinischen Erprobung unterzogen.


                                *********

  Zeit:   Montag, 29. August 2005, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Inst. f. Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence
          d. Zentrums f. Hirnforschung der Medizinischen Universitaet
          Wien, Wien 1, Freyung 6, Stg.2 (Schottenhof), 
          Tel. 4277-63101, www.ai.univie.ac.at/imkai


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

2005-06-27

2005-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

OFAI's all-new and renovated web pages are available under the new address http://www.ofai.at.

Mag. Dr. Arthur Flexer, Med. Universitaet Wien

2005-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Mag.Dr. Arthur Flexer,
  Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik, 
  Zentrum fuer Hirnforschung 
  der Medizinischen Universitaet Wien


                      MUSIC INFORMATION RETRIEVAL:
                EINFUEHRUNG UND AUSGESUCHTE ANWENDUNGEN


  Music Information Retrieval (MIR) ist eine interdisziplinaere
  Forschungsrichtung die Technologien enwickelt, die den effizienten
  Zugang zu grossen digitalen Musiksammlungen ermoeglichen. MIR hat
  sich im Zuge der Verbreitung des Internet und der dort verwendeten
  digitalen Formate fuer Musikdateien (z.B. MP3) etabliert. Der Vortrag
  gibt einen Ueberblick ueber die Grundproblematiken und stellt
  ausgesuchte Anwendungen aus der Forschungstaetigkeit der "Intelligent
  Music Processing Group" des OFAI vor (Berechnung von Aehnlickeiten
  zwichen Musikstuecken aufgrund von Audiosignalen oder mit Hilfe von
  Abfragen im WWW, automatische Strukturierung und Visualisierung von
  Musiksammlungen).


                                *********

  Zeit:   Montag, 27. Juni 2005, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. G. Neuman, DFKI, Saarbruecken

2005-06-06T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Priv.-Doz. Dr. Guenter Neumann,
  Deutsches Forschungszentrum
  fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz, DFKI

                CROSS-LINGUALE DOMAENENOFFENE FRAGE-ANTWORT-
                      VERARBEITUNG IN FREIEN TEXTEN

  Die Entwicklung von domaenenoffenen Frage-Antwort- (Open Domain
  Question Answering -ODQA) -Systemen ist ein sehr aktives
  Forschungsgebiet, in dem Methoden und Verfahren aus den Gebieten
  Information Retrieval (IR), Information Extraction (IE) und
  Natuerlichsprachliche Verarbeitung auf neuartige Weise verbunden
  werden. ODQA-Systeme erhalten als Eingabe Fragen in natuerlicher
  Sprache (und nicht Schluesselwoerter), verarbeiten und analysieren
  sehr grosse Mengen von freien Texten und liefern exakte Antworten
  (und nicht Dokumente) zurueck. Sehr aktuell ist hierbei die
  Entwicklung von cross-lingualen Systemen, die Fragen in einer
  Sprache empfangen (z.B. deutsch) und in Dokumenten einer anderen
  Sprache (z.B. englisch) die Antworten bestimmen. In diesem Vortrag
  moechte ich auf die wissenschaftlichen und technischen
  Herausforderungen von cross-lingualen ODQA eingehen und die am
  LT-lab des DFKI entwickelten Methoden und Techniken hierzu im
  Detail vorstellen, u.a. robuste Verarbeitung von
  natuerlichsprachlichen Fragen fuer offene Domaenen, einen hybriden
  Ansatz zur maschinellen Uebersetzung von Fragen, und Strategien
  zur multidimensionalen Annotation von sehr großen freien
  Textmengen.


                                *********

  Zeit:   Montag, 6. Juni 2005, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

2005-06-05

2005-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

The OFAI Music Group in The New York Times: Werner Goebl was interviewed for an article by Anne Midgette: Play It Again, Vladimir (via Computer) (NYT, Arts & Leisure, June 5, 2005).

Prof. Dr. Michal Pechoucek, Prague

2005-05-18T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Prof.Dr. Michal Pechoucek,
  Czech Technical University and
  Gerstner Laboratory, Prague


        THE USE OF ACQUAINTANCE MODELS FOR EFFICIENT CONTRACTION
                 IN COMPLEX COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENTS

  Intelligent coordination in complex multi-agent environments requires
  sophisticated mechanisms for suboptimal task decomposition and
  efficient task delegation among agents.

  Besides the quality of coordination (i.e. efficiency of decomposition
  and delegation) we need to handle also computational efficiency
  restriction such as fast response time and limited communication
  traffic among agents but also the amount of disclosed private
  knowledge while the semi-collaborative agents negotiate collaboration.
  We present a novel contraction mechanism based on the use of the
  acquaintance model, a structure where agents store the information
  about possible collaborators. We suggest an approach of iterative
  construction of partially-linear acquaintance models that is
  beneficial mainly in complex agent communities. The Use of the
  suggested approaches is an alternative to socially uniformed
  contraction mechanisms such as a contract-net-protocol or various
  private value auction techniques, that proved to be inadequate in
  complex negotiation domains.

  This approach has shown to be useful in various application domains,
  especially for collaboration in semi-trusted virtual environments
  such as planning humanitarian aid logistics.

                                *********

  Zeit:   Mittwoch, 18. Mai 2005, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dipl.-Ing. Bernhard Jung, OFAI

2005-05-10T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Dipl.-Ing. Bernhard Jung,
  OFAI, Wien

                         AGENT ENCAPSULATION
              IN A COGNITIVE VISION MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM

  We cast a basic cognitive vision design into a multi-agent framework
  and therein address the questions how and to what extent explicit
  consideration of coordination may affect the design and performance of
  such systems. In an analysis of our decomposition into task-dependent
  entities using both functional and physical approaches to
  encapsulation, we show that different kinds of algorithms with
  different notions of architecture and representation become possible.
  We describe the evolution of our implementation out of a traditional
  monolithic design, show how in it functionalities akin to notions of
  conventional tracking and reasoning emerge out of the distributed
  interaction between component agents, and compare its performance to
  the one of the original design.

                                *********

  Zeit:   Dienstag, 10. Mai 2005, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dipl.-Ing. Stefan Rank, OFAI

2005-05-03T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Dipl.-Ing. Stefan Rank,
  OFAI, Wien


                    MOTIVATING DRAMATIC INTERACTIONS

  Simulated dramatic story-worlds need to be populated with situated
  software agents that act in a dramatically believable way.

  With this premise in mind, I present work on an architecture that
  exploits social embedding and concepts from appraisal theories of
  emotion to model the interplay of motivational constructs and the
  subjective evaluative interpretation of changes in aN agent's
  environment.

  In this architecture, emotional processes drive an agent, mediating
  between its subjective concerns and preferences, its current state
  of activity, and the status and offerings of its environment.

                                *********

  Zeit:   Dienstag, 3. Mai 2005, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Prof. Dr. Tom Ziemke, University of Skovde, Sweden

2005-04-29T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Prof.Dr. Tom Ziemke,
  School of Humanities & Informatics
  University of Skovde, Sweden


                       TAKING EMBODIMENT SERIOUSLY:
                INTEGRATING COGNITION, EMOTION AND ACTION

  Much research in embodied AI and cognitive science emphasizes the fact
  that robots, like animals, but unlike the computer models of classical
  AI, are "embodied". However, in this talk it is argued that the
  physical embodiment that robots share with animals provides only one
  aspect of the "organismic embodiment" that is underlying natural
  cognition. Based on Damasio's theory of emotions (as survival-related
  bioregulatory reactions) and feelings (mental representations of
  physiological changes during emotions), the talk discusses why life
  is relevant to mind and outlines a project that aims to model the
  integration of cognition, emotion and self-preserving action in
  robots.


                                *********

  Zeit:   Freitag, 29. April 2005, 14:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. Roman Rosipal, OFAI, Wien

2005-03-16T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Dr. Roman Rosipal
  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
  fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI, Wien


           OVERVIEW AND SOME ASPECTS OF PARTIAL LEAST SQUARES

  Partial least squares (PLS) is a popular approach for soft modeling in
  industrial applications. PLS is a method for constructing predictive
  models consisting of a set of score vectors (latent variables). The
  score vectors are constructed to model relations between multivariate
  descriptor and uni- or multivariate response blocks of data where a
  criterion of maximal covariance is used. This talk will give an
  overview of PLS and its different forms. The nonlinear, kernel-based,
  extension of PLS will be considered throughout the talk in parallel to
  the linear PLS model. Existing relations of PLS to canonical
  correlation analysis, Fisher discriminant analysis and principal
  component analysis will be highlighted. The talk will focus on
  statistical perspective of the PLS regression model and its shrinkage
  properties with respect to ordinary least squares regression. Several
  aspects of PLS associated with multiple multivariate response
  regression, geometric interpretation, variables selection and the use
  of the PLS model in discrimination tasks will also be mentioned in the
  talk. Finally, several successful applications of the use of the PLS
  regression and classification models on electroencephalogram data will
  be described.

                                *********

  Zeit:   Mittwoch, 16. Maerz 2005, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. Douglas Eck, University of Montreal, Canada

2005-02-16T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Dr. Douglas Eck
  www.iro.umontreal.ca/~eckdoug
  University of Montreal Department of Computer Science
  Montreal Center for Brain, Music, and Sound (BRAMS)


       USING AUTOCORRELATION TO FIND TEMPORAL STRUCTURE IN MUSIC


   Autocorrelation is a simple, fast-to-compute method that has long
   been used as a tool for analyzing metrical structure in music (e.g.
   Judy Brown, 1993). Because autocorrelation can be performed online
   and works on a variety of inputs including filtered and rectified
   digital audio, it is an interesting method for exploring
   non-stationary effects such as acceleration and deceleration in
   performed music. However autocorrelation has a severe limitation:
   while it provides information about the magnitude of signal energy
   at different periods, it discards all information about phase. I will
   address this issue by presenting a naive way to compute a
   phase-preserving autocorrelation for music. I will go on to discuss
   a faster method that limits the number of lags where phase is
   preserved. Meter induction results will be presented from the Essen
   Database and the Finnish Folksong Database. I will conclude by
   observing that this model performs online dimensionality reduction
   and can be applied outside the areas of beat induction and meter
   detection. I will discuss ongoing research into using the results of
   the model as input to a gradient-based automatic music composition
   learner.

                                *********

  Zeit:   Mittwoch, 16. Februar 2005, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
          Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Buch: Agent Culture

2004-12-28T00:00:00+01:00

Sehr geehrte Dame,
sehr geehrter Herr,

wir freuen uns, auf ein Buch hinweisen zu koennen, das soeben im
Verlag Lawrence Erlbaum Associates erschienen ist,
von WissenschafterInnen des OeFAI herausgegeben wurde,
und das moeglicherweise fuer Sie von Interesse ist:


                         AGENT CULTURE
      Human-Agent Interaction in a Multicultural World

             Edited by Sabine Payr and Robert Trappl


Aus dem Vorwort:

Computer animation and -simulation have been making such
rapid progress during the last years that we are facing an
increasing number of computer-generated, realistic, and
believable actors in  different roles and in different media, e.g.
in computer games and even in movies.

While scientific research and technical development have
been focusing mainly on the (individual) personality of
synthetic actors,  we investigated the role of the synthetic being
as part of a heterogeneous society of real and virtual persons.
We furthermore tried to investigate in which cultural context synthetic
actors are developed and used. They can be developed as being
"as universal as possible", as expressing a specific culture, this
being an ethnic or a national culture or a sub-culture, or as a
means for better understanding another culture. Therefore, also
modelling non-verbal communication, especially by mimics, by
gestures, and by postures, plays a major role. Ignoring these
culture-dependencies can lead to a breakdown in (intercultural)
communication.


The twelve projects presented are grouped under "Culture(s)
and Agent Technology", "Design for Cross-Cultural Believability"
and "Agents for Intercultural Communication". The book is not
only of relevance for researchers and developers but also for
everyone interested in the psychological, social and cultural
aspects of this fascinating new technology.

Dieses Buch ist bereits im Buchhandel erhaeltlich.

Mit herzlichen Gruessen und den besten Wuenschen fuer ein
erfolgreiches und glueckliches Jahr 2005,


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. Simon Dixon, OFAI, Wien

2004-12-21T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Dr. Simon Dixon
  Senior Researcher
  OeFAI, Wien


         TOWARDS CHARACTERISATION OF MUSIC VIA RHYTMIC PATTERNS


   A central problem in music information retrieval is finding
   suitable representations which enable efficient and accurate
   computation of musical similarity and identity.

   Many aspects of music can only be captured by considering high
   level features. In this work, bar-length rhythmic patterns are
   automatically extracted from the audio signal and used as
   features for genre classification.  Standard classification
   algorithms are utilised to discriminate 8 classes of Standard
   and Latin ballroom dance music with a classification rate of
   up to 96%.


                            *********

  Zeit:   Dienstag, 21. Dezember 2004, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence
          Freyung 6/6, 3. Stock, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. Matthias Scheutz, University of Notre Dame, USA

2004-12-10T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Asst.Prof.Dr. Matthias Scheutz
  Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering,
  University of Notre Dame, USA


              STEPS TOWARDS COMPLEX AFFECTIVE AGENTS


  Over the last several years, affect has received increasing
  attention in artificial intelligence and cognitive science.
  Some even argue that affect provides the "glue" that makes
  complex agents possible.
  In this talk, I will briefly discuss different roles of affect
  in artificial agents and demonstrate some of them with examples
  from our own work with artificial and robotic agents.


                            *********

  Zeit:   Freitag, 10. Dezember 2004, 14:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence
          FREYUNG 6/6, 3. Stock, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Prof. Dr. Jonathan Kaye, Universitaet Wien

2004-11-30T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Prof. Dr. Jonathan Kaye
 Gastprofessor am Institut fuer Sprachwissenschaft,
 Universitaet Wien

                     SEX, LIES AND LINGUISTICS


 In this talk I will try to answer, at least in part, some of
 the following questions about human linguistic behaviour.

   €    Why do children learn language when they do?
   €    Why does language acquisition appear to tail off at puberty?
   €    Why do linguistic systems always change?
   €    Why do people say such stupid things about language?

 My principal hypothesis is the human language derived from the
 group recognition system employed by hominids rather than from
 any primate communication system. It will be shown that a number
 of otherwise mysterious properties of human linguistic systems
 may be explained by this hypothesis.

                            *********

  Zeit:   Dienstag, 30. November 2004, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence
          FREYUNG 6/6, 3. Stock, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. Lola Canamero, University of Hertfordshire, UK

2004-11-18T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Dr. Lola Canamero
 Senior Lecturer
 University of Hertfordshire, UK

        MOTIVATIONAL AND EMOTIONAL ROOTS OF COGNITION AND ACTION:
                       AN EMBODIED AI PERSPECTIVE

 Motivation and emotion are highly intertwined (e.g., emotions are
 often very powerful motivational factors; motivation can be seen
 as a consequence of emotion and viceversa, etc.) and it is not
 always easy to establish clear boundaries between them. Both types
 of phenomena are grouped under the broader category of "affect",
 traditionally distinguished from "cold" cognition. They lie at
 the heart of autonomy, adaptation, and social interaction in both
 biological and artificial agents. They also have a powerful and
 wide-ranging influence on many aspects of cognition and action.
 However, their roles are often considered to be complementary - as
 a first approximation, motivation would be concerned with the internal
 and external factors involved in the establishment of "goals" and the
 initiation and execution of goal-oriented action, whereas emotion is
 rather concerned, among other critical factors, with evaluative
 aspects of the relation between an agent and its environment.

 This talk will consider and illustrate some of the roles and mutual
 interactions of motivation and emotion in influencing different
 aspects of "low-level" cognition and action in artificial (in
 particular robotic) agents that interact with their physical and
 social environment from an Embodied AI perspective, i.e. in tightly
 coupled Perception-Action loops.

                            *********

  Zeit:   Donnerstag, 18. November 2004, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence
          FREYUNG 6/6, 3. Stock, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. Steven Greenberg, ICSI, Berkeley, USA

2004-10-21T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Dr. Steven Greenberg
 International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley

                A MULTI-TIER THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR
                     UNDERSTANDING SPOKEN LANGUAGE

 Spoken language is often viewed merely as sequences of words and
 phonemes. The listener's task is one of decoding the speech signal into
 its constituent elements derived from spectral decomposition of the
 acoustic signal. However, under acoustic interference, spectral
 decomposition is particularly challenging. Future-generation speech
 separation methods are likely to utilize a more comprehensive set of
 representational approaches than merely decoding words and phonemes.

 This presentation outlines a multi-tier theory of spoken language in
 which utterances are composed not only of words and phones, but
 also syllables, articulatory-acoustic features and (most importantly)
 prosemes, encapsulating the prosodic pattern in terms of prominence
 and accent. This multi-tier framework portrays pronunciation variation
 and the phonetic micro-structure of the utterance with far greater
 precision than the conventional lexico-phonetic approach, and thereby
 offers the prospect of improving machine-based recognition and
 separation systems in the future.


  Zeit:   Donnerstag, 21. Oktober 2004, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence
          FREYUNG 6/6, 3. Stock, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. G. Vizzari, University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy

2004-09-14T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Dr. Giuseppe Vizzari,
 Department of Computer Science, Systems and Communication,
 University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy

        SPATIAL METAPHOR FOR CONTEXT-AWARE APPLICATIONS

  Technological innovation is transforming the environment
  wherein we live, work, and interact. The growing availability
  of ever smaller computational devices and pervasive network
  connectivity allow to conceive new applications that support
  users in interactions among themselves, and with computer systems.
  Interaction thus is a crucial aspect of these new and increasingly
  decentralised systems, whose components need to act according
  to their local, subjective perception of their situation.

  Agent based models, and interaction models defined for these
  systems are a promising research area, facing issues related to
  pervasive context-aware systems. This talk will introduce the
  current landscape in agent interaction models, with specific
  references to the development of open and pervasive systems.
  Finally, some research results on a spatially based agent
  interaction model (Multilayered Multi Agent Situated System)
  will be presented.


  Zeit:   Dienstag, 14. September 2004, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence
          FREYUNG 6/6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Open position in Biosignal Processing

2004-07-27T00:00:00+02:00

The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence has an opening for a position in

Biosignal processing

This position will be open starting Sep. 1, 2004 and will be limited to 2 years. Work will be done as part of the EU-commission funded project SENSATION (Advanced Sensor Development for Attention, Stress, Vigilance & Sleep/Wakefulness Monitoring, www.sensation-eu.org). In this project, work will focus on building novel models of a person's sleep-wake cycle based on biosignal data like EEG, EOG or EMG. This will be done based on probabilistic models of pattern recognition, clustering and modeling, exploiting methods such as hidden Markov models, Gaussian mixtures and the like.

Required background

know-how in signal processing (e.g. EEG)
academic degree in computer science or engineering (with focus on signal processing) or equivalent degree
motivation for and interest in application-oriented research
basic programming skills (in particular, Matlab)
proficiency in English

Desired background

background in probabilistic pattern recognition methods
research experience
publications related to the field
basic understanding of German (minor requirement)

A Ph.D. degree is not required but will be preferred.

Application procedure

Interested applicants should apply by email, mail or fax, no later than August 20, 2004, at the address below. Include a short vita, a list of publications, and any other information demonstrating your qualification.

Send applications to:

Georg Dorffner
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Freyung 6/6
A-1010 Vienna
fax: +43-1-5336112-77
email: georg@ai.univie.ac.at
[use the keyword 'SENSATION' in the subject line!]

Open position in Cognitive Robotics

2004-07-27T00:00:00+02:00

The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence has an opening for a position in

Cognitive robotics

This position will be open starting Sep. 1, 2004 and will be limited to 3 years. Work will be done as part of the EU-commission funded project MACS (Multi-sensory Autonomous Cognitive Systems Interacting with Dynamic Environments for Perceiving and Using Affordances) and/or MindRACES (From Reactive to Anticipatory Cognitive Embodied Systems). These projects are in the domain of cognitive robotics dealing with learning interaction-based representations of objects, with foci on affordances (what a robot can do with objects) and anticipation of actions as the major driving force behind robotic cognition.

Required background

know-how in and hands-on experience with robotics
academic degree in computer science or engineering (with focus on autonomous robots) or equivalent degree
motivation for and interest in cognitive science research
basic programming skills (Matlab, C++, or Java)
proficiency in English

Desired background

research experience
publications related to the field
basic understanding of German (minor requirement)

A Ph.D. degree is not required but will be preferred.

Application procedure

Send applications to:

Georg Dorffner
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Freyung 6/6
A-1010 Vienna
fax: +43-1-5336112-77
email: georg@ai.univie.ac.at
[use the keyword 'Robots' in the subject line!]

Call for Papers: Methods for Adaptive Intelligent Systems

2004-07-22T00:00:00+02:00

                         Call for Papers

  ---------------------------------------------------------------
                        Special Issue of
                Applied Artificial Intelligence

                           Methods for
                  Adaptive Intelligent Systems
  ---------------------------------------------------------------

 Deadline: Oct 31, 2004
 Publication: Summer 2005

Special issue editors:
Georg Dorffner, Medical University of Vienna,
and Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Jon Garibaldi, University of Nottingham
Davide Anguita, University of Genoa

Papers are solicited that deal with true adaptivity of models, such as

  - Online adaptation to environmental changes
  - Transfer of a solution to another similar one
  - Systems learning on the task (growing knowledge)

in the areas of Neural computation, Machine learning, Fuzzy systems,
Evolutionary computation and related fields. The focus of papers can
be on new algorithm, tested on real data, or on case studies of real
applications. In order to be suitable for the special issue, it is
crucial to show that the algorithm cannot just be used for model
estimation but also to adapt models during routine application.
Special emphasis will be put on sound experimental validation of
the methods used.

Examples of methods to be investigated are

  - online variants of learning algorithms
  - incremental learning
  - learning on growing structures
  - adaptivity in Bayesian learning

Possible application areas include

  - time series forecasting
  - industrial process modeling
  - medical pattern recognition
  - image processing
  - etc.

Papers can be submitted until the deadline, October 31, 2004,
electronically by email to georg@ai.univie.ac.at or by regular
mail to

Georg Dorffner
Dept. of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence
Medical University of Vienna
Freyung 6/2
A-1010 Vienna, Austria

This special issue is supported by the European network EUNITE
(Smart Adaptive Systems for Intelligent Technologies), funded by
the European Commission.

Applied Artificial Intelligence is a renowned international journal
(editor: Robert Trappl) with a current impact factor of 0.789 (2003).

Prof. Kristina Hook, IT-University in Kista, Sweden

2004-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Prof. Kristina Hook, Petra Fagerberg, Anna Stahl (PhD-students),
 IT-University in Kista, Sweden


    A USER-CENTRED PERSPECTIVE ON THE DESIGN OF AFFECTIVE
           INTERACTION INVOLVING BOTH BODY AND MIND

 This seminar will present recent research results from the
 INVOLVE-group at DSV, in particular concerning a mobile 
 service named eMoto. In eMoto, users can express their 
 emotions through affective gestures that in turn render color, 
 shapes, and animations in the background of the SMS (MMS) 
 message they are writing. The gestures are picked up by sensors 
 that we have built into the pen that comes with the P800/P900 
 mobile phone from SonyEricsson.

 eMoto is built to explore how we can design for an affective 
 loop. The aim of the affective loop is to couple the affective 
 channels of users closely to those of interactive applications, 
 so that the user's emotions are influenced by those expressed 
 by or through the application, and vice versa. Through designing 
 for physical expressions of the end-user (eg., body posture, gestures, 
 tangible input through toys, speech) that makes sense with regards 
 to the design of the overall interaction or narrative or the system
 they  interact with, we try to make users involved both physically 
 and cognitively.

 Our research is firmly rooted in a user-centred perspective. In 
 particular we are interested in: embodiment as a means to address 
 physical and mental concepts in the interaction, natural but designed 
 expressions as a means to communicate affect instead of aiming for 
 complete naturalness, and ambiguity of the designed expressions to 
 allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of  
 simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs.

 Our aim is to leave the control over the interaction with the user,  
 rather than inferring human emotion, but still maintain the mystery 
 and open interpretation of emotional interactions and expressions.


  Zeit:   Montag, 26. April 2004, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence
          FREYUNG 6/6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

17th EMCSR 2004: Plenary Talk Prof. A. Nijholt, Twente, The Netherlands

2004-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

         OESTERREICHISCHE STUDIENGESELLSCHAFT FUER KYBERNETIK
                        Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
  Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
************************************************************************

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

wir erlauben uns, Sie zu dem anlaesslich der Eroeffung des
"17th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research 2004"
stattfindenden Eroeffnungsvortrages herzlich einzuladen:


  Prof.Dr. Anton NIJHOLT
  Center of Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT)
  University of Twente, The Netherlands

                      COMPUTATIONAL HUMOR:
              HUMOROUS INTERACTION WITH THE COMPUTER

  Abstract:

  In this presentation we survey the role of humor in human-human
  interaction with the aim to see whether it is useful for computers
  and (embodied conversational) interface agents to integrate humor
  modelling, humor interpreting and humor generating capabilities in
  their internal model of intelligence, emotions and interaction
  (verbal and nonverbal). We look at the current state of the art of
  humor research and at research into embodied conversational
  agents, affective computing and verbal and nonverbal interaction.
  In order to do this we also need to look at earlier attempts to
  define and model verbal and nonverbal humor in computational contexts.

  The talk will be illustrated with examples that show attempts to
  define and model humor and humorous interaction in a particular
  context, and attempts to introduce humor models underlying
  humorous interaction in general.

  ORT:   Großer Festsaal der Universitaet Wien,
         Dr. Karl Lueger-Ring 1, 1010 Wien

  ZEIT:  Dienstag, 13. April 2004, 10:00 Uhr


                  Wir freuen uns ueber Ihren Besuch!


  Mit herzlichen Gruessen,


  Univ.-Prof.Ing.Dr. Robert Trappl

17th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2004)

2004-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

Please visit the conference website for further information.

Dr. Brigitte Krenn, OFAI, Wien

2004-01-08T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Dr. Brigitte Krenn
 Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence


      ANIMIERTE CHARAKTERE IM INTERNET  ERGEBNISSE AUS DEM 
              EUROPAEISCHEN FORSCHUNGSPROJEKT NECA

 Der Einsatz animierter Charaktere im Internet hat in den letzten 
 Jahren grosse Verbreitung gefunden. Vor allem stoesst man immer 
 wieder auf Webseiten mit Chatterbots, die vorgeblich mit dem Benutzer 
 kommunizieren. Dieser erkennt aber schnell die Grenzen der 
 Technologie. 

 Ein voellig anderer Ansatz wurde im Europaeischen Forschungsprojekt 
 NECA (http://www.oefai.at/NECA/) gewaehlt, das sich mit der Computer-
 simulation menschlicher Kommunikation mittels animierter Charaktere 
 beschaeftigt. Im Vortrag werden Probleme und Loesungsansaetze aus 
 Sicht der Artificial Intelligence dargelegt und die Gesamtarchitektur
 sowie einzelne Komponenten des NECA-Systems zur Generierung 
 von multimodalen, animierten Dialogen vorgestellt.

                             *******

  Zeit:   Donnerstag, 08. Jaenner 2004, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
          fuer Artificial Intelligence
          FREYUNG 6/6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Fabien Gouyon, Barcelona, Spain

2003-12-16T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Fabien Gouyon
 Universitat Pompeu Fabra, IUA, Music Technology Group, Barcelona und
 Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence,
 Music Processing Group

   FROM LOW-LEVEL SOUND PROCESSING TO CONTENT-BASED MUSIC PROCESSING:
     ACTIVITIES OF THE MUSIC TECHNOLOGY GROUP (MTG) IN BARCELONA

   Since its creation, the MTG focused on building signal models for
   the analysis and synthesis of musical sounds, extending the doctoral
   work of its director, Xavier Serra, on Spectral Modeling Synthesis
   in Stanford University. From this initial research direction, the
   focus has been widened to embrace related topics. Among others are
   singing voice synthesis and transformation, time-stretching of audio,
   interactive composition systems, fingerprinting techniques for song
   and music recording identification and audio content analysis,
   description and transformation.

   In this lecture, we will provide a short overview of current research
   efforts in the MTG and we will put a special focus on the work being
   done on music content-based processing. One aspect of processing
   musical content is the automatic description of music in terms of
   highly abstract representations. Applications to content-based
   description are manifold: browsing musical databases, performance
   analysis, etc. We will concentrate on musical expressiveness
   transformations; that is, the editing and transformation of musical
   audio signals triggered by musically-meaningful representational
   elements, in contrast to low-level signal descriptors. We will
   demonstrate a computer software for modifying rhythmic performances
   of polyphonic musical audio signals. The rhythmic dimension it
   triggers is the swing. It first describes offline the rhythmic
   content of an audio signal: determination of tempi and beat indexes
   at the quarter-note and eighth-note levels, as well as estimation of
   the swing ratio. Then, the signal is transformed in real-time using
   a time-stretch algorithm. We will present basic techniques provided
   by commercial products for swing modification and compare these to
   our system.

  Zeit:   Dienstag, 16. Dezember 2003, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial
          Intelligence der Universitaet Wien (IMKAI)
          Wien 1, Freyung 6, Stg.2 (Schottenhof), Tel. 4277-63101
          www.ai.univie.ac.at/imkai


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. Thomas Rist, DFKI, Saarbruecken

2003-12-11T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Dr. Thomas Rist
 Deutsches Forschungszentrum für 
 Kuenstliche Intelligenz (DFKI), Saarbruecken

    ENTWURF UND GESTALTUNG VON MENSCH-MASCHINE-SCHNITTSTELLEN 
                      MIT ANIMIERTEN AGENTEN

 Der Wunsch, die Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation anthropozentrischer, 
 persoenlicher und zugleich unterhaltsamer zu gestalten, fuehrt 
 unmittelbar zur Metapher des personifizierten Interaktionspartners, 
 der dem Systembenutzer in Form einer animierten Figur entgegentritt. 
 Solche, auch als Interface-Agenten bezeichnete Artefakte, eroeffnen 
 ein breites Spektrum potentieller Anwendungsfelder - angefangen beim 
 Hilfeassistenten ueber virtuelle Produktberater und Verkaeufer im 
 Internet bis hin zum persoenlichen Kompagnon, der dem Benutzer ueber 
 Anwendungen hinweg mit Rat, Tat und nicht zuletzt zur Erheiterung zur 
 Seite steht.  Die visuelle Gestaltung der Agenten muß dabei nicht 
 notwendigerweise antropomorph ausfallen. Von einer zu starken 
 phaenotypischen Anlehnung an das Vorbild Mensch ist sogar abzuraten, 
 wenn die dadurch benutzerseitig geweckten Erwartungen hinsichtlich 
 kommunikativer Fähigkeiten systemseitig nicht erfüllt werden koennen.

 Ermuntert durch Ergebnisse empirischer Akzeptanzstudien und gepraegt 
 durch eine interdisziplinaer ausgerichtete Arbeitsgruppe am DFKI 
 rueckt die Idee der "beseelten" Kreaturen in den Vordergrund, und es 
 werden neue Interaktionssituationen mit mehreren Agenten erforscht. 
 Anhand ausgewaehlter Beispiele aus Forschungs- und Industrieprojekten 
 versucht der Vortrag diese noch keineswegs abgeschlossene Evolution 
 agenten-basierter Praesentationssysteme aufzuzeigen. 


  Zeit:   Donnerstag, 11. Dezember 2003, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
          fuer Artificial Intelligence   
          FREYUNG 6/6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. Brian Sallans, OFAI, Wien

2003-12-03T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Dr. Brian Sallans
 Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
 fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)


              AN AGENT-BASED MODEL OF INTERACTING MARKETS


  With the increase in available computational power, agent-based
  economic models have grown in prominence as a supplement to analytic 
  models and empirical studies. I will describe an agent-based discrete-
  time model of interacting consumer and financial markets.  The two 
  markets are linked through the behavior of boundedly-rational, 
  learning firms. The firms compete in the consumer market, and try to 
  satisfy both their customers and their shareholders. The model also 
  includes stock traders and simple consumers. I will give an overview 
  of the model, discuss validation and model exploration methods, and 
  show how the model can be used to investigate stock-option-based 
  management compensation.


  Zeit:   Mittwoch, 3.12.2003, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

  Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
          fuer Artificial Intelligence   
          FREYUNG 6/6, 1010 Wien.


  OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
  FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


  o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Jonathan Gratch and Stacey Marsella, California, USA

2003-06-18T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Prof. Jonathan Gratch
University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies,
Prof. Stacey Marsella
University of Soutern California's Information Sciences Institute

  THE ARCHITECTURAL ROLE OF EMOTIONS IN INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

  Emotion is nature's unique solution to challenges faced in the 
  design of any intelligent system. Findings in psychology and 
  neuroscience have overturned long-standing views that emotion is 
  in conflict with rational thought and have worked out a number of 
  the mechanisms through which emotion helps an organism adapt to 
  its environment. In this talk, we will discuss how an architectural 
  examination of these findings can begin to abstract the function 
  emotion plays in human information processing and inform the design 
  of intelligent systems in general. In contrast to contemporary 
  computational models of emotion that have focused largely on external 
  behavior, we harken back to Simon and Johnson-Laird and Oatley, who 
  also addressed the internal architectural role emotion plays in 
  intelligent behavior. In particular, cognitive appraisal theory, 
  which dominates recent psychological thought on emotion, emphasizes 
  the adaptive function of emotion and the close relationship between 
  cognition, emotion, and motivation. We show how to recast these 
  psychological theories in computational terms. The resulting general 
  framework has informed the design of significant AI applications and 
  can potentially lead to a concretization of these psychological 
  theories. We discuss an application of this framework to the problem 
  of generating coherent emotional behavior for a social training 
  application, giving a flavor of how contemporary research in human 
  emotion can influence general issues in the design of 
  intelligent systems.

                  !ACHTUNG, UNSERE NEUE ADRESSE!:

Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence  
        Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 3. Stock, 1010 Wien

Zeit:   Mittwoch, 18.6.2003, 18:30 Uhr pktl.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Prof. Joseph Goguen and Ryoko Goguen, San Diego, USA

2003-03-20T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Prof. Joseph Goguen and Ryoko Goguen
  University of California, San Diego

                LECTURE/DEMONSTRATION ON QUALIA IN MUSIC 
   WITH TALKING BY JOSEPH GOGUEN AND DEMONSTRATION BY RYOKO GOGUEN    

  Philosophers have generally taken a simplistic view of qualia, as 
  feeling tones associated with basic perceptions, such as a patch of 
  red. But much more complex qualia appear in music, involving 
  simultaneous perceptions, sequences of perceptions, emergent 
  properties of blended qualia, sensory and conceptual discrimination 
  limitations, both short and long term memory, and more. We will 
  discuss and demonstrate such phenomena, and also consider 
  improvisation, mentioning some challenges that it poses to the 
  philosophy of music. We will argue that certain problematic aspects 
  of both qualia and improvisation arise from failure to take full 
  account of the situatedness of human experience, especially its 
  social contextualization.

Zeit:   Donnerstag, 20. Maerz 2003, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

Ort:    Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik
        und Artificial Intelligence der Universitaet Wien   
        Freyung 6, Stiege 2, (Schottenhof), 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

c45-ofai

2003-03-15T00:00:00+01:00

c4.5-ofai is a modification of Ross Quinlan's famous and widely-used program c4.5 which is available from Ross Quinlan's homepage.

The license and rules for redestribution for C4.5 do seem to have changed over time, therefore I do NOT distribute a modified version of c4.5, but rather a patch that should be applied to Release 8 of the original c4.5 sources.

Features

Additional options for c4.5 and c4.5rules. The additional option -h will show a short help about all possible options and their default settings.
Can compile and run with CygWin (and possibly VC) under Windows.
Representation of missing values for continuous attributes changed from -999 to 1.1E-38
Options to suppress the output of trees to speed up finalization for large trees, suppress pruning completely, do the learning for an attribute that is different from the last one, store the binary tree representations in differently named files, treatment of missing values in the class label, and more.
New program bconsult: after learning a tree with c4.5, this program can be used to create a file that contains all the predictions for a test file, based on either the pruned or unpruned tree.
New program bconsultr: after learning rules with c4.5rules, this program can be used to create a file that contains all the predictions for a test file for these rules.
New program c4.5showtree: to print the full generated pruned or unpruned tree (c4.5 will split large trees and print subtrees seperately) with different levels of detail, optionally including instance weights.
New program c4.5showrules: to print the rules generated with c4.5rules.
Class confusion matrices will print zero values as 0 instead of blank to simplify automatic parsing.

Installation

Download the patch uncompress it.
Download the original c4.5-Release 8 distribution from Ross Quinlan's homepage and extract it to some directory.
Change to the subdirectory of the c4.5 release 8 package where the source files are in, most likely "Src".
Apply the patch with the command patch -p0 < path_to_patch_file
Edit the Makefile and change things as needed, e.g. change the destination directory for the binaries.
Build the binaries with the command make.
As a user with sufficient access rights to write into the destination directory for the binaries, install them with the command make install.

The license applies only to this patch, not the original C45 software!

Prof. T. Fuerstner, Universitaet f. Angewandte Kunst Wien

2002-12-10T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Prof. Tom Fuerstner
 Gastprofessor fuer Visuelle Mediengestaltung
 an der Universitaet für angewandte Kunst

                    DIE CHRONOFILE SOCIETY     

  Zu den interessantesten neuen Medienformaten, die das Internet 
  hervorgebracht hat, gehoeren zweifelsohne Weblogs (auch Blogs 
  genannt). Grundsaetzlich sind Weblogs hoch individualisierte 
  Webtagebuecher, in denen nicht-professionelle Autoren ihre 
  Alltagserfahrungen und Meinungen fuer ein potentiell weltweites 
  Publikum regelmaessig publizieren und archivieren.

  Interessant ist dabei, dass Weblogs binnen weniger Jahre zu einem 
  Massenphaenomen geworden sind. Taeglich eroeffnen mehrere tausend 
  Webuser neue Blogs. Blogs dienen allerdings nicht nur als 
  individuelles Artikulationsmittel, sondern dank der sehr 
  standardisierten Technologie, die zur Bespielung und Verwaltung der 
  elektronischen Tagebuecher eingesetzt wird, auch als ein voellig 
  neuartiges, kollektives Medium.

  Insbesondere diese Standardisierung erlaubt es, in einem nie da 
  gewesenen Ausmass kollektive Erfahrung automatisiert zu erfassen, 
  zu bewerten und erfahrbar zu machen. Die verschiedenen Moeglichkeiten
  und Arten semantischer Bewertungen und die daraus abgeleiteten 
  Schlussfolgerungen, bilden den Schwerpunkt meines Vortrages.


Zeit:   Dienstag, 10. Dezember 2002, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

Ort:    Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und 
        Artificial Intelligence (IMKAI)
    Freyung 6, Stiege 2, 2. Stock, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Priv.-Doz. D. Schmauks, Technische Universitaet Berlin

2002-12-05T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Priv.-Doz. Dr. Dagmar Schmauks
 TU Berlin, Arbeitsstelle für Semiotik

                   BEREDTES SCHWEIGEN; GESPANNTE RUHE.
       DER VERZICHT AUF ZEICHENPRODUKTION UND SEINE INTERPRETATION

  Inwieweit es moeglich ist, keine Zeichen zu produzieren, haengt von 
  der Kommunikationssituation ab. In Dialogen kann jemand zwar 
  absichtlich stumm und still sein, sein Koerper wird aber weiterhin als 
  Zeichenkomplex aufgefasst. Der Rezipient interpretiert jedes Schweigen,
  indem er das nonverbale Verhalten des Senders, sein Wissen ueber ihn 
  ("Partnermodell") und den vorangegangenen Dialog als Wissensquellen 
  benutzt. Die Skala des gemeinsamen Schweigens reicht vom "wortlosen 
  Einssein" (Sprechen ist ueberfluessig) bis zum "eisigen Schweigen" 
  (Sprechen ist unmoeglich). Beim nonverbalen Verhalten gibt es kein 
  genaues Analogon zum Schweigen, da auch ein Koerper, der sich nicht 
  absichtlich bewegt, ein Komplex aussagekraeftiger (An)Zeichen bleibt. 
  Koerperhaltung und -spannung sind wahrnehmbar bzw. erschliessbar, 
  eventuell auch physiologische Faktoren wie Puls- und Atemfrequenz, 
  Koerpertemperatur und Schweissproduktion. Die moeglichst vollstaendige 
  Bewegungslosigkeit ist so vieldeutig wie das Schweigen; sie kann 
  eine wunschlose Geloestheit, atemlose Erwartung oder angstvolle 
  Erstarrung sein, was in erster Linie anhand der Mimik entschieden 
  wird. Abschliessend wird gefragt, inwieweit der komplementaere Verzicht
  auf Zeichenrezeption - zu der auch die Wahrnehmung gehoert - moeglich 
  ist, der in manchen Formen der Meditation gesucht wird.


Zeit:   Donnerstag, 5. Dezember 2002, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence    
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Prof. A. Ferscha, J. Kepler Universitaet Linz

2002-12-03T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Alois Ferscha 
 Department of Computer Science, Johannes Kepler Universität of Linz


       "DIGITAL AURA": TOWARDS AD-HOC INTERACTION IN CONTEXT                 

 Services delivered through pervasive computing environments demand 
 to be related to "context", particularly to the person, the time and 
 the place of their use. 

 The aim for seamless service provision to anyone (personalized 
 services), at any place (location based services) and at any time 
 (time dependent services) has brought the issues of software framework
 design and middleware to a new discussion: it is expected that 
 context-aware services will evolve, enabled by wirelessly ad-hoc 
 networked, autonomous special purpose computing devices (i.e. "smart 
 things"), providing largely invisible support for tasks performed by 
 users. It is further expected that services with explicit user input 
 and output will be replaced by a computing landscape sensing the 
 physical world via a huge variety of electrical, magnetic, optical, 
 etc. sensors, and controlling it via a manifold of actuators. 
 Interaction among persons, places and things in the pervasive 
 computing environment will most likely follow the principles of P2P 
 computing, rather than be centralized services.

 The idea of a "Digital Aura" is to equip persons and real world 
 objects with digital nimbus information, and P2P concepts to implement
 context sensitive, situative, implicit and non-distracting modes and 
 styles of interaction.

 In this presentation I will explore the software engineering issues, 
 challenges and enabling technologies associated with the provision of 
 context aware services, and will demonstrate digital aura "in 
 operation". 

Zeit:   Dienstag, 3. Dezember 2002, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence    
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. E. Hudlicka, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA

2002-11-21T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Dr. Eva Hudlicka
 Psychometrix Associates Inc., Blacksburg, Virginia, USA

                    THIS TIME WITH FEELING: 
        METHODOLOGY AND TESTBED FOR MODELING STATE AND 
        TRAIT EFFECTS ON DECISION MAKING AND BEHAVIOR       

  Decision making and behavior are influenced by a variety of cognitive,
  personality, and affective factors. Together these factors are 
  referred to as individual differences. Modeling their effects within 
  cognitive architectures is critical, both for the development of 
  more realistic agents, and for the advancement of our understanding 
  of a variety of perceptual and cognitive processes.  

  In this talk I will describe a generic methodology for modeling the 
  effects of individual differences within symbolic cognitive 
  architectures, with particular focus on trait and state effects. 
  The core component of the methodology is a high degree of 
  architecture parameterization of both structure and processing. 
  This parameter space then provides a means of encoding the effects 
  of specific configurations of individual differences on a variety of 
  perceptual and cognitive processes. The methodology has been 
  implemented in the context of a specific cognitive architecture and 
  a computational cognitive modeling testbed environment, which 
  supports the definition of multiple, interacting agent types.   

  A demonstration of 'anxious', 'aggressive' and 'normal' agent 
  behavior will be presented in the context of a series of events 
  occurring within a demonstration scenario. 

Zeit:   Donnerstag, 21. November 2002, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence    
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. K. Hirata, NTT, Japan

2002-10-22T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Keiji Hirata
NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan


         INTERACTIVE MUSIC SUMMARIZATION SYSTEM BASED ON GTTM

  My talk presents a music summarization system called "Papipuun." 
  Papipuun performs quick listening in a manner similar to a stylus 
  skipping on a scratched record, but the skipping occurs correctly 
  at punctuations of musical phrases, not arbitrarily. 

  First, I would mention a method for representing polyphony based 
  on time-span reduction in the generative theory of tonal music 
  (GTTM) and the deductive object-oriented database (DOOD). The 
  operation, least upper bound, plays an important role in similarity 
  checking of polyphonies represented in our method. Next, I would 
  talk on the system operation of Papipuun. In a preprocessing phase 
  of Papipuun, a user analyzes a set piece by the time-span reduction, 
  using a dedicated tool, called TS-Editor.

  For a real-time phase, the user interacts with the main system, 
  Summarizer, to perform music summarization. Summarizer discovers a 
  piece structure by similarity checking. When the user identifies the 
  fragments to be skipped, Summarizer deletes them and concatenates 
  the rest. Papipuun can produce the music summarization of good 
  quality, reflecting the atmosphere of an entire piece through 
  interaction with the user. I will demonstrate Papipuun during my 
  presentation.

Zeit:   Dienstag, 22. Oktober 2002, 18:00 Uhr pktl.

Ort:    Institut für Medizinische Kybernetik und 
        Artificial Intelligence (IMKAI)
        Freyung 6, Stiege 2, 2. Stock, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

ao.Univ.-Prof.Dr. Gerhard Widmer, START Preistraeger

2002-10-16T00:00:00+02:00

  Ich erlaube mir auf einen Vortrag, der vielleicht Ihr Interesse
  findet, hinzuweisen: Auf Einladung des Praesidenten des Fonds zur
  Foerderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung wird 
  Herr ao.Univ.-Prof.Dr. Gerhard Widmer, START Preistraeger, 
  am 16. Oktober 2002 um 18.00 Uhr im Rahmen des FWF-Forums in den 
  Raeumen des Fonds, Weyringergasse 35/1, 1040 Wien, einen Vortrag 
  zum Thema "Auf der Suche nach dem Horowitz-Faktor" halten.

  Ein Abstract finden Sie unter 
             http://www.fwf.ac.at/de/news/widmer.html
  Genauere Informationen zum FWF-Forum:
             http://www.fwf.ac.at/de/fwf-forum/fwf_forum.html

Mit herzlichen Gruessen,

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl

DI Elias Pampalk, OFAI, Wien

2002-10-07T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Dipl.-Ing. Elias Pampalk
 Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence 

                            ISLANDS OF MUSIC

  Die enorme Menge an Musik, die heutzutage digital verfuegbar ist, 
  hat die Popularitaet und Verbreitung von digitalen Musikarchiven 
  deutlich gesteigert. Dadurch ergibt sich aber auch die Notwendigkeit,
  solche Musiksammlungen (automatisch) zu organisieren und intelligente
  Suchmethoden zur Verfuegung zu stellen, die einen User die Musik 
  finden lassen, die er/sie wirklich hoeren will.

  Islands of Music ist ein User Interface zu Musiksammlungen, das sich 
  an die graphische Gestaltung von Landkarten anlehnt. Inseln 
  repraesentieren Gruppen von Musikstuecken mit aehnlichem Stil. Berge 
  und Huegel auf diesen Inseln repraesentieren Untergruppen. Die Inseln 
  sind derart angeordnet, dass aehnliche Gruppen nahe beisammen liegen 
  und gegebenenfalls durch eine Landpassage verbunden sind, waehrend 
  Gruppen, die sehr unterschiedlich wahrgenommen werden, durch ein 
  tiefes Meer getrennt sind. Die Musikstuecke aus der Sammlung werden 
  auf der Karte entsprechend ihrer Beziehung zu den Gruppen platziert. 
  Dies ermoeglicht nicht nur die Suche nach Interpreten oder Titeln, 
  sondern auch nach Musikstilen.

  Im Vortrag wird das Verfahren zur automatisierten Erstellung von 
  Islands of Music vorgestellt, wobei als Input lediglich reine 
  Audiodaten dienen. Weiters werden das User Interface vorgefuehrt und 
  offene Probleme diskutiert.

 Zeit:   Montag, 7. Oktober 2002, 18:00 Uhr pktl.
 Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
         fuer Artificial Intelligence    
         Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dixon, Goebl, Pampalk, Widmer, OFAI, Vienna

2002-06-19T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Dr. Simon Dixon, Mag. Werner Goebl, Dipl.-Ing. Elias Pampalk, 
 ao.Univ.-Prof.Dr. Gerhard Widmer
 Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence


                         THE PERFORMANCE WORM

  Im Rahmen eines ausgedehnten Grundlagenforschungsprojekts 
  (finanziert durch einen START-Preis 1998) wird am Oesterreichischen 
  Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence an AI-Methoden zur 
  Analyse ausdrucksvoller Musikinterpretation gearbeitet. 

  Eines der derzeitigen Ziele dieser Arbeiten ist die Erforschung und 
  explizite Charakterisierung des Interpretationsstils grosser 
  PianistInnen. Als technologische Grundlage fuer solche Untersuchungen 
  wurde ein neuartiges Visualisierungstool - der sogenannte Performance
  Worm - entwickelt, mit dem Aspekte der Interpretation eines 
  Musikstuecks durch einen Musiker direkt sichtbar gemacht und in 
  Echtzeit (d.h. synchron mit der Musik) in Form einer Animation 
  visualisiert werden koennen. 

  Im Rahmen des Vortrags werden verschiedene Varianten und Anwendungen 
  des Tools demonstriert, und es wird auch gezeigt, wie aus der 
  systematischen Analyse solcher Visualisierungen (mit Hilfe von 
  AI-Methoden) stilistische Eigenheiten verschiedener PianistInnen 
  identifiziert und quantifiziert werden koennen.

  Und was das ganze mit einem Wurm zu tun hat, 
  wird bald klar werden ...


Zeit:   Mittwoch, 19. Juni 2002, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence    
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Edward R. Kozel, San Francisco, USA

2002-06-04T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Edward R. Kozel 
  San Francisco, USA

            TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT IN THE POST BUBBLE AREA: 
         CONSIDERATIONS ON VIABLE DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING MODELS

  About the Speaker:

  Edward R. Kozel is partner and managing director of Open Range 
  Ventures, a private venture capital firm active in telecom, 
  networking, and internet startups. He is a member of the Board of 
  Directors of Cisco Systems, which he co-founded in the late eighties 
  and where he worked for 11 years in a variety of roles including 
  Chief Technology Officer and Sr. VP Business Development. 
  In addition, he is on the boards of Reuters and Yahoo!.

  Previously, Mr. Kozel worked at Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and at 
  SRI International, where he participated in the early design and 
  development of the Internetwork Protocol (IP) model and TCP/IP, 
  packet radio networks and highly distributed information systems. 
  He graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a degree 
  in Electrical Engineering.


Zeit:   Dienstag, 4. Juni 2002, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence    
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. M. V. (Pek) van Andel, The Netherlands

2002-05-21T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Dr. M.V. (Pek) van Andel 
  Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands

        SERENDIPITY: THE GIFT OF MAKING UNSOUGHT FINDINGS

  'Accidental' Discoveries, Inventions and Creations in Science, 
  Technique and Art. About the Origin, History, Domains, Traditions, 
  Appearances, Patterns and Programmability of Serendipity   

  'Nothing is accidental, and what seems to us accident is only an 
  unknown fact whose explanation may furnish the occasion for a more 
  or less important discovery.' (Cl. Bernard, 1865) 

  Serendipity is a surprising observation followed by a correct 
  explanation. My collection of serendipitous discoveries, inventions 
  and creations in science, technique and art is, as far as known, the 
  largest in the world. In the 'chaos' of these serendipities I found 
  a 'order' of thirty serendipity patterns, which gives a new 
  perspective on the old subject of serendipity. Knowledge of these 
  serendipity patterns helps in finding also the unsought and in 
  expecting even the unexpected. 

  'Je planmaessiger die Menschen vorgehen, desto wirksamer trifft sie 
  der Zufall.' (F. Duerrenmatt, 1962).


Zeit:   Dienstag, 21. Mai 2002, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
        (bis 19:15 + Discussion)
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence    
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl

A. Albright, M.A., UCLA Linguistics Dept., Los Angeles

2002-04-18T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Adam Albright, M.A.
UCLA Linguistics Department, Los Angeles

     A MINIMAL GENERALIZATION APPROACH TO RULE INDUCTION                          

Numerous computational models of morphology have taken on the task 
of identifying morphemes and decomposing complex words into their 
constituent parts.  Relatively fewer models have taken on the reverse 
task, of learning rules to compose novel complex forms.  Before a 
model can combine morphemes to create new forms, it must learn two 
things: (1) the contexts in which the morphemes occur (their 
distribution), and (2) the rates at which they occur (their 
productivity).  I present an inductive approach to learning the 
distribution and productivity of rules. The model starts by 
considering pairs of morphologically related forms (e.g., (present,past)), and 
comparing them to discover the rules that are needed to derive one 
form from the other.  Comparing (jump,jump[t]) and (sip,sip[t]), the 
model posits a rule suffixing [t] after stems ending in [p]; 
comparing further with (kick,kick[t]), it posits a rule suffixing [t] 
after stems ending in non-coronal voiceless stops, and so on.  This 
conservative strategy, which we refer to as "minimal 
generalization", can accurately discover the distribution of 
morphemes, because it never generalizes a process beyond the contexts 
in which it has been observed. In order to discover the productivity 
of rules, the model collects simple statistics about the reliability 
of rules in different environments.

After describing the basic model, I discuss a common but neglected 
pattern of linguistic exceptions, in which a few exceptional forms 
take the "wrong" allomorph.  For example, the English verb 
(burn,burnt) uses the [t] suffix, but in the context of the voiced 
sound [n], which should ordinarily take the [d] allomorph.  I present 
an algorithm for identifying this type of exception and learning the 
"true" distribution of allomorphs, even in the presence of such 
exceptions.


Zeit:   Donnerstag, 18. April, 2002, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence    
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Ing.Dr. Robert Trappl

16th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2002)

2002-04-02T00:00:00+02:00

Please visit the conference website for further information.

Dr. K. Oliva und Mag. P. Kveton, OFAI, Wien

2002-03-21T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Dr. Karel Oliva und Mag. Pavel Kveton
  Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
  fuer Artificial Intelligence, Wien


           A LINGUISTIC BASIS OF CORRECTLY TAGGED POS CORPORA    


  In this talk, we shall first review two notions from the area of 
  statistical (i.e. purely "quantitative-based") language processing: 
  "representativity of a corpus" and "bigram", and we shall try to 
  give them a linguistic ("qualitative") interpretation. Based on 
  these considerations, we shall develop a practical technique serving 
  for detection of errors in a part-of-speech tagged corpus.  Further, 
  we shall generalize the approach in two orthogonal directions: from 
  bigrams to n-grams (for any natural n) and from error detection to 
  genuine tagging. In the last section, we shall illustrate the 
  error-detection method developed on the NEGRA corpus of German, and 
  discuss the general implications of the linguistics-based framework 
  developed for statistical taggers. 


Zeit:   Donnerstag, 21. Maerz 2002, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence    
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl

M. Graham, Philips Research Laboratories, UK

2002-03-15T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mike Graham
Senior Scientist
Interactive Systems Group, Philips Research Laboratories, UK


    THE FILM AGENT: SYNTHESIZING A PERSONALISED TELVISION PROGRAMME

In recent years, the rapid growth in the availability of digital 
entertainment content through diverse distribution channels has 
motivated academic and industrial research in the area of personalised 
filtering and recommendation technology. Philips' Film Agent is a 
prototype of recommendation system in the domain of movies, for use 
in the home on domestic consumer electronic equipment.

The Film Agent synthesizes a personalised TV review programme. 
It explains its recommendations by specific reference to a user's 
viewing history, and exploits the conventions of television programme 
production to present multimedia information which it gathers from 
various remote internet resources. The design of the system takes 
into consideration its anticipated domestic context of use, the 
likely capabilities of near-future consumer-level platforms, and 
insights from the academic community about believable agents.

In this talk, I shall describe the architecture and components of 
the system, and discuss the motivations for the design choices it 
embodies. I shall also show a short (offline) demonstration of the 
Film Agent in action.


Zeit:   Freitag, 15. Maerz 2002, 17:00 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence    
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl

Prof. Saso Dzeroski, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia

2002-02-18T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Professor Dr. Saso Dzeroski
Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia 


     IS COMBINING CLASSIFIERS BETTER THAN SELECTING THE BEST ONE?


We empirically evaluate several state-of-the-art methods for 
constructing ensembles of classifiers with stacking and show that 
they perform (at best) comparably to selecting the best classifier 
from the ensemble by cross validation. We then propose a new method 
for stacking, that uses multi-response model trees at the meta-level, 
and show that it clearly outperforms existing stacking approaches, 
as well as selecting the best classifier from the ensemble by cross 
validation.


Zeit:   Montag, 18. Feber 2002, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence    
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl

Univ.-Doz. DI Dr. Johannes Fuernkranz, OFAI, Austria

2002-02-11T00:00:00+01:00

                                  VORTRAG
                                  *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Univ.-Doz.DI Dr. Johannes Fuernkranz
OeFAI

   WEB MINING - NUTZUNG DER VERNETZUNGSSTRUKTUR DES WORLD-WIDE WEBS

Das World-Wide Web verschafft jedem Internet-User Zugang zu einer
stetig wachsenden Informationsfuelle, die ohne entsprechende
Unterstuetzung nicht mehr zu ueberschauen ist. Web Mining ist eine junge
Forschungsrichtung, die versucht, das Problem mit Hilfe von Techniken
des Maschinellen Lernens und Data Minings in den Griff zu bekommen. In
diesem Vortrag werde ich einen kurzen Ueberblick ueber Web Mining geben,
wobei besonderer Schwerpunkt auf Methoden zur Nutzung der starken
Vernetzung der Dokumente gelegt werden wird, die das Web auszeichnet
und von anderen Dokumentensammlungen unterscheidet. Im Detail werden
dann "Hyperlink Ensembles" vorgestellt, eine neue Methode zum
automatischen Erlernen einer Zuordnungsfunktion von Web-Seiten zu
einer vorgegebenen Menge von Klassen. Diese Methode zeichnet sich
dadurch aus, dass der Text der zu kategorisierenden Seite voellig
ignoriert werden kann und statt dessen nur Informationen von Seiten,
die auf diese Seite zeigen, beruecksichtigt werden. Diese Methode wird
anhand einer Anwendung zur Erkennung von verschiedenen Typen von
Seiten, die man typischerweise auf Universitaetsinstituten findet (z.B.
Homepages von Professoren vs. Homepages von Studenten), illustriert.

Zeit:   Montag, 11. Feber 2002, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence    
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. E. Raybourn, Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque, NM, USA

2001-12-14T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Elaine Raybourn
Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque

        TOWARD THE COMPUTATIONAL REPRESENTATION OF COGNITIVE, 
     EMOTIONAL, AND CULTURAL STRESSORS ON HUMAN DECISION-MAKING:
                      A PEACEMAKING SCENARIO

My presentation will describe an approach taken by Sandia National 
Labs, Albuquerque, New Mexico, to represent the cognitive, cultural, 
and physiological variability in decision-making under stress. A 
project focused on the computational representation of an individual 
in an ambiguous, highly stressful situation while faced with a 
high-consequence decision that greatly impacted subsequent events. 
This project sought to demonstrate steps toward a realistic 
computational representation of the variability encountered in human 
behavior. A software model of a scenario adapted from a Desert Storm 
incident was developed in which the framework consisted of a 
computational instantiation of Recognition Primed Decision Making in 
the context of a Naturalistic Decision Making model (Klein, 1997). 
Recognition Primed Decision Making was augmented with an underlying 
foundation based on a basic understanding of human neurophysiology 
and its relationship to human cognitive processes. The goal was to 
provide initial steps toward a computational representation of human 
variability in cultural, cognitive, and physiological (arousal, 
emotions, etc.) state in order to attain a better understanding of the 
full depth of human decision-making processes in the context of 
ambiguity, novelty, and heightened arousal. I will present the research 
undertaken in the project, and discuss the challenges we encountered, 
and provide a basis from an intercultural communication perspective 
for reasons why we must be very careful in modeling cultural dynamics.

Zeit:   Freitag, 14. Dezember 2001, 17:00 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence    
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl

Dr. K. Tochtermann, Graz

2001-11-29T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


Dr. Klaus Tochtermann
Geschaeftsfuehrer
Knowledge Management Center (KNOW) GmbH
Graz

                            DAS KNOW-CENTER

Das Know-Center ist ein im Rahmen des Kplus-Programms gefoerdertes 
Kompetenzzentrum mit einem Themenschwerpunkt auf Wissensmanagement. 
In seiner Rolle als Bruecke zwischen Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft 
foerdert das Know-Center sowohl den Transfer von Forschungsergebnissen 
in die Praxis als auch die durch praktische Fragestellungen stimulierte 
strategische Grundlagenforschung. Das Know-Center kooperiert derzeit 
mit 11 Partnerunternehmen aus der Industrie und vier 
wissenschaftlichen Partnern.

Als zentrale Aufgabe verfolgt das Know-Center die Umsetzung einer 
ganzheitlichen Sichtweise auf Wissensmanagement. Dieser ganzheitliche 
Ansatz des Wissensmanagements harmonisiert strategische Ziele mit 
operativen Moeglichkeiten innerhalb eines Unternehmens. Auf der 
strategischen Ebene bietet das Know-Center Loesungen fuer das 
Management intellektuellen Kapitals. Fuer die Unterstuetzung des 
Wissensmanagements auf operativer Ebene baut das Know-Center auf 
seinen umfangreichen Kompetenzen im Bereich innovativer Informations- 
und Kommunikationstechnologien auf. Als Bindeglied zwischen 
strategischer und operativer Ebene des Wissensmanagements setzt das 
Know-Center auf seine Kompetenzen in den Innovationsfeldern 
Wissenstransfer und eLearning.

Zeit:   Donnerstag, 29. November 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.

OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl

Prof. G. Gottlob, Wien

2001-11-22T00:00:00+01:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ass.Dr. Robert Baumgartner,o.Univ.-Prof.Dr. Georg Gottlob,Marcus Herzog
Abteilung fuer Datenbanken und Artificial Intelligence
Institut fuer Informationssysteme
Technische Universitaet Wien

                  EXTRAKTION UND INTEGRATION VON WEBDATEN: 
                        NEUE METHODEN UND NEUE TOOLS

Nach einer kurzen Einfuehrung in die Problematik der Web-Informations-
extraktion und der weiterfuehrenden Verarbeitung der extrahierten 
Information auf XML Basis werden Vorfuehrungen der neuen Tools "Lixto" 
und "Infopipes" praesentiert.
Mittels dieser Tools koennen Informationsagenten realisiert werden, 
die es einem Benutzer erlauben, relevante Ausschnitte von Webseiten 
(mit staendig wechselnden Inhalten) zu definieren, die entsprechenden 
Informationen automatisch und kontinuierlich zu extrahieren und in XML 
umzuwandeln, Informationen aus mehreren Quellen zu integrieren und in 
geeigneten Formaten ueber verschiedene Kanaele (mail, wml,sms, 
Datenbanken, usw.) an Empfaenger auszuliefern. Zur Illustration wird 
die in Kooperation mit Max Mobil erstellte Anwendung "now playing" 
vorgestellt.

Zeit:   Donnerstag, 22. November 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
        fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl

Priv. Doz. D. Schmauks, Technische Universitaet Berlin

2001-10-18T00:00:00+02:00

                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Priv.Doz.Dr. Dagmar Schmauks
Technische Universitaet Berlin

TAEUSCHEN, LUEGEN UND VERSCHWEIGEN ALS DISKURSPHAENOMENE

Die Linguistik konzentriert sich oft einseitig auf die Mit-
teilungsfunktion von Sprache. Im Alltag wird Sprache jedoch
auch oft fehlerhaft, unaufrichtig oder unernst verwendet: 
wir taeuschen andere absichtlich oder verschweigen ihnen etwas, 
verursachen mehr oder weniger fahrlaessig Missverstaendnisse, 
stellen Raetsel und Fangfragen, erzaehlen Witze und erfinden 
Geschichten. 
Eine aehnliche Vielfalt von Funktionen finden wir bei anderen 
Zeichensystemen, etwa beim nonverbalen Verhalten, bei Bildern 
und bei der Beschilderung des oeffentlichen Raumes. Der Vortrag 
zeigt anhand konkreter Beispiele aus diesen Bereichen, was bei 
der Kommunikation - ungewollt oder absichtlich - schieflaufen kann. 
Ferner stellt er Strategien vor, mit denen Sender zu taeuschen 
versuchen sowie solche, mit denen umgekehrt Empfaenger versuchen, 
Taeuschungen zu erkennen und somit unwirksam zu machen.


Zeit:   Donnerstag, 18. Oktober 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl

Prof. R. Trappl, Vienna

2001-10-08T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
                             (OeFAI)
                    Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at

-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl
Oesterrerreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
Wien

                         "A.I.": DIE REALITAET

  Falls Sie den Film "A.I." gesehen haben und wissen wollen, was 
  die A.I. derzeit wirklich kann: 
  Falls Sie wissen wollen, was die A.I. derzeit wirklich kann, und 
  sich den Film ersparen wollen:
  dann erhalten Sie darueber mit diesem Vortrag einen Ueberblick, und 
  dies nicht an Hand von Arbeiten am MIT im fernen Massachussetts, 
  sondern an Hand der Ergebnisse von Forschungs- und Anwendungs-
  projekten, die im Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstitut für AI in 
  Wien durchgefuehrt wurden, u.a. als Partner in 24 multinationalen 
  Projekten der Europaeischen Union.

  Falls Sie noch mehr ueber A.I. wissen wollen: Am 3.Oktober beginnt 
  um 17:15 Uhr im HS 50 des Hauptgebaeudes der Universitaet Wien die 
  einstuendige, einsemestrige Vorlesung "Artificial Intelligence. Eine
  Einfuehrung" für HoererInnen aller Fakultaeten, d.h. allgemein ver-
  staendlich. Sie ist selbstverstaendlich auch allgemein zugaenglich.

Zeit:   Montag, 8. Oktober 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial
        Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. K. Bellman, LosAngeles, CA

2001-08-23T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                   Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                             VORTRAG
                             *******


Dr. Kirstie Bellman
Principle Director, The Aerospace Integration Science Center
Los Angeles, CA


INTELLIGENT SYSTEM ARCHITECTURES WITH WRAPPINGS
(Or why AI often gets defeated by poor system engineering)

Our architecture includes both our Wrapping infrastructure to provide
a computationally reflective base for all component integration, and
our `conceptual categories` to provide a flexible representation 
mechanism that separates model structures from the roles they play.
To make it more interesting, we are also exploring how to create 
systems capable of changing their symbol systems in order to adapt 
to changing dynamic environments.

Zeit:   Donnerstag, 23. August 2001, 18:00 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT FÜR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. H. Mixdorff, Berlin

2001-07-03T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Prof. Dr.-Ing.Hansjoerg Mixdorff
Fachbereich Informatik
Technische Fachhochschule Berlin


EIN LINGUISTISCH MOTIVIERTES QUANTITATIVES MODELL DER DEUTSCHEN PROSODIE


Die Analyse und Synthese prosodischer Sprachmerkmale ist nicht zuletzt 
fuer die Verbesserung synthetischer Sprache von grundlegender Bedeutung. 
Dabei spielt insbesondere die Interaktion der Merkmale Grundfrequenz
(F0) und Dauer (von Silben, Lauten etc.) eine zentrale Rolle.
In frueheren Arbeiten des Autors zur Intonation des Deutschen wurde
der Zusammenhang zwischen den einer Lautaeusserung zugrundeliegenden 
linguistischen Funktionen und der dazugehoerigen F0-Kontur vermittels 
der Parameter des Fujisaki-Modells etabliert. Wahrnehmungsexperimente 
mit dem so entwickelten Intonationsmodell zeigten zwar einerseits eine 
deutliche Praeferenz gegenueber anderen Ansaetzen, andererseits wurde 
auch deutlich, dass die rhythmische Natuerlichkeit ebenfalls eine 
herausragende, wenn nicht entscheidende Rolle spielt. Basierend auf 
diesen Erkenntnissen wurde ein sogenannter 'integrierter Ansatz' zur 
Prosodiegenerierung entwickelt, der F0- und Dauersteuerung in eine 
Einheit zusammenfasst.

Zeit:   Dienstag, 3. Juli 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. G. Widmer, Wien

2001-06-26T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******



Univ.-Prof.Dr. Gerhard Widmer
Institut fuer Med. Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence 
der Universitaet Wien und
Oesterrerreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
Wien


  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, MACHINE LEARNING UND MUSIKINTERPRETATION:
              2 JAHRE INTERDISZIPLINAERE FORSCHUNG AM OEFAI

Im Fruehjahr 1999 begannen die Forschungsarbeiten zum Projekt 
"Computer-Based Music Research: Artificial Intelligence Models of
Musical Expression", das durch einen grosszuegigen START-
Forschungspreis (1998) moeglich gemacht wurde. Hauptziel des Projekts
ist die Erforschung von grundlegenden Prinzipien ausdrucksvoller
Musikinterpretation mittels Methoden der AI.

Dieser Vortrag berichtet ueber die Entwicklungen und Resultate der
ersten zwei Projektjahre - d.h. das erste Projektdrittel -, in denen 
nicht nur wichtige Grundlagenarbeit geleistet wurde wie z.B. die 
Erarbeitung und detaillierte Dokumentation (in computerlesbarer Form) 
der wahrscheinlich weltweit groessten Sammlung exakt vermessener 
Klavierinterpretationen), sondern auch bereits interessante 
Forschungsergebnisse zu verschiedensten Aspekten des Themenbereichs
AI & Musikinterpretation erzielt wurden wie z.B. Computerprogramme, 
die in Musikaufnahmen den Takt aufspueren und Tempoaenderungen 
nachvollziehen koennen; Programme, die die motivische Struktur von 
Musikstuecken verstehen; Programme, die aus Aufnahmen allgemeine 
Interpretationsregeln entdecken und diese auf neue Stuecke anwenden 
koennen, ...

Zeit:   Dienstag, 26. Juni 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

A. Cserer, Wien

2001-06-13T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120,  Fax: +43-1-5336112-77,  Email: sec@oefai.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Mag. Amelie Cserer
Wien 


       UTOPISCHE MASCHINEN: LOESUNG NORMIERTER PROBLEMLAGEN?

Normierte Problemlagen sind Ausdruck sozial eingeschliffenen,
alltaeglichen Verhaltens. Normalitaet institutionalisiert Handlungen.
Automatisches kann durch materielle Abbilder kopiert werden.
Technologische Artefakte, wie sie utopische Maschinen darstellen,
simulieren Handlungsspielraeume.Im Spiel werden techno-wissenschaftliche
Muster repraesentiert. Science Fiction bedient sich
einer wissenschaftlichen Huelle, deren Inhalt von zukunftstraechtigen
Wuenschen getragen wird. Konkret sollen am Beispiel eines
"Neuralisators" aesthetische Verweise, konflikthafte Rollendefinition 
und gesellschaftliche Selektionsmechanismen besprochen werden.


Zeit:   Mittwoch, 13. Juni 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

A. Stern, M.Sc., www.interactivestory.net

2001-04-02T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Andrew Stern, M.Sc., www.interactivestory.net

         Towards Building a Fully-Realized Interactive Drama

Andrew Stern is an artist and computer scientist who has spent the last ten
years developing AI-based interactive virtual characters and interactive drama. 
His talk will cover an array of design and technical issues involved in creating
compelling, lifelike AI-based interactive characters, stories and art.  He will
discuss the development of the award-winning Dogz, Catz and Babyz interactive
virtual characters, which sold over two million copies worldwide over the past
six years.  These characters were achieved through an artistic combination of a
reactive behavior-based AI, a simple emotion system, a gestural user interface
and realtime rendered non-photorealistic 3D animation.  The advantages and
limitations of this approach for interactive story will be presented.

Building upon the design and AI from Petz and Babyz, Stern is now collaborating
with Michael Mateas, an artist and AI researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. 
Motivated by their belief that a "fully-realized" computer-based interactive
drama has not yet been built, the authors are currently engaged in a three-year
collaboration to build Facade, an interactive story integrating an
interdisciplinary set of artistic practices and artificial intelligence
technologies.  Facade will combine a reactive behavior-based architecture (an
extended version of the Oz project's Hap language) with a deliberative story
manager - an attempt to merge of "character" and "plot" - designed to integrate
the user's interactions into the space of potential plot directions and
character behaviors in the story. Certain techniques from Aristotelian drama
such as the story "beat" and dramatic value change will be operationalized. The
system will have a natural language and gestural input interface, within a 3D
virtual world.

Zeit:   Montag 2. April 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. H. Blockeel, Leuven, Belgium

2001-03-29T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr. Hendrik Blockeel
Department of Computer Science
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

       Experiments in the use of machine learning for playing Go

Go is a board game with very simple rules but a complex high-level behaviour.
While brute-force approaches (e.g., an alpha-beta search) work well for many
other board games, such as chess, they do not work well for Go because of the
very large number of moves that can be made.  It is therefore crucial to
understand the effect of moves in terms of the board patterns that they help to
create or destroy.

The best current computer programs for playing Go are much less good than good
human players, mainly because they lack insight in such patterns.  Such insight
is hard to program, so a program would preferably learn about the important
patterns and their interactions itself. 

Inductive logic programming is a machine learning technique that has the
potential to identify important patterns and to find out how to exploit them. It
can be hoped that with such an approach improvements to Go playing programs
become possible. 

This talk consists of two parts. In a first part the game of Go will be
presented, as well as inductive logic programming. The second part focuses on
the application of inductive logic programming in Go. This will be illustrated
by a number of experiments that show the usefulness of the approach.

Zeit:   Donnerstag, 29. Maerz 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
    Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Mag. O. Holle, Vienna

2001-03-26T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Mag. Oliver Holle
CEO & Co-Founder
sysis interactive simulations ag
Vienna

                       Flirtboat & Austropolis: 
       or how to marry AL science with online entertainment

The sysis NetLife platform provides a basis for interactive soap operas. People
move around a well defined world, meeting and interacting, talking about
ordinary, everyday things, like love, politics or sports, and of course: each
other. And the most important thing, voyeurism: You can watch them on a daily
basis! But NetLife is even better than any standard soap opera in one important
aspect: it is interactive! Avatars are always keen to learn the user's opinion
and get some advice - although they might not always follow it.

So far, sysis launched two products based upon this platform. Flirtboat, the
first application, hosted more than 16.000 registered users, every day, an
average of 1.450 users were visiting their avatar. Austropolis, the second
product, just launched these days and is focused on the world of politics. 

The sysis NetLife platform is a software tool that allows to create virtual
worlds which can be dedicated to all kinds of topics and populating them with
avatars. The user can create his own avatar and lets this avatar participate in
the stories that evolve. The activities of an avatar can be influenced through
giving advice, but the avatar has his own life and personality, acting as an
autonomous being. In fact, this platform presents a combination of the common
avatar concept (virtual creatures which are completely driven by the user in all
aspects) and the concept of agents, which are by definition, completely
autonomous. 


Zeit: Montag, 26. Maerz 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. K. Oliva, Germany

2001-03-13T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Dr.Karel Oliva
Dept. of Computational Linguistics 
University of the Saarland

         CORPORA WITH LINGUISTIC INFORMATION FOR LINGUISTIC USE

Reviewing the information available in current linguistically interpreted
corpora shows that for linguistic (and especially syntactic) research
crucial information is missing, in particular:

- the input lexical ambiguity, i.e., all potential interpretations
  of occurring word forms 

- the input syntactic ambiguity, i.e., all possible syntactic readings

Moreover, this information should ideally be stored in a theory-neutral
manner. In this talk we will discuss possible ways to structure and
represent corpora meeting these requirements. We shall also briefly
touch upon computational techniques which can be used to construct
such corpora.


Zeit:   Dienstag, 13. Maerz 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Ch. Koch, CERN, Genf

2001-03-08T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Christoph KOCH   
European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN)
Genf

   On  the  Integration of  Heterogeneous  Information  Systems in  
                  Large Scientific Collaborations

After  a  short  introduction   into  the  mainstream  principles  and
architectures  related   to  Information  Integration   (e.g.   global
information systems,  mediation, and  schema mapping), this  talk will
discuss one of its aspects,  the source integration problem (i.e., the
resolution  of  semantic  schema  mismatch)  in  the  context  of  the
information   infrastructure  of   large   scientific  collaborations.
Environments   like  these  have   properties  that   render  previous
approaches  infeasible, such as  rapidly changing  requirements, large
data sets, and the impossibility to create common "global" integration
models.  We  present a combined  model management and  query rewriting
approach  for  solving  these  problems  and  conclude  with  a  brief
demonstration of  a practical system  that we have  implemented, which
uses new, scalable query rewriting algorithms based on techniques from
both AI and databases.

Zeit: Donnerstag, 8. Maerz 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Priv.-Doz. Dr. D. Schmauks, Berlin

2000-12-11T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Priv.-Doz. Dr. Dagmar SCHMAUKS
Technische Universitaet Berlin


       DIE VISUALISIERUNG VON INTERJEKTIONEN IN WERBUNG UND COMIC

Die Visualisierung von Interjektionen in Werbung und Comics ist ein 
Sonderfall der Aufgabe, Hoerbares sichtbar zu machen. Es wird gezeigt, 
dass diese Umsetzung aus drei Schritten besteht. (1) Zunaechst werden 
Geraeusche - dem Lautsystem der betreffenden Sprache entsprechend - 
durch die gesprochene Sprache wiedergegeben, indem man eigene Aus-
druecke einfuehrt ("kraehen") oder den Hoereindruck so getreu wie 
moeglich wiedergibt ("Kikeriki"). (2) Bei der Verschriftung dieser 
Ausdruecke werden spezielle Gestaltungsmittel eingesetzt wie etwa die 
Graphemballung ("psssst!", "oooooh!"). (3) Die Visualisierung schliess-
lich loest Interjektionen und Geraeuschwoerter aus dem Raster des Fließ-
textes und gestaltet sie durch Variationen von Form, Farbe, Groesse 
und Richtung der Zeichen derart, dass zusaetzliche Aspekte des ur-
spruenglichen Hoereindrucks wiedergewonnen werden. Der Vortrag stellt 
diese komplexen Prozesse der Umsetzung von Hoereindruecken in sichtbare
Zeichen anhand konkreter Beispiele dar.


Zeit:   Montag, 11.Dezember 2000, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. S. Dixon, Wien

2000-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Simon DIXON
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence
Wien


               AUTOMATIC EXTRACTION OF TEMPO AND BEAT FROM
                      EXPRESSIVE MUSIC PERFORMANCES

Although variation in tempo is one of the main expressive parameters in 
musical performance, most music still has an underlying tempo, that is, 
a semi-regular sequence of times at which listeners might clap their 
hands or tap their feet. In this talk, I will present a program that 
automatically extracts these beat locations from musical performance 
data in either audio or MIDI formats. A simple clustering algorithm 
finds regularities in the times between the beginnings of notes, and 
a multiple-hypothesis search is used to choose the sequence of beat 
locations best fitting a model of musical accent and timing. The system
will be demonstrated in both its automatic and interactive modes, 
performing tempo and beat extraction on music of various styles 
(e.g. classical, pop, jazz).


Zeit:   Donnerstag, 9.November 2000, 18.30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. H.-J. Lenz, Berlin

2000-10-30T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.H.-J.Lenz
Freie Universitaet Berlin


                    DATA FUSION (OBJECT IDENTIFICATION)

We consider data fusion in the case of missing object identification. 
As a simple example think of fusion of partial overlapping address files
of customers extracted from autonomous sites or of an administrative 
record census. The first example is related to customer relationship 
management (CRM), while the last one is a substitute of a regular census. 
This kind of data fusion causes problems of (schema) integration, solving
semantic conflicts, and object identification if global identifiers are
not locally available and local heterogeneous, autonomous databases are
to be accessed. The complexity of the problem is increased by the exist-
ence of errors like input or loading errors, mispellings, missing values,
and, of course, duplicated entries. We develop a unified framework for 
such kind of data fusion. We cover the feature selection problem, and 
embed the data fusion problem into a supervised classification problem. 
For each pair of records we have to decide whether a definite decision 
upon matching or not is possible and if it is possible, whether the two
records are linked to an identical unit (customer, citizen etc.) or not. 
Candidates for classification can be selected from likelihood ratio 
tests (record linkage), classification trees, non linear classification
or state vector machines.

The approach is illustrated by a running example. 

DER VORTRAG WIRD AUF DEUTSCH GEHALTEN.

References:

M. Neiling, H.-J. Lenz, Data Fusion and Object Identification, Intl. 
Conference on Advances in Infrastructure for Electronic Business, 
Science and Education on the Internet (SSGRR2000), lAquila, 2000


Zeit:   Montag, 30.Oktober 2000, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. M. Jeitler, Genf

2000-10-20T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Mag.Dr.Manfred JEITLER
CERN
Genf


                    TIME'S ARROW IN PARTICLE PHYSICS
                   (T-VIOLATION AND RELATED PHENOMENA)

We know very well that in our environment, time always runs in the same
direction. We can jump from a high place into the water but not out of it, 
glasses fall and break but never jump back on the table to reassemble
themselves, and every day we get older and not younger. But what do 
things look like on the sub-microscopic scale of elementary particles?

I will give an introduction into the current understanding of time
invariance and evidence of its violation in experimental particle 
physics. The connection between time invariance and other discrete
symmetries, in particular CP-invariance, will be explained. I will 
show the first experimental determination of T-violation and discuss 
recent experiments on CP-violation and T-violation. 


Zeit:   Freitag, 20.Oktober 2000, 15:00 Uhr pktl. 
        (*** Bitte Beginnzeit beachten! ***)
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

R. Bresin, M.Sc., Stockholm

2000-09-11T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Roberto BRESIN, M.Sc.
Royal Institute of Technology
Stockholm


        EMOTIONAL COLOURING IN AUTOMATIC PIANO MUSIC PERFORMANCE

An important contribution in music performance is given by the emotional 
component, often marked in the score by the composer with Italian words, 
such as Con fuoco, Tenero, Vivace, Brillante. From studies in music 
psychology it emerges that musicians use particular acoustic cues when 
performing the same score with different emotional intentions and that 
listeners use the same set of cues for decoding these emotions. 
Mr. Bresin will illustrate recent results in the analysis/synthesis 
of expressive piano music performance, and the possibility to obtain 
musical and emotionally different performances of the same score by 
"hyper-articulating" the performance of the score itself using the 
Director Musices (DM) program. DM is a software tool for automatic 
performance of music that has been developed in the Music Acoustics 
Group at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. More information 
can be found at the following address: 
http://www.speech.kth.se/music/performance/

Zeit:   Montag 25. September 2000, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:    Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. C. Scheepers, Saarbruecken

2000-07-27T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Christoph SCHEEPERS
Universitaet des Saarlandes
Saarbruecken


         VALENCY PREDICTION IN GERMAN VERB FINAL CONSTRUCTIONS

Three experiments on clause-final verb integration in German will be 
reported. These manipulated the verb's lexically preferred valency 
(monotransitive vs. ditransitive bias) and the syntactic context prior
to the verb (comprising either one or two NP-objects in addition to the
subject). Experiment 1 combined self-paced reading with an off-line
acceptability judgement task. The results were validated by, respect-
ively, a paper-and-pencil questionnaire (Experiment 2) and an eye-
tracking study (Experiment 3). 

The main findings were as follows. Syntactic integration of a mono-
transitive-bias verb into a context with a subject and two objects is 
costly. By contrast, syntactic integration of a ditransitively biased
verb into a context with a subject and only one object is unproblem-
atic. The results favour an incremental, but nevertheless monotonic 
sentence processor that predicts a *minimum* verb valency on the basis
of how many arguments have already been encountered at each point 
during parsing. We will show that neither a strictly head-driven 
model, nor a probabilistic (i.e. "exposure-based") incremental
processor can fully account for the data.


Zeit: Donnerstag, 27.Juli 2000, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. U. Berger, Erlangen

2000-07-18T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Ute BERGER
Geschaeftsfuehrerin
FORWISS
Erlangen


                                FORWISS: 
        Bedarfsorientierte Grundlagenforschung fuer die Wirtschaft

Das Unternehmen der Zukunft ist vernetzt, sogar virtuell: Produktion und
Distribution, Controlling und Management sind ueber ein zentrales
Informationssystem verbunden; die Mitarbeiter muessen jederzeit und 
ortsunabhaengig auf Daten und Fakten zugreifen koennen. Informations- 
und Wissensmanagement sind zum erfolgsentscheidenden Instrument 
geworden. Das Bayerische Forschungszentrum fuer Wissensbasierte Systeme
(FORWISS) entwickelt als Partner von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 
Software-Loesungen, die modernes Wissensmanagement technisch unter-
stuetzen und die die wachsende Informationsflut beherrschen helfen. 
FORWISS ist ein gemeinsames Institut der Universitaeten Erlangen-
Nuernberg, Passau und der TU Muenchen, in dem ueber 60 Informatiker, 
Ingenieure, Wirtschafts- und Naturwissenschaftler beschaeftigt sind. 
Zusammen mit unseren Partnern aus der Produktionsindustrie (zum 
Beispiel Medizintechnik, Automobilindustrie), aus dem Dienst-
leistungsgewerbe, der Softwareindustrie und der oeffentlichen Hand
entwickeln wir branchenunabhaengig und themenuebergreifend Methoden, 
Verfahren und Prototypen.

* Multimediale, vernetzte Informationssysteme:
  Datenbanktechnik fuer grosse, multidimensionale Daten, 
  Online-Informationssysteme, Data Warehouses,

* Informationslogistik und Analyse-Methoden:
  u. a. PPS- und Management-Informationssysteme, Workflow-Management 
  sowie Supply-Chain-Managementsysteme, E-Commerce-Applikationen,

* Wissensmanagementsysteme:
  zur Bewahrung und Weitergabe von Wissen sowie zur Analyse 
  bestehender, bisher unbekannter Zusammenhaenge (Data Mining, 
  Information Filtering),

* Bild- und Sensordatenverarbeitung:
  Auswertung von Bild(folgen), z. B. in der Medizin, Produktion 
  und Qualitaetssicherung,

* Sprachverarbeitung:
  Dialogsysteme fuer natuerliche und gesprochene Sprache, 
  intelligente Benutzerschnittstellen.


Zeit: Dienstag, 18.Juli 2000, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl


P.S.: Da ich dem Kuratorium des FORWISS seit seiner Gruendung im Jahr 
      1989 als Mitglied angehoere, freue ich mich besonders, dass 
      dessen Geschaeftsfuehrerin das FORWISS in Wien praesentiert.

Dr. D. Bainbridge, Hamilton, New Zealand

2000-06-13T00:00:00+02:00

      Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik (OeSGK)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
              Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr. David BAINBRIDGE
University of Waikato
Hamilton
New Zealand


               TOWARDS A DIGITAL LIBRARY OF POPULAR MUSIC

Digital libraries of music have the potential to capture popular 
imagination in ways that more scholarly libraries cannot. At the 
University of Waikato (New Zealand) we are working towards a 
comprehensive digital library of musical material, including popular 
music. We have developed new ways of collecting musical material, 
accessing it through searching and browsing, and presenting the 
results to the user. We work with different representations of 
music: facsimile images of scores, the internal representation 
of a music editing program, page images typeset by a music editor, 
MIDI files, audio files representing sung user input, and textual 
metadata such as title, composer and arranger, and lyrics. The talk 
will include demonstrations of the various components of the system.


Zeit: Dienstag, 13.Juni 2000, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik,
      Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHE STUDIENGESELLSCHAFT
FUER KYBERNETIK

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. A. Riegler, Bruessel

2000-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Dr.Alexander RIEGLER
CLEA
Vrije Universiteit Brussel


              EVOLUTION ODER FORTSCHRITT VON KOGNITION?

In diesem Vortrag wird die Relevanz asymmetrischer Prozesse in lebenden 
Systemen, sowohl in prozeduraler als auch in struktureller Hinsicht, 
diskutiert. Verhalten wird hier nicht als ahistorischer logischer 
Problemloesungsprozess verstanden; es wird vielmehr gezeigt, dass 
Verhalten - und damit Kognition - durch Antizipation gesteuert werden. 
Auf struktureller Ebene ist evident, dass ein Zuwachs an Verhaltens-
kompetenz sich, aehnlich wie bei biologischen Strukturen, immer auf 
bereits vorhandene Komponenten gruenden muss. Aber auch Reversibilitaet
ist moeglich. Dadurch ergeben sich Auswirkungen auf die Frage, ob 
Evolution gleichbedeutend mit Fortschritt ist, und auf das Design von 
kuenstlichen Systemen. 


Zeit: Mittwoch, 31.Mai 2000, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

M. Corley, Ph.D., Edinburgh

2000-05-22T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Martin CORLEY, Ph.D.
University of Edinburgh


         TOWARDS A SATISFACTORY MODEL OF LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION

Until recently, the dominant view in cognitive psychology has been that
the processing system endeavours to form the most complete and detailed 
representation of external stimuli possible (Pylyshyn, 1984). However, 
a growing body of evidence from work in visual cognition suggests that 
processing may satisfy a viewer's current needs without resulting in a
full analysis. 

This talk outlines an attempt to discover whether a similar principle 
governs human language comprehension: our working hypothesis is that 
humans do not necessarily fully process language, but simply understand 
enough of the input to satisfy their current communicative needs. We 
present evidence from current work showing the operation of such a 
satisfaction principle, and discuss future attempts to work out how 
it is parameterised.


Zeit: Montag, 22.Mai 2000, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

J. Reichardt, London, UK

2000-04-28T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Jasia REICHARDT
London
United Kingdom


               THE CHANGING FACE OF ELECTRONIC PORTRAITS

                     Invited Plenary Lecture at the
       15th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research
                             (EMCSR 2000)

Traditionally, the idea of a portrait is to represent the sitter as 
closely and completely as possible. One would imagine that electronic
portraits could achieve this with an even greater precision with 
images in motion and with sound. Presenting the sitter through time,
through multiple filters and a variety of contexts should provide
more information. However, electronic artists have defied our expect-
ations and escaped the accepted canon of portraiture. They have 
subverted their subject matter and reinvented the very people they 
portray. They have merged reality with fiction and combined analysis 
with fantasy, leaving the viewers to wonder what it is precisely that 
they are looking at.

"The changing face ..." is a talk by Jasia Reichardt illustrated with 
slides, music, video and CD-ROM. It deals with the aspects of 
electronic portraiture since the 1960s 
    self portraits 
    talking portraits
    portraits of people that don`t exist
    unrecognizable portraits
    future portraits. 
Artists discussed include: Roy Ascott, Gary Hill, Lei Cox, Yasumasa 
Morimura, Markus Kaech, David Perrett, Richard Kriesche, Marty 
St.James, Daisuke Furuike, Fumio Hara, Irfan Essa, Luc Courchesne, 
Joan Pueyo, and Patrice Caire.


Zeit: Freitag, 28.April 2000, 9:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  Hoersaal 47 im Hauptgebaeude der Universitaet Wien,
      Dr.Karl Lueger-Ring 1, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. N. Jennings, Highfield, Southampton, UK

2000-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Nicholas JENNINGS
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
United Kingdom


                   Ross Ashby Memorial Lecture at the
        15th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research
                             (EMCSR 2000):

           AUTOMATED HAGGLING: BUILDING ARTIFICIAL NEGOTIATORS


Computer systems in which autonomous software agents negotiate with one
another in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements are likely 
to become pervasive in the next generation of networked systems. In 
such systems, the agents will be required to participate in a range 
of negotiation scenarios and exhibit a range of negotiation behaviours 
(depending on the context). To this end, this talk explores the issues
involved in designing and implementating a number of automated 
negotiators for real-world electronic commerce applications. 


Zeit: Mittwoch, 26.April 2000, 9:00 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  Hoersaal 47 im Hauptgebaeude der Universitaet Wien,
      Dr.Karl Lueger-Ring 1, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. M. Minsky, Cambridge, MA, USA

2000-04-25T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Marvin MINSKY
Media Lab
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA
USA


                         THE EMOTION MACHINE

                    Opening Plenary Lecture at the
       15th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research
                             (EMCSR 2000)


Zeit: Dienstag, 25.April 2000, 10:00 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  Grosser Festsaal der Universitaet Wien,
      Dr.Karl Lueger-Ring 1, 1010 Wien


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

15th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2000)

2000-04-25T00:00:00+02:00

Please visit the conference website for further information.

Dr. K. Steinmueller, Gelsenkirchen

2000-04-12T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Karlheinz STEINMUELLER
SFZ - Sekretariat fuer Zukunftsforschung
Gelsenkirchen


                PERSPEKTIVEN DER AI IM 21.JAHRHUNDERT
         SZENARIEN AUS ZUKUNFTSFORSCHUNG UND SCIENCE FICTION


AI koennte eine Schluesseltechnologie des 21. Jahrhunderts werden. Doch 
ebenso wie die ultimativen technologischen Potenzen sind die fernen
kuenftigen Nutzungskontexte ungewiss: Wie koennte eine Welt aussehen, 
in der AI zur Alltagstechnologie geworden ist? AI, Emotionale Intel-
ligenz, Sprachtechnologien und ein ubiquitaeres Web werden den Alltag 
wahrscheinlich noch staerker transformieren als von einhundert Jahren
die Einfuehrung des elektrischen Stroms. 

In dem Vortrag wird versucht, aus den Spekulationen von Technikpionieren
und Zukunftsforschern und aus den Visionen der Science Fiction Szenarien
abzuleiten. Dabei werden die Ideen von Minsky, Moravec und Tipler ebenso
thematisiert wie die von Stanislaw Lem, William Gibson und anderen 
SF-Autoren. Im Sinne eines Leitbild Assessment wird davon ausgegangen,
dass heute existierende Wunschvorstellungen und Ziele ein relevanter 
Faktor der Innovationstaetigkeit sind und daher die Gestalt der Zukunft 
mitpraegen. Anhand der in den Spekulationen und Visionen vorhandenen 
Leitbilder lassen sich prinzipiell fuer die fernere Zukunft drei Haupt-
szenarien unterscheiden: Eine vereinzelte Nutzung von AI mit geringen 
Auswirkungen auf Kommunikationsverhalten und Gesellschaft, eine Synergie 
von HI und AI, sowie eine "genetische Wachabloesung" der Menschheit. 
Die interessantesten Aspekte sind nicht in den Extremszenarien "verein-
zelte Nutzung" oder "genetische Wachabloesung", sondern im Szenario der 
Synergie zu erwarten: Was bedeutet eine Verschmelzung von menschlicher 
und artifizieller Intelligenz?

Der Vortrag stuetzt sich in Teilen auf die unlaengst erschienene 
Publikation Angela und Karlheinz Steinmueller: "Visionen. 1900 - 
2000 - 2100. Eine Chronik der Zukunft", Verlag Rogner & Bernhard, 
Hamburg Nov. 1999, http://www.z-punkt.de/visionen


Zeit: Mittwoch, 12.April 2000, 18:00 Uhr pktl. 
      (*** Bitte Beginnzeit beachten ***)
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. A. Pinz, Graz

2000-03-06T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


ao.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Axel PINZ
TU Graz


                     AKTIVE AUTONOME BILDANALYSE - 
               Objekterkennung, Tracking, mobile Roboter

Im Bildverstehen (Computer Vision) hat sich in den letzten Jahren
verstaerkt das Paradigma der "Active Vision" durchgesetzt. Die 
Komplexitaet vieler Probleme wird drastisch vereinfacht, manche
Aufgaben werden ueberhaupt erst loesbar, wenn mehrere Bilder, meist 
von einem aktiven System, aufgenommen und ausgewertet werden. Oft 
ist es auch notwendig, mehrere komplementaere Sensoren miteinander
zu kombinieren.
Im Vortrag werden aktuelle Forschungsarbeiten aus dem Bereich der
aktiven Echtzeitbildverarbeitung mit industriell relevanten 
Anwendungen gezeigt:
- aktive Objekterkennung
- optisches Tracking
- mobile Roboternavigation
Neben monokularer und Stereobildverarbeitung kommt auch Odometrie,
Sonar, magnetisches Tracking, sowie Beschleunigungs- und Drehwinkel-
sensorik zum Einsatz.


Zeit: Montag, 6.Maerz 2000, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. B. Pfahringer, Wien

2000-02-02T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Bernhard PFAHRINGER
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence


             Das ESPRIT Long Term Research Projekt METAL:
     "A Meta-Learning Assistant for Providing User Support in Data
                     Mining and Machine Learning"

Waehrend von seiten der Wirtschaft ein immer groessres Interesse an der 
Technologie des Maschinellen Lernens und des Data Mining, besonders im 
Bereich der Klassifikation und der Vorhersage, besteht und bereits eine 
Anzahl von Tools fuer das Data Mining verfuegbar sind, haben Endbenutzer, 
die keine Experten auf dem Gebiet des Maschinellen Lernens sind, noch 
immer erhebliche Schwierigkeiten beim Einsatz dieser Werkzeuge. Das Ziel
des Projekts METAL besteht darin, die Technologien des Maschinellen 
Lernens leichter einsetzbar zu machen.  

Insbesondere soll durch Einsatz sogenannten Metalernens ein inkrementell
adaptierbarer "Assistent" entwickelt werden, der den Benutzer beim 
Einsatz dieser Technologien unterstuetzt. Der "Assistent" soll dem 
Benutzer Hilfe leisten beim Navigieren durch den Raum moeglicher 
Experimente (z.B. Auswahl der Lernprogrammen, Kombinieren von Methoden,
etc.). Kriterien wie z.B. Vorhersagegenauigkeit, Verstaendlichkeit, 
oder Zeit- und Speicherkomplexitaet werden dabei vom Benutzer vorgegeben. 

In diesem Vortrag wird von den Erfahrungen und Ergebnissen des ersten 
Projektjahres berichtet. Eines der "Nebenprodukte" dieser Forschung war 
der Gewinn des KDD-CUP-99, eines internationalen Data Mining Wettbewerbs,
auf den auch kurz eingegangen wird, durch den Vortragenden. 

Das Projekt wird in Zusammenarbeit mit den Universitaeten Bristol, 
Genf und Porto sowie mit den Unternehmen DaimlerChrysler (Ulm) und 
SPSS (UK) durchgefuehrt. 

Weitere Informationen:
http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/oefai/ml/metal/metal.html


Zeit: Mittwoch, 2. Februar 2000, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. I. Kopecek, Brno

2000-01-28T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Assoc.Prof.Dr.Ivan KOPECEK
Masaryk University
Brno


             NLP RESEARCH IN THE FACULTY OF INFORMATICS AT
                        MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO

The research carried out by the NLP (Natural Language Processing) group 
of the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University Brno will be over-
viewed in the presentation. The principal aims of this research involve 
the text-corpora based analysis of Czech (disambiguation methods, 
morphological and syntax analysis, and building up a Czech lexical 
Wordnet database), speech technologies and dialogue systems (speech 
segmentation, in particular for syllable segments, syllable-based 
speech synthesis and recognition, modeling and developing of speech 
interfaces and dialogue systems) and applications of AI methods 
(especially machine learning) to the analysis of natural languages. 
The developed tools for corpora analysis, the TTS system Demosthenes, 
as well as some applications, especially in the field of the assistive 
technologies for visually impaired persons, will also be briefly 
described. 


Zeit: Freitag, 28.Jaenner 2000, 14:30 Uhr pktl. 
      (*** Bitte Beginnzeit beachten ***)
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Computer Animation '99 Film Festival

2000-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

                  Interdisziplinaeres Konversatorium des
    Instituts fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence
                          der Universitaet Wien
                                 und der
             Meisterklasse fuer visuelle Mediengestaltung der
                    Universitaet fuer angewandte Kunst



            A R T  /  I F I C I A L   I N T E L L I G E N C E

        DIE BEZIEHUNG ZWISCHEN KUNST UND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE



                         o.Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl 


                              WS 1999/2000


Di., 25.Jaenner 2000, 18:00 Uhr pktl. (IMKAI):

        "Computer Animation '99 Film Festival". November 1999, Geneva,
        organised by MIRALab. A selection of the best contributions 
        (45 min)

        Mit anschliessender Diskussion


Termine zu weiteren Veranstaltungen werden im naechsten Semester
bekanntgegeben.


IMKAI   (Inst.f.Med.Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence):
        Wien 1, Freyung 6, Stg.2 (Schottenhof), Tel. 4277-63101

MVM     (Meisterklasse fuer visuelle Mediengestaltung der
        Univ. fuer angewandte Kunst):
        Wien 1, Salzgries 14, Tel. 71133-530

OeFAI   (Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial
        Intelligence): Wien 1, Schottengasse 3, Tel. 5336112


Alle Veranstaltungen beginnen   w i r k l i c h   puenktlich!

Dr. E. Prem, Wien

1999-12-14T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Erich PREM
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
und Buero fuer Internationale Forschungs-
und Technologiekooperation (BIT)


             RADARBASIERTE KURZFRISTIGE REGENFALLPROGNOSE -
              ERGEBNISSE DES EU-FORSCHUNGSPROJEKTS "RADAR"

Die kurzfristige Prognose des Regenfalls ist ein wichtiges Problem 
fuer die optimale Kontrolle der Abwasserklaerung. Eine Information 
darueber, ob in der naechsten Stunde mit einem Regenschauer zu 
rechnen ist, wuerde eine Verbesserung des Klaerergebnisses und 
eine Reduktion der Kosten erlauben. Im ESPRIT-Projekt RADAR 
wurde in knapp 3 Jahren sowohl Soft- als auch Hardware entwickelt,
um dieses Problem zu loesen. Neben der Erstellung und Evaluierung 
einer Prognosesoftware wurde ein neuartiges kostenguenstiges Radar-
system auf Basis eines Schiffsradars entwickelt. Dieses im Vergleich 
zu konventionellen meteorologischen Radarsystemen sehr billige 
System ist in der Lage, den Regen in einem Umkreis von ca. 60 km 
zu messen. Fuer die Prognosesoftware wurden zahlreiche Verfahren 
implementiert und auf umfangreichem Datenmaterial getestet. In
diesem Vortrag wird ueber die Ergebnisse des Projekts berichtet, 
das in Kooperation mit Partnern aus Frankreich, Daenemark, Schweden 
und Italien im November dieses Jahres erfolgreich abgeschlossen wurde. 


Zeit: Dienstag, 14.Dezember 1999, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. G. Groessing, Wien

1999-12-09T00:00:00+01:00

      Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik (OeSGK)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Dr.Gerhard GROESSING
Austrian Institute for Nonlinear Studies
Wien



                          NEUERE ARBEITEN DES
             AUSTRIAN INSTITUTE FOR NONLIENAR STUDIES (AINS)

Obwohl unsere Forschungsthemen aus mitunter sehr unterschiedlichen 
Wissensbereichen stammen, sind sie durch vergleichbare systemische 
Ansaetze charakterisierbar.

Der erste vorgestellte Schwerpunktbereich bezieht sich auf die Model-
lierung von Quantensystemen durch Rueckkopplungsprozesse zwischen 
"Quanten" und ihren experimentellen Rahmenbedingungen (G.G., Quantum 
Cybernetics, Springer-Verlag, 2000, im Druck).

Der zweite Forschungsschwerpunkt unseres Instituts betrifft die 
Verknuepfung einer grossen Anzahl von Rueckkopplungsprozessen mit den 
systemischen Hilfsmitteln der "cellular automata" und "coupled map 
lattices". Basierend auf der Entwicklung von "quantum cellular 
automata" (G.G. mit Anton Zeilinger) haben wir in den letzten Jahren 
eine Verallgemeinerung in Form von verknuepften, diskreten Rueck-
kopplungsprozessen studiert und dabei die universale Eigenschaft der 
sogenannten fraktalen Evolution entdeckt. (S.Fussy und G.G., 
Phys. Lett. A 186(1994)145-151.) Dies liess sich erfolgreich auf das 
Studium der Irreversibilitaet biologischer Makro-Evolution uebertragen 
(S.Fussy, G.G., H.Schwabl, J.Biol.Syst. 5 (1997)341-357.)

Da wir eine private Institution sind, koennen wir uns auch einen 
besonderen Luxus leisten: den Versuch, Ergebnisse der neueren For-
schung mit allgemeineren kulturellen Prozessen in Bezug zu bringen. 
Von besonderem Interesse ist dabei unter anderem das Verhaeltnis des 
"harten" (formalen) "Kerns" einer Theorie mit der Peripherie innova-
tiver Ideen, das auf eine Dialektik zwischen wissenschaftlichen 
"Bildern" und ihren hermeneutischen "Vor-Bildern"  (imaginativen 
Prototypen) hinweist. Als Beispiel fuer letztere wird (nach einem 
Vortrag in der Bonner Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland) die historische Bedeutung von "Wasser" als Vor-Bild 
zur Naturforschung erlaeutert.


Zeit: Donnerstag, 9.Dezember 1999, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik,
      Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHE STUDIENGESELLSCHAFT
FUER KYBERNETIK

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

J. Trouvain, M.A., Saarbruecken

1999-10-04T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Juergen TROUVAIN, M.A.
Universitaet des Saarlandes
Saarbruecken


              NICHT-LINEARE MODELLIERUNG VON SPRECHTEMPO -
                    IMPLIKATIONEN FUER SPRACHSYNTHESE

In den meisten Sprachsynthesesystemen wird - wenn ueberhaupt - eine 
Aenderung der Sprechgeschwindigkeit durch eine lineare Anpassung der 
temporalen Struktur erreicht. 

In natuerlicher Sprache hingegen sind die Unterschiede zwischen ver-
schiedenen Tempi als nicht-linear zu charakterisieren. So zeichnet 
sich z.B. schnelleres Sprechen hauptsaechlich durch weniger und auch
kuerzere Pausen aus. Aenderungen in der prosodischen Struktur wie 
z.B. Wegfall prosodischer Phrasengrenzen oder De-Akzentuierung von 
Silben haben Einfluss auf die Dauer linguistischer Einheiten (wie
z.B. Lautsegmente). Ein weiteres nicht-lineares Merkmal ist die sog.
Elastizitaet der Lautdauern, die bei Vokalen ueblicherweise groesser
ist als bei Konsonanten. Auf der phonemischen Ebene lassen sich 
Assimilationen, Reduktionen und Tilgungen von Lauten feststellen. 
Vor allem Funktionswoerter sind fuer solche segmentalen Prozesse 
anfaellig. Da ein schnelleres Tempo in aller Regel auch ein 
oekonomischeres Artikulieren nach sich zieht, hat dies auch Folgen
fuer die spektralen Eigenschaften der Laute. Konkatenative Sprach-
synthese mit Signalstuecken, die aus akzentuierter Position ent-
nommen wurden, hinterlassen oft und vor allem bei schnellem Tempo 
einen Eindruck von Ueberartikulation. 

Beispiele fuer die o.g. Parameter werden durch Ergebnisse einer 
Pilot-Studie illustriert und Implikationen fuer (konkatenative) 
Sprachsynthese werden diskutiert. 


Zeit: Montag, 4.Oktober 1999, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. D. Lenat, Austin, TX

1999-10-01T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Douglas B. LENAT
President of Cycorp
Austin, Texas


                     COMPUTERS VERSUS COMMON SENSE

Computers today are idiot-savants. They may manage bits flawlessly 
and furiously, but they have no understanding of what those bits 
signify. And they have poor models of themselves and of the human 
beings they serve and represent. To break that "brittleness bottle-
neck," we need a new software layer that contains the millions of 
things the average person knows about the world.  Some of this is 
factual, such as who's the current President of the USA; but most 
of the needed content is more like rules of thumb, such as why you 
should carry a glass of water open-end up. In terms of a newspaper 
or book, we are talking about codifying the whitespace - the things 
the authors don't need to bother saying (e.g., the items displayed 
in a museum are valuable; tables have flat horizontal tops; 
appliances stop working during a power failure). Since 1984, my team 
has spent the 4 person-centuries necessary to build that artifact. 
In this talk, I'll describe what we did, and why, and some of the 
lessons we learned about representing commonsense knowledge, and 
doing reasoning in huge knowledge-based systems. I'll discuss some 
current and future applications of our technology (CYC) as well.


Zeit: Freitag, 1.Oktober 1999, 16:00 Uhr pktl. 
      (*** Bitte Beginnzeit beachten ***)
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. F. J. Radermacher, Ulm

1999-09-14T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Univ.-Prof.Dr.Dr.F.J.RADERMACHER
Direktor des Forschungsinstituts fuer
anwendungsorientierte Wissensverarbeitung (FAW)
an der Universitaet Ulm


                       SUPERORGANISMEN IM KONTEXT
               VON INFORMATIONS- UND WISSENSVERARBEITUNG

Der Vortrag beschaeftigt sich mit Grundsatzfragen der Informations- 
und Wissensverarbeitung im Kontext der biologischen Evolution. Die 
Generalthese ist, dass Information und Wissen letztlich nur vor dem 
Hintergrund lebender Systeme und ihrer Intentionalitaet Sinn macht. 
Mit dieser Perspektive werden Superorganismen als Traeger und Ziel 
von Informations- und Wissensverarbeitung thematisiert. Dies um-
schliesst vier Ebenen der Wissensverarbeitung, dazu korrespondierende
Mechanismen des Lernens und eine bestimmte Sicht auf Kreativitaet und 
Bewusstsein. Die Uebertragung der Ueberlegungen auf konkrete Anwendungen
wird an drei Beispielen vorgenommen, die in der Arbeit des FAW eine 
grosse Rolle spielen.

Diese drei Beispiele sind:
- das Studium autonomer technischer Systeme
- Wissensmanagement in Unternehmen und Organisationen
- Steuerungsfragen der Menschheit (von GAIA) im Kontext von 
  Globalisierung, Ueberbevoelkerung und dem Ziel einer nachhaltigen 
  Entwicklung.


Zeit: Dienstag, 14.September 1999, 15:00 Uhr pktl. 
      (*** Bitte Beginnzeit beachten ***)
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. I. H. Witten, Hamilton, New Zealand

1999-07-01T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Prof.Dr.Ian H. WITTEN
University of Waikato
Hamilton
New Zealand


                   BROWSING AROUND A DIGITAL LIBRARY

What will it be like to work in the digital library of the future? We
begin by browsing around an experimental digital library of the pres-
ent, glancing at some collections and seeing how they are organized.
Then we look to the future. Although present digital libraries are 
quite like conventional libraries, we argue that future ones will
feel qualitatively different. Readers - and writers - will work in 
the library using a kind of context-directed browsing. This will 
be supported by structures derived from automatic analysis of the 
contents of the library - not just the catalog, or abstracts, but 
the full text of the books and journals - using new techniques of 
data mining. 

                                 *****

Ian H. Witten is professor of computer science at the University of
Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital 
Library research project, and is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal 
Society of New Zealand. His research interests include information 
retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by 
demonstration. He has published widely in these areas, his most 
recent books being "Managing gigabytes" and "Data mining" (both 
Morgan Kaufmann, 1999). He received an MA in mathematics from 
Cambridge Unversity, England; an MSc in computer science from 
the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in electrical 
engineering from Essex University, England.


Zeit: Donnerstag, 1.Juli 1999, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dipl.-Designer U. Spierling, Darmstadt

1999-06-21T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


      gemeinsam mit dem Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und
  Artificial Intelligence der Univ. Wien im Rahmen des Konversatoriums
        "Art/ificial Intelligence: Die Beziehung zwischen Kunst
                      und Artificial Intelligence"


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Designer Ulrike SPIERLING
Zentrum fuer Graphische Datenverarbeitung e.V.
Darmstadt


                          DIGITAL STORYTELLING:

       MENSCHORIENTIERTE KOMMUNIKATION MIT MULTIMEDIAANWENDUNGEN

Fuer Multimedia-Anwendungen stehen immer komplexere Technologien zur
Verfuegung, um menschorientierte Interaktion jenseits von Point-&-Click-
Techniken zu ermoeglichen. Dennoch ist die Vision der "Informations-
technologie fuer jedermann" zur Zeit noch nicht Realitaet. Dies ist
wiederum nur zu erwarten, wenn wie in bekannten Medien nun auch durch 
Multimedia-Anwendungen "Geschichten" vermittelt werden, die eine Bindung
des Publikums bewirken.

Der Vortrag widmet sich der Frage, wie Kommunikationsgestalter analog 
zu bereits etablierten Medien in Zukunft die Verantwortung fuer die 
Kommunikation mit dem Benutzer uebernehmen koennen und wie neue 
Generationen von "User Interfaces" unter Einbeziehung von Konversation
und "Storytelling" aussehen koennen. Die Vision resultiert in einer 
konkreten Forschungsagenda, die durch die Konzeption hochsprachlicher
API's neue Formen der interdisiplinaeren Zusammenarbeit bei der
Produktion von Software ermoeglicht. Dabei verschwindet die harte
Grenze zwischen kreativem Schreiben und abstrakter Programmierung:
An ihre Stelle tritt "Digital Storytelling".


Zeit: Montag, 21.Juni 1999, 18:00 Uhr pktl. 
      (***** BITTE BEGINNZEIT BEACHTEN! *****)
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Rechnen mit dem Rechenschieber - WIEDERHOLUNGSTERMIN

1999-06-15T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


DA DER ERSTE KURS SOFORT AUSGEBUCHT WAR, GIBT ES EINEN WIEDERHOLUNGS-
TERMIN - DEN LETZTEN IN DIESEM MILLENNIUM!


- Wenn Sie befuerchten, dass ab 1.1.2000 oder schon frueher kein 
  Rechner mehr funktionieren wird,

- wenn Sie sich eine Breitling Uhr gekauft haben - z.B. weil deren
  Ballon die Welt umrundet hat - oder geschenkt erhielten und wissen
  wollen, was man mit ihrer Drehlunette alles anfangen kann,

- wenn Sie vor vielen Jahren mit einem Rechenschieber gerechnet haben 
  und sich das wieder in Erinnerung rufen wollen,

- wenn Sie viel juenger sind, aber gerne wissen moechten, wie man 
  mehrere hundert Jahre hindurch die meisten mathematischen und 
  technischen Berechnungen durchgefuehrt hat, so dass dieses Geraet 
  sogar zum Ingenieursabzeichen wurde,

- oder einfach neugierig sind,

dann ist dieser Kurzkurs (= 2,5 Stunden) fuer Sie das Richtige:

                 ////////////////////////////////////////
                 /                                      /  
                 /            Rechnen mit dem           /
                 /                                      /
                 /      R E C H E N S C H I E B E R     /
                 /                                      /
                 ////////////////////////////////////////

Kurszeit:   Di., 15.Juni 1999, 18:00 bis 20:30 Uhr 
                (in der Pause eine Jause :-)

Kursort:    Kursraum des Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstituts 
                fuer Artificial Intelligence, Schottengasse 3, 
                1010 Wien 

Kursleiter: Es ist uns gelungen, als Kursleiter wieder den  
                Leiter der Rechenschieberkurse der OeH an der  
                Technischen Hochschule Wien in den Jahren 1961 - 1964,
                Herrn Robert Trappl, zu gewinnen.

Kursanmeldung:  Per Telefon (533 61 12-60), Fax (533 61 12-77) oder 
                Email (sec@ai.univie.ac.at). 
            Sie erhalten sofort eine Antwort, ob der Kurs noch 
                nicht ueberbucht ist. 
                Bitte ueberweisen Sie dann die Kursgebuehr von S 150,- 
                incl.10% MWSt. auf unser Konto 26-34400/00 bei der CA, 
                BLZ 11000, oder schicken Sie einen Scheck an unsere
                Adresse bis spaetestens Fr., 4.Juni 1999.

Jenen Personen, die keinen eigenen Rechenschieber zum Kurs mitbringen
koennen, wird ein Rechenschieber zur Verfuegung gestellt - aus Plastik
oder Papier ;-)

Prof. M. Gervautz, Wien

1999-06-14T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******

Univ.-Prof.Dr.Michael GERVAUTZ
Technische Universitaet Wien


                VIRTUAL AND AUGMENTED REALITY PROJEKTE
             AM INSTITUT FUER COMPUTERGRAPHIK DER TU WIEN

AUGMENTED REALITY ist ein relativ neuer Begriff in der Computergraphik, 
obwohl das erste Virtual Reality System, von Sutherland 1969 angedacht,
eigentlich ein augmented reality system war. Der Begriff hat sich aber
erst in den letzten Jahren etabliert und bedeutet soviel wie "veraen-
derte", "verstaerkte", "erweiterte" Realitaet. Es werden darunter 
Techniken verstanden, die es erlauben, in die reale Welt virtuelle 
Objekte oder Visualisierungen einzublenden und mit ihnen zu inter-
agieren. Dabei werden oft halbdurchsichtige Brillen verwendet, die
es erlauben, sowohl die reale Welt als auch die in der Brille 
stereoskopisch eingeblendeten virtuellen Elemente zu sehen.

Am Institut für Computergraphik der TU-Wien werden zu dem Thema
AUGMENTED REALITY Projekte durchgefuehrt, die im Rahmen des Vortrags
vorgestellt werden. Die Studierstube ist das Rahmenprojekt, in dem 
viele Einzelarbeiten verwirklicht werden. Dabei handelt es sich um 
ein System, das es mehreren Personen gleichzeitig erlaubt, mit 
virtuellen Objekten gemeinsam zu arbeiten. Die Studierstube wurde 
sowohl fuer wissenschaftliche Visualisierung als auch fuer den 
kommerziellen Einsatz wie z.B. Edutainment oder Marketing entwickelt.  


Zeit: Montag, 14.Juni 1999, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. W. Maass, Graz

1999-05-27T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Wolfgang MAASS
Vorstand des Instituts fuer Grundlagen
der Informationsverarbeitung
der Technischen Universitaet Graz


              NEURONALES RECHNEN MIT DYNAMISCHEN SYNAPSEN

Die ueblichen Modelle fuer kuenstliche neuronale Netze nehmen an, 
dass die synaptischen Gewichte waehrend des Rechnens im Netz konstant 
bleiben, sich also nur beim "Lernen" veraendern. Dagegen zeigen neuere 
experimentelle Arbeiten sehr klar, dass biologische Synapsen ihre 
Staerke laufend aendern - sogar um mehrere hundert Prozent - in 
Abhaengigkeit von dem Input, den die Synapse waehrend der vorher-
gehenden Zeit erhalten hat ("history dependent dynamic synapses"). 
Ein Uebersichtsartikel mit Literaturhinweisen ist online unter 
http://www.cis.tu-graz.ac.at/igi/maass/#Publications (Arbeit # 101)
erhaeltlich.

In diesem Vortrag werden neue Forschungsergebnisse vorgestellt, die
zeigen, wie sich die Rechenstaerke von neuronalen Netzen veraendert, 
wenn man diese inhaerente synaptische Dynamik beruecksichtigt. 
Ferner diskutieren wir die Frage, was "Lernen" in einem neuronalen 
Netz bedeutet, wenn synaptische Gewichte zwischen den Lernschritten 
nicht konstant bleiben, sondern in komplexer Weise vom vorhergehenden
Input abhaengen.  


Zeit: Donnerstag, 27.Mai 1999, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. S. Harnad, Southampton

1999-05-19T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Stevan HARNAD
Southampton University
United Kingdom


              SYMBOL GROUNDING AND THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

The Symbol Grounding Problem concerns the question of how to connect
meaningless symbols to what they mean, rather than to just further 
meaningless symbols, all systematically interpretable to an outside
mind, but meaningless in and of themselves. Evolution has clearly 
solved this problem in the case of both natural language and the 
language of thought. How has it done so? Some very simple artificial-
life simulations of the adaptive advantages of symbolic "theft" over
sensorimotor "toil" will be presented as a hint of how and why this
might have taken place.


Zeit: Mittwoch, 19.Mai 1999, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Rechnen mit dem Rechenschieber

1999-04-22T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

- Wenn Sie befuerchten, daß ab 1.1.2000 oder schon frueher kein 
  Rechner mehr funktionieren wird,

- wenn Sie sich eine Breitling Uhr gekauft haben - z.B. weil deren
  Ballon die Welt umrundet hat - oder geschenkt erhielten und wissen
  wollen, was man mit ihrer Drehlunette alles anfangen kann,

- wenn Sie vor vielen Jahren mit einem Rechenschieber gerechnet haben 
  und sich das wieder in Erinnerung rufen wollen,

- wenn Sie viel juenger sind, aber gerne wissen moechten, wie man 
  mehrere hundert Jahre hindurch die meisten mathematischen und 
  technischen Berechnungen durchgefuehrt hat, so dass dieses Geraet 
  sogar zum Ingenieursabzeichen wurde,

- oder einfach neugierig sind,

dann ist dieser Kurzkurs (= 2,5 Stunden) fuer Sie das Richtige:

                 ////////////////////////////////////////
                 /                                      /  
                 /            Rechnen mit dem           /
                 /                                      /
                 /      R E C H E N S C H I E B E R     /
                 /                                      /
                 ////////////////////////////////////////

Kurszeit:   Do., 22.April 1999, 18:00 bis 20:30 Uhr 
                (in der Pause eine Jause :-)

Kursort:    Kursraum des Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstituts 
                fuer Artificial Intelligence, Schottengasse 3, 
                1010 Wien 

Kursleiter: Es ist uns gelungen, als Kursleiter den Leiter der 
                Rechenschieberkurse der OeH an der Technischen 
                Hochschule Wien in den Jahren 1961 - 1964,
                Herrn Robert Trappl, zu gewinnen.

Kursanmeldung:  Per Telefon (533 61 12-60), Fax (533 61 12-77) oder 
                Email (sec@ai.univie.ac.at). 
            Sie erhalten sofort eine Antwort, ob der Kurs noch 
                nicht ueberbucht ist. 
                Bitte ueberweisen Sie dann die Kursgebuehr von S 150,- 
                incl.10% MWSt. auf unser Konto 26-34400/00 bei der CA, 
                BLZ 11000, bis spaetestens Do., 15.April 1999.

Die ersten sechs Personen, die sich anmelden, erhalten waehrend des 
Kurses einen kostenlosen Leihrechenschieber! 

P.S.: Sie koennen natuerlich schon vorher ueben, mit einem 
      Web-Rechenschieber - den gibt's wirklich! - unter 
       
      oder sich ueber historische Rechenschieber, -scheiben, -walzen 
      unter  
      informieren.

                          Wien, den 1.April 1999 (kein Aprilscherz :-)

M. Corley, Ph.D., Edinburgh

1999-04-15T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Martin CORLEY, Ph.D.
University of Edinburgh


                   SYNTACTIC PRIMING OF PRODUCTION:
            ARGUMENTS, LINEAR PRECEDENCE, JAVA, AND GERMAN

Current theories of human language production tend to differentiate 
between a (syntactic) functional level and a (surface) positional level 
in the generation of sentences, where functional selection precedes and
constrains positional processing. In this talk, evidence is presented
from a syntactic priming study in German, where position, function, and
type of constituent are orthogonally specified for monotransitive and  
ditransitive verbs. In contrast to findings for English (in which these
factors are confounded) it will be shown that previous generation of 
a ditransitive structure can inhibit the production of a further 
ditransitive when the order of potential arguments differs between 
prime and target. The results suggest that positional processing must
at the least interact with functional processing in production, and 
point to the importance of cross-linguistic evidence in the formation
of models of language processing. 


Zeit: Donnerstag, 15.April, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

M. Perin Wogenburg, Wien

1999-04-14T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

      gemeinsam mit dem Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und
  Artificial Intelligence der Univ. Wien im Rahmen des Konversatoriums
        "Art/ificial Intelligence: Die Beziehung zwischen Kunst
                      und Artificial Intelligence"


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Michael PERIN WOGENBURG
CEO, Science Wonder Productions
Wien

                   presents multimedia programs of 98:

                            VIENNA WALK DEMO

                  ... they were sent by the delegation
                         they are on a mission
                           they have 24 hours

Vienna Walk Demo is a prototype project for an interactive film
DVD-ROM about the City of Vienna. It is supposed to shape the 
vision of DVD-ROM development. - Vienna Walk seeks to combine 
elements of an encyclopedia, a game, and a movie into a new 
interactive environment where there are no strict borders 
between science, art, economy and fiction.

Other programs to be presented: 
- Swiss Poster Art - the Zurich project - the dynamic thesaurus 
  machine 
- die Auswahl - Austria's best-of furniture - 32 qtvr variations 
- Ringturm CD - history of a skyscraper

Special gift: 1 Vienna Walk Demo CD-ROM for everybody who joins.


Zeit: Mittwoch, 14.April 1999, 18:30 Uhr
Ort:  Institut fuer Med.Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence
      der Universitaet Wien, Freyung 6/2/2, 1010 Wien 1.

      (***** BITTE GEAENDERTEN ORT BEACHTEN! *****)


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

E. Cambouropoulos, Ph.D., Wien

1999-03-10T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

      gemeinsam mit dem Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und
  Artificial Intelligence der Univ. Wien im Rahmen des Konversatoriums
        "Art/ificial Intelligence: Die Beziehung zwischen Kunst
                      und Artificial Intelligence"


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Emilios CAMBOUROPOULOS, Ph.D.
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence


      TOWARDS A GENERAL COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MUSICAL STRUCTURE

In this talk an overview of work done towards the development of a 
computational model of musical structure will be presented. Input to 
the model is an unstructured melodic surface and output is a 
'plausible' segmentation and categorisation of the discovered 
musical segments into 'motives' or 'themes'. The proposed theory is 
based on general cognitive and logical principles and is independent 
of any specific musical style or idiom. A range of musical examples 
from various musical styles will be presented.

An extended abstract can be found at:
http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/~emilios/phd.html


Zeit: Mittwoch, 10.Maerz 1999, 18:00 (*** Bitte Beginnzeit beachten ***)
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. A. Geyer-Schulz, Wien

1999-02-22T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


ao.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Andreas GEYER-SCHULZ
Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration


                      THE VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY AND 
                   ITS EMBEDDED (INTELLIGENT) AGENTS

In this talk the current state of usage of (intelligent) Internet agents
in the virtual university of the Vienna University of Economics and 
Business Administration will be presented. Opportunities and challenges 
for the development of several classes of agents and their sensor 
systems will be discussed. More specifically, agents of the following 
classes embedded in the virtual university system will be presented:  

1. VU-Library/component interface robots.
2. VU-Component support robots.
3. Adaptive (and personalized) VU-navigation services.
4. Communicating agents for tele-presentation, tele-consulting, 
   recording, multi-media integration, and automated post-editing.

For additional information, see: http://vu.wu-wien.ac.at


Zeit: Montag, 22.Februar 1999, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. R. Trappl, Wien

1998-12-14T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


o.Univ.-Prof.Ing.Dr.Robert TRAPPL
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence
und Universitaet Wien


                ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE UND/MIT EMOTION?

"Rationalitaet" und "Emotionalitaet" erschienen immer als Gegensaetze. 
Erst durch empirische Untersuchungen in den letzten zehn Jahren stellte 
sich immer deutlicher heraus, dass sie nicht voneinander zu trennen 
sind, sondern einander sogar z.T. bedingen. Dies konnte nicht ohne 
Auswirkungen auf Informatik und insbesondere Artificial Intelligence 
bleiben.

1997 veroeffentlichte daher Rosalind W.Picard ihr Buch "Affective
Computing", in dem diese Tendenzen klar zusammengefasst und ein For-
schungskonzept entworfen wurde; wahrscheinlich nicht zufaellig im
gleichen Jahr erschien das von Dr.Paolo Petta und mir herausgegebene 
Buch "Creating Personalities for Synthetic Actors", das mehrere
Persoenlichkeitsmodelle mit Emotion zum Gegenstand hatte.

Im Rahmen dieses Referates sollen nicht nur die grundlegenden Ueber-
legungen, sondern auch zwei Projekte zu diesem Thema vorgestellt 
werden, die derzeit an unserem Forschungsinstitut durchgefuehrt 
werden: Der Versuch, Sprache mit emotionalem Ausdruck zu synthetisieren,
und die Entwicklung eines emotionalen Persoenlichkeitsagenten zur 
Steuerung eines Wesens in einer reichen interaktiven Situation.


Zeit: Montag, 14.Dezember 1998, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

ao.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Gerhard Widmer

Mag. B. Krenn, Saarbruecken

1998-12-04T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Mag.Brigitte KRENN
Institut fuer Computerlinguistik
Universitaet des Saarlandes, Saarbruecken
und
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
fuer Artificial Intelligence


         METHODEN UND WERKZEUGE ZUR AUTOMATISCHEN EXTRAKTION
                    VON KOLLOKATIONEN AUS ROHTEXT

Kollokationen, lexikalische Kookkurrenzen wie z.B. "zur Verfuegung 
stellen", "den Anschein erwecken" aber auch "Hut aufsetzen" versus 
"Jacke anziehen" etc., stellen ein wesentliches Merkmal des
Sprachgebrauchs dar und sind entsprechend fuer eine anwendungs-
ortientierte, realitaetsnahe Sprachverarbeitung von Interesse.

Im Vortrag werden computerlinguistische Methoden und Werkzeuge zur
automatischen Extraktion von Kollokationen aus beliebigem,
maschinenlesbaren Text vorgestellt. Korpora werden anhand flacher
Verarbeitung (Tokenisierung, Part-of-Speech Tagging, Phrase Chunking)
mit rudimentaerer syntaktischer Information versehen, wodurch der
Zugriff auf im Text vorhandene lexikalische Kookkurrenzen unterstuetzt
wird. Des weiteren werden Methoden zur Abgrenzung von Kollokationen von
lexikalisch nicht konventionalisierten Wortkombinationen diskutiert,
wobei im besonderen rein frequenzbasierte statistische Ansaetze
hybriden linguistisch motivierten Ansaetzen gegenuebergestellt werden.


Zeit: Freitag, 4.Dezember 1998, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. F. Nack, Darmstadt

1998-11-27T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Frank NACK
IPSI - Integrated Publication
and Information Systems Institute
GMD - Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH
Darmstadt


              DIE AUTOMATISCHE GENERIERUNG VON SLAPSTICK?
                         DASS ICH NICHT LACHE!


Dieser Vortrag beschaeftigt sich mit der automatischen Generierung 
von visuellem Humor. Im Verlauf wird unser Ansatz zu Erzaehlstrukturen
und visuellem Humor erlaeutert, unter Beruecksichtigung des Einflusses 
von Thema und Genre; die Problematik von Kontext und Shotanordnung 
fuer die Videoproduktion diskutiert, mit einer Schwerpunktbildung auf
den Videoschnitt; und es wird die Rolle von semantischen Netzwerken
fuer die automatische Generierung von Videosequenzen dargelegt. 

Der zweite Teil des Vortrags beschaeftigt sich mit AUTEUR, einem 
experimentellen System zur Annotation, Manipulation und Interpretation
von Videosequenzen. AUTEUR ist in der Lage, automatisch filmisch 
korrekte Filmsequenzen visuellen Humors (Slapstick) aus einem Pool
von annotierten Videoclips zu generieren, wobei dem System nur der
Startshot der zu erstellenden Sequenz vorgegeben wird. Ein Beispiel 
einer generierten Sequenz wird gezeigt.


Zeit: Freitag, 27.November 1998, 17:30 Uhr pktl. 
      (*** Bitte Beginnzeit beachten! ***)
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Rechnen mit dem Rechenschieber

1998-11-26T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

- wenn Sie befuerchten, dass ab 1.1.2000 oder schon viel frueher kein 
  Rechner mehr funktionieren wird,

- wenn Sie sich eine Breitling Uhr gekauft haben oder geschenkt 
  erhielten, und wissen wollen, was man mit dieser Drehlunette alles 
  anfangen kann,

- wenn Sie vor vielen Jahren mit einem Rechenschieber gerechnet haben, 
  und sich das wieder in Erinnerung rufen wollen,

- wenn Sie viel juenger sind, aber gerne wissen moechten, wie man 
  mehrere hundert Jahre hindurch die meisten mathematischen und 
  technischen Berechnungen durchgefuehrt hat, so dass dieses Geraet 
  sogar zum Ingenieursabzeichen wurde,

- oder einfach neugierig sind,

dann ist dieser Kurzkurs (= ein Nachmittag) fuer Sie das Richtige:

                 ////////////////////////////////////////
                 /                                      /  
                 /            Rechnen mit dem           /
                 /                                      /
                 /      R E C H E N S C H I E B E R     /
                 /                                      /
                 ////////////////////////////////////////

Kurszeit:   Do., 26.Nov. 1998, 14 Uhr pktl. bis 17 Uhr 
                (in der Pause eine Jause :-)

Kursort:    Kursraum des Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstituts 
                fuer Artificial Intelligence, Schottengasse 3, 
                1010 Wien 

Kursleiter: Es ist uns gelungen, als Kursleiter den Leiter der 
                Rechenschieberkurse der OeH an der Technischen 
                Hochschule Wien in den Jahren 1961 - 1964,
                Herrn Robert Trappl, zu gewinnen.

Kursanmeldung:  Per Telefon (533 61 12-60), Fax (533 61 12-77) oder 
                Email (sec@ai.univie.ac.at). 
            Sie erhalten sofort eine Antwort, ob der Kurs noch 
                nicht ueberbucht ist. 
                Bitte ueberweisen Sie dann die Kursgebuehr von S 150,- 
                incl.10% MWSt. auf unser Konto 26-34400/00 bei der CA, 
                BLZ 11000, bis spaetestens Do., 19.Nov. 1998.

Die ersten sechs Personen, die sich anmelden, erhalten waehrend des 
Kurses einen kostenlosen Leihrechenschieber! 

P.S.: Sie koennen natuerlich schon vorher ueben, mit einem 
      Web-Rechenschieber - den gibt's wirklich unter 
       
      oder sich ueber historische Rechenschieber, -scheiben, -walzen 
      unter  
      informieren.

Dr. H. Chalupsky, Marina del Rey, CA

1998-11-19T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Hans CHALUPSKY
USC Information Sciences Institute
Marina del Rey, CA

                                STELLA:
                   SYMBOLISCHE PROGRAMMIERUNG IN C++
                              OHNE FRUST


Seit ueber 40 Jahren ist Lisp nun eine der populaersten Programmier-
sprachen im Bereich der Artificial Intelligence. Trotzdem ist es nie 
eine Sprache der "breiten Masse", wie C++ oder Java, geworden. Dies
erschwert die Integration mit kommerzieller Software und motiviert 
Geldgeber, die Verwendung von gaengigeren Programmiersprachen zu 
diktieren. 

Da Sprachen wie C++ oder Java zur symbolischen Programmierung schlecht 
geeignet sind, entwickelten wir STELLA (Strongly TypEd Lisp-like 
LAnguage). STELLA behaelt die attraktivsten Aspekte Common Lisps bei,
ohne die Uebersetzung in effizientes und verstaendliches C++ zu 
kompromittieren. STELLA-Programme koennen derzeit nach C++ und 
Common Lisp uebersetzt werden, ein Java-Uebersetzer ist in Arbeit.
Programmentwicklung in STELLA ist fast ebenso komfortabel wie in 
Lisp, zusaetzlich laufen die C++-Uebersetzungen aber drei- bis 
fuenfmal schneller. 

Im Vortrag werden die Grundlagen und Motivation von STELLA beschrieben,
mit alternativen Ansaetzen verglichen und ein Ueberblick ueber das in 
STELLA entwickelte PowerLoom Wissensrepraesentationssystem gegeben. 


Zeit: Donnerstag, 19.November 1998, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. C. Helma, Dipl.-Ing. S. Kramer, Wien

1998-10-22T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Mag.Dr.Christoph HELMA
Institut fuer Tumorbiologie-Krebsforschung
der Universitaet Wien
und
Dipl.-Ing.Stefan KRAMER
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence


                  DER COMPUTER ALS VERSUCHSKANINCHEN -
          ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE-METHODEN ZUR IDENTIFIZIERUNG
                     KREBSERREGENDER SUBSTANZEN

Schaetzungen zufolge werden bis zu 80% der Krebserkrankungen durch die 
Einwirkung von toxischen Fremdsubstanzen verursacht. Derzeit sind erst 
sehr wenige chemische Verbindungen auf krebserregende Wirkungen 
untersucht worden, da dafuer extrem aufwendige Langzeittierversuche 
notwendig sind. Aus diesen Gruenden ist die Vorhersage der Kanzero-
genitaet von grossem humanitaeren, medizinischen und wissenschaft-
lichen Interesse. 

In dem hier vorgestellten Forschungsprojekt versuchen wir herauszu-
finden, welche Beziehungen zwischen der chemischen Struktur und der 
kanzerogenen Wirkung von organischen Verbindungen bestehen. Fuer 
unsere Untersuchungen setzen wir Methoden des Maschinellen Lernens 
ein, die aus Beispielsdaten allgemeine Regeln ableiten, welche der 
Vorhersage kanzerogener Wirkungen dienen. Mit solchen Methoden 
koennen verborgene Zusammenhaenge entdeckt und in einer leicht 
interpretierbaren Form dargestellt werden. Die von uns erzielten 
Ergebnisse sind aeusserst vielversprechend: Die Vorhersagegenauigkeit 
ist besser als die anderer Struktur-Aktivitaets-Modelle, aber auch 
biologischer Kurzzeittests. Wir hoffen, mit dieser Arbeit einen 
Beitrag zu einer groesseren Akzeptanz von computergestuetzten 
Methoden in der Toxikologie leisten zu koennen. 


Zeit: Donnerstag, 22.Oktober 1998, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. G. Widmer, Wien

1998-10-12T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


ao.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Gerhard WIDMER
Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence
der Universitaet Wien und
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence


De/Reconstructing Horowitz?
Artificial Intelligence, maschinelles Lernen
und musikalischer Ausdruck
--------------------------------------------

Was macht Musik fuer Zuhoerer lebendig? 
Wie formen Interpreten Musikstuecke? 
Was macht den Stil eines Vladimir Horowitz aus? 
Und was haben Computer mit diesen Fragen zu tun? 

Dieser Vortrag berichtet ueber ein langfristiges Projekt am Oester-
reichischen Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence, in dem 
es um die Erforschung der Grundlagen des musikalischen Ausdrucks mit 
Hilfe von Methoden der Artificial Intelligence (speziell: des 
maschinellen Lernens) geht. Computerprogramme analysieren Aufnahmen 
menschlicher Interpreten und lernen, selbst Musik mit "Ausdruck" 
zu spielen. Der Computer wird dabei als Hilfsmittel zur Entdeckung 
grundlegender Muster und Regelhaftigkeiten eingesetzt und soll so 
zu neuen Einsichten in dieses fuer Musik als Kunstform und kognitive 
Kulturleistung so zentrale Phaenomen beitragen. 

Der Vortrag gibt einen Ueberblick ueber den aktuellen Stand der 
Arbeiten und skizziert Forschungsziele und moegliche Entwicklungen 
fuer die naechsten Jahre. 

Der Vortragende wurde fuer diese Arbeiten mit dem Kardinal-Innitzer-
Foerderungspreis 1997 und mit dem START-Preis der Oesterreichischen
Bundesregierung 1998 ausgezeichnet.


Zeit: Montag, 12.Oktober 1998, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. P. A. Schrodt, Lawrence, KS, USA

1998-09-17T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Philip A. SCHRODT
Department of Political Science
University of Kansas
USA


Early Warning of International Conflict Using Hidden Markov Models
------------------------------------------------------------------

This presentation will discuss the application of hidden Markov 
models (HMMs) to the problem of forecasting international conflict.  
HMMs are a sequence comparison method widely used in computerized 
speech recognition as a computationally efficient method of 
generalizing a set of sequences observed in a noisy environment.  
An HMM is tested for its ability to correctly discriminate between 
crises that involve and do not involve war, and then applied to the
problem of forecasting the outbreak of armed violence between Israel 
and Arab forces in southern Lebanon during the period 1979 to 1997.  
This research is part of the Kansas Event Data System project 
(http://www.ukans.edu/~keds).


Zeit: Donnerstag, 17.September 1998, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. F. Kaplan, Paris

1998-07-20T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
   Tel.: +43-1-5336112, Fax: +43-1-5320652, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Frederic KAPLAN
SONY Computer Science Lab
Paris


Using Agents Playing Language Games
to Understand Spontaneous Lexicon Change
----------------------------------------

We argue that lexicon change can be explained through the stochasticity 
observed in real-world natural language use. To support this thesis, we 
model language use through language games played in evolving populations 
of agents. Obtaining variation is not obvious, because a language com-
munity should also have a natural tendency towards coherence, otherwise 
communication would not be effective. An adequate explanatory model of 
lexicon change must therefore show (1) how a coherent lexicon may arise 
in a group of agents, (2) how nevertheless the lexicon may remain intern-
ally varied and exhibit constant innovation, (3) how some of this vari-
ation may be amplified to become dominant in the population.


Zeit: Montag, 20.Juli 1998, 18:30 Uhr
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. M. Niranjan, Cambridge

1998-06-25T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

            gemeinsam mit dem SFB 010 "Adaptive Modelle in den
         Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften",  gefoerdert vom
       Fonds zur Foerderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF)


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Mahesan NIRANJAN
Cambridge University
United Kingdom


Use and Abuse of Neural Networks in Finance
-------------------------------------------

Neural Networks offer a powerful method for tackling many inference
problems. This comes from a combination of function approximation
capabilities combined with statistical methods for parameter estim-
ation and dynamical systems for modelling time variations. It is 
also true that the hype associated with some of the terminology in 
this area leads to many "blind" applications of neural networks to 
difficult problems.

This talk is in two parts; firstly I will give an overview of some
applications of neural networks in financial forecasting, focusing
on sequential methods centered around the extended Kalman filtering
framework. In the second part, I will talk about using neural net-
works in an options pricing task. Sequential methods used in this
framework will be extended to derive smooth estimates of implied
volatilities from the Black-Scholes type approach. More recent work 
along the lines of replacing the extended Kalman filter by 
sequential sampling methods will also be discussed.


Zeit: Donnerstag, 25.Juni 1998, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Data Mining

1998-06-18T00:00:00+02:00

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                  Leiter: o.Univ.-Prof.Dr. Robert Trappl
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                            TAGESSEMINAR

                       ***********************
                             DATA MINING
                       ***********************

            Zeit: Donnerstag, 18. Juni 1998, 9:00-17:00 Uhr
               Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
                     fuer Artificial Intelligence,
                     Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                           Tel. 5353281-0


Motivation
----------

Die Menge und Komplexitaet der in Industrie, Wirtschaft, Verwaltung und
Wissenschaft routinemaessig anfallenden Daten nimmt explosionsartig zu.
Ob Scannerdaten in Supermaerkten, Aufzeichnungen ueber Kunden, Vertraege
und Transaktionen im Bank- und Versicherungsbereich, technische Prozess-
daten in grossen Produktionsanlagen -- die automatische Datenerfassung
im Verein mit moderner Datenbanktechnik ermoeglicht das Anlegen immer
groesserer Datensammlungen.

Mehr Daten bedeuten allerdings nicht automatisch mehr Information oder
bessere Entscheidungsunterstuetzung. Zwar erleichtern neue Konzepte wie
"Data Warehousing" die Verwaltung und Wartung der Datenbestaende, das
Problem der Interpretation bzw. der Extraktion nuetzlichen Wissens aus
den Daten wird damit aber nicht geloest. Herkoemmliche Methoden der
Datenauswertung  (manuelle Abfragen, klassische statistische Methoden
u.a.) stossen hier an ihre Grenzen.

"Data Mining" (auch: "Knowledge Discovery in Databases, KDD") bezeichnet
neuartige, auf Methoden des Maschinellen Lernens basierende Techniken zum
(semi-)automatischen Auffinden von interessanten und nuetzlichen Mustern
und Regeln ("Wissen") in grossen Datenbestaenden. Data Mining ist ein
junges, aeusserst aktives Forschungsgebiet im Bereich der Artificial
Intelligence. Das praktische Anwendungspotiential dieses Gebiets wurde
von der Industrie schnell erkannt, und Software- und Beratungsfirmen, die
Data-Mining-Dienste anbieten, erleben derzeit einen ungeheuren Boom.
Berichte ueber kommerziell erfolgreiche Anwendungen reichen vom Bank-
und Versicherungswesen ueber die Telekommunikation bis zur Astronomie. 

Am Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence wurde
bereits 1997 ein Tagesseminar zum Thema Data Mining veranstaltet. Aufgrund
des grossen Interesses wird nun wieder ein Seminar zu diesem Thema angeboten.

Zielsetzung
-----------

Durch den im Rahmen des Seminars gebotenen Ueberblick soll ein tieferes
Verstaendnis fuer die Moeglichkeiten dieser Technologie vermittelt werden.
Zu diesem Zweck werden nach einem einleitenden Ueberblick ueber das
Gesamtgebiet auch praxisrelevante Methoden genauer erklaert und spezielle
Aspekte des Data-Mining-Prozesses anhand einer Beispielanwendung
demonstriert werden. Der Schwerpunkt hiebei wird auf tatsaechlichen
Wissensentdeckungsmethoden (und weniger auf Datenbankaspekten) liegen.
Die Breite der Anwendungsmoeglichkeiten des Data Mining wird unter anderem
durch die Vorstellung einiger Projekte illustriert werden, die am Oester-
reichischen Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (z.T. auch in
Kooperation mit industriellen Partnern) durchgefuehrt wurden und werden.

Zielgruppe
----------

EDV-Entscheidungstraeger, Projektleiter, Datenanalytiker und Datenbank-
verantwortliche, Software-Entwickler sowie alle, die viele Daten haben
und wissen wollen, was darin steckt.

Vortragende
-----------

ao.Univ.-Prof.Dr. Gerhard Widmer, Dozent fuer Artificial Intelligence an der
Universitaet Wien, Leiter der Abteilung "Maschinelles Lernen und Data Mining"
des Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstituts fuer Artificial Intelligence,
Leiter mehrerer Forschungs- und Entwicklungsprojekte im Bereich des Maschi-
nellen Lernens, Autor zahlreicher internationaler Publikationen in den Be-
reichen Artificial Intelligence, Maschinelles Lernen, auch Musikwissenschaft;
Program Chairman der 9th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML'97).

Dr. Bernhard Pfahringer, Autor zahlreicher internationaler Publikationen
in den Bereichen Maschinelles Lernen, Wissensrepraesentation, Expertensysteme
und Constraintprogrammierung, war u.a. Post-doctoral Researcher am Machine
Learning Laboratory der Waikato University in Hamilton, Neuseeland, Gewinner
eines internationalen Machine-Learning-Wettbewerbs, und ist derzeit wissen-
schaftlicher Mitarbeiter in der Abteilung "Maschinelles Lernen" des Oester-
reichischen Forschungsinstituts fuer Artificial Intelligence sowie Lektor
an der Universitaet Wien fuer "Induktive Logische Programmierung".

Dipl.-Ing. Johann Petrak arbeitete einige Jahre als Systemanalytiker im
Rechenzentrum des Bundesministeriums fuer Finanzen und ist jetzt wissen-
schaftlicher Mitarbeiter in der Abteilung "Maschinelles Lernen" des
Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstituts fuer Artificial Intelligence und
Lektor an der Universitaet Wien zum Thema "Wissensextraktion aus Daten-
banken (Data Mining)".



Programm
--------

9:00-9:30       Begruessung, Vorstellung der Vortragenden und
                Teilnehmer, Ueberblick ueber das Tagesseminar
                (o.Univ.-Prof.Dr. Robert Trappl und
                 ao.Univ.-Prof.Dr. Gerhard Widmer)

9:30-10:30      Was ist Data Mining?
                Eine kurze Einfuehrung in Ziele, Methoden und
                Anwendungsmoeglichkeiten
                (Dipl.-Ing. Johann Petrak)

10:30-10:45     Kaffeepause

10:45-12:00     Ausgewaehlte Methoden und Techniken des Data Mining
                (Dr. Bernhard Pfahringer)

12:00-13:30     Gemeinsames Mittagessen

13:30-15:00     Der Data Mining-Prozess: Demonstration der 
                konkreten Vorgangsweise anhand einer
                exemplarischen Problemstellung
                (mit praktischen Demonstrationen)
                (Dipl.-Ing. Johann Petrak und Dr. Bernhard Pfahringer)

15:00-15:15     Kaffeepause

15:15-16:00     Data Mining am OeFAI:
                Ein Ueberblick ueber aktuelle Projekte und Anwendungen
                (Dr. Gerhard Widmer)

16:00-16:30     Resumee; Ausblick auf praktische Anwendungs-
                moeglichkeiten, Angebote des OeFAI im Bereich Data Mining
                (Dr. Gerhard Widmer)

16:30-17:00     Diskussion




Anmeldung: Mit folgendem Abschnitt bis spaetestens 5. Juni 1998:

------------------------------------------------------------------- 

An das Oesterreichische Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence,
Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
Fax: 5320652

Hiemit melde ich .... Personen für das Tagesseminar "Data Mining"
am 18.6.98 an.

o  Gleichzeitig ueberweise ich die Teilnahmegebuehr (pro Teilnehmer
   oeS 4.800,-, fuer Mitglieder von OeSGK oder OCG oeS 3.500,-,
   jeweils zuzuegl. 10% MWSt.) auf das Konto der Oesterreichischen
   Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik, CA 26-34400/00, BLZ 11000,
   und ersuche um Uebersendung einer Empfangsbestaetigung.

o  Ich werde die Teilnahmegebuehr sofort nach Erhalt der Rechnung
   ueberweisen.


Name:                                Telefon:

Anschrift:


Datum:                               Unterschrift:

Prof. C. Moeller, Karlsruhe

1998-05-28T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                            gemeinsam mit dem 
    Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence
                          der Universitaet Wien
        im Rahmen des Konversatoriums "Art/ificial Intelligence: 
        Die Beziehung zwischen Kunst und Artificial Intelligence"


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Architekt DI Christian MOELLER
Professor fuer mediale Ausstellungsgestaltung
an der Staatlichen Hochschule fuer Gestaltung Karlsruhe


Intelligente Umgebungen: Christian Moeller - ein Werkbericht
------------------------------------------------------------

An der "Sprache der Architektur" haben Generationen von Baumeistern 
gearbeitet. Der Frankfurter Architekt Christian Moeller gehoert jedoch
zu den ersten seines Fachs, die diese Arbeit nicht mehr metaphorisch
auffassen. Seine Installationen, die elektronische Medien konsequent
als Mittel der Gestaltung einsetzen, praesentieren eine neue, naemlich
dialogisch konzipierte Umgebung in Architektur und Ausstellungsdesign. 


Zeit: Donnerstag, 28.Mai 1998, 18:00 Uhr pktl.
                               *********
Ort:  Seminarraum des Instituts fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und
      Artificial Intelligence der Universitaet Wien,
      Freyung 6/Stiege 2 (Schottenhof), 1010 Wien 1.
      ******************


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Prof. H. Huebner, Kassel

1998-05-27T00:00:00+02:00

       Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik (OeSGK)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Univ.-Prof.Dipl.-Ing.Dr.habil.Heinz HUEBNER
Universitaet Kassel


Moeglichkeiten der Technikwirkungsanalyse 
(Technology Assessment):
Magnetschnellbahn Transrapid zwischen Oekonomie und Oekologie
-------------------------------------------------------------

Technische Innovationen koennen aufgrund des zielpraegenden Potentials
tiefgreifende Veraenderungen in vielen Lebensbereichen bewirken; 
neben erwuenschten koennen auch unerwuenschte, evtl. auch schaedliche 
und gefaehrliche Wirkungen und Folgen auftreten. Um diese zu identifi-
zieren, sind verschiedene Konzepte entwickelt worden, die als Technik-
bewertung, Techology Assessment bzw. Technikwirkungsanalyse bezeichnet
werden.

Der Vortrag stellt Ergebnisse einer solchen Technikwirkungsanalyse vor,
in der die neue, im TRANSRAPID realisierte Magnetschwebetechnik mit 
der konventionellen Rad-/Schiene-Technik am Beispiel des Hochgeschwin-
digkeitszuges "InterCityExpress" (ICE) verglichen wird. Der Vergleich 
bezieht sich auf
         - regionaloekonomische und
         - oekologische Effekte
fuer die - Errichtungs- und die
         - Betriebsphase.

Die Anwendung unterschiedlicher Methoden entspricht der Komplexitaet 
der Problemstellung, insbesondere zur Erfassung oekologischer 
Wirkungen; im Rahmen des Vortrages wird auch auf diese Methoden 
eingegangen.

Die Methodik ist zur Beurteilung auch komplexer Projekte (z.B. 
Semmering-Basistunnel) anwendbar und geeignet, emotionell 
gefuehrte Diskussionen wieder zu objektivieren.

Literatur: Huebner H., Dunkel T., Gers V., Hoeft J., Jahnes S., 
Kleinkauf U., Schotter A.: Transrapid zwischen Oekonomie und 
Oekologie - Eine Technikwirkungsanalyse alternativer Hochge-
schwindigkeitsverkehrssysteme, Wiesbaden, 1997. 


Zeit: Mittwoch, 27.Mai 1998, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik,
      Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHE STUDIENGESELLSCHAFT
FUER KYBERNETIK

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

N. Nicolov, Univ.of Sussex

1998-05-05T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                          gemeinsam mit der

         W i e n e r   S p r a c h g e s e l l s c h a f t :



                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Nicolas NICOLOV
University of Sussex


Parsing Techniques for D-Tree Grammars
--------------------------------------

This talk presents ongoing work on the LexSys system for "Analysis of
Naturally-occurring English Text with Stochastic Lexicalised Grammars"
which is being built in the context of a large project at the
University of Sussex. 

D-Tree Grammar (DTG) is a variant of Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG). DTG
is designed to share some of the advatages of TAG while overcoming
some of its limitations. DTG assumes similar elementary structures as
in TAG but combines them in a more uniform way. The elementary (and
intermediate) structures are viewed as descriptions of trees and are
composed by equating certain nodes. 

I will briefly introduce the current version of D-Tree Grammar
formalism. I will present the architecture of the system and will
discuss the approach for encoding a wide-coverage lexicalised grammar.
In the rest of the talk I will present a bottom-up parser for D-Tree
Grammars. Advantages from using DTGs for parsing include:

1. Elementary structures have an extended domain of locality and
   allow certain kinds of dependencies to be stated directly which in
   other frameworks can only be enforced by a mechanism of percolation
   of feature values; 

2. A DTG parser need only consider the lexicalised d-trees
   corresponding to the input words; 

3. DTG derivation structures directly reflect predicate argument
   structure due to the uniform treatment of complementation and
   modification.

Time permitting I will present how we are addressing the problem of
duplication of parsing steps by sharing computations across elementary
structures and how we might take into account probabilistic
information. I could also discuss the kind of changes we are
considering to introduce to the linguistic analyses.


Zeit: Dienstag, 5.Mai 1998, 18:00 Uhr c.t.
Ort:  *ACHTUNG*: Seminarraum des Instituts fuer Sprachwissenschaft,
      Berggasse 11, 1.Stiege, 3.Stock
      *******************************


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. K. Alter, Dipl.-Biol. K. Steinhauer, Leipzig

1998-04-29T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Kai ALTER und
Dipl.-Biol.Karsten STEINHAUER
Max-Planck-Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
Leipzig


Die Syntax-Prosodie-Verarbeitung: Produktion und Perzeption
-----------------------------------------------------------

Unsere Studien verfolgen das Ziel, die kognitive Verbindungsstelle 
zwischen grammatischer Kompetenz und Performanz bei Sprecher und 
Hoerer zu untersuchen. Die vorliegende Untersuchung konzentrierte 
sich auf die Umsetzung von syntaktischer Struktur auf Satzmelodie
und -intonation. Auf der Basis von Syntaxinformation wurden unter-
schiedliche prosodische Strukturen fuer syntaktisch verschiedene, 
jedoch oberflaechenaehnliche Satztypen abgeleitet. 

Die vorhergesagten prosodischen Differenzen wurden akustisch 
analysiert und die Prosodie-relevanten Parameter extrahiert 
(rhythmische und tonale Muster, Dauerwerte, Pauseninsertion, 
Grenztoene etc.). Durch digitale Signalmanipulierung wurden nicht 
miteinander korrelierende syntaktische und prosodische Information 
verknuepft. Diese so manipulierten Saetze wurden einer Reihe von 
Testpersonen vorgespielt. Beim Hoerer wurde dadurch ein kuenstlicher 
Konflikt zwischen diesen Informationen erzeugt. Waehrend des Hoerens 
wurde die Hirnaktivitaet der Testpersonen mittels EKP registriert. 
Es konnten im EKP sowohl Korrelate der unterschiedlichen prosodischen 
Phrasierung als auch des Prosodie-Syntax-Konflikts nachgewiesen werden. 
Dieses Ergebnis zeigt, dass syntaktische und prosodische Information
vom Sprecher satzinitial kodiert wird und auch vom Hoerer sofort fuer 
das Verstehen genutzt wird. Weiters spielt bei der Verarbeitung auch 
die prosodische Strukturierung eine wesentliche Rolle. Es kann gezeigt
werden, dass sogenannte Intonationsphrasen relativ stabile prosodische
Verarbeitungseinheiten konstituieren.


Zeit: Mittwoch, 29.April 1998, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Plenarvortraege EMCSR'98

1998-04-22T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                 VIDEOS
                                 ******


Fuer jene Damen und Herren, denen es nicht moeglich war, die Plenar-
vortraege des 14th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research 
zu hoeren, bringen wir eine Videoaufzeichnung der folgenden Vortraege:

    Mittwoch, 22.April 1998, 16:00 Uhr pktl.:
    Prof.Dr.Dr.Franz Josef Radermacher, 
        Direktor des Forschungsinstituts fuer Anwendungsorientierte 
        Wissensverarbeitung an der Universitaet Ulm (FAW): 
    "Challenges at the Beginning of a New Century" 

    Mittwoch, 22.April 1998, 17:15 Uhr pktl.:
    Prof.Dr.Lynn Andrea Stein, Massachusetts Institute of
        Technology and Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA:
    "Challenging the Computational Metaphor: Implications
        for How We Think" 

        Mittwoch, 22.April 1998, 18:30 Uhr pktl.:
        Prof.Dr.Michael Wooldridge, University of London:
        "Why You Should Care About Agents"

Ort: Institut fuer Med.Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence
     der Universitaet Wien, Freyung 6/2, 1010 Wien

Aufgrund der beschraenkten Anzahl der Sitzplaetze ersuchen wir um 
telefonische Voranmeldung unter 5336112 oder mittels e-mail 
(sec@ai.univie.ac.at).


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

14th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 1998)

1998-04-14T00:00:00+02:00

Please visit the conference website for further information.

Priv.-Doz. D. Schmauks, Berlin

1998-03-26T00:00:00+01:00

       Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik (OeSGK)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Priv.-Doz.Dr.Dagmar SCHMAUKS
TU Berlin


Koerpermetaphern und Organsprache
---------------------------------

Metaphern dienen dazu, etwas weniger Bekanntes in Analogie zu etwas 
Bekanntem zu verstehen. Da unser eigener Koerper fuer uns das am besten 
bekannte Objekt ist, uebertragen wir das Wissen ueber seine Struktur 
und Funktion auf alle anderen Bereiche. Dieser Vortrag behandelt einen 
Sonderfall, bei dem das Seelische in Kategorien des Koerperlichen 
dargestellt wird. So beschreiben wir seelische Beschaedigungen genau 
wie koerperliche: man ist "verletzt", hat "Wunden", die mehr oder 
weniger gut "heilen" und von denen oft Narben zurueckbleiben. 
Wortfeldanalysen belegen, dass einige Metaphern reich strukturiert und
breit anwendbar sind, naemlich die der Gegensaetze von hell und dunkel, 
warm und kalt, weich und hart, bewegt und starr, hoerbar und stumm.
Redensarten wie "um Haaresbreite" und "um eine Nasenlaenge voraus" 
zeigen, dass wir unseren Koerper als "Mass aller Dinge" ansehen. Die 
Analyse spezieller Metaphern ueber einzelne Koerperteile und -funk-
tionen beweist, dass das in ihnen enthaltene Wissen enge Verbindungen 
zur modernen Psychosomatik hat. Diese spricht von "Organsprache" und
meint damit, dass der Koerper durch seine Beschwerden und Krankheiten 
selbst Hinweise darauf gibt, was die jeweiligen Ursachen sein koennten. 
Zum Beispiel drueckt die herzspezifische Metapher "eng vs. weit" 
einen Zusammenhang von Umweltbelastungen und Blutdruck aus, der
wissenschaftlich nachweisbar ist. Solche Zusammenhaenge werden fuer 
alle Koerperfunktionen festgestellt und durch Beispiele belegt - von 
der Atmung über Nahrungsverwertung und Sinnestaetigkeit bis zu 
Koerperhaltung und Fortbewegung.

Zeit: Donnerstag, 26.Maerz 1998, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik,
      Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHE STUDIENGESELLSCHAFT
FUER KYBERNETIK

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dr. N. Reithinger, Saarbruecken

1998-03-25T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Norbert REITHINGER
Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer
Kuenstliche Intelligenz (DFKI)
Saarbruecken


Robuste Dialogverarbeitung in VERBMOBIL
---------------------------------------

Verbmobil ist das derzeit groesste deutschsprachige Projekt im Bereich
der Sprachtechnologie. Aufgabe des Systems ist es, gesprochene Sprache
zwischen den Sprachen Deutsch, Englisch und Japanisch zu uebersetzen.

Die Aufgaben der Dialogverarbeitung unterscheiden sich hierbei von 
Mensch-Maschine-Systemen. Eine Hauptaufgabe fuer die linguistisch 
motivierte tiefe Analyse ist es, Kontextwissen zu speichern und 
bereitzustellen. Es wird gezeigt, welche Informationsarten in einem 
Uebersetzungssystem relevant sind und wie sie berechnet werden.

Um die Robustheit des Gesamtsystems zu erhoehen, erhaelt es alterna-
tive Verarbeitungsstraenge. Einer davon ist die dialogaktbasierte 
Uebersetzung, die statistische Methoden der Dialogverarbeitung 
verwendet. An einigen Beispielen wird gezeigt, wie die Verfahren 
arbeiten und wie mit symbolischen Mitteln die Erkennungsrate 
gesteigert werden kann.  


Zeit: Mittwoch, 25.Maerz 1998, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Dipl. Inform. H. Aust, Aachen

1998-03-03T00:00:00+01:00

Österreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence (ÖFAI)
                     Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                        Tel.+43-1-5336112-60
----------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Inform. Harald AUST
Philips Speech Processing
Aachen


Sprachverstehen und Dialogmodellierung in natuerlichsprachlichen
Informationssystemen
----------------------------------------------------------------

Automatische Informationssysteme sind Systeme, mit deren Hilfe ein
Interessent oder Kunde, typischerweise per Telefon, bestimmte
Informationen abfragen oder Transaktionen veranlassen kann. Derzeit
werden die erforderlichen Benutzereingaben dabei ueber die
Telefontastatur oder mit einfachen Sprachkommandos vorgenommen. Unser
Ziel war es hingegen, ein System zu entwickeln, das sich in einem
natuerlichen Dialog bedienen laesst, ganz aehnlich wie dies Menschen
untereinander tun.

Dazu haben wir Verfahren entwickelt, untersucht und implementiert, die
die Erstellung von solchen natuerlichsprachlichen Informationssystemen
ermoeglichen. Die wichtigsten Ueberlegungen, Grundlagen und Techniken
fuer Sprachverstehen und Dialogmodellierung in diesen Systemen werde ich
im Rahmen des Vortrags vorstellen.


Zeit: Dienstag, 3.Maerz 1998, 16:00 (*** Bitte Beginnzeit beachten ***)
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl


PS. Wir ersuchen die kurzfristige Ankuendigung zu entschuldigen.

Prof. P. Bruck, Salzburg

1997-12-04T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Peter A. BRUCK
Honorarprofessor fuer Informationswirtschaft
an der Universitaet Salzburg
Geschaeftsfuehrer und wissenschaftlicher Leiter
der TECHNO-Z FH Forschung & Entwicklung GmbH
in Salzburg


Oesterreichs 'Content Industry':
Bestandsaufnahme und Marktstrategien
------------------------------------

Oesterreich versteht sich als Kulturnation und hochentwickeltes Wirt-
schaftsland. Die Content Industry wird zu einem zunehmend entscheidenden
Wirtschaftssektor. Damit die Moeglichkeiten der neuen Medien hierzu-
lande wirtschaftlich ertragreich und beschaeftigungsfoerdernd genutzt
werden koennen, bedarf es konkreter Schritte sowohl von seiten der
Unternehmen als auch von seiten der Politik.

In diesem Referat werden die Ergebnisse einer im Auftrag des Bundes-
ministeriums fuer wirtschaftliche Angelegenheiten durchgefuehrten
Studie und die darin aufgestellten fuenf Thesen vorgestellt und
begruendet. 

Zeit: Donnerstag, 4.Dezember 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl


P.S.: Prof.Bruck hat in seiner bekannt liebenswuerdigen Art erklaert,
      dass er jedem Teilnehmer ein Exemplar des Buches "Oesterreichs
      Content Industry" (144 Seiten) als Geschenk ueberreichen wird.

Mag. G. Hinterleitner, Wien

1997-11-12T00:00:00+01:00

       Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik (OeSGK)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Mag.Gerlinde HINTERLEITNER
Projektleiterin, "Der Standard Online"
DER STANDARD
Wien


Zeitungen im Internet:
Die speziellen Aufgaben einer Online-Redaktion
----------------------------------------------

Seit DER STANDARD am 2.Feber 1995 als erste deutschsprachige Tages-
zeitung ins Internet ging, haben auch in Oesterreich immer mehr 
Tageszeitungen eine Ausgabe in diesen Cyberspace gestellt. 

In diesem Referat sollen daher folgende oft gestellte Fragen ange-
sprochen werden: Warum stellen Zeitungen eine Ausgabe ins Internet? 
Hat eine Internet-Ausgabe eine andere Leserschaft? Welche speziellen 
Marketing-Konzepte gibt es dafuer? Wodurch unterscheiden sich die 
Aufgaben einer online-Redaktion von einer "konventionellen" Zeitungs-
redaktion? Ergeben sich daraus neue Berufsbilder? Welche zukuenftige
Entwicklungen zeichnen sich ab?


Zeit: Mittwoch, 12.November 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  Oesterr. Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence,
      Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. H. Wiklicky, London

1997-10-29T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Ing.MMag.Dr.Herbert Wiklicky
Marie Curie Fellow
City University
London


Probabilistische Berechnungsmodelle und deklarative Programmierung
------------------------------------------------------------------

Probabilistische Algorithmen, zum Beispiel Simulated Annealing Tech-
niken, erfreuen sich seit einiger Zeit einer regen Popularitaet etwa 
im Bereich der kombinatorischen Optimierung oder zur Loesung von 
Problemen im Bereich der mikrobiologischen Strukturanalyse.

Waehrend die Untersuchung dieser Algorithmenklasse im Rahmen der 
Komplexitaetstheorie Fortschritte gemacht hat, gibt es nur relativ 
wenige Ansaetze zu einer semantischen Modellierung, welche aber zu 
einer Verifizierung oder abstrakten Analyse solcher Programme noetig 
waere.

Derartige semantische Fragestellungen werden anhand einer von uns 
entwickelten konkreten Modellsprache, Probabilistic Concurrent 
Constraint Programming (PCCP), in welcher probabilistische Elemente 
im Rahmen einer deklarativen Programmiersprache implementiert wurden, 
erlaeutert und untersucht. Darueber hinaus soll auch ein Ausblick auf 
andere quantitative, insbesondere ressourcenabhaengige, Berechnungs-
modelle gegeben werden.


Zeit: Mittwoch, 29.Oktober 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. R. Trappl, Wien

1997-10-06T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


o.Univ.-Prof.Ing.Dr.Robert TRAPPL
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence
und Universitaet Wien


Schulen und Universitaeten im Zeitalter der Informationsrevolution
------------------------------------------------------------------

Neue Medien wie im Internet verbundene Multimediacomputer, Fernsehen
mit Dutzenden von Programmen, Walkmen u.a. stellen durch das geaenderte
gesellschaftliche Umfeld neue Anforderungen an Vermittler, Teilnehmer 
und Absolventen in/von Bildungseinrichtungen, bieten aber auch neue
Optionen sowohl fuer Inhalte als auch Vermittlungsmethoden und damit 
Strukturen von Bildungseinrichtungen.

In seiner Eigenschaft als Mitglied des Zukunftsforums im Bundeskanzler-
amt wurde der Referent beauftragt, zu diesem "heissen" Thema Ueberlegun-
gen anzustellen und, daraus folgernd, politische Handlungsvorschlaege
zu praesentieren. Der Berichtsentwurf wird vor- und zur Diskussion 
gestellt - selbstverstaendlich kann er, zu diesem Zeitpunkt, weder die
offizielle Meinung des Zukunftsforums noch die des Bundeskanzleramtes
darstellen.


Zeit: Montag, 6.Oktober 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. P. Tino, Bratislava

1997-07-16T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Peter TINO
Slovak University of Technology
Bratislava


Neural Modeling of Complex Symbolic Sequences
---------------------------------------------

We study the problem of modeling long, complex symbolic sequences
with recurrent neural networks  and stochastic machines. The talk 
will be focused on the following issues:

1. What do we mean by saying that a long symbolic sequence is 
   complex?
2. How to monitor the training process in which recurrent networks  
   are trained on complex sequences? (We use information theory 
   based performance measures.)
3. How to extract the knowledge the recurrent net has gained during 
   the training process? (We use stochastic finite state machine 
   representations.)
4. How do we know the extracted machine represents the original 
   network well?
5. We shall present a tool for an "intelligent" transformation of 
   a sequence temporal symbolic structure into a spatial fractal 
   representation and present theorems supporting the claim that 
   this transformation is "intelligent".
6. We show how to build context dependent variable length "Markov 
   systems" from spatial representations of temporal sequence 
   structures (analogical to approaches of Ron, Singer and Tishby). 


Zeit: Mittwoch, 16.Juli 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. S. Umpleby, Washington, DC

1997-07-03T00:00:00+02:00

       Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik (OeSGK)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Stuart UMPLEBY
George Washington University
Washington, D.C.
USA


The Movement to Improve Quality
in Higher Education in the U.S.
-------------------------------

Since 1980 quality improvement methods have been widely adopted by 
corporations and government agencies in the US. Quality improvement 
methods have been shown to produce superior financial returns in the 
private sector and more efficient government in the public sector. 
In 1996 pilot studies were conducted to create quality awards for
educational and health care institutions in addition to the current 
awards for corporations and government agencies. Quite a few 
universities in the US now have quality improvement efforts underway.
Conferences are regularly held among coordinators of campus quality 
improvement efforts. Listservs and websites have been created for 
people to share experiences. The ability to measure quality of 
instruction and a culture of experimentation and innovation are 
thought to be very important as educational institutions continue 
to incorporate new information technologies into their operations. 
Quality improvement methods are a way to engage in control and 
communication and are based on a pragmatic philosophy.

Biography: Prof.Umpleby is the Director of the Center for Social 
and Organizational Learning at George Washington University in 
Washington, DC. He has taught a course on quality improvement 
methods for five years, and for three years he served as the 
faculty facilitator for a Quality and Innovation Initiative in 
the School of Business and Public Management at GWU.

Zeit: Donnerstag, 3.Juli 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik,
      Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. K. Goldberg, Berkeley, CA

1997-06-17T00:00:00+02:00

Österreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence (ÖFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
----------------------------------------------------------------------

                           gemeinsam mit dem
  Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence
                         der Universitaet Wien


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Ken GOLDBERG
University of California
Berkeley, CA
USA


TELEPISTEMOLOGY AND THE AESTHETICS OF TELEPRESENCE -
HOW DISTANCE INFLUENCES BELIEF, TRUTH, AND PERCEPTION
-----------------------------------------------------

"We must rediscover a commerce with the world and a 
presence to the world that is older than intelligence."
                          Merleau-Ponty (1945)

I'm interested in the distance between the viewer and what is 
being viewed. How does technology alter our perceptions of distance, 
scale, and structure? On an epistemological level: "How do I know 
this is real?" The visitor of a web site acts and perceives this 
"reality" through an instrument with no objective scale. 
Several telepresence installations have appeared on the WWW. 
The Telegarden (http://telegarden.aec.at), an installation that 
allows WWW visitors to view and interact with a remote garden, has 
won many awards and is now installed at the Ars Electronica Center 
in Linz. A related installation is the Invisible Cantilever 
(http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/flw/), a 1/1 millionth 
scale version of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. 

Ken Goldberg is an artist and engineer on the faculty at UC Berkeley. 
He has exhibited technology based artwork internationally, Ars 
Electronica '96, and his installations have won juried awards at 
the Interactive Media Festival, the Festival for Interactive Arts,
New Voices/New Visions, and the National Information Infrastructure
Awards. He was named an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow by Bill 
Clinton in 1995. 


Zeit: Dienstag, 17.Juni 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. Marovac, TU Graz

1997-06-04T00:00:00+02:00

Österreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence (ÖFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
----------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Nenad MAROVAC
Visiting Professor
Technical University of Graz


INTERACTIVE SOLVER SELECTION AND CONSTRUCTION
---------------------------------------------

Every day our world is becoming more complex, dynamic and competitive.
This forces us to make management and operational decisions faster and
tighter, i.e. decisions which will bring us competitive edge.  On the
other hand problems which we are concerned with are becoming larger
and more complex.

This indicates a need for decision support tools that will enable us
to make decisions based on fast appraisal of the situation and
development of appropriate models and solutions.  These tools must be
highly interactive, easy to interface to different imformation
repositories, i.e. external data bases, execution environments, and
should be applicable to situations in different application domains.

Furthermore, software systems we produce are becoming larger and more
complex, and the cost of their construction is increasing at an
alarming rate.  New methodologies introduced recently and the
application of software reuse in construction of software is becoming
"a silver bullet" answer to rein in the cost and time overruns of
software development.

In the talk we propose a methodology and a tool in the form of an
interactive platform based on HyperNet - a world-wide distributed
hypermedia system, as its infrastructure.  They are our answer to
interactive decision making and semi-automatic construction of
software problem solvers.

Zeit: Mittwoch, 4.Juni 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  ÖFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. Kai Ming TING, Hamilton, NZ

1997-04-28T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Kai Ming TING
University of Waikato
Hamilton
New Zealand


Stacked Generalization: When Does It Work?
------------------------------------------

Stacked generalization is a general method of using a high-level model
to combine lower-level models to achieve greater predictive accuracy.
We resolve two crucial issues which have been considered to be a 
`black art' in classification tasks ever since the introduction of 
stacked generalization in 1992 by Wolpert: the type of generalizer
that is suitable to derive the higher-level model, and the kind of
attributes that should be used as its input.   

We demonstrate the effectiveness of stacked generalization for 
combining three different types of learning algorithms. 


Zeit: Montag, 28.April 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

S. Clift, St. Paul, MN

1997-04-22T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Steven CLIFT
Minnesota Office of Technology
St.Paul, Minnesota
USA


Building Citizen-Based Electronic Democracy:
The Minnesota E-Democracy Experience
--------------------------------------------

Minnesota E-Democracy created the world's first election-oriented
WWW site back in 1994.  Today the project focuses on citizen-to-citizen
online interaction on political issues in Minnesota. Learn about the 
project's lessons in order to help "build" citizen-based electronic
democracy across the world.


Zeit: Dienstag, 22.April 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. Y. Rav, Paris

1997-04-21T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Yehuda RAV
Universite de Paris-Sud


Wie kann man Regeln der Logik rechtfertigen?
--------------------------------------------

Seit dem Altertum gab es Meinungsverschiedenheiten ueber die Zulaessig-
keit (Engl.: "soundness") von diversen Regeln der Logik. Es stellt sich
die Frage, wie weit ueberhaupt die elementaren Axiome und Regeln einer 
Logik eine nichtzirkulaere Rechtfertigung zulassen. Hilbert hat einen 
Konsistenzbeweis der von ihm axiomatisierten Aussagenlogik gegeben, 
andere versuchten, die ueblichen Schlussregeln sprachphilosophisch zu 
unterbauen. Wir geben eine kurze Uebersicht ueber die verschiedenen 
Wege, welche unternommen wurden, und argumentieren, dass sie alle vom 
konstruktivistischen Standpunkt inadaequat sind. Es wird vorgeschlagen,
Regeln der Logik als eine Schematisierung des konkreten Handelns und 
Hantierens zu deuten. Da Verhaltenskoordinationen im Prinzip kohaerent 
sind - die Phylogenese hat dafuer gesorgt - erhaelt man durch dieses 
Modell einen Kohaerenz-Erweis (zum Unterschied von einem Kohaerenz-
Beweis) einer Protologik. Interessanterweise stellt es sich heraus, 
dass die Protologik, welche durch das Handlungsmodell rechtfertigbar 
ist, eine Hornlogik ist. Es werden dann weitere Fragen ueber Hornlogik
bezueglich ihres privilegierten Platzes im Logikprogrammieren besprochen.

Zeit: Montag, 21.April 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

1. Oesterr. Workshop ueber Neuronale Netze

1997-04-09T00:00:00+02:00

         ERSTER OESTERREICHISCHER WORKSHOP UEBER NEURONALE NETZE
                               (NN-AT '97)

                            9.-11. April 1997
                       Schloss St. Martin bei Graz

          unterstuetzt durch das Network of Excellence NEuroNet


Kuenstliche neuronale Netze sind in den letzten Jahren zu einer eta-
blierten Technologie geworden und werden in vielfaeltigen industriellen,
wirtschaftlichen und anderen Anwendungen eingesetzt. Durch zahlreiche
empirische Untersuchungen und durch die Anwendung und Weiterentwicklung 
von theoretischen Analysemethoden aus der mathematischen Statistik und 
der Komplexitaetstheorie ist man einem tieferen Verstaendnis, was neu-
ronale Netze leisten koennen (und was nicht), ein betraechtliches 
Stueck naeher gekommen. Es besteht nun die Herausforderung, die Lei-
stungsfaehigkeit kuenstlicher neuronaler Netze an die der biologischen
Vorbilder weiter anzunaehern, sowie neue Anwendungsmoeglichkeiten fuer
kuenstliche neuronale Netze zu erschliessen. Daneben wird auch intensiv
an der Entschluesselung der Funktionsweise biologischer neuronaler 
Netze gearbeitet.

Auch in Oesterreich ist das Interesse an neuronalen Netzen sehr gross,
was sich in einer regen Forschungstaetigkeit an Universitaeten und
Forschungsinstituten sowie in Anwendungen in der Industrie und Wirt-
schaft widerspiegelt. Allerdings sind diese Taetigkeiten auf eine 
grosse Anzahl kleinerer Gruppen an verschiedenen Orten und in ver-
schiedenen Disziplinen verteilt, denen ein Forum fuer verstaerkten 
Erfahrungsaustausch und gemeinsame Aktivitaeten bisher noch fehlt.

Der Workshop NN-AT '97 hat zum Ziel, ein solches Forum zu bieten, und
zu einer Konsolidierung der oesterreichischen Forschung zum Thema 
neuronale Netze beizutragen. Mit Unterstuetzung des EU/ESPRIT-
`Network of Excellence' fuer neuronale Netze (NEuroNet), das aehn-
liche Ziele auf gesamteuropaeischer Ebene verfolgt, soll hier ein 
Rahmen zum gegenseitigen Kennenlernen einerseits und zur Initiierung
verstaerkter gesamtoesterreichischer Kontakte zur Verfuegung gestellt 
werden. Daneben soll die Gelegenheit geboten werden, Tips, Kontakte, 
Materialien und so weiter zu Lehrveranstaltungen und Forschungsarbeit
auszutauschen.

Organisatoren:

Wolfgang Maass (TU Graz, maass@igi.tu-graz.ac.at) 
Georg Dorffner (OeFAI, georg@ai.univie.ac.at) 
Kurt Hornik (TU Wien, Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at) 


Informationen ueber Programm, Zeitplan, Anmeldung und vieles mehr 
findet man unter der WWW-Adresse

                http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/nn-at-97/

Dr. K. Alter, Wien

1997-03-19T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Kai ALTER
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence
Wien


Von der Intention zum sprechenden Computer
------------------------------------------

Eines der interessantesten Bereiche der aktuellen Forschung ist zweifel-
los der Bereich der natuerlichen Sprachverarbeitung. Zu dieser Thematik
gehoert die Sprachsynthese, d.h. die Ausgabe von Sprache mittels Compu-
ter. Einen Computer zum Sprechen zu bringen ist ob der Mannigfaltigkeit
der involvierten Forschungsgebiete nicht trivial. Das Zusammenwirken von
Wissensrepraesentationen aus der Pragmatik, der Grammatik, der segmenta-
len und suprasegmentalen Phonologie sowie der Phonetik ist hochgradig 
komplex. Hinzu kommt, dass die Strategien fuer Generalisierungen keines-
wegs einheitlich sind. 

Ich moechte zeigen, welche Probleme bei der Sprachsynthese auftreten und
welche Problemloesungen sich gegenwaertig abzeichnen, dies vor allem im
Bereich der Intonation. Die Methoden fuer gelungene Implementierungen 
intonatorischer Eigenschaften umfassen das Spektrum von regel- bis zu 
statistikbasierten Ansaetzen. Die Qualitaet der Sprachausgabe haengt 
sowohl vom Typ des Synthetisators als auch von seiner Ansteuerung und 
Anreicherung mit kodierter Information aus den o.g. Wissensbereichen ab.
Problematisch scheint die Verknuepfung abstrakter linguistischer Eigen-
schaften mit konkreten signalphonetischen Ereignissen zu sein. Am Bei-
spiel des 'Vienna Concept-to-Speech'-Systemes (VieCtoS) moechte ich 
exemplifizieren, welche Moeglichkeiten ein Concept-to-Speech-Ansatz 
offeriert und welche Probleme bis dato (un-)geloest sind.


Zeit: Mittwoch, 19.Maerz 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

ECML'97 Preliminary Program

1997-03-18T00:00:00+01:00

Fuer alle an Theorie und Praxis des Maschinellen Lernens
Interessierten:


EINLADUNG ZUR TEILNAHME UND VORLAEUFIGES PROGRAMM:


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
        9th EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON MACHINE LEARNING (ECML-97)
                          23.-26.April 1997, Prag
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


        Vom 23.-26. April 1997 findet in Prag die
        9th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML-97) statt.
        Es handelt sich dabei um *die* wissenschaftliche Veranstaltung
        zum Themenkreis Maschinelles Lernen in Europa. Alle, die sich
        fuer die neuesten Entwicklungen im Bereich des Maschinellen Lernens
        interessieren, sind herzlich zur Teilnahme eingeladen.

Wissenschaftliches Programm:

        Das wissenschaftliche Programm der ECML-97 von Mittwoch, 23. bis
        Freitag, 25.April besteht aus drei eingeladenen Vortragen
        sowie aus 25 Plenarvortraegen, die aus 74 eingereichten Arbeiten
        ausgewaehlt wurden und einen Einblick in die derzeitige europaeische
        Forschung bieten (und nicht nur die europaeische -- es sind u.a.
        auch Arbeiten aus den USA, Kanada, Singapur und Neuseeland vertreten).

Eingeladene Vortragende:

    STUART RUSSELL (University of California, Berkeley, USA),
        Traeger des IJCAI-95 Computers and Thought Award,
        wird seine aktuellsten Forschungsergebnisse auf dem Gebiet
        des Lernens und Schlussfolgerns unter Unsicherheit praesentieren
        ("Uncertain Learning Agents");

    LUC STEELS (Freie Universitaet Bruessel und Sony Computer
        Science Laboratory, Paris) berichtet ueber den derzeitigen Stand
        seines Modells des interaktiven und sozialen Lernens in Gruppen
        von virtuellen Agenten ("Constructing and Sharing Perceptual
        Distinctions"), und

    PAUL VITANYI (Universitaet Amsterdam) beleuchtet
        grundlegende Fragen des Lernens aus der Sicht der
        Komplexitaetstheorie ("On Prediction by Data Compression").

ECML-97/MLNet Workshops:

        Im Anschluss an die Konferenz (26.April) finden 4 spezialisierte
        Workshops statt (siehe unten), die vom European Network of
        Excellence in Machine Learning (MLNet) organisiert werden.
        Diese stehen nicht nur Mitgliedern des MLNet offen.

Proceedings:

        Die Konferenzproceedings werden in der "Lecture Notes in AI"-Serie
        des Springer Verlags erscheinen:

                Maarten van Someren & Gerhard Widmer (Eds.) (1997).
                Machine Learning: ECML-97.
                Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence # 1224.
                Berlin - Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.

Naehere Informationen:

        Univ.-Doz. Dr. Gerhard WIDMER
        Programme Co-Chair, ECML-97
        Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
        Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien
        Tel. 535 32 81-0
        Fax. 532 06 52
        e-mail: gerhard@ai.univie.ac.at
        WWW: http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/~gerhard



----------------------------------------------------------------------------

         9th EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON MACHINE LEARNING (ECML-97)

                23-26 April 1997, Prague, Czech Republic


                          PRELIMINARY PROGRAMME 


----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Up-to-date information on the conference (including registration information)
can be found at 
        http://is.vse.cz/ecml97/home.html

This programme with complete abstracts of all talks and links to the
workshops is also available at
        http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/ecml/programme.html

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------


--------------------
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23:
--------------------

 9.00 -  9.30   Welcome

 9.30 - 10.30   INVITED TALK:
                Uncertain Learning Agents
                Stuart Russell, University of California, Berkeley, USA


10.30 - 11.00   Coffee Break


11.00 - 10.30   Integrated Learning and Planning Based on
                Truncating Temporal Differences 
                Pawel Cichosz

11.30 - 12.00   Finite-Element Methods with Local Triangulation Refinement
                for Continuous Reinforcement Learning Problems
                Remi Munos

12.00 - 12.15   Learning and Exploitation Do Not Conflict
                Under Minimax Optimality
                Csaba Szepesvari

12.15 - 12.30   Exploiting Qualitative Knowledge to Enhance Skill Acquisition
                Cristina Baroglio


12.30 - 14.00   Lunch


14.00 - 15.00   INVITED TALK:
                Constructing and Sharing Perceptual Distinctions
                Luc Steels, Free University of Brussels (VUB) and
                            Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris

15.00 - 15.30   Ibots Learn Genuine Team Solutions
                Cristina Versino, Luca Maria Gambardella


15.30 - 16.00   Coffee Break


16.00 - 16.30   NeuroLinear: A System for Extracting Oblique Decision Rules
                from Neural Networks
                Rudy Setiono, Huan Liu

16.30 - 17.00   Learning Different Types of New Attributes by Combining the
                Neural Network and Iterative Attribute Construction
                Yuh-Jyh Hu

17.00 - 17.45   Commenting Session



-------------------
THURSDAY, APRIL 24:
-------------------

 9.00 - 10.00   INVITED TALK:
                On Prediction by Data Compression
                Paul Vitanyi, CWI, Amsterdam

10.00 - 10.30   Conditions for Occam's Razor Applicability and
                Noise Elimination
                Dragan Gamberger, Nada Lavrac


10.30 - 11.00   Coffee Break


11.00 - 11.30   Compression-Based Pruning of Decision Lists
                Bernhard Pfahringer

11.30 - 11.45   Inductive Genetic Programming with Decision Trees
                Nikolay I. Nikolaev, Vanio Slavov

11.45 - 12.00   Probabilistic Incremental Program Evolution:
                Stochastic Search Through Program Space
                Rafal Salustowicz, Juergen Schmidhuber

12.00 - 12.30   Constructing Intermediate Concepts by Decomposition
                of Real Functions
                Janez Demsar, Blaz Zupan, Marko Bohanec, Ivan Bratko


12.30 - 14.00   Lunch


14.00 - 14.30   Global Data Analysis and the Fragmentation Problem in
                Decision Tree Induction
                Ricardo Vilalta, Gunnar Blix, Larry Rendell

14.30 - 15.00   Model Combination in the Multiple-Data-Batches Scenario
                Kai Ming Ting, Boon Toh Low

15.00 - 15.30   Commenting Session


15.30 - 16.00   Coffee Break


16.00 - 17.00   Poster Session

17.00 - open    ECML Community Meeting



-----------------
FRIDAY, APRIL 25:
-----------------

 9.00 -  9.15   A Case Study in Loyalty and Satisfaction Research
                Koen Vanhoof, Josee Bloemer, Koen Pauwels

 9.15 -  9.30   Inducing and Using Decision Rules in the
                GRG Knowledge Discovery System
                Ning Shan, Howard J. Hamilton, Nick Cercone

 9.30 -  9.45   Learning When Negative Examples Abound
                Miroslav Kubat, Robert Holte, Stan Matwin

 9.45 - 10.00   Search-Based Class Discretization
                Luis Torgo, Joao Gama

10.00 - 10.15   Classification by Voting Feature Intervals
                G"ulsen Demir"oz, H. Altay G"uvenir

10.15 - 10.30   A Model for Generalization Based on Confirmatory Induction
                Nicolas Lachiche, Pierre Marquis


10.30 - 11.00   Coffee Break


11.00 - 11.30   Natural Ideal Operators in Inductive Logic Programming
                Fabien Torre, Celine Rouveirol

11.30 - 12.00   Theta-subsumption for Structural Matching
                Luc De Raedt, Peter Idestam-Almquist, Gunther Sablon

12.00 - 12.30   Induction of Feature Terms with INDIE
                Eva Armengol, Enric Plaza

12.30 - 12.45   Metrics on Terms and Clauses
                Alan Hutchinson

12.45 - 13.00   Learning Linear Constraints in Inductive Logic Programming
                Lionel Martin, Christel Vrain



Afternoon off - trip and farewell party (optional; see social programme)



------------------
SATURDAY, APRIL 26:
------------------

ECML/MLNet WORKSHOPS: 

    WS 1: Data-Driven Learning of Natural Language Processing Tasks 
    WS 2: Case-Based Learning: Beyond Classification of Feature Vectors 
    WS 3: Learning in Dynamically Changing Domains:
          Theory Revision and Context Dependence Issues 
    WS 4: Machine Learning and Human-Agent Interaction

Data Mining

1997-03-06T00:00:00+01:00

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------



                            TAGESSEMINAR

                       ***********************
                             DATA MINING
                       ***********************

           Zeit: Donnerstag, 6. Maerz 1997, 9:00 - 17:00 Uhr
               Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
                     fuer Artificial Intelligence,
              Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien, Tel. 53532810


Motivation
----------

Die Menge und Komplexitaet der in Industrie, Wirtschaft, Verwaltung und
Wissenschaft routinemaessig anfallenden Daten nimmt explosionsartig zu.
Ob Scannerdaten in Supermaerkten, Aufzeichnungen ueber Kunden, Vertraege
und Transaktionen im Bank- und Versicherungsbereich, technische Prozess-
daten in grossen Produktionsanlagen -- die automatische Datenerfassung
im Verein mit moderner Datenbanktechnik ermoeglicht das Anlegen immer
groesserer Datensammlungen.

Mehr Daten bedeuten allerdings nicht automatisch mehr Information oder
bessere Entscheidungsunterstuetzung. Zwar erleichtern neue Konzepte wie
"Data Warehousing" die Verwaltung und Wartung der Datenbestaende, das
Problem der Interpretation bzw. der Extraktion nuetzlichen Wissens aus
den Daten wird damit aber nicht geloest. Herkoemmliche Methoden der
Datenauswertung  (manuelle Abfragen, klassische statistische Methoden
u.a.) stossen hier an ihre Grenzen.

"Data Mining" (auch: "Knowledge Discovery in Databases, KDD") bezeichnet
neuartige, auf Methoden des Maschinellen Lernens basierende Techniken
zum (semi-)automatischen Auffinden von interessanten und nuetzlichen 
Mustern und Regeln ("Wissen") in grossen Datenbestaenden. Data Mining
ist ein junges, aeusserst aktives Forschungsgebiet im Bereich der
Artificial Intelligence. Das praktische Anwendungspotiential dieses 
Gebiets wurde von der Industrie schnell erkannt, und Software- und 
Beratungsfirmen, die Data-Mining-Dienste anbieten, erleben derzeit 
einen ungeheuren Boom. In den einschlaegigen Medien haeufen sich in 
letzter Zeit die Meldungen ueber kommerziell erfolgreiche Anwendungen
in den verschiedensten Bereichen, vom Bank- und Versicherungswesen 
ueber die Telekommunikation bis zur Astronomie. 

Zielsetzung
-----------

Durch den im Rahmen des Seminars gebotenen Ueberblick soll ein tieferes
Verstaendnis fuer das grosse Potential dieser Technologie vermittelt
werden. Zu diesem Zweck werden nach einem einleitenden theoretischen 
Ueberblick ueber das Gesamtgebiet auch praxisrelevante Methoden genauer
erklaert und spezielle Aspekte des Data-Mining-Prozesses anhand einer
Beispielanwendung demonstriert werden. Die Breite der Anwendungsmoeg-
lichkeiten des Data Mining wird unter anderem durch die Vorstellung 
einiger Projekte illustriert werden, die derzeit am Oesterreichischen 
Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (z.T. auch in Koopera-
tion mit industriellen Partnern) durchgefuehrt werden.

Zielgruppe
----------

Fuehrungskraefte, Projektleiter, Datenanalytiker und Datenbankverant-
wortliche, Software-Entwickler sowie alle, die viele Daten haben und
wissen wollen, welche Informationen in diesen stecken.

Vortragende
-----------

Univ.-Doz.Dr.Gerhard Widmer, Dozent fuer Artificial Intelligence an der
Universitaet Wien, Leiter der Abteilung "Maschinelles Lernen und Data
Mining" des Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstituts fuer Artificial 
Intelligence, Leiter mehrerer Forschungs- und Entwicklungsprojekte 
im Bereich des Maschinellen Lernens, Autor zahlreicher internationaler
Publikationen in den Bereichen Artificial Intelligence, Maschinelles
Lernen, auch Musikwissenschaft; Program Chairman der 9th European 
Conference on Machine Learning (ECML'97), Prag, April 1997.

Dr.Johannes Fuernkranz forschte nach Abschluss seines Informatikstudiums
ein Jahr am Artificial Intelligence Laboratory der University of Chicago
und ist derzeit wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in der Abteilung
"Maschinelles Lernen" des Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstituts fuer 
Artificial Intelligence sowie Lektor an der Universitaet Wien fuer 
Maschinelles Lernen und fuer Induktive Logische Programmierung.

Dipl.-Ing.Johann Petrak arbeitete einige Jahre als Systemanalytiker im
Rechenzentrum des Bundesministeriums fuer Finanzen und ist jetzt wissen-
schaftlicher Mitarbeiter in der Abteilung "Maschinelles Lernen" des
Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstituts fuer Artificial Inteligence und
Lektor an der Universitaet Wien zum Thema "Wissensextraktion aus Daten-
banken (Data Mining)".


Programm
--------

9:00-9:30       Begruessung, Vorstellung der Vortragenden und
                Teilnehmer, Ueberblick ueber das Tagesseminar
                (o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl und
                Univ.-Doz.Dr.Gerhard Widmer)

9:30-10:30      Was ist Data Mining?
                Eine kurze Einfuehrung in Ziele, Methoden und
                Anwendungsmoeglichkeiten
                (Dipl.-Ing.Johann Petrak)

10:30-10:45     Kaffeepause

10:45-12:00     Methoden und Techniken des Data Mining
                (Dr.Johannes Fuernkranz)

12:00-13:30     Gemeinsames Mittagessen

13:30-15:00     Der Data Mining-Prozess: Demonstration der 
                konkreten Vorgangsweise anhand einer
                exemplarischen Problemstellung
                (mit praktischen Demonstrationen)
                (Dipl.-Ing.Johann Petrak und Dr.Johannes Fuernkranz)

15:00-15:15     Kaffeepause

15:15-16:00     Data Mining am OeFAI:
                Ein Ueberblick ueber aktuelle Projekte und Anwendungen
                (Univ.-Doz.Dr.Gerhard Widmer)

16:00-16:30     Resumee; Ausblick auf praktische Anwendungs-
                moeglichkeiten, Angebote des OeFAI im Bereich Data Mining
                (Univ.-Doz.Dr.Gerhard Widmer)

16:30-17:00     Diskussion




Anmeldung (bis spaetestens 21. Februar 1997):

------------------------------------------------------------------- 

An das Oesterr. Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence,
Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
Fax: 5320652

Hiemit melde ich .... Personen fuer das Tagesseminar "Data Mining"
am 6.3.97 an.

o  Gleichzeitig ueberweise ich die Teilnahmegebuehr (pro Teilnehmer
   oeS 3.700,-, fuer Mitglieder von OeSGK, OCG oder ADV oeS 2.900,-,
   jeweils zuzuegl. 10% MWSt.) auf das Konto der Oesterreichischen
   Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik, CA 26-34400/00, BLZ 11000,
   und ersuche um Uebersendung einer Empfangsbestaetigung.

o  Ich werde die Teilnahmegebuehr sofort nach Erhalt der Rechnung
   ueberweisen.


Name:                                Telefon:

Anschrift:


Datum:                               Unterschrift:

Prof. Y. Kodratoff, Paris

1997-02-24T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Yves KODRATOFF
CNRS & LRI, Universite Paris-Sud


For a Science of KDD (or 'Data Mining')
---------------------------------------

We describe and analyze the present achievements of KDD. Under the 
incredible fashion for so-called data mining, some out-of-fashion, quite 
classical, scientific problems are seen as being the base of this new
research field. 

A definition of KDD's key concepts is proposed: What are, for KDD, 
'knowledge', 'comprehensibility', and 'interestingness'?                 

A new definition of KDD itself, slightly different from Fayyad's, 
is also proposed.   


Zeit: Montag, 24.Februar 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


P.S.:
-----
Wer nach diesem Ueberblick mehr zum Thema "Data Mining" erfahren will,
den moechten wir nochmals auf unser Tagesseminar hinweisen, das am 
Donnerstag, den 6.Maerz 1997 am Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstitut 
fuer Artificial Intelligence stattfindet. Naehere Informationen, 
Programm und Teilnahmebedingungen unter
http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/oefai/events/1997/Aussendung.24-Jan-97.1.text
oder unter Tel. 53532810. Anmeldeschluss: 21.Februar 1997.

Dr. C. Holzbaur, Wien

1997-02-17T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Christian HOLZBAUR
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence
und Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und
Artificial Intelligence der Universitaet Wien


Das industrielle Anwendungspotential 
von Constraint (Logic) Programming
------------------------------------

Seit einiger Zeit stehen maechtige CLP Programmiersprachen in industrie-
tauglichen Entwicklungsumgebungen zur Verfuegung. Das OeFAI war durch 
die Zusammenarbeit mit einschlaegigen Herstellern massgeblich an der 
Ent-Akademisierung dieser Technologie beteiligt. Schon jetzt wird das 
eingebrachte Know-How an ca. 1000 primaer auslaendischen Institutionen
von Mexiko bis Singapur genutzt.

Die Diversitaet der Applikationen spiegelt die Allgemeinheit, den 
Abstraktionsgrad der Methodik wieder: CLP wird verwendet zur Planung, 
kombinatorischen Optimierung, (Re)configuration, Diagnose, Synthese 
und Analyse technischer Systeme, etc. Constraints bewegen Container 
im Hafen von Hongkong, verdichten den Flugverkehr ueber Suedfrankreich
und konfigurieren Vermittlungsrechner fuer Mobilfunknetze. Gemeinsam 
ist all diesen Applikationen die deklarative Formulierung und die 
damit verbundene leichtere Herstellung und Wartbarkeit.

Wir berichten ueber den Stand der Technik, exemplarische Applikationen,
die Rolle des OeFAI als nationales Kompetenzzentrum und internationale 
Zusammenarbeiten und Aktivitaeten zum Thema.


Zeit: Montag, 17.Februar 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dipl.-Ing. K. Polatschek, Hamburg

1997-01-20T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Ing.Klemens POLATSCHEK
"Die Zeit"
Hamburg


Journalismus als Robotik - oder: Brauchen wir eine AI light?
------------------------------------------------------------

Die Erfindung des Computers im Zweiten Weltkrieg hat uns seither 
allerhand schoene Stunden beschert, aber auch eine jahrhundertealte
geisteswissenschaftliche Tradition abgebrochen. Rasch zu brutaler
Rechengewalt herangewachsen, hat sich das neue Kind zu seinen eigent-
lichen Ahnen naemlich nie bekannt. Diese Erbsuende lastet bis heute 
auf den Disziplinen Information Science, Artificial Intelligence und 
Human-Computer Interfaces.

Es spricht deshalb vieles dafuer, dass just zwischen diesen Gebieten 
weisse Flecken auf der Forschungslandkarte existieren. Vor allem 
verspraechen sie, wenn sie von manchen alten Anspruechen zurueck-
traeten, interessante Anwendungen, die das neue Medium Internet 
dringend braeuchte. Es ringt derzeit darum, seine Bestimmung als 
Informationsvermittler fuer alle zu erfuellen; es sucht dafuer gute 
neue Software und Menschen, die mit ihr Hand in Hand arbeiten koennen.


Zeit: Montag, 20.Jaenner 1997, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. E. Prem, Wien

1996-12-17T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Erich PREM
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence
Wien


Koerperbasierte Artificial Intelligence
---------------------------------------

In den letzten Jahren hat sich eine koerperbasierte und verhaltens-
orientierte (embodied und behavior-based) Alternative zu klassischen 
Theorien der AI entwickelt, die einen starken Aufschwung verzeichnet.  

Dieser neue Zugang zur Robotik und AI beruht auf einer neuen Auffassung
von Intelligenz als koerperbasierter Interaktion mit der Umwelt. Im 
Gegensatz zu vielen herkoemmlichen Theorien der AI wird in der koerper-
basierten AI nicht von der Verkoerperung der Intelligenz in einem 
realen Koerper und der Existenz einer ebenso realen Umwelt abstrahiert.
Koerper und Umwelt werden als konstruktive Elemente in die kognitiven 
Theorien und technischen Verfahren aufgenommen. Dadurch werden viele 
klassische Fragen der Kognitionsforschung (Repraesentation, Planen,
Sprache) neu formuliert und durch neue Methoden erforscht.

In diesem Vortrag wird die Arbeitsweise und der Gegenstand der koerper-
basierten AI an praktischen Beispielen dargelegt. Unter anderem werden
Videos vom ersten humanoiden Roboter "Cog" gezeigt, der derzeit am MIT
entwickelt wird. Dipl.-Ing.Dr. Prem war waehrend eines Forschungsauf-
enthaltes in den USA Mitglied der Entwicklergruppe um "Cog".


Zeit: Dienstag, 17.Dezember 1996, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Intelligente Softwareagenten

1996-12-11T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                             TAGESSEMINAR

                     ****************************
                     INTELLIGENTE SOFTWAREAGENTEN
                     ****************************

           Zeit: Mittwoch, 11.Dezember 1996, 9:00 - 17:00 Uhr
               Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut 
                     fuer Artificial Intelligence,
              Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien, Tel. 53532810

Motivation
----------

Mit der Entwicklung vom Client/Server-Modell zu netzwerkzentrierten 
Architekturen verschmelzen Computing, Communication und Content: das 
Netzwerk selbst wird zum Ort der Informationsverarbeitung. Mit diesem 
Gewinn an Flexibilitaet im Umgang mit Information steigt jedoch u.a.
die Gefahr der Informationsueberflutung der Benutzer stark an.

Es ist daher auch aus diesem Grund kein Zufall, dass gerade jetzt 
der Begriff des Softwareagenten als jener Designansatz in das Zentrum 
des Interesses rueckt, der die Uebertragung vieler Aufgaben vom 
Benutzer an das Rechnernetzwerk ermoeglicht. Das Delegieren des 
Auffindens, Beschaffens und Filterns von Information, das Loesen von 
Aufgaben, die inhaltlich statt wie bisher anhand der Angabe genauer 
Vorgehensweisen definiert werden koennen, und eine auf individuelle 
Beduerfnisse massgeschneiderte Interaktion der Benutzer mit dem 
Rechner sind nur einige Beispiele der sich daraus ergebenden Vorteile.

Uebrigens: Intelligente Agenten koennen als Softwareeinheiten 
definiert werden, die eine Menge von Operationen in Vertretung von 
Benutzern oder anderer Programme mit einer gewissen Autonomie aus-
fuehren, mit Wissen ueber Ziele und Beduerfnisse dieser Auftraggeber.

Zielsetzung
-----------

Durch den im Rahmen dieses Seminars gebotenen Ueberblick soll ein 
tieferes Verstaendnis fuer das grosse Potential dieser Technologie 
vermittelt werden. Zu diesem Zweck wird nach einer einleitenden 
theoretischen Charakterisierung anhand von notwendigen und wuenschens-
werten Eigenschaften eines Softwareagenten wie Agency, Intelligence 
und Mobility das breite Anwendungsfeld systematisch beleuchtet. 
In jedem der besprochenen Bereiche wird dabei auch besonderes Augen-
merk auf die Veranschaulichung der zugrunde liegenden Konzepte anhand 
von konkreten Beispielen gelegt. Eine Eroerterung aktueller Problema-
tiken und ein Ausblick auf zu erwartende Entwicklungen runden das 
Programm ab.

Zielgruppe
----------

Fuehrungskraefte, Projektleiter, Software-Entwickler, sowie jeder,
der mehr ueber eines der "key computing paradigms over the next ten
years" wissen will.

Vortragende
-----------

Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Paolo Petta, Leiter der Abteilung "Intelligente Software-
agenten und Neue Medien" des Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstituts 
fuer Artificial Intelligence, Lektor an der Universitaet Wien fuer 
Softwareagenten und fuer Hypertext und Multimedia, in den Jahren 
1984-1986 Mitarbeit im Europaeischen Kernforschungszentrum C.E.R.N. 
in Genf, Mitautor von "Creating Personalities for Synthetic Actors", 
Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg und New York, 1997.

Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Johannes Fuernkranz forschte nach Abschluss seines 
Informatikstudiums ein Jahr am Artificial Intelligence Laboratory 
der University of Chicago und ist derzeit wissenschaftlicher Mit-
arbeiter in der Abteilung "Maschinelles Lernen" des Oesterreichischen 
Forschungsinstituts fuer Artificial Intelligence sowie Lektor an der 
Universitaet Wien fuer Maschinelles Lernen und fuer Induktive Logische
Programmierung.

Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Ernst Buchberger, stellvertretender Leiter der Abteilung
"Natuerlichsprachige Systeme" am Oesterreichischen Forschungsinstitut 
fuer Artificial Intelligence, Lektor fuer Wissensbasierte Sprachver-
arbeitung an der Universitaet Wien, Site Manager des oesterreichischen 
National Focal Point "Language Engineering", Oesterreich-Koordinator 
des European Network on Language and Speech der EU (ELSNET), Autor von 
ueber 50 wissenschaftlichen Publikationen im Bereich Computerlinguistik
und Sprachverstehen.

Programm
--------

9:00-9:30   Begruessung, Vorstellung der Vortragenden und 
                Teilnehmer, Ueberblick ueber das Tagesseminar
        (o.Univ.-Prof.Ing.Dr.Robert Trappl)

9:30-10:30  Warum Softwareagenten? Was ist ein Softwareagent?
        Architekturansaetze anhand von Anwendungsgebieten aus
        Technik, Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Entertainment: 
                Teil I
        (Univ.-Lektor Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Paolo Petta)

10:30-10:45 Kaffeepause

10:45-12:00 Architekturansaetze anhand von Anwendungsgebieten aus
        Technik, Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Entertainment: 
                Teil II
        (Univ.-Lektor Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Paolo Petta)

12:00-13:30 Gemeinsames Mittagessen

13:30-14:00 Business- und Office-Agenten
        (Univ.-Lektor Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Paolo Petta)

14:00-14:45 Maschinelles Lernen und Data Mining: 
        Massgeschneiderte Informationsgewinnung und -einholung
                mittels Agenten
        (Univ.-Lektor Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Johannes Fuernkranz, M.S.)

14:45-15:00 Kaffeepause

15:00-15:45 Agenten und Sprache
        (Univ.-Lektor Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Ernst Buchberger)

15:45-16:15 Informationsstrukturen und Informationsintegration im 
                Internet (Java, Telescript, KQML, etc.)
        (Univ.-Lektor Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Paolo Petta)

16:15-16:30 Problembereiche und Entwicklungstrends:
        Delegation und Autonomie, Datenschutz, 
                Authentifizierung, Koordinierung, u.a.
        (Univ.-Lektor Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Paolo Petta)

16:30-17:00 Diskussion



Anmeldung:

------------------------------------------------------------------- 

An das Oesterr. Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence,
Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
Fax: 5320652

Hiemit melde ich .... Personen für das Tagesseminar "Intelligente 
Softwareagenten" am 11.12.96 an.

o  Gleichzeitig ueberweise ich die Teilnahmegebuehr (pro Teilnehmer
   oeS 3.700,-, fuer Mitglieder von OCG oder ADV oeS 2.900,-, jeweils
   zuzuegl. 10% MWSt.) auf das Konto der Oesterr.Studiengesellschaft 
   fuer Kybernetik, CA 26-34400/00, BLZ 11000, und ersuche um 
   Uebersendung einer Empfangsbestaetigung.

o  Ich werde die Teilnahmegebuehr sofort nach Erhalt der Rechnung
   ueberweisen.


Name:                        Telefon:

Anschrift:

Prof. E. von Glasersfeld, Amherst, MA

1996-11-15T00:00:00+01:00

       Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik (OeSGK)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Ernst von GLASERSFELD
Scientific Reasoning Research Institute (SRRI)
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA
USA


Ein Gespraech ueber die Geschichte des Konstruktivismus
-------------------------------------------------------


Zeit: Freitag, 15.November 1996, 19:00 Uhr pktl.
                                 *********
Ort:  Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik
      Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.



-------------------------------------------------------------------------


Wir erlauben uns, auf die Veranstaltung "Die kulturellen Wurzeln der
Kognitionswissenschaft - Internationale Tagung aus Anlass des 85.Geburts-     
tages von Heinz von Foerster" hinzuweisen, die Mittwoch, 13.November
und Donnerstag, 14.November 1996 im Haus Wittgenstein, Kulturabteilung
der Bulgarischen Botschaft, Parkgasse 18, 1030 Wien, stattfindet.
Naehere Informationen beim Veranstalter, dem Institut Wiener Kreis
(Tel. und Fax 5261005, Email i_v_c@ping.at) oder unter .

Prof. J. Siekmann, Saarbruecken

1996-10-28T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Joerg SIEKMANN
Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer
Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH
Saarbruecken


New Directions in Automated Deduction
-------------------------------------

An automated theorem prover of the classical kind searches through a
(very large) space of possible inference steps: its strength is derived
from intricate representation techniques and strategies that guide the
search. 

Currently the field witnesses a paradigm change: the search for a proof
is no longer an (exhaustive) search at the object level of representa-
tion, but the result of a multi-level planning process that simulates
the planned approach based on specialized proof techniques of a human
mathematician.


Zeit: Montag, 28.Oktober 1996, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Doz. G. Dorffner, Wien

1996-10-16T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Univ.-Doz.Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Georg DORFFNER
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence und
Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und
Artificial Intelligence der Universitaet Wien


Neuronale Netze in der Biosignalverarbeitung am Beispiel
der Elektroenzephalographie (EEG): Das ANNDEE-Projekt
--------------------------------------------------------

Dieser Vortrag berichtet ueber die Resultate des europaeischen Projekts
ANNDEE (Enhancement of EEG-based diagnosis of neurological and
psychiatric disorders using artificial neural networks), sowie ueber
die daraus gewonnenen Erfahrungen im Einsatz neuronaler Netze in der 
Biosignalverarbeitung. In dieser konzertierten Aktion des EU-Programms
BIOMED-1 ist es gelungen, die Arbeit von mehr als 15 europaeischen Teams
zu koordinieren und den gezielten Einsatz neuronaler Netze in der 
Verarbeitung von EEG-Signalen zu verbessern. Die Zusammenarbeit von
Aerzten, Informatikern und EEG-Experten fuehrte zu vielversprechenden
Ergebnissen in Anwendungen wie der Erkennung epileptischer Spikes,
der Schlaf-EEG Analyse und der Diskriminierung von verschiedenen
psychiatrischen Erkrankungen. Neben konkreten Beispielen aus der im
Rahmen von ANNDEE durchgefuehrten Forschung werden in diesem Vortrag
auch einige allgemeine Richtlinien fuer den Einsatz neuronaler Netze
in der Signalverarbeitung, sowie die Bedeutung der Vorverarbeitung
und Merkmalsauswahl diskutiert.


Zeit: Mittwoch, 16.Oktober 1996, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. S. Hambrusch, West Lafayette, IN

1996-08-01T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Susanne HAMBRUSCH
Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana
USA


High Performance Computing:
Can We Achieve Scalability and Usability?
-----------------------------------------

High performance computing must meet seemingly contradictory goals: 
software development should be carried out in an architecture- and
technology-independent environment, but both algorithms and system
software should take full advantage of the hardware features of
potentially diverse MPP (Massively Parallel Processors) systems.
Distributed memory, message-passing MPPs, which include the Intel 
Paragon, IBM SP-2, and Cray T3D machines, have emerged as major high
performance architectures.

In this talk we discuss the impact of different MPP features on the 
performance of scalable algorithms. We show how parameters like the 
number of processors, the message size, cost of setting up a message, 
the bandwidth of the processors and the network, the latency, and the 
bisection width influence scalability. We describe a parallel model, 
the C^3-model, which gives an accurate prediction of algorithm per-
formance and supports a realistic scalability metric. We argue that 
scalability is achieved by the use of poly-algorithms which employ 
a parallel model to make algorithm selection and that usability is 
enhanced through libraries incorporating poly-algorithms. We validate 
our approach for regular and irregular communication operations and
discuss performance results for the Intel Paragon.


Zeit: Donnerstag, 1.August 1996, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. R. Banerji, Philadelphia, PA

1996-06-26T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Ranan B. BANERJI
Saint Joseph's University
Philadelphia, PA
USA


A Simplified Proof of a Complicated Fact
----------------------------------------

The theorem was developed by Ramsey in connection with some decidable 
classes of theories, but can also be considered as combinatorial 
fun-and-games. The simplest form: 'If six people come into a room, 
either there will be three people each of whom have met the other two 
before or three people none of whom have met either of the above two 
before'. The idea can be transferred to graphs, solids and other 
dimensions.  

Zeit: Mittwoch, 26.Juni 1996, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

T. Druckrey, New York

1996-06-17T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                            gemeinsam mit dem 
    Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence
                          der Universitaet Wien
        im Rahmen des Konversatoriums "Art/ificial Intelligence: 
        Die Beziehung zwischen Kunst und Artificial Intelligence"


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Timothy DRUCKREY
New York, N.Y.
USA


The End of the Millenium: Telephobic Modernity: 
Fallacies of the "second modern", the web, and 
other tropes of virtuous enlightenment rationality
--------------------------------------------------

Timothy Druckrey referiert ueber Arbeiten, die sich mit Kuenstlichem 
Leben und biologischen Systemen auseinandersetzen und spekuliert anhand 
von Beispielen ueber deren Zusammenhaenge mit Konzepten aus dem Bereich
des Networking ...

Timothy Druckrey, freier Autor, Kritiker und Ausstellungsmacher, lebt 
in New York. Seine Arbeitsgebiete sind Geschichte der Fotografie, Trans-
formation der Repraesentation in der Technokultur und gesellschaftliche
Auswirkungen digitaler Medien.


Zeit: Montag, 17.Juni 1996, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  Seminarraum des Instituts fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und
      Artificial Intelligence der Universitaet Wien,
      Freyung 6/Stiege 2 (Schottenhof), 1010 Wien 1.

V. Widrich, Wien/Muenchen

1996-06-13T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                            gemeinsam mit dem 
    Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence
                          der Universitaet Wien
        im Rahmen des Konversatoriums "Art/ificial Intelligence: 
        Die Beziehung zwischen Kunst und Artificial Intelligence"


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Virgil WIDRICH
Wien/Medienlabor Muenchen


Das Drehbuch aus dem Computer
-----------------------------

Sollen Drehbuchautoren ihren Computer nur als bessere Schreibmaschine
nutzen? Oder soll der Computer das Drehbuch gleich selber schreiben? 
Zwei sehr unterschiedliche Softwarepakete, welche die Erstellung von 
Themen, Charakteren oder des dramaturgischen Aufbaus Schritt für Schritt
unterstuetzen. Vorstellung der Moeglichkeiten und Unmoeglichkeiten von 
"Dramatica" und "StoryLine Pro" anhand von Kinobeispielen.


Zeit: Donnerstag, 13.Juni 1996, 18:00 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  Seminarraum des Instituts fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und
      Artificial Intelligence der Universitaet Wien,
      Freyung 6/Stiege 2 (Schottenhof), 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. L. Manovich, San Diego, CA

1996-05-29T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                            gemeinsam mit dem 
    Institut fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence
                          der Universitaet Wien
        im Rahmen des Konversatoriums "Art/ificial Intelligence: 
        Die Beziehung zwischen Kunst und Artificial Intelligence"


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Lev MANOVICH
Visual Arts Department
University of California
San Diego, CA


Cinema in Digital Media
-----------------------

This talk is about digital media - its technological base, its visual 
language, and its aesthetics - through the history of cinema. I suggest 
that a number of key principles, which we associate with digital media, 
such as sampling, random access, and the database, were already present 
in cinema from its first days. I also argue that digital media brings 
back pro-cinematic techniques which characterized the moving image in 
the nineteenth century and which were suppressed or eliminated by the 
twentieth century institution of cinema.


Zeit: Mittwoch, 29.Mai 1996, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  Seminarraum des Instituts fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und
      Artificial Intelligence der Universitaet Wien,
      Freyung 6/Stiege 2 (Schottenhof), 1010 Wien 1.

EMCSR'96 Plenary Talks

1996-05-02T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                 VIDEOS
                                 ******


Fuer jene Damen und Herren, denen es nicht moeglich war, die Plenar-
vortraege des 13th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research 
zu hoeren, bringen wir eine Videoaufzeichnung der folgenden Vortraege:

    Donnerstag, 2.Mai 1996, 18:00 Uhr pktl.:
    Prof.Dr.Ernst von Glasersfeld, 
        University of Massachusetts, Amherst: 
    "The Cybernetic Art of Living" (35 min.)

    Donnerstag, 2.Mai 1996, 18:35 Uhr:
    Prof.Dr.Luc Steels, Free University of Brussels:
    "Robots and the Origins of Intelligence" (80 min.)

Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence,
     Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien

Aufgrund der beschraenkten Anzahl der Sitzplaetze ersuchen wir um 
telefonische Voranmeldung unter 5336112 oder mittels e-mail 
(sec@ai.univie.ac.at).

Prof. L. Steels, Brussels

1996-04-12T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Luc STEELS
Artificial Intelligence Lab
Free University of Brussels
Belgium


Robots and the Origins of Intelligence
--------------------------------------  

Plenary Lecture at the
13th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research
(EMCSR'96)

The talk reviews work going on at the VUB AI Laboratory in Brussels 
concerned with understanding the origins of intelligence using experi-
ments with robotic agents and software agents. I will go into detail 
on two experiments: one that shows how agents progressively build up 
behavioural complexity in interaction with a physically realised 
challenging ecosystem, the second shows how agents are able to develop 
their own language and meaning. The talk is illustrated with videos 
and live computer demonstrations.


Zeit: Freitag, 12.April 1996, 9:30 Uhr pktl.
                              ********
Ort:  Hoersaal 47 im Hauptgebaeude der Universitaet Wien,
      **************************************************
      Dr.Karl Lueger-Ring 1, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. G. Spencer-Brown, London

1996-04-10T00:00:00+02:00

       Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik (OeSGK)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.George SPENCER-BROWN
London


Uncolourable Trivalent Graphs
-----------------------------

Plenary Lecture at the
13th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research
(EMCSR'96)

A 3-graph is said to be uncolourable if its links cannot be completely 
coloured with just three colours so that similarly-coloured links do not 
meet at any node. It is considered trivial if it is less than five-
connected, or if it can obviously be factored so that one of the factors 
is a smaller nontrivial uncolourable graph.

Isaacs (Am Math Monthly, 73 (1975) 221-239) described an infinite class 
of nontrivial uncolourable 3-graphs but was unable to answer the question
whether it accounts for all such graphs. The present communication 
demonstrates a method of factorization that supplies an affirmative 
answer to this question.

Zeit: Mittwoch, 10.April 1996, 9:00 Uhr pktl.
                               ********
Ort:  Hoersaal 47 im Hauptgebaeude der Universitaet Wien,
      **************************************************
      Dr.Karl Lueger-Ring 1, 1010 Wien 1.

EMCSR'96

1996-04-09T00:00:00+02:00

                              *          *       
                      *                          *

                *      THIRTEENTH EUROPEAN MEETING     *

              *                    ON                    *

                *    CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH  *

                      *       (EMCSR 1996)       *

                           April 9 - 12, 1996

                          UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA




        organized by the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies
                          in cooperation with
 Dept.of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, Univ.of Vienna
                                  and
             International Federation for Systems Research


                        Chairman: Robert Trappl


Plenary lectures:
***************** 

    ERNST VON GLASERSFELD (USA):
        "The Cybernetic Art of Living"

        GEORGE SPENCER-BROWN (UK):
    "Uncolourable Trivalent Graphs" 

    LUC STEELS (BELGIUM):
    "Robots and the Origins of Intelligence"


215 papers will be presented and discussed in the following symposia:
*********************************************************************

GENERAL SYSTEMS METHODOLOGY
    C.Joslyn (USA), G.J.Klir (USA)

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN MATHEMATICAL SYSTEMS THEORY
    Y.Rav (France), F.Pichler (Austria)

COMPLEX SYSTEMS ANALYSIS AND DESIGN
    J.W.Rozenblit (USA), H.Praehofer (Austria)

FUZZY SYSTEMS, APPROXIMATE REASONING AND KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS
    C.Carlsson (Finland), K.-P.Adlassnig (Austria), E.P.Klement
    (Austria)

DESIGNING AND SYSTEMS, AND THEIR EDUCATION
    B.Banathy (USA), W.Gasparski (Poland), G.Goldschmidt 
    (Israel)

HUMANITY, ARCHITECTURE AND CONCEPTUALIZATION
    G.Pask (United Kingdom), E.Prem (Austria)

BIOCYBERNETICS AND MATHEMATICAL BIOLOGY
    L.M.Ricciardi (Italy)

CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS IN MEDICINE AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
    M.Okuyama (Japan), G.Porenta (Austria)

CYBERNETICS OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC SYSTEMS AND OF COUNTRY DEVELOPMENT
    K.Balkus (USA), P.Ballonoff (USA), S.A.Umpleby (USA)

SYSTEMS, MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION
    G.Broekstra (Netherlands), R.Hough (USA)

COMMUNICATION AND COMPUTERS
    A M.Tjoa (Austria)

THEORIES AND METAPHORS OF CYBERSPACE
    F.Heylighen (Belgium), S.A.Umpleby (USA) 

KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN DATABASES
    Y.Kodratoff (France)

ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS AND ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS
    G.Palm (Germany), G.Dorffner (Austria)

THEORIES AND APPLICATIONS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 
    V.Marik (Czech Republic), E.Buchberger (Austria)


WORKSHOPS:
**********

SYSTEM, THE QUANTUM, AND COMPLEXITY
    M.A.Carvallo (Netherlands)

MAKING WATERSHEDS VISIBLE
    R.Hough (USA)

CYBERNETICS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY AND HEALING
    M.Okuyama (Japan)


TUTORIAL: 
*********

KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN DATABASES (KDD) AND DATA MINING
(Usame Fayyad, Jet Propulsion Lab, Calif.Inst.of Technology,
Pasadena, CA, and
Evangelos Simoudis, IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA) 

(please see special mailing)

PROCEEDINGS: 
************ 

Trappl R.(ed.): CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS '96, 2 vols.


FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: 
***************************************

    EMCSR'96 Secretariat
    c/o Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies
    Schottengasse 3
    A-1010 Vienna
    Austria
    Phone:  +43-1-53532810
    Fax:    +43-1-5320652
    E-mail: sec@ai.univie.ac.at

Prof. E. v. Glasersfeld, Amherst, MA

1996-04-09T00:00:00+02:00

       Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik (OeSGK)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Ernst von GLASERSFELD
Scientific Reasoning Research Institute (SRRI)
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA
USA


The Cybernetic Art of Living
----------------------------

Opening Plenary Lecture at the
13th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research
(EMCSR'96)

The scientific and technological exploits of cybernetics will no doubt 
be copiously represented at this conference. Much less, I suspect, will 
be said about the fundamental support a cybernetic attitude can supply 
to those who search for balance in their own lives rather than power 
and control over others. Through no fault or merit of my own I came to 
live for much of my time as a vagabond in a variety of countries and 
disciplines. In retrospect, I feel that this taught me to see the 
cybernetic way of thinking as an eminently useful tool in the practice 
of living. To me, indeed, it is the art of creating equilibrium in a 
world of possibilities and constraints. I shall try to make this 
definition plausible with the help of a few examples.


Zeit: Dienstag, 9.April 1996, 10:00 Uhr pktl.
                              *********
Ort:  Grosser Festsaal der Universitaet Wien,
      **************************************
      Dr.Karl Lueger-Ring 1, 1010 Wien 1.

13th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 1996)

1996-04-09T00:00:00+02:00

Please visit the conference website for further information.

Prof. T. Christaller, Sankt Augustin

1996-03-12T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence  (OFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                            gemeinsam mit der
                      Abt. Wissensbasierte Systeme
           des Instituts fuer Informationssysteme der TU Wien


                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Thomas CHRISTALLER
GMD - Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH
Sankt Augustin
Deutschland


Probehandeln als ein imaginativer Prozess
-----------------------------------------

Mithilfe mentaler Bilder koennen zumindest wir Menschen die Welt ohne 
Augen sehen. Vieles deutet darauf hin, dass diese mentalen Bilder, die 
aufgrund unserer Introspektion einen sehr starken visuellen Charakter 
haben, gekoppelt sind mit anderen imaginativen Eindruecken, z.B. aku-
stischer oder olfaktorischer Art, und emotionalen Erfahrungen. Probe-
handeln basiert auf mentalen Bildern und dient der Auswahl einer tat-
saechlichen, realen Handlung aus einer Menge von Handlungsalternativen.
Die einfachsten Handlungen sind Bewegungsablaeufe. Diese erzwingen, 
dass jede Form von Probehandeln moeglichst schneller sein muss als 
die Realitaet. Das kann aber nur gelingen, wenn durch oder mithilfe 
der mentalen Bilder ein Modell der Welt konstruiert werden kann, 
das nur die wichtigsten Merkmale dieser Welt bezogen auf Bewegungs-
ablaeufe beruecksichtigt. So ist es nicht verwunderlich, dass Probe-
handeln uns keine Gewissheiten darueber geben kann, die optimale 
oder richtige Handlungsweise gefunden zu haben. 

Im Vortrag wird zuerst eine Erklaerungshypothese fuer das beobachtbare 
Phaenomen der mentalen Bilder formuliert. Danach folgt ein komplexeres 
Beispiel fuer die Vorhersagefaehigkeit von menschlichen Bewegungs-
ablaeufen. Will man kuenstliche Systeme, Roboter, mit einer aehnlichen 
Vorhersagefaehigkeit versehen, so muß man die dafuer benoetigten 
Konstruktionsprinzipien definieren. Dies geschieht in zwei eigenen
Abschnitten, in denen zuerst eine grobkoernige Architektur fuer 
vorhersagefaehige Systeme dargestellt wird und danach eine Methodik 
zur sogenannten verhaltensorientierten Programmierung von Robotern.
Um ueberhaupt eine Vorstellung davon zu bekommen, wie mentale Bilder 
bei derartigen Robotern zustandekommen koennten, wird ein Experiment 
beschrieben, in dem es urspruenglich um die Visualisierung eines 
simulierten Roboters und seiner Umgebung ging. Die naheliegende 
Idee, genau eine solche kombinierte Simulations-Visualisierungs-
Komponente fuer Probehandeln mithilfe mentaler Bilder zu verwenden,
wird sich als falsch herausstellen. Im letzten Abschnitt wird anhand
eines anderen Experimentes, bei dem ebenfalls ein simulierter 
Roboter visualisiert wird, ein Weg aufgezeigt, wie erfolgver-
sprechender nach mentalen Bildern bei einem verhaltensorientierten
Roboter gesucht werden kann. Ob dieser Weg wirklich gangbar ist, 
muss der Diskussion ueberlassen werden. 


Zeit: Dienstag, 12.Maerz 1996, 14:00 Uhr
                               *********
Ort:  Seminarraum der Abt. Wissensbasierte Systeme des
      Instituts fuer Informationssysteme der TU Wien,
      Treitlstr. 3, 4.Stock 
      *********************

Projekte des OFAI

1996-01-19T00:00:00+01:00

Projekte des
Österreichischen Forschungsinstituts für Artificial Intelligence

Freitag, 19.Jänner 1996
Wien 1, Schottengasse 3

Um Anmeldung bis Mittwoch, 17.Jänner 1996 wird gebeten:
Tel. 53532810, Fax 5320652

Programm:

9:00: Eröffnung durch den Bundesminister für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst, Dr.Rudolf Scholten
9:10: Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl:; Das Österreichische Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence - ein kurzer Überblick
9:30: Dr.Kai Alter:; Ein sprechendes Auskunftssystem
10:00: Dr.Ernst Buchberger:; GIST: Mehrsprachige Generierung von Formulartexten (EU-Projekt LRE)
10:30: Kaffeepause
11:00: Mag.Günter Linhart:; Statistische Werkzeuge und Wissenstransfer für das Neural Software Engineering Environment ECANSE(Kooperation mit SIEMENS Österreich)
11:30: Univ.-Doz.Dr.Georg Dorffner:; Verbesserung der EEG-basierten Diagnose von neurologischen und psychiatrischen Erkrankungen mittels künstlicher neuronaler Netze (EU-Programm BIOMED-1)
12:00: Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl:; Beiträge der Artificial Intelligence zur Unterstützung von Bemühungen zur Kriegsvermeidung oder -beendigung (im Auftrag des BMWFK)
12:30: Kleines Buffet
13:00: Dr.Christian Holzbaur:; Effiziente numerische Verfahren in deklarativen Programmiersprachen durch Constraint Logic Programming
13:30: Dr.Johannes Fürnkranz:; Knowledge Discovery in Databases: Grundlagenforschung im Bereich des Data Mining
14:00: Univ.-Doz.Dr.Gerhard Widmer:; Entwicklung wissensbasierter Lernmethoden: Fallstudien anhand musikalischer Problemstellungen
14:30: Kaffeepause
15:00: Univ.-Doz.Dr.Werner Horn:; Informationsmanagement in der Intensivmedizin: Monitoring, Datenvalidierung, Therapieplanung
15:30: Univ.-Doz.Dr.Georg Dorffner und Dr.Paolo Petta:; Wissens- und datenbasierte Modelle zur Unterstützung der Diagnose von koronaren Herzerkrankungen
16:00: Dr.Paolo Petta und Dr.Mario Veitl:; Multimediale Lehr- und Informationssysteme für das Lernzentrum des Neuen AKH (im Auftrag von VOEST-ALPINE Medizintechnik)
16:30: Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl und Dr.Paolo Petta:; Softwareagenten in Datennetzen und als synthetische Akteure (im Auftrag des BMWFK)
17:00: Ausklang, mit allen Referenten, und Getränken

Das Österreichische Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence wird vom Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst gefördert.

Dr. J. Miklosko, Bratislava

1995-12-13T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Jozef MIKLOSKO
Vizekanzler der Tschechoslowakischen Regierung a.D.
ehem.Leiter des Internat.Basic Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence
der Slowakischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
Bratislava


Die Situation in der Slowakei drei Jahre nach dem Zerfall der CSFR
------------------------------------------------------------------

In dem Vortrag werden die Ursachen des Zerfalls und die Konsequenzen 
fuer beide Republiken analysiert. Die Probleme des Aufbaus der selb-
staendigen Slowakei besonders im Hinblick auf Wirtschaft, Demokratie, 
Menschenrechte, aber auch Wissenschaft, Bildung und Kultur werden 
erwaehnt. Auch die Fragen der heutigen Legislatur, die Situation in 
der Kirche und die internationalen Beziehungen werden besprochen.

Die negativen Seiten der heutigen Transformation der Gesellschaft 
(Skandale, Korruption, schlechte soziale Situation, Arbeitslosigkeit, 
wilde Privatisation, Rueckkehr ehemaliger Kommunisten, ethnische 
Probleme, usw.), aber auch positive Tendenzen (makrooekonomische 
Fakten, kultivierter und ruhiger Zerfall des alten Staates, starke 
Kirche, Geduld und Opferbereitschaft der Buerger, hoher Standard 
in Kultur und Bildung, usw.) werden unterstrichen.

Der heutige Stand der Ost-West-Beziehungen, die Chancen und Probleme 
fuer die Zukunft werden am Beispiel der Slowakei diskutiert.

Die Vortraege finden in zwangloser Reihenfolge statt und sind frei 
zugaenglich. Auf Wunsch werden Einladungen zu weiteren Vortraegen 
zugesandt. 


Zeit: Mittwoch, 13.Dezember 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. J. Zytkow, Wichita, KS

1995-12-07T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Jan ZYTKOW
Wichita State University, Kansas
and Polish Academy of Sciences


Creating a Robot-Scientist:
Linking a Discovery System to Real World Domains
------------------------------------------------

In this talk, a general robotic mechanism for real-world discovery is 
proposed. The basic components include (1) the abstract agent, which is 
a system of exploration goals, plans, and knowledge representation, 
applicable in many domains, and (2) empirical semantics that provides 
the linkage of the abstract agent with the world through sensors and 
manipulators coordinated by operational procedures. The ways in which 
different machine discoverers can be linked to their environment are 
discussed and the principles of operational semantics are presented. 
Examples include chemistry experiments, mechanical theory construction 
by robot arm and exploration of the environment with the Nomad mobile 
robot. Examples of discovered knowledge will be shown and the notion 
of autonomous pursuit of knowledge will be clarified. 


Zeit: Donnerstag, 7.Dezember 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. E. Prem, OFAI und MIT

1995-11-27T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Erich PREM
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
Wien, und 
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA, USA


Zur Konstruktion eines Humanoiden
---------------------------------

Spaetestens seitdem humanoide Roboter wie C3PO und Mr. Data Teil un-
serer Medien- und (nicht nur) Jugendkultur geworden sind, scheint der
Traum von der menschengleichen Maschine nicht mehr voellig unerreichbar.
In der Tat versuchen in letzter Zeit neben Romanschriftstellern auch 
serioese Wissenschafter, solche Systeme zu entwerfen.

Der derzeit ernstzunehmendste Versuch, einen humanoiden Roboter zu kon-
struieren, findet am AI-Lab des Massachusetts Institute of Technology
statt. Hier baut Prof. Rodney A. Brooks mit seinen Studenten den Roboter
"Cog", der in wenigen Jahren wesentliche Leistungen eines dreijaehrigen
menschlichen Babys simulieren koennen soll.

In diesem Vortrag berichte ich von der Arbeit an diesem Roboter. Ich
werde die Grundzuege der Architektur des Systems erlaeutern und einige
Designprobleme diskutieren. Zusaetzlich soll auch der Hintergrund des
Unterfangens, ein neuer Zugang zum Verstaendnis menschlicher und zur 
Konstruktion kuenstlicher Intelligenz, beleuchtet werden.


Zeit: Montag, 27.November 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. S. Wrobel, Sankt Augustin

1995-11-16T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Stefan WROBEL
GMD - Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH
Sankt Augustin
Deutschland


Data Mining in der induktiven logischen Programmierung
------------------------------------------------------

Das Auffinden interessanter Regelmaessigkeiten in (grossen) Datenmengen
(Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery) wird im Bereich des Maschinellen 
Lernens ganz allgemein und im Rahmen des Inductive Logic Programming 
(ILP) im besonderen als zunehmend interessante Aufgabenstellung wahr-
genommen. Waehrend jedoch fuer das Lernen von Konzepten aus Beispielen
eine weithin akzeptierte Definition existiert, wurden fuer das Data 
Mining in ILP erst in letzter Zeit Definitionen vorgeschlagen.
In diesem Vortrag werden diese Definitionen, die auf der sogenannten
"nicht-monotonen Semantik" basieren, naeher analysiert, und es wird
gezeigt, dass der nicht-monotone Charakter des Data Mining keineswegs
inhaerent ist und durchaus keine Voraussetzung fuer die sinnvolle 
Durchfuehrung dieser Aufgabe darstellt. Es wird daher unter dem Begriff
"ILP Description Learning Problem" eine allgemeinere Definition des 
Data Mining vorgestellt und zum traditionellen "Concept Learning 
(Prediction Learning)" Problem in Beziehung gesetzt. 

Die theoretische Darstellung wird am Ende des Vortrags durch eine
kurze Vorstellung und Vorfuehrung eines Data Mining Prototyps der GMD 
ergaenzt.   


Zeit: Donnerstag, 16.November 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. H. Linstone, Portland, OR

1995-11-08T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr. Harold A. LINSTONE
Portland State University
Portland, OR
USA


Cybernetics and Real World Systems: Bridging the Gap
----------------------------------------------------

The talk introduces the concept of multiple perspectives in dealing 
with complex or "messy" systems. There are three types: the technical 
(cybernetic), the organizational/institutional, and the personal/
individual perspectives. Each sees the same system through different 
lenses, providing insights unattainable with the others. Together 
they offer a means of bridging the chasm between the analyst/modeler
and the real world, presenting a three-dimensional system view rather 
than the typical analyst's one-dimensional one. The distinct paradigms 
of the three types are described and applications of the concept 
developed. These range from industrial system breakdowns (such as 
the Exxon Valdex oil spill) to strategic planning in private and 
public sectors. Among the issues clarified: error-inducing vs. 
safety-reinforcing systems, high-reliability organizations, the 
discounting dilemma, and technological vs. societal rates of change. 


Zeit: Mittwoch, 8.November 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. V. Marik, Prag

1995-10-04T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Vladimir MARIK
Czech Technical University
Prague


Current AI Research at the CTU Prague
-------------------------------------

An overview of the current research activities of the AI Group at the 
CTU will be given. The main attention will be paid to the research 
concentrated around a distributed expert system based on a multiagent 
approach (architecture, communication principles, etc.). A short overview
of the results achieved in the area of genetic algorithms and qualitative
simulation will be presented. Part of the talk will be focused on par-
ticular experimental applications. The international research projects
in which the group participates will be briefly reviewed. 


Zeit: Mittwoch, 4.Oktober 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

HeKoNN'95 (Herbstschule Konnektionismus)

1995-10-02T00:00:00+01:00

(Beachten Sie bitte auch die Informationen ueber Reisekosten-
zuschuesse im Anhang an die Ankuendigung der HeKoNN.) 



        = = =    H e K o N N   9 5    = = =

            Herbstschule Konnektionismus 
                 und Neuronale Netze

                 2.-6. Oktober 1995
                     M"unster

          = = =   P R O G R A M M   = = = 

Seit mehreren Jahren werden k"unstliche neuronale Netze
(kNN) in den verschiedensten Bereichen diskutiert. Das
Spektrum reicht von Modellen zur Erkl"arung des Lernens im
Gehirn bis zur Steuerung industrieller Prozesse. Die HeKoNN
hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, eine "ubergreifende Einf"uhrung
in die verschiedenen Aspekte des Konnektionismus und der
k"unstlichen neuronalen Netze zu geben und den derzeitigen
Stand der Entwicklung aufzuzeigen. 

Es werden Kurse in f"unf Themenschwerpunkten angeboten:  

Der Bereich GRUNDLAGEN gliedert sich in eine Einf"uhrung
grundlegender Konzepte (A. Zell, Uni Stuttgart), sowie Kurse
zur Informationsverarbeitung in biologische neuronalen
Systemen (G. Palm, Uni Ulm), der Verbindung von kNN mit
Fuzzy Logik (R. Kruse, Uni Braunschweig) sowie mit
genetischen Algorithmen (S. Vogel, Uni K"oln).

Der Bereich THEORIE ist den Eigenschaften von kNN als
abstrakten Lernverfahren gewidmet. Es werden Kurse angeboten
"uber Approximationseigenschaften von kNN (K. Hornik, Uni
Wien), zur algorithmische Komplexit"at der Lernverfahren
(M. Schmitt, TU Graz), Prognosegenauigkeit und
Modellselektion (G. Paa"s, GMD St. Augustin) und
"neuronalen" L"osungen von Optimierungsproblemen
(J. Buhmann, Uni Bonn).

Ein Schwerpunkt der diesj"ahrigen HeKoNN ist der Bereich
ANWENDUNGEN, der einen "Uberblick "uber den Einsatz von kNN
in realen Problemen geben soll. Er umfa"st Kurse "uber
Bildverarbeitung (H.Bischof, TU Wien), Schrifterkennung
(J. Sch"urmann, Daimler Benz Ulm), Spracherkennung
(R. Rojas, FU Berlin), industrielle Anwendungen
(B. Sch"urmann, Siemens M"unchen), Robotik (K.M"oller, Uni
Bonn), und Hardware f"ur kNN (U. R"uckert, TU
Hamburg-Harburg).

Im Bereich SYMBOLISCHER KONNEKTIONISMUS werden diskutiert:
Verfahren der Wissensverarbeitung in kNN (F. Kurfe"s, New
Jersey IT), hybride Systeme in der Sprachverarbeitung
(S. Wermter, Uni Hamburg), konnektionistische Aspekte der
Sprachverarbeitung (U. Schade, Uni Bielefeld) und Verfahren
zur Extraktion von Regeln aus kNN (J. Diederich, TU
Brisbane).

In dem Abschnitt zur KOGNITIVEN MODELLIERUNG finden Kurse
statt "uber Repr"asentation und kognitive Modelle
(G. Dorffner, Uni Wien), Aspekte der Kognitionspsychologie
(R. Mangold-Allwinn, Uni Saarbr"ucken), selbstorganisierende
kNN im visuellen System (C v.d. Malsburg, Uni Bochum), und
Informationsverarbeitung im visuellen Cortex
(J.L. v. Hemmen, TU M"unchen).

Au"serdem sind Kurse geplant zu PROGRAMMIERUNG und
SIMULATOREN. Teilnehmer erhalten die Gelegenheit sich in die
Systeme SESAME (J. Kindermann, GMD St.Augustin) und SNNS
(A.Zell, Uni Stuttgart) einzuarbeiten.


        = = =   I N F O R M A T I O N E N    = = =

Veranstalter:
Fachgruppe "Konnektionismus" der GI in Zusammenarbeit mit
der Fachgruppe "Neuronale Netze". Materielle und personelle
Unterst"utzung erfolgen durch die GMD, Sankt Augustin und
die Universit"aten von Bonn und K"oln, das "Osterr.
Forschungsinstitut f"ur Artificial Intelligence, die "Osterr.
Gesellschaft f"ur Artificial Intelligence, sowie die
European Neural Network Society (ENNS). 

Organisations- und Programmkomitee:
        Georg Dorffner, Universit"at Wien,
        Knut M"oller, Universit"at Bonn,
        Gerhard Paa"s, GMD Sankt Augustin (Vorsitz),
        Helge Ritter, Universit"at Bielefeld,
        Stephan Vogel, Universit"at K"oln.

Tagungsort:
    Jugendg"astehaus Aasee
    Bismarckallee 31
    48151 M"unster (Westf.)
        Tel: 0251/532470        Fax: 0251/521271
Beginn: Montag, den 2.Oktober 1995, 12.00 Uhr
Ende:   Freitag, den 6. Oktober 1995, 12.00 Uhr.

Teilnehmerkreis: 
Fortgeschrittene Studenten, die einen "Uberblick "uber das
Gebiet gewinnen wollen, sowie Dokteranden und aktive
Wissenschaftler, denen es an Vertiefungswissen und
Querbez"ugen gelegen ist. Die Anzahl der Teilnehmer ist auf
100 beschr"ankt.

Unterlagen: 
"Uber WWW sind eine ausf"uhrlichere Beschreibung der Tagung
sowie Abstracts der Kurse abrufbar:
        http://borneo.gmd.de/~hekonn

Per anonymen FTP k"onnen die Unterlagen vom Server ftp.gmd.de,
Verzeichnis Learning/neural/hekonn95 abgeholt werden (s. unten).


        = = =   A N M E L D U N G   = = =

Teilnahme: 
Die Anzahl der Teilnehmer an der Herbstschule ist
begrenzt. Die Auswahl unter den Interessenten erfolgt durch
das Programmkomitee. Hierbei werden Vorkenntnisse,
praktische Erfahrungen und das derzeitige Arbeitsgebiet
ber"ucksichtigt. Interessierte schicken bis zum
        - - - 1.8.95 - - - 
das untenstehende Formular an das Tagungsb"uro. Bis zum
15.8.95 erfolgt eine Mitteilung "uber die Zulassung. 

Tagungsb"uro: 
Teilnahmebewerbungen und R"uckfragen bitte an
        Frau M. Knepper 
        Institut f"ur Informatik I  
        Universit"at Bonn   
        R"omerstr. 164  
        53117 Bonn
    Tel: 0228 / 550 333        Fax: 0228 / 550 321
    e-mail: knepper@informatik.uni-bonn.de

Tagungsgeb"uhren:
                      GI-Mitglieder    Nicht-GI-Mitglieder
Studenten                    160 DM                 200 DM 
Hochschulangeh"orige         450 DM                 550 DM
sonstige Teilnehmer          650 DM                 800 DM
In den Tagungsgeb"uhren sind die Tagungsunterlagen
enthalten, nicht aber Unterbringung und Verpflegung.

Unterbringung:
Die Unterbringung erfolgt grunds"atzlich f"ur die gesamte
Tagungsdauer. Der Preis umfa"st Vollpension. 
        Vierbettzimmer:                             250 DM
        Doppelzimmer (im beschr"ankten Umfang)      300 DM
Alle Zimmer haben eigene Duschen und WCs. Ortsans"assige
Teilnehmer k"onnen zu Hause "ubernachten und zahlen 140 DM
f"ur Verpflegung. 

Die Tagungsgeb"uhren und Unterbringungskosten m"ussen nach
Erhalt der Zulassungsmitteilung "uberwiesen werden. Ist dies
nicht bis zum 1.9.95 geschehen, so wird der Platz an andere
vergeben. Bei einem R"ucktritt nach dem 1.9.95 k"onnen
Tagungsgeb"uhren und Unterbringungskosten leider nicht
erstattet werden.


- . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - .

          Bewerbung zur Teilnahme an der
                  H e K o N N  9 5

Name:           ____________________________________________

T"atigkeitsfeld: ___________________________________________

O    Industrie/Firma:  _____________________________________

O    Gro"sforschung/Institut: ______________________________

                ____________________________________________

O    Hochschule/Institut:  _________________________________

                ____________________________________________

O    Student/Hochschule:   _________________________________

     Semester ___  Studienrichtung: ________________________

                ____________________________________________

GI-Mitglied:  O    Mitgliedsnummer ____________

Vorkenntnisse "uber Neuronale Netze und Konnektionismus:

     Theoretische Kenntnisse ____ Semesterwochenstunden

     praktische Kenntnisse ____ Projektjahre

     Interessengebiet: ____________________________________

                ____________________________________________

                ____________________________________________

                ____________________________________________

                ____________________________________________




____________________________________________________________
Datum                                       Unterschrift



- . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - .

          ftp - Dialog zum Abholen der Informationen

unix> ftp ftp.gmd.de
Name (...): anonymous
331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password.
Password: 
ftp> binary
200 Type set to I.
ftp> cd Learning/neural/hekonn95
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> get info.ps.Z
ftp> get anmeldung.ps.Z
ftp> bye
unix> uncompress info.ps.Z
unix> lpr info.ps
unix> uncompress anmeldung.ps.Z
unix> lpr anmeldung.ps


=====================================================================

Die Oesterreichische Gesellschaft fuer 
Artificial Intelligence (OeGAI)
gewaehrt fuer Studenten eine beschraenkte Anzahl von

  R e i s e k o s t e n z u s c h u e s s e n   

zur HeKoNN '95
(Herbstschule Konnektionismus und Neuronale Netze)

in der Hoehe von oeS 2.000,--

Voraussetzungen:

* Studium der Informatik oder verwandter Studienrichtung
  mit Spezialisierung in Richtung neuronale Netze

* Akzeptanz zur Teilnahme bei der HeKoNN

Einreichung:

Ein formloser Brief oder Email mit kurzer Beschreibung des
Studienhergangs und der fachlichen Interessen, bzw. 
abgelegte einschlaegige Lehrveranstaltungen, 
bis 1.8.1995 an:

Georg Dorffner
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence
Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien
georg@ai.univie.ac.at

Bei zu grosser Zahl von Antraegen wird Studenten mit
fortgeschrittenerem Studium (z.B. Diplomarbeit), 
deutlicherem Bezug zu neuronalen Netzen, bzw. besserem
Studienerfolg der Vorzug gegeben.

P. Whigham, Canberra

1995-09-19T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Peter A. WHIGHAM, M.Sc.
University of New South Wales
Canberra
Australia


A Grammatical Genetic Learning System
-------------------------------------

The genetic programming paradigm (GP) is a functional approach to 
inductively forming programs that describe a particular problem. 
The use of natural selection based on a fitness function for modifying
the program population has allowed many problems to be solved that 
require a non-fixed representation. 

In this seminar a learning system, inspired by GP, is described. 
A context free grammar is used to define the structure of the initial 
language and to direct crossover and mutation. This represents a form 
of declarative bias. Operators that take the initial grammar and modify 
its definition are described. These operations may be considered as a 
form of specialization, given the initial grammar describes the most
general form of a solution. Hence the learning system modifies its 
own bias during the evolution of a solution. The results using these 
operators are described for various problems. 

The use of a modified grammar for future runs is discussed as a form 
of incremental learning. This shows that the learnt grammatical changes
are representing structures of the problem that are important. 


Zeit: Dienstag, 19.September 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. K. Alter, Berlin

1995-09-12T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr. Kai ALTER
Humboldt-Universitaet Berlin


Akzentuierung und Phrasierung in der Sprachsynthese 
---------------------------------------------------


Zeit: Dienstag, 12.September 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. R. Wolff, Salzburg

1995-06-28T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


o.HS-Prof.Dr.Robert WOLFF
Hochschule fuer Musik und 
darstellende Kunst Mozarteum
in Salzburg


Intelligentes Musizieren:
AI-Perspektiven fuer Musiker und Musikliebhaber
-----------------------------------------------


Zeit: Mittwoch, 28.Juni 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. L. Steels

1995-06-21T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Luc STEELS
Free University of Brussels


Studying the Origins of Intelligence through Autonomous Robots 
--------------------------------------------------------------

An experimental setup is described for studying how intelligence may
have originated in physical systems. The setup consists of a robot 
ecosystem that includes a number of small robots and challenges
for the robots in terms of parasites as well as opportunities in 
the form of a charging station. A number of biologically inspired
mechanisms are being investigated for generating more behavioral
complexity in the robots: adaptivity, selectionism, self-organisation,
level formation, and representation formation. The talk will focus on
one series of surprising experiments that demonstrate how it has
indeed been possible to arrive at more complexity. 

Luc Steels is director of the VUB AI Laboratory (Brussels) and holds at
present the Sony sabbatical chair at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory
in Tokyo. 


Zeit: Mittwoch, 21.Juni 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Call for Papers: EMCSR 1996

1995-05-24T00:00:00+02:00

                              *          *       
                      *                          *

                *      THIRTEENTH EUROPEAN MEETING     *

              *                    ON                    *

                *    CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH  *

                      *       (EMCSR 1996)       *

                           April 9 - 12, 1996

                          UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA


        organized by the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies
                          in cooperation with
 Dept.of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, Univ.of Vienna
                                  and
             International Federation for Systems Research


                               * * * * *

An electronic version of this CfP (and further information whenever it
becomes available) can be found under 

              http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/emcsr/emcsr.html

                   * * * * *


Cybernetics - "the study of communication and control in the animal and
the machine" (N.Wiener) - has recently returned to the forefront, not
only in cyberpunk and cyberspace, but, even more important, contributing
to the consolidation of various scientific theories. Additionally, an
ever increasing number of research areas, including social and economic
theories, theoretical biology, ecology, computer science, and robotics
draw on ideas from second order cybernetics. Artificial intelligence,
evolved directly from cybernetics, has not only technological and
economic, but also important social impacts. With a marked trend 
towards interdisciplinary cooperation and global perspectives, this
important role of cybernetics is expected to be further strengthened
over the next years.

Since 1972, the biennial European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems
Research (EMCSR) have served as a forum for discussion of converging
ideas and new aspects of different scientific disciplines. As on
previous occasions, a number of sessions providing wide coverage of the
rapid developments will be arranged, complemented with daily plenary
meetings, where eminent speakers will present latest research results.


SESSIONS + Chairpersons:

   A    General Systems Methodology
    G.J.Klir, USA

   B    New Developments in Mathematical Systems Theory
    Y.Rav, France, and F.Pichler, Austria

   C    Complex Systems Analysis and Design
        J.W.Rozenblit, USA, and H.Praehofer, Austria

   D    Fuzzy Systems, Approximate Reasoning and Knowledge-Based Systems
    C.Carlsson, Finland, K.-P.Adlassnig, Austria, and E.P.Klement,
        Austria

   E    Designing and Systems, and Their Education 
    B.Banathy, USA, W.Gasparski, Poland, and G.Goldschmidt, Israel 

   F    Humanity, Architecture and Conceptualization
    G.Pask, UK, and E.Prem, Austria

   G    Biocybernetics and Mathematical Biology
    L.M.Ricciardi, Italy

   H    Cybernetics and Informatics in Medicine and Psychotherapy
    M.Okuyama, Japan, and G.Porenta, Austria

   I    Cybernetics of Socio-Economic Systems and of Country Development
    K.Balkus, USA, P.Ballonoff, USA, and S.A.Umpleby, USA

   J    Systems, Management and Organization
    G.Broekstra, Netherlands, and R.Hough, USA

   K    Communication and Computers
    A M.Tjoa, Austria

   L    Theories and Metaphors of Cyberspace
        F.Heylighen, Belgium, and S.A.Umpleby, USA

   M    Knowledge Discovery in Databases
    Y.Kodratoff, France

   N    Artificial Neural Networks and Adaptive Systems
    G.Palm, Germany, and G.Dorffner, Austria

   O    Theory and Applications of Artificial Intelligence
    V.Marik, Czech Republic, and E.Buchberger, Austria


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Acceptance of contributions will be 
determined on the basis of Draft Final Papers. These Papers 
must not exceed 10 single-spaced A4 pages (maximum 43 lines, max.
line length 160 mm, 12 point), in English. They have to contain 
the final text to be submitted, including graphs and pictures. 
However, these need not be of reproducible quality.
The Draft Final Paper must carry the title, author(s) name(s), and 
affiliation (incl. e-mail address, if possible) in this order. 
Please specify the symposium in which you would like to present 
your paper. Each scientist shall submit only   o n e   paper.
Please send   f o u r   hard copies of the Draft Final Paper 
to the Conference Secretariat (NOT to symposia chairpersons!)
Electronic or fax submissions cannot be accepted.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: October 12, 1995. 
Submissions received after the deadline cannot be considered.

NOTIFICATION OF ACCEPTANCE/REJECTION: Authors will be notified
about acceptance or rejection no later than December 11, 1995.
Successful authors will be provided by the conference secretariat
at the same time with the instructions for the preparation of the
final paper, which will also be available via ftp and World-Wide
Web.

FINAL PAPERS: The final paper will be limited to a maximum of
6 pages (10-point, double column). Camera-ready copies of the
final paper will be due at the conference secretariat by 
January 29, 1996. Acceptance of the final paper will be based
on compliance with the reviewers' comments.

PRESENTATION: It is understood that each accepted paper is
presented personally at the Meeting by one of its authors.

CONFERENCE FEE:
AS 2800 if received before January 31, 1996
AS 3300 if received later
AS 3800 if paid at the conference desk.
The Conference Fee includes participation in the Thirteenth European 
Meeting, attendance at official receptions, and the volume of the 
proceedings available at the Meeting. 
Please send cheque, or transfer the amount free of charges for
beneficiary to our account no. 0026-34400/00 at 
Creditanstalt-Bankverein Vienna. Please state your name clearly.

HOTEL ACCOMMODATIONS will be handled by OESTERREICHISCHES 
VERKEHRSBUERO, Kongressabteilung, P.O.Box 30, A-1043 Vienna,
phone +43-1-58925-118, fax +43-1-5867127. Reservation cards 
will be sent to all those returning the attached registration form.

SCHOLARSHIPS: The International Federation for Systems Research
and the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies are willing to
provide a limited number of scholarships covering the registration
fee for the conference and part of the accommodation costs for 
colleagues from weak currency countries. Applications should be 
sent to the Conference Secretariat before October 12, 1995. -
The EMCSR organizers cannot handle applications for participants
to obtain support from other sources.

INSURANCE: The conference organizers can accept no liability for
personal injuries, or for loss or damage to property belonging to
conference participants, either during or as a result of the
conference. Please check the validity of your personal insurance.


                                 * * * * *


The Proceedings of the 1st to 12th European Meetings on Cybernetics 
and Systems Research were published as 

Pichler F. and Trappl R.(eds.):
ADVANCES IN CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
2 vols, Transcripta Books, London, 1973.

Trappl R. and Pichler F.R.(eds.):
PROGRESS IN CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
Vol.I, Hemisphere, Washington,DC / Halsted-Wiley, New York, 1975.

Trappl R. and Hanika F.de P.(eds.):
PROGRESS IN CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
Vol.II, Hemisphere, Washington,DC / Halsted-Wiley, New York, 1975.

Trappl R., Klir G.J. and Ricciardi L.(eds.):
PROGRESS IN CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
Vol.III, Hemisphere, Washington,DC / Halsted-Wiley, New York, 1978.

Trappl R. and Pask G.(eds.):
PROGRESS IN CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
Vol.IV, Hemisphere, Washington,DC / Halsted-Wiley, New York, 1978.

Trappl R., Hanika F.de P. and Pichler F.R.(eds.):
PROGRESS IN CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
Vol.V, Hemisphere, Washington,DC / Halsted-Wiley, New York, 1979.

Pichler F.R. and Trappl R.(eds.):
PROGRESS IN CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
Vol.VI, Hemisphere, Washington,DC / McGraw-Hill, 1982.

Pichler F.R. and Hanika F.de P.(eds.):
PROGRESS IN CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH, 
Vol.VII, Hemisphere, Washington,DC, 1980.

Trappl R., Klir G.J. and Pichler F.R.(eds.):
PROGRESS IN CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
Vol.VIII, Hemisphere, Washington,DC / McGraw-Hill, 1982.

Trappl R., Ricciardi L. and Pask G.(eds.):
PROGRESS IN CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
Vol.IX, Hemisphere, Washington,DC / McGraw-Hill, 1982.

Trappl R., Hanika F.de P. and Tomlinson R.(eds.):
PROGRESS IN CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
Vol.X, Hemisphere, Washington,DC / McGraw-Hill, 1982.

Trappl R., Findler N.V. and Horn W.(eds.):
PROGRESS IN CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
Vol. XI, Hemisphere, Washington,DC / McGraw-Hill, 1982.

Trappl R.(ed.):
CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH,
North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1982.

Trappl R.(ed.):
CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH 2,
Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1984.

Trappl R.(ed.):
CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS '86,
Reidel, Dordrecht, 1986.

Trappl R.(ed.):
CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS '88,
2 vols., Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1988. 

Trappl R.(ed.):
CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS '90,
World Scientific, Singapore, 1990.

Trappl R.(ed.):
CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS '92,
2 vols., World Scientific, Singapore, 1992. 

Trappl R.(ed.):
CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS '94,
2 vols., World Scientific, Singapore, 1994.

Please contact the conference secretariat for more details. 


------------------------------------------------------------------------


CHAIRMAN of the Meeting: Robert Trappl, President
                         Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies

SECRETARIAT:             I. Ghobrial-Willmann and G. Helscher
                         Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies

                         A-1010 Vienna 1, Schottengasse 3 (Austria)
                         Phone: +43-1-53532810
                         Fax: +43-1-5320652
                         E-mail: sec@ai.univie.ac.at


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

K.-P. Adlassnig (Austria)   H. Mannila (Finland)
K. Balkus (USA)         V. Marik (Czech Republic)
P. Ballonoff (USA)      K. Morik (Germany)
B. Banathy (USA)        G. Nakhaeizadeh (Germany)
G. Broekstra (Netherlands)  M. Okuyama (Japan)
E. Buchberger (Austria)     G. Palm (Germany)
C. Carlsson (Finland)       G. Pask (UK)
G. Chroust (Austria)        G. Piatetsky-Shapiro (USA)
G. Dorffner (Austria)       F. Pichler (Austria)
W. Gasparski (Poland)       G. Porenta (Austria)
A. Giordana (Italy)     H. Praehofer (Austria)
G. Goldschmidt (Israel)     E. Prem (Austria)
F. Heylighen (Belgium)      Y. Rav (France)
W. Horn (Austria)       L. M. Ricciardi (Italy)
R. Hough (USA)          J. W. Rozenblit (USA)
N. C. Hu (China)        N. Rozsenich (Austria)
E. P. Klement (Austria)     D. Sleeman (UK)
G. J. Klir (USA)                A  M. Tjoa (Austria)
W. Kloesgen (Germany)           R. Trappl (Austria)
Y. Kodratoff (France)           H. Trost (Austria)
O. Ladanyi (Austria)            S. A. Umpleby (USA)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

E. Buchberger           P. Petta
G. Chroust          F. Pichler
I. Ghobrial-Willmann        R. Trappl
G. Helscher         H. Trost
W. Horn             M. Veitl
J. Matiasek                          


              *******************************************
              PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE: October 12, 1995
              *******************************************


------------------------------------------------------------------------


EMCSR-96  THIRTEENTH EUROPEAN MEETING ON CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH


Please return to: Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies
                  Schottengasse 3, A-1010 VIENNA, AUSTRIA (EUROPE)
          E-mail: sec@ai.univie.ac.at

   o    I plan to attend the Meeting.

   o    I intend to submit a paper to Session .....

   o    I enclose the Draft Final Paper.

   o    My Draft Final Paper will arrive prior to October 12, 1995.

   o    My cheque for AS ....... covering the Conference Fee is enclosed.

   o    I have transferred AS ........ to your account 0026-34400/00
    at Creditanstalt Vienna.

   o    I shall not be at the Meeting but am interested to receive
        particulars of the Proceedings.

Prof. V. Dhar

1995-05-23T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Vasant DHAR
New York University
New York, N.Y.


The Intelligent Customer Support Function:
Minimizing Customer Downtime and Dissatisfaction
------------------------------------------------

A common challenge facing the customer support function in business
organizations is the effective allocation of personnel to tasks so
that the loss of value by the firm due to customers' "down time" is
minimized. But this alone won't insure that customers are happy. We
need to be concerned with minimizing dissatisfaction due to the 
timeliness of support. In practice, this is complicated by numerous 
issues. The customer support administrator needs to consider the 
priority of the various tasks in the queue. Is a problem a severe one 
that seriously prevents a user from doing her job, or is it a less 
serious problem that is more of an inconvenience? The administrator 
must also consider how long will it take to resolve a particular task 
and how this impacts the support function's ability to service other 
users. The ability of the various customer service representatives to 
perform the various tasks will also impact schedule design. All 
things being equal, it makes little sense to have a highly experienced
technician perform a relatively simple task while a more complex task 
remains undone because the other (idle) technicians do not have the 
skills to perform it. On top of all of this, the administrator also 
needs to consider the amount of time that a given task has been
outstanding. The longer a problem, even a minor one, is outstanding, 
the more dissatisfied a user will be resulting a loss of goodwill.

I shall present an "intelligent" solution to the problem that combines
a genetic algorithm as the task assignment engine with a standard
problem tracking system. The system is currently in routine use at
Moody's Investor's Service where it supports the help desk function.
It has been a resounding success, showing how Artificial Intelligence
techniques can be integrated with conventional technologies to yield
powerful and practical systems.


Zeit: Dienstag, 23.Mai 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. K. Oliva

1995-05-18T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Karel OLIVA
Universitaet des Saarlandes
Saarbruecken


Implementation of an HPSG-Style Lexicon
---------------------------------------

The talk will describe the linguistic background of an implementation 
of a lexicon in an HPSG style.

In the first part, the information contained in the lexicon and above 
all its structuring will be discussed, together with techniques used 
for expressing "vertical" lexical regularities and for compressing the
hierarchy. Linguistic motivation for limited defaults will be given, 
and it will be shown how these "mild" defaults are coped with.   

In the second part, a method of removing the "horizontal" regularities
will be presented: an alternative to the lexical rules will be proposed
by replacing them by relational constraints corresponding more directly
to the standard lexicographic and morphological practice. Possible impli-
cations of this view of lexical rules for (lexical) derivation will be
also  discussed, albeit only shortly, because these are not implemented
in the system proper as it stands now.


Zeit: Donnerstag, 18.Mai 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.   


-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Da wir erst heute von dem Kurzbesuch von Dr.Oliva in Wien erfahren
haben und er sich in dankenswerter Weise zu einem Vortrag bereit
erklaerte, konnte diese Einladung nur mehr an jene Personen 
uebermittelt werden, die im elektronischen Verteiler sind.

Prof. W. Wahlster

1995-05-12T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Wolfgang WAHLSTER
Wissenschaftlicher Direktor
Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer
Kuenstliche Intelligenz (DFKI), Saarbruecken


Verbmobil: Towards the DRT-based 
Translation of Spontaneous Negotiation Dialogs 
----------------------------------------------

Verbmobil is a long-term project on the translation of spontaneous speech
in negotiation dialogs. We describe the goals of the project, the data
collection effort and the architecture of the first demonstrator.  In
particular, we will discuss the role of the prosodic module and the 
domain model based on a description logic for efficient speech under-
standing. We present a new domain-independent semantic construction 
component based on lambda abstraction over discourse representation 
structures. The recursive DRT-based transfer component maps fully
specified HPSG signs with a source DRS onto an underspecified target DRS. 
The source language generator is based on a lexicalized tree adjoining 
grammar with feature unification. The fully operational demonstrator 
translates German speech input into English speech output in the 
appointment scheduling domain.


Zeit: Freitag, 12.Mai 1995, 17:00 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. R. Holte, Canada

1995-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Robert C. HOLTE
University of Ottawa
Canada


A Learning Apprentice for Browsing
----------------------------------

This talk describes the task of browsing and an agent we have developed
to improve the speed and success rate of browsing. The agent is a
learning apprentice: it monitors the user's normal browsing actions and 
learns a measure of "relevance" to the user interests. It searches the 
library being browsed, uses the learned measure to evaluate items and
presents to the user those that are most relevant. The paper discusses
the main issues raised during the development of the browsing agent. 
These are of general interest not only because browsing is of consider-
able practical importance but also because it represents a prototypical
task for learning apprentice research.


Zeit: Donnerstag, 4.Mai 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. P. Petta

1995-04-05T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Paolo PETTA
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence
und Universitaet Wien


Autonome Agenten:
Beitraege der Artificial Intelligence
-------------------------------------

In den letzten Jahren fanden bewaehrte AI-Technologien raschen Eingang 
in das sich weitende Gebiet der Computeranimation. Mit zunehmender Kom-
plexitaet und Interaktivitaet der Umgebungen, in denen Computeranima-
tionen, bei welchen autonome Agenten eine Rolle spielen, zum Einsatz
gelangen, richtet sich bei den weiteren Entwicklungen das Interesse auch
auf Computermodelle von Verhaltens- und kognitiven Phaenomenen. Dieser 
Vortrag stellt einige repraesentative Beispiele aus der derzeitigen 
AI-Forschung vor, die moegliche Schritte zur Bewaeltigung dieser neuen 
Herausforderung bilden koennten.

Diese Arbeit ist Teil des vom Bundesministerium fuer Wissenschaft, For-
schung und Kunst gefoerderten Projektes "Die Entwicklung intelligenter 
autonomer Softwareagenten fuer Virtual Environments und andere Gebiete 
der Telematik".


Zeit: Mittwoch, 5.April 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. G. P. Landow, USA

1995-03-24T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.George P. LANDOW
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island
USA


Hypermedia and Poststructuralism
--------------------------------

The writings of so-called poststructuralist theorists of writing and
culture -- particularly Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault,
and Jean Baudrillard -- reconfigure long-accepted assumptions about
texts, authors, and readers in ways that have value for the designers and
users of digital information technology. Hypertext (or Hypermedia), an 
information technology composed of lexias (or parcels of information) 
joined by electronic links, similarly redefines our conceptions of 
authorship, intellectual property, textuality, and the relation of the
reader to all of them. The electronic link, for example, blurs the 
boundaries of what, in the print world, is a discrete text or work.

This talk, which examines convergences between poststructuralism and 
hypertext technology, also briefly discusses the relation of the World 
Wide Web to hypertext and the role of Artificial Intelligence in gigantic
interlinked webs of information.


Zeit: Freitag, 24.Maerz 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. A. Riegler

1995-03-22T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Alexander RIEGLER
Institut fuer Zoologie
Universitaet Wien


CALM: Eine konstruktivistische Kognitionsarchitektur
und ihre Anwendung auf Artificial Life
----------------------------------------------------

"Riegler hat ein 'Constructivist Artificial Life Model' entworfen, in 
dem sich zeigen soll, wie 'Kognition' und 'Intelligenz' entstehen und
funktionieren, wie Leben in Interaktion mit einer Umwelt lernt. 

'Die klassische Biologie kann das nicht, weil Nervensystem und Gehirn
fuer Messungen zu komplex sind, und man sie in jedem Detail nur dann 
studieren kann, wenn man das Tier aufschneidet, also seine Kognition 
beendet', grenzt Riegler ab, 'und die Artificial Intelligence kann es 
auch nicht, weil sie immer die menschliche Intelligenz nachbilden will 
und sich fuer den Weg der Evolution dorthin nicht interessiert.'

Im Unterschied dazu beginnt Rieglers Kunstwelt, eine Computersimulation, 
auf einer 'quasimolekularen Ebene' mit 'sensomotorischen Wesen'. Das ist 
eine Art simulierter Einzeller, bestehend aus informationsverarbeitenden 
Speicherzellen - analog dem Gehirn - und einer Aussenschicht, die analog 
zu Sinnen und Bewegungsapparat den Kontakt mit der Aussenwelt haelt.

Diese Welt ist voll von Objekten, von denen die 'Wesen' zunaechst nichts 
wissen: Eines kann 'Futter' sein, ein anderes 'Artgenosse', aber die 
'Wesen' muessen den Objekten ihre jeweilige Bedeutung erst zuordnen und 
dadurch ihre Umwelt strukturieren. Das unterscheidet Rieglers Entwurf 
wieder von anderen Ansaetzen zum 'Artificial Life', in denen die 
Kunstwesen die Bedeutung ihrer Umgebung schon kennen und nur optimale 
Ueberlebensstrategien finden muessen."

(aus: "Kuenstliches 'Lebewesen' aus dem Computer", Juergen Langenbach, 
DER STANDARD, 7./8.Jaenner 1995)

Zeit: Mittwoch, 22.Maerz 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. A. Sloman

1995-03-09T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Aaron SLOMAN
Cognitive Science Research Center
University of Birmingham


Playing God: A toolkit for experimenting with agent architectures
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Most people who give definitions of AI offer narrow views of the scope
of AI, whereas the research activities to be found in AI conferences,
books, journals and laboratories have a very broad and deep scope, going
beyond engineering objectives and the study or replication of human
capabilities, to include exploration of the space of possible designs
for behaving systems (design space) and the relationships between
designs and various collections of requirements and constraints (niche
space). This exploration is a multi-disciplinary affair, and includes
both exploration of architectures, mechanisms, formalisms, inference
systems, and the like (in natural and artificial designs), and also
characterisation of various kinds of behavioural capabilities and the
environments in which they are required, or possible.

These mappings between design space and niche space are hard to analyse
at a purely theoretical level, so we build working models to try out
ideas, and get a deeper understanding of problems and, above all, the
limitations of our provisional solutions.

This talk describes a toolkit developed at The University of Birmingham,
implemented in Poplog Pop-11, for experimenting with a variety of agent
architectures. The simulations include one or more agents with a
"mind" composed of a collection of coexisting interacting components,
constructed from a combination of traditional symbolic AI mechanisms and
sub-symbolic mechanisms such as neural nets. The toolkit smoothly
integrates symbolic and sub-symbolic mechanisms in a hybrid system.


Zeit: Donnerstag, 9.Maerz 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. A. Sloman

1995-03-08T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Aaron SLOMAN
Cognitive Science Research Center
University of Birmingham


What kind of architecture underlies human affective states?
-----------------------------------------------------------

An autonomous agent is driven by its own motivation rather than goals
provided for it. I'll discuss some of the distinctive features of human
motivation in terms of their biological functions and engineering
requirements for intelligent autonomous agents. This defines a rich
collection of capabilities related to perception, action, generating
motives, processing motives (e.g. evaluating, selecting, scheduling
them), making and executing plans, reasoning and learning.

The talk presents a coarse-grained characterisation of one sort of
architecture that might meet some of the requirements for autonomy in a
natural or artificial agent with various resource limits, including not
only physical resource limits but also information and information
processing resource limits (e.g. incomplete and partially inaccurate
knowledge, and limited processing resources.)

An architecture designed to address generic requirements and constraints
may be expected to have some characteristically human features, including
some form of self-awareness and the capability of getting into emotional
states involving partial loss of control of attention and thought 
processes (which I call "perturbances").

All this has potentially profound implications for philosophy, for
psychology, for studies of the evolution of mind, and also for the
development of effective therapies and educational practices.


Zeit: Mittwoch, 8.Maerz 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. K. Brunnstein

1995-02-28T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr. Klaus BRUNNSTEIN
Universitaet Hamburg


Aufklaerung von Unfaellen computergestuetzter Systeme:
Ansaetze zu einer neuen Informatik-Disziplin
------------------------------------------------------

Mit der zunehmenden Komplexitaet technischer Systeme, bei denen inte-
grierte Informations- und Kommunikationstechniken wichtige Funktionen
unterstuetzen oder wahrnehmen, steigen zugleich die Probleme von 
Benutzern, solche Systeme zu verstehen und in selten auftretenden, 
kritischen Situationen angemessen zu reagieren. Eine zunehmende Anzahl 
ernster Vorfaelle mit schwerwiegenden Folgen fuer Menschen, Umwelt und 
Systeme verlangt nach einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit den Ur-
sachen, von der Spezifikation und dem Entwurf ueber die Realisierung 
bis hin zur Bedienung.

Im phaenomenologischen Teil werden nach einem Ueberblick ueber das Spek- 
trum bisheriger Vorfaelle einige ausgewaehlte Vorfaelle, insbesondere 
aus dem Bereich Verkehrstechnik (Electronic Flight Control System des 
Airbus A 320), der Medizin (THERAC-25) sowie der militaerischen Sicher-
heit (AEGIS) dargestellt und Ursachen fuer die Vorfaelle analysiert.

Im methodischen Teil wird dargestellt, aufgrund welcher Annahmen 
(Paradigmen) und an welchen Stellen im informatischen Problemloesungs-
prozess solche Fehler entstehen, und mit welchen Methoden und Ansaetzen
man solche Fehler bekaempfen kann. Insgesamt plaediert der Vortrag fuer 
besseren Verbraucherschutz durch gezielte Verbesserung der Qualitaet 
informatischer Produkte, wobei eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme 
herkoemmlicher Informatikmethoden geboten erscheint.


Zeit: Dienstag, 28.Februar 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

U. Schaefer, DFKI

1995-01-27T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Ulrich SCHAEFER
Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer
Kuenstliche Intelligenz (DFKI)
Saarbruecken


Parametrizable Type Expansion in the Feature Structure Formalism TDL
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Over the last few years, constraint-based grammar formalisms have become
the predominant paradigm in natural language processing and computational
linguistics. From the viewpoint of computer science, typed feature 
structures can be seen as data structures that allow to represent 
linguistic knowledge in a uniform fashion. Type expansion is an operation
that makes constraints of a typed feature structure explicit and deter-
mines its satisfiability. We describe an efficient expansion algorithm 
that takes care of recursive type definitions and allows to explore 
different expansion strategies through the use of control knowledge.
This knowledge is specified on a separate layer, independent of
grammatical information. The algorithm, as presented, has been fully 
implemented in Common Lisp and is an integrated part of the type 
description language TDL developed at DFKI.


Zeit: Freitag, 27.Jaenner 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. H. Wiklicky, Amsterdam

1995-01-26T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Ing.MMag.Dr.Herbert Wiklicky
Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica
Amsterdam


Elemente einer analytischen Algorithmik:
Operatoren, Algebren und (neuronale) Netzwerke
----------------------------------------------

Zwei Fragestellungen standen am Beginn der hier zu diskutierenden
mathematischen Modellierung von Algorithmen: Die Suche nach einer
(einheitlichen) Theorie neuronaler Netzwerke - einem in den letzten
Jahren wieder intensiver diskutierten "Nichtstandardmodells"  fuer 
Berechnung (Computation) - sowie die Frage nach Zusammenhaengen
mit Modellen der theoretischen Informatik, z.B. Automaten oder dem
lambda-Kalkuel.

Die Hauptthese dazu: Als geeignetes mathematisches Modell fuer ein
umfassendes theoretisches Studium komplexer Algorithmen koennen und
sollten sogenannte Operatoralgebren, z.B. C*-Algebren, herangezogen
werden. Das betrifft sowohl verschiedene neuronale Netzwerkparadigmen
und andere Nichtstandardmodelle, aber auch klassische Modelle, wie
deterministische, nichtdeterministische oder auch probabilistische
Automaten.

Man kann dabei nicht zuletzt auf umfangreiche Ergebnisse aus dem
Bereich der "Funktionalanalysis" zurueckgreifen. Ausserdem bestehen
interessante Verbindungen zu einer Anzahl von anderen Gebieten; die
Palette reicht von logischen Kalkuelen (Lineare Logik), ueber
diskrete Strukturen (Graphen) und probabilistische Modelle
(Markov Ketten) bis zur Quantenmechanik.

Ein einfaches konkretes Beispiel, wie ein solcher Ansatz im Rahmen
insbesondere der Theorie neuronaler Netzwerke praktisch einsetzbar
ist, liefert die Verallgemeinerung des bekannten Resultats von
Hornik-Stinchcombe-White und anderer verwandter Theoreme bezueglich
der universellen Approximationseigenschaften von Feed-Forward
Netzwerken.

Nicht zuletzt angesichts der als chronisch zu bezeichnenden "Software
Crisis" koennten funktionalanalytische Modelle - im Unterschied
zu den ueblicherweise betrachteten logischen oder diskreten Modellen -
aber auch im Bereich konventioneller Softwaretechnologie an Bedeutung
gewinnen. Das Lernen in neuronalen Netzwerken kann als Suche in einem
(abstrakten) Raum von Algorithmen verstanden werden. Andererseits sind
aber auch Programmtransformationen, z.B. Portierung, Anpassung und
Wartung von Software, Operationen, welche in einem solchen Raum von
Algorithmen modelliert werden koennten, um beispielsweise
Stabilitaetsfragen beantworten zu koennen.


Zeit: Donnerstag, 26.Jaenner 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. H.-J. Zimmermann, Aachen

1994-12-09T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.H.-J.ZIMMERMANN
Rheinisch-Westfaelische
Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen


Fuzzy Technologie: Prinzipien, Anwendungen und Historie
-------------------------------------------------------

Fuzzy Set Theorie - mit ca. 15.000 Veroeffentlichungen in der Zwischen-
zeit - hat sich zur "Technologie" entwickelt. Sie hat ein breites 
Anwendungsspektrum, das von der Medizin ueber die Regelungstechnik zur 
Informatik und Entscheidungstheorie reicht. Der Vortrag fuehrt zunaechst 
in die Grundlagen der FSTh ein, beschreibt dann die Hauptanwendungs-
gebiete und zeichnet zum Schluss die Entwicklungsgeschichte von der 
akademischen Phase ueber den "Fuzzy Boom" bis zur "Computational 
Intelligence" nach.

Prof.Zimmermann ist Editor-in-Chief der Zeitschrift "Fuzzy Sets and 
Systems", Herausgeber des "European Journal of Operations Research" und 
Mitherausgeber von 10 weiteren Zeitschriften.  Er ist Verfasser, 
Herausgeber und Mitherausgeber zahlreicher Buecher auf dem Gebiet 
Operations Research und Fuzzy Systems, darunter "Fuzzy Set Theory - and
its Applications" (2.rev.Aufl., Kluwer, 1991) und "Operations Research -
Methoden und Modelle" (2.rev.Aufl., Vieweg, 1992).


Zeit: Freitag, 9.Dezember 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


Wir bitten um Entschuldigung fuer den Termin, doch war fuer den
Vortragenden nur dieser Zeitpunkt moeglich.

Prof. F. Sherman, USA

1994-11-30T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Frank SHERMAN
Syracuse University
Syracuse, N.Y.
USA


After the Call for Help: Systemic Constraints for 
Conflict Management in Contemporary International Politics
----------------------------------------------------------

In order to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" 
national leaders in 1945 established a structure for a series of 
collective security-seeking practices - the United Nations System. 
This structure has had a debateable effect in providing security 
over the last fifty years. With the increased use of the organization, 
the search for the development of conflict early warning systems, 
and the heightened political visibility of preventive diplomacy, 
another, perhaps more important, factor needs to be assessed: 
What happens once a "call for help" is made? The process of agenda
setting within the United Nations system for conflict management 
since 1945 provides striking evidence about the constraints for 
joint action in providing system-wide management assistance. 


Zeit: Mittwoch, 30.November 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

10 Years of OFAI

1994-11-17T00:00:00+01:00

The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies had their 10th and 25th anniversaries, respectively. An event at the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research was held to celebrate the occasion.

Prof. Dr. Werner von Seelen: Versuche zu einer neuronalen Architektur für Navigationssysteme

1994-09-21T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. W. v. Seelen, Bochum

1994-09-21T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Werner VON SEELEN
Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum 


Versuche zu einer neuronalen Architektur fuer Navigationssysteme
----------------------------------------------------------------

In Neuronalen Systemen spielt die Struktur (Topologie), auf der ein
Prozess ablaeuft, eine entscheidende Rolle fuer die Loesbarkeit und
Stabilitaet. Damit entsteht ein "Architekturproblem" in neuronal
beeinflussten Systemen, das die Topologie mit Dekomposition des Problems
und der Netzwerkmodularisierung verbindet. Am Beispiel eines autonom
navigierenden Fahrzeugs werden eine Reihe von Teilloesungen vorge-
schlagen und diskutiert.


Zeit: Mittwoch, 21.September 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. Charles Petrie: Next-Link: An Experiment in Coordination of Distributed Agents

1994-08-31T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. C. Petrie, USA

1994-08-31T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Charles PETRIE
Center for Design Research
Stanford University
USA 


Next-Link: An Experiment in Coordination of Distributed Agents
--------------------------------------------------------------

In this talk, Next-Link, a system that uses distributed design agents
to configure and route cable harnesses for missiles and airplanes, will
be described. Each design agent consists of a human design engineer in 
conjunction with a specialized design software tool. A semi-hierarchical
architecture that reduces sources of conflict will be described.

Redux' is a control agent that coordinates the design task.  Among other
coordination functions, Redux' provides general support for resolution 
of conflicts.  In this talk, I will describe the current architecture
and status of the Next-Link project and how Redux' is used to support 
conflict resolution in combination with design documentation.


Zeit: Mittwoch, 31.August 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. Dr. Hayward R. Alker: Research Possibilities Linking Artificial Intelligence to Conflict Early Warning Systems

1994-08-17T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. H. R. Alker, USA

1994-08-17T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Hayward R. ALKER
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA
USA


Research Possibilities Linking Artificial Intelligence
to Conflict Early Warning Systems
------------------------------------------------------


Zeit: Mittwoch, 17.August 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. Dr. Yves Kodratoff: The Comprehensibility Manifesto or "Comprehensibility in View of Industrial Applications"

1994-07-26T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Y. Kodratoff

1994-07-26T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Yves KODRATOFF
Directeur de recherche au CNRS
Orsay
France


The Comprehensibility Manifesto
or
"Comprehensibility in View of Industrial Applications"
------------------------------------------------------

When I had to prepare a talk on industrial applications of Machine
Learning, I wanted to underline the main result that showed the deep 
commonality among all these real world applications, how industrial 
constraints would force the academics to think differently. To my 
surprise, some applications request very simple algorithms, others 
use the most complex multistrategy approaches, some have plenty of 
noise, for some others the industrial constraint is to forbid any 
kind of noise, etc. In other words, industrial constraints are varied
to an unbelievable point. Only one thing is in common to all industrial
applications of Machine Learning: the users demanded comprehensibility 
of the results of the Machine Learning algorithms, and the greater the 
comprehensibility, all the more enthusiastic they have been. This is
why I suggest to stop giving absolute supremacy to measuring the 
complexity of the algorithms and the accuracy of their results. Let us 
be concerned also by the comprehensibility of the software and of the 
results. The problem is that we do not understand comprehensibility! 
This is why I propose to stop fleeing from the problem and define 
comprehensibility as an acknowledged research topic.

I will discuss some of the interdisciplinary issues and also some of the 
pure computer science problems linked to comprehensibility.

Zeit: Dienstag, 26.Juli 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dr. Gloria Mark: Collaboration and Hypermedia: The Use of Formal and Informal Structures in Supporting Group Coordination

1994-06-16T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. G. Mark

1994-06-16T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dr.Gloria MARK
Gesellschaft fuer Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung
Darmstadt


Collaboration and Hypermedia: The Use of Formal and
Informal Structures in Supporting Group Coordination
----------------------------------------------------

The DOLPHIN system supports the collaborative creation of hyperdocuments 
using both formal structures (typed nodes and links), as well as informal 
structures (free hand drawings and scribbles). Informal thoughts and 
interactions in a group play an important role in the group process. 
They can serve to help the group structure its thinking as well as 
provide the group with a means to record its process. The role of 
both types of structures in a group collaboration for a hypermedia 
document will be discussed, focusing on the impact they have on the 
group's coordination. The type of strategy that a group adopts, in 
conjunction with the use of the system features will also be discussed.


Zeit: Donnerstag, 16.Juni 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. Dr. Alfred Kobsa: Wissensbasierte Methoden zur Anpassung von interaktiven Softwaresystemen an den Benutzer

1994-06-14T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. A. Kobsa

1994-06-14T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Alfred KOBSA
Universitaet Konstanz


Wissensbasierte Methoden zur Anpassung von
interaktiven Softwaresystemen an den Benutzer
---------------------------------------------

Der Vortrag gibt zuerst einen Ueberblick darueber, wie interaktive 
Softwaresysteme im Laufe einer Interaktion mit einem Benutzer in 
begrenztem Umfang Annahmen ueber dessen Wissen, Ziele und Praeferenzen 
gewinnen und zur Anpassung des Interaktionsverhaltens an diesen Benutzer 
verwenden koennen. Daran anschliessend wird das Werkzeugsystem BGP-MS 
beschrieben, das es Software-Entwicklern erleichtern soll, Anwendungs-
systeme mit Komponenten zur Benutzermodellierung und zur Benutzeradaption
zu versehen. Zum Entwicklungszeitpunkt muss BGP-MS mit anwendungsab-
haengigem Benutzermodellierungswissen in bezug auf die Domaene und die 
erwarteten Benutzergruppen ausgestattet werden. Zum Anwendungszeitpunkt 
ist BGP-MS dann ein eigenstaendiger Prozess, der von der Anwendung 
Informationen ueber den Benutzer erhaelt, verschiedene Arten von Schluss-
folgerungen ueber ihn zieht, und die Anwendung mit den gegenwaertigen 
Annahmen ueber den Benutzer versorgt. Im Vortrag werden die einzelnen
Komponenten und deren Interaktion beschrieben und auf erste Anwendungen 
von BGP-MS im Bereich von benutzerwissensadaptiertem Hypertext und
interessensbasierter Informationspraesentation eingegangen. 


Zeit: Dienstag, 14.Juni 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. Dr. Gerhard Chroust: Software-Archäologie: Was hat Archäologie mit Software zu tun?

1994-06-09T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. G. Chroust

1994-06-09T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Univ.-Prof. Dr. Gerhard CHROUST
Systemtechnik und Automation
Johannes Kepler-Universitaet Linz 


SOFTWARE-ARCHAEOLOGIE
Was hat Archaeologie mit Software zu tun? 
-----------------------------------------

Software-Entwicklung befindet sich seit vielen Jahren in einer Krise. 
Das Service, die Wartung und die Adaptierung von bestehender Software 
bindet einen grossen Teil der Entwicklungsmannschaften (bis zu 80%) 
bei Software-Herstellern und DV-Abteilungen. Aus wirtschaftlichen 
und organisatorischen Gruenden ist aber ein komplettes Neuschreiben 
der existierenden Software ausgeschlossen. Dadurch hat sich in den 
letzten Jahren die Aufmerksamkeit staerker auf Aspekte der Verlaengerung 
der Verwendungsdauer und auf Wiederverwendung verlagert.

Und das bietet einen reizvollen Ansatz zu Vergleichen mit Archaeologie, 
wo man es ebenfalls mit Artefakten vergangener Zeiten zu tun hat, 
und wo (und diese Liste passt auch auf die Software):
- vieles alt und nicht brauchbar ist,
- manches sich ueber viele Jahre hinweg bewaehrt hat,
- die urspruenglichen Motive und Konzepte vergessen sind,
- die Entwicklungsingenieure nicht mehr gefragt werden koennen,
- Unterlagen nicht vorhanden oder unleserlich sind,
- vieles verborgen, vergessen und
- im Laufe der Zeit veraendert wurde.

Anhand von Bildern, hauptsaechlich ueber archaeologische Grabungen in 
Mesopotamien, werden die Grundkonzepte der Software-Wartung und 
Wiederverwendung demonstriert.

Als klassisches Beispiel fuer die Problematik des Reverse Engineering 
diente der Turm von Babel, von dem es mindestens ein Dutzend oft grund-
legend verschiedene Rekonstruktionsversuche gibt.


Zeit: Donnerstag, 9.Juni 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. Dr. Pattie Maes: Modeling Intelligent Agents that Assist and Entertain Users

1994-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. P. Maes, M. I. T., USA

1994-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Pattie MAES
The Media Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.)
Cambridge, USA


Modeling Intelligent Agents That Assist and Entertain Users
-----------------------------------------------------------

For the past 7 years I have been modeling and building intelligent 
autonomous agents. I have worked with different types of agents: 

* Robotic agents, such as the 6-legged insect-like robot "Genghis", 
  which I programmed to make it teach itself to walk,

* Computer animated agents, such as the agents of the ALIVE system, 
  which coexist and interact with users in a virtual reality, and 
  finally, 

* "Cyberspace" agents, or agents that perform transactions on 
  behalf of users in the computer and network world, for example, 
  agents that find articles that the user is interested in, or agents 
  that filter your email or schedule meetings on your behalf. 

I will give an overview of these different types of agents and the 
techniques used to develop them. I will illustrate the discussion 
with a lot of videotapes. I will conclude with my vision for the future 
of Human Computer Interaction: a world in which a person is surrounded 
by virtual characters that assist and entertain the user.


Zeit: Dienstag, 31.Mai 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  Hoersaal U18 im Juridicum, Wien 1, Schottenbastei 10-16

Prof. Dr. Daniel R. Montello: Empirically Evaluating AI Models of Human Spatial Knowledge

1994-05-24T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. D. R. Montello, USA

1994-05-24T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Daniel R. MONTELLO
University of California
Santa Barbara
USA


Empirically Evaluating AI Models of Human Spatial Knowledge
-----------------------------------------------------------

For the past couple of decades, one of the important areas of research 
and development in the artificial intelligence (AI) community has
concerned spatial reasoning and problem-solving. In the context of 
large-scale (environmental) space, some areas of continuing interest to
the AI community include robotic navigation and wayfinding, computerized 
cartography and GIS, vehicular navigation systems, and human-computer 
interface design. I distinguish between four distinct purposes of AI       
work: "human simulation", "human inspiration", "human needs", and "humans
be damned". I provide a brief overview of some of the approaches and 
models to spatial reasoning and problem-solving from the AI community. 
I then discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, 
from the perspective of a behavioral scientist. I will conclude by dis-
cussing some empirical evaluations of particular AI models and offering
some ideas about future prospects for interdisciplinary cooperation 
between behavioral scientists and AI researchers. 


Zeit: Dienstag, 24.Mai 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Ernst Buchberger: Einführung in World-Wide Web

1994-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Ernst Buchberger

1994-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                          WORLD-WIDE WEB SERVER
                          *********************


Sehr geehrte Dame, sehr geehrter Herr,

seit 11.Maerz 1994 besitzt unser Institut gemeinsam mit unserem 
korrespondierenden Universitaetsinstitut, dem Institut fuer Medizinische
Kybernetik und Artificial Intelligence (IMKAI), einen World-Wide Web 
Server.

Damit koennen u.a. alle Veranstaltungen, Informationen ueber unsere
Bibliothek mit ueber 30.000 Buechern und Fachartikeln, allgemeine Infor-
mationen ueber unsere Institute, Mitarbeiter, Projekte, etc. von jedem
Computer mit Internet-Anschluss abgefragt, bzw. die meisten unserer
Technical Reports sogar komplett abgerufen werden. Mehr als 700 Benutzer
aus 28 Laendern haben in dieser kurzen Zeit von dieser Moeglichkeit 
Gebrauch gemacht.

Derzeit gibt es mehr als 1500 WWW-Server. Taeglich kommt ein rundes 
Dutzend hinzu. Im WWW koennen Sie von Informationen ueber Forschungspro-
jekte, Daten der wichtigsten AI-Konferenzen, die Tragoedien Shakespeares
bis zum Plan der Pariser Metro oder dem Lachen von Francois Mitterrand 
die unterschiedlichsten Informationen finden.

Da Sie jetzt vielleicht mehr ueber World-Wide Web wissen wollen, bieten 
wir Ihnen 

am  Mittwoch, 4. Mai, 18:30 Uhr pktl.

eine    Einfuehrung in World-Wide Web

von     Univ.-Lektor Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Ernst Buchberger

im Seminarraum des Instituts fuer Medizinische Kybernetik und Artificial 
Intelligence an. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt wird bereits ein Informationsterminal 
im Vorraum des IMKAI installiert sein, an dem von Montag bis Donnerstag 
zwischen 9 und 18 Uhr und an Freitagen zwischen 9 und 17 Uhr die Moeglichkeit 
besteht, selbst im WWW zu navigieren.

Aufgrund der beschraenkten Teilnehmerzahl bitten wir um vorhergehende 
Anmeldung unter Tel. 53532810 oder email sec@ai.univie.ac.at. 

Mit freundlichen Gruessen,


o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl

Videos von 2 EMCSR'94-Plenarvortraegen

1994-04-21T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                 VIDEOS
                                 ******


Fuer jene Damen und Herren, denen es nicht moeglich war, die Plenar-
vortraege des 12th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research 
zu hoeren, bringen wir an folgenden Tagen eine Videoaufzeichnung der 
folgenden Vortraege:

    Donnerstag, 21.April 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.:
    Prof.Dr.Margaret Boden, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK: 
    "Artificial Intelligence and Creativity"

    Dienstag, 26.April 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.:
    Prof.Dr.Stephen Grossberg, Boston University, USA:
    "Neural Networks for Learning, Recognition, and Prediction"

Ort: OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Aufgrund der beschraenkten Anzahl der Sitzplaetze ersuchen wir um 
telefonische Voranmeldung unter 53532810 oder mittels e-mail 
(sec@ai.univie.ac.at).

Doz. Dr. Christoph Mandl: Lernen und Wissen von sozialen Systemen

1994-04-19T00:00:00+02:00

Doz. Dr. C. Mandl

1994-04-19T00:00:00+02:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Univ.-Doz.Dr.Christoph MANDL
Mandl, Luethi & Partner
Wien


Lernen und Wissen von sozialen Systemen
---------------------------------------

Mit der stetigen Dynamisierung des Umfeldes sozialer Systeme stellt 
sich auch in steigendem Masse die Frage, wie soziale Systeme lernen 
und sich Wissen aneignen. Die Hypothese, dass es genuegt, wenn alle 
Individuen von sozialen Systemen ueber ausreichendes Wissen verfuegen, 
damit das soziale System insgesamt etwas "weiss", erweist sich als 
nicht haltbar. Auch der Ansatz, ueber Standardsoftware Wissen in ein 
soziales System zu verpflanzen, ist nur bedingt erfolgreich. 
Erfahrungen, Gedanken und Analogien zu aehnlichen Fragestellungen 
im Bereich AI sind Gegenstand dieses Vortrages.


Zeit: Dienstag, 19.April 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

12th EMCSR 1994

1994-04-08T00:00:00+02:00

                              *          *       
                      *                          *

                *       TWELFTH EUROPEAN MEETING        *

              *                    ON                     *

                *    CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS RESEARCH   *

                      *       (EMCSR 1994)       *

                           April 5 - 8, 1994

                          UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA


        organized by the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies
                          in cooperation with
 Dept.of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, Univ.of Vienna
                                  and
             International Federation for Systems Research




Plenary lectures:
***************** 

    MARGARET BODEN (United Kingdom):
        "Artificial Intelligence and Creativity"

        STEPHEN GROSSBERG (USA):
    "Neural Networks for Learning, Recognition, and Prediction" 

    STUART A. UMPLEBY (USA):
    "Twenty Years of Second Order Cybernetics"


241 papers will be presented and discussed in the following symposia:
*********************************************************************

GENERAL SYSTEMS METHODOLOGY
    G.J.Klir (USA)

ADVANCES IN MATHEMATICAL SYSTEMS THEORY
    J.Miro (Spain), M.Peschel (Germany), F.Pichler (Austria)

FUZZY SYSTEMS, APPROXIMATE REASONING AND KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS
    C.Carlsson (Finland), K.-P.Adlassnig (Austria), E.P.Klement
    (Austria)

DESIGNING AND SYSTEMS, AND THEIR EDUCATION
    B.Banathy (USA), W.Gasparski (Poland), G.Goldschmidt 
    (Israel)

HUMANITY, ARCHITECTURE AND CONCEPTUALIZATION
    G.Pask (United Kingdom), G.de Zeeuw (Netherlands)

BIOCYBERNETICS AND MATHEMATICAL BIOLOGY
    L.M.Ricciardi (Italy)

SYSTEMS AND ECOLOGY
    F.J.Radermacher (Germany), K.Fedra (Austria)

CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS IN MEDICINE
    G.Gell (Austria), G.Porenta (Austria)

CYBERNETICS OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC SYSTEMS
    K.Balkus (USA), O.Ladanyi (Austria)

SYSTEMS, MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION
    G.Broekstra (Netherlands), R.Hough (USA)

CYBERNETICS OF COUNTRY DEVELOPMENT
    P.Ballonoff (USA), T.Koizumi (USA), S.A.Umpleby (USA)

COMMUNICATION AND COMPUTERS
    A M.Tjoa (Austria)

INTELLIGENT AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS
    J.Rozenblit (USA), H.Praehofer (Austria)

CYBERNETIC PRINCIPLES OF KNOWLEDGE DEVELOPMENT
    F.Heylighen (Belgium), S.A.Umpleby (USA)

CYBERNETICS, SYSTEMS AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
    M.Okuyama (Japan), H.Koizumi (USA)

ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS AND ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS
    S.Grossberg (USA), G.Dorffner (Austria)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE
    V.Marik (Czech Republic), R.Born (Austria)


TUTORIALS:
**********

A SYNTACTIC APPROACH TO HEURISTIC NETWORKS: LINGUISTIC GEOMETRY
    Prof.Boris Stilman, University of Colorado, Denver, USA

FUZZY SETS AND IMPRECISE BUT RELEVANT DECISIONS
    Prof.Christer Carlsson, Abo Akademi University, Abo, Finland

CONTEXTUAL SYSTEMS: A NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR KNOWLEDGE BASED SYSTEM
DEVELOPMENT
    Dr.Irina V. Ezhkova, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow

TWENTY YEARS OF SECOND ORDER CYBERNETICS
    Prof.Stuart A. Umpleby, George Washington University,
    Washington, D.C., USA


PROCEEDINGS: 
************ 

Trappl R.(ed.): CYBERNETICS AND SYSTEMS '94,
2 vols, 1911 pages, World Scientific Publishing, Singapore. 


FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: 
***************************************

    EMCSR'94 Secretariat
    c/o Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies
    Schottengasse 3
    A-1010 Vienna
    Austria
    Phone:  +43-1-53532810
    Fax:    +43-1-5320652
    E-mail: sec@ai.univie.ac.at

Dr. G. Dorffner: Neuronale Netze in der Anwendung - ein Projektbericht

1994-01-26T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. G. Dorffner

1994-01-26T00:00:00+01:00

Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Dipl.-Ing.Dr.Georg Dorffner
Universitaet Wien und
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence


Neuronale Netze in der Anwendung - ein Projektbericht
-----------------------------------------------------

Dieser Vortrag berichtet ueber das dieser Tage abgeschlossene ESPRIT-II-
Projekt NEUFODI ("Neural Networks for Forecasting and Diagnosis Appli-
cations") und seine wesentlichen Resultate. Das Projekt hatte eine 
Vertiefung des Wissens ueber Neuronale Netze in praktischen Anwendungen 
durch gleichzeitige Grundlagenforschung und Entwicklung mehrerer Anwen-
dungsprototypen zum Ziel. Dieses Ziel ist durch fuenf systematische 
Vergleichsstudien, vier erfolgreiche neue Anwendungen (im Bereich der 
Fehlerdiagnose und Vorhersage) und eine Reihe von neu entwickelten 
Netzwerkmodellen und -methoden erreicht worden. Neben einer Darstellung 
der Erfahrungen mit der Kooperation innerhalb des Konsortiums (5 Partner
aus 4 Laendern) wird ueber den Nutzen berichtet, den ein Anwender aus 
diesem "NEUFODI-Paket" und aus einer Zusammenarbeit mit dem OeFAI als 
einem der NEUFODI-Partner ziehen kann.


Zeit: Mittwoch, 26.Jaenner 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFai, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. Dr. M. Wabl: Können wir länger leben als Methusalem?

1994-01-18T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. M. Wabl

1994-01-18T00:00:00+01:00

       Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik (OeSGK)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
                       Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                VORTRAG
                                *******


Prof.Dr.Matthias Wabl
University of California, San Francisco
und
Institut fuer Immunologie, Basel


Koennen wir laenger leben als Methusalem?
-----------------------------------------

Niemand will alt sein - aber (fast) jeder moechte alt werden. Koennen 
wir die "Schallmauer" von etwa hundert Jahren durchbrechen? Es gibt zwei
populaere Theorien fuer die Lebensspanne einer biologischen Spezies. 
Die eine Theorie spricht von einer (Lebens-)Uhr, die ablaeuft; dieses 
Modell wird wohl von den meisten Menschen im Alltagsleben gepflegt. Die
andere Theorie sieht den Grund fuer den Tod im Altern, das eine Folge
der Anhaeufung von Fehlern (Mutationen) ist. Der letztere Standpunkt 
wird im vorliegenden Vortrag eingenommen. Im konkreten Teil gibt es 
einen kleinen Ausflug in das Reich der Mutationen und der experimen-
tellen Fragestellungen. Zum Schluss wird diskutiert, ob Methusalem 
Konkurrenz bekommen wird.


Zeit: Dienstag, 18.Jaenner 1994, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  Oesterreichische Studiengesellschaft fuer Kybernetik,
      Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.

Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl: Mit Artificial Intelligence gegen den Krieg

1993-12-07T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Axel Pinz: Bildverstehen

1993-11-29T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl: Cyberpunk und Cyberspace - technologische und soziale Aspekte

1993-10-26T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Dr. Yousri El Fattah: Learning for Diagnosis and Repair

1993-10-13T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. F. J. Radermacher: Servicesysteme im alltäglichen Lebensumfeld als Gegenstand von Forschungen im KI-Bereich

1993-09-28T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Peter Mertens: Expertensysteme im Dienste des Kunden

1993-09-22T00:00:00+02:00

Alexander Grunewald: Bindung von visueller Information durch Synchronisation von Oszillatoren

1993-08-10T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Michael Gasser: Towards Connectionist Language Acquisition

1993-07-22T00:00:00+02:00

Dr.-Ing. Peter Protzel: Neuronale Netze und Fuzzy Logik am Bayerischen Forschungszentrum für Wissensbasierte Systeme (FORWISS)

1993-07-13T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Gerhard Widmer: Die rationalen Grundlagen des musikalischen Ausdrucks: Ein AI-Modell

1993-06-21T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Maass: Über die Theorie des Lernens auf Neuronalen Netzen

1993-06-08T00:00:00+02:00

Dipl.-Ing. Erich Prem: Behaviour-Based Robotics und ihre Rolle für die Zukunft der AI

1993-06-03T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Alexander Narin'yani: The Russian Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence

1993-05-12T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Frank Pfetsch: Konflikt und Konfliktbewältigung

1993-05-06T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. J. Ross Quinlan: Predicting Continuous Values: A Case Study

1993-03-30T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Werner Rammert: Braucht die Technikfolgenabschätzung eine Integration in die KI-Forschung

1993-03-22T00:00:00+01:00

Doc. Dr. Jozef Kelemen: From the Bottom of Behavior-Based Robots up to the Rational Agents

1993-01-27T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Takayuki Dan Kimura: KUMON Machine: Learning Math with Silicon Paper

1993-01-13T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Irina V. Ezhkova: Contextual Systems: A Tool for Investigation of Fuzzy Environments

1992-12-16T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Klaus Donner: Geometrische Modellierung am Beispiel Bildverarbeitender Diagnosesysteme

1992-12-10T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Yves Kodratoff: Application of Machine Learning to Vision

1992-11-26T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Marta Franova: Constructive Matching - A User-Independent Methodology for Constructing Programs from Formal Specifications: Applications to Robotics

1992-11-24T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Thomas Bernold: New Realities - Neue Wirklichkeiten

1992-11-19T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Wojciech Gasparski: Systems Approach as a Style

1992-11-11T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Mag. Herbert Wiklicky: Synthese und Analyse Neuronaler Netzwerke

1992-10-13T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Paolo Petta: Das Internet als "Docuverse für alle BenutzerInnen"

1992-09-29T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. ir. Daniel Dubois: The Hyperincursive Fractal Machine

1992-09-22T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Gottfried Mayer-Kress: Chaos and Crises in International Systems

1992-07-29T00:00:00+02:00

Bryan Loyall: The Oz Project at Carnegie Mellon

1992-07-27T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Pamela McCurdock: Kissin' Cousins: New Art and Literature in the Spirit of a New Science: Complex Adaptive Systems

1992-07-13T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Ernst von Glasersfeld: Entwicklungen im radikalen Konstruktivismus

1992-07-09T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Bo Goeranzon: Skill and Technology

1992-06-15T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Julian Hilton: Que Viva Multimedia?

1992-06-01T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. John Mylopoulos: Representing and Using Non-Functional Requirements

1992-05-26T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Alexander Borgida: Description Logics - A Knowledge Base Management Perspective OR Terminological Logics are not just for the "FlightlessBirds"

1992-05-26T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Oliviero Stock: Natural Language and Exploration of an Information Space: the ALFresco Interactive System

1992-05-15T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Martin Wirsing: Modulare und wiederverwendbare Spezifikationen

1992-05-11T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl: Case-Based Reasoning: Hit, Hype, oder beides?

1992-03-31T00:00:00+02:00

David Rokeby: Perception and Feedback Systems in Interactive Art

1992-03-23T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Sigrid Unseld: Erkennung von Trends in Krisen und Konflikten: Eine computerunterstützte Methode

1992-01-29T00:00:00+01:00

Hans Haugeneder: Eine Parserarchitektur für koordinierte Strukturen: Parsing ohne grammatische Spezifikation

1992-01-27T00:00:00+01:00

Ivan M. Havel: On Transdisciplinary Themes

1992-01-23T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Otthein Herzog: Wissensrepräsentation und Wissensverarbeitung als Software-Engineering-Konzepte

1992-01-13T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Irina Ezhkova: Contextual Technology for Supporting Decision-Making

1991-12-16T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Georg Dorffner: Autonome Agenten und Kognition am Beispiel Sprache

1991-12-12T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Wolfgang Banzhaf: Die Forschungsaktivitäten der Fa. Mitsubishi Electric im Bereich Neurocomputing

1991-12-05T00:00:00+01:00

Margot Pilz und Mag. Martina Molnar Art Aided Dialogue

1991-11-20T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Wolfgang Slany: Artificial Intelligence Trends in Japan 1991

1991-11-13T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Jeffrey Johnson: A Universal Mathematics of Complex Human and Physical Systems?

1991-10-30T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Gerrit Broekstra: Organizational Closure and the Quantum View of Organizations: Towards a New Theory of Corporate Self-Renewal

1991-10-10T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Jaakko Hintikka: Independence-friendly Logic as a Medium of Information Representation and Reasoning about Knowledge

1991-10-02T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Rolf Pfeifer: The New Age of the Fungus Eater: Comments on AI and Emotion

1991-09-16T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Ryzsard S. Michalski: The Inferential Theory of Learning: Basic Assumptions and a Review of Issues

1991-08-01T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Stuart A. Umpleby: The Science of Cybernetics and the Cybernetics of Science

1991-07-23T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Ranan Banerji: How Does One Know If and When One Has Learned?

1991-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Uwe Haass: FORWISS - ein KI-Zentrum mit befristetem Auftrag - wird KI bald passè sein?

1991-06-13T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Miroslav Kubat: Increasing the Efficiency of Inductive Learning with Forgetting and Aging of Knowledge

1991-06-10T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. N. M. Thalmann: Synthetic Actors: The Simulation of Human Motion

1991-05-29T00:00:00+02:00

Univ.-Doz. Dr. Harald Trost: Das Lexikon und die morphologische Verarbeitung in natürlichsprachigen Systemen

1991-05-27T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Rainer Maria Köppl: Digitales Theater

1991-05-23T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Alain Colmerauer: Constraint Logic Programming

1991-05-22T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. M. Jarke: ConceptTalk: Kooperationsunterstützun g in Softwareumgebungen

1991-05-14T00:00:00+02:00

Florian Brody: How Virtual is Reality?

1991-04-18T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Miroslav Benesovsky and Dr. Martin Smidek: Programming Language WANDER

1991-04-11T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Rebecca Allen: Computer-Generated Human Character in an Artificial World (mit Videos)

1991-03-21T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Marvin Minsky: The Future Merging of Science, Psychology, and Art

1991-02-21T00:00:00+01:00

Univ.-Doz. DI Dr. Christoph Mandl: Informatikinduzier te Störungen in sozialen Systemen

1991-01-23T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Igor Mozetic, DI Dr. Christian Holzbaur: Controlling the Complexity in Model-based Diagnosis

1991-01-21T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Vladimir Marik: Experience in Constructing and Use of Diagnostic Rule-based Expert Systems, Dr. Olga Stepankova: Artificial Intelligence Research in Czechoslovakia

1991-01-09T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Math. Frank Piron: Die semantische Behandlung von Wortgruppen "Natürliche Arten"

1990-12-17T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Georg Dorffner: NEUFODI: Neural Networks for Forecasting and Diagnosis Applications (ESPRIT-Projekt)

1990-12-10T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl: AI-Forschung in Österreich

1990-10-29T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Fausto Giunchiglia: A Theory of Abstraction

1990-10-24T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Britta Schinzel: Frauen und Informatik

1990-09-27T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Paul Churchland: Some Feyerabendian Themes in Neurocomputational Form

1990-09-17T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Paul Smolensky: Harmonic Grammar: A Connectionist Theory of Linguistic Well-Formedness

1990-09-03T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Sundra T. Kumara: AI-Based Manufacturing Research at Penn State

1990-08-30T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Stevan Harnad: Minds, Machines, and Searle

1990-07-02T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Mirsad Hadzikadic: Incremental Concept Formation: The INC2 Machine Learning System

1990-06-12T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Fred Karlsson: A Language-Independent Model for Morpho-Syntactic Parsing of Running Text

1990-06-11T00:00:00+02:00

Dipl.-Psych. Zoltan Schreter: Attention, Discrimination Learning, Arousal and Unspecific Modulatory Effects in the Brain: A Connectionist Model on Their Relation

1990-05-21T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. F. J. Radermacher: KI und Modellierung

1990-05-03T00:00:00+02:00

Robert Stein: The Nature of Communication (or You Never Have Enough Bandwidth)

1990-04-27T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Julian Hilton: Pygmalion und der Mythos der intelligenten Maschine

1990-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

Florian Brody: TED2 - Technology Entertainment Design

1990-03-28T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Vahrenkamp: Erfahrungen mit der Technologiefolgenabschätzung im Deutschen Bundestag

1990-03-22T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Stuart A. Umpleby: The Evolution of Cybernetics

1990-03-13T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Gerhard Mehlsam: Automatisches Erzeugen von Klassifikationskriterien

1990-01-23T00:00:00+01:00

Mag. Dr. Gerhard Hanappi: Social Intelligence Support - ein Forschungsprojekt

1990-01-18T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Christian Holzbaur: Metastrukturen als Basis für die Implementierung Constraint-basierter Inferenzmechanismen

1990-01-15T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Gerhard Widmer: Inkrementelles wissensintensives Lernen: Eine Erweiterung der Bergadano & Giordana-Methode für dynamische Lernsituationen

1989-12-11T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Heinz Hübner: Technikwirkungsanalyse als Instrument einer selektiven Innovationspolitik

1989-11-23T00:00:00+01:00

Univ.-Doz. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Gerhard Chroust: Vorgehensmodel le der Softwareentwicklung: Probleme und Herausforderungen

1989-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Inform. Günther Cyranek: Artificial Intelligence und Dritte Welt

1989-10-23T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Igor Mozetic: Hierarchical Model-based Diagnosis

1989-10-11T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Helmut Horacek: Das natürlichsprachige Beratungssystem WISBER

1989-10-02T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Robert Hecht-Nielsen: Spatio-temporal Attention-focusing by Expectation Feedback

1989-09-07T00:00:00+02:00

Erik C. Thomsen: Towards a General Information Element

1989-08-23T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. James G. Miller: Austria and The University of The World

1989-07-12T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Tuncer Ören: Essence of Artificial Intelligence in Software Engineering

1989-06-15T00:00:00+02:00

Dipl.-Inform. Norbert Reithinger: POPEL - ein inkrementelles Generierungssystem.

1989-06-13T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Jon Sticklen: Task Specific Problem Solving Architectures: Motivation, Current Status, and Future Promise

1989-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Ernst von Glasersfeld: Geschichte des Konstruktivismus und warum er radikal sein muss

1989-05-23T00:00:00+02:00

Dipl.-Inf. Jürgen Allgayer: Erweiterung eines Netzwerkformalismus um Mengen

1989-03-16T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Ernst Buchberger und Dipl.-Ing. Markus Kommenda: HAL Revisited: Die Entwicklung eines Concept-to-Speech Systems für das Deutsche

1989-03-14T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Werner Horn: Integration von assoziativem und kausalem Wissen in einem medizinischen Expertensystem

1989-01-26T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Gerrit Broekstra: Creating Intelligent Organizations

1988-12-07T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Ingo Althöfer: Theoretische Modelle zur Suche in Spielbäumen

1988-12-05T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Gerhard Widmer: Flexibles, wissensbasiertes maschinelles Lernen durch Integration deduktiver und induktiver Lernmechanismen

1988-11-08T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek: Technologie, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Ein Forschungsprogramm des IIASA

1988-09-27T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Mary A. Foulkes: Design, Methods, and Baseline Characteristics in the Stroke Data Bank and in the Traumatic Coma Data Bank

1988-09-06T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Asa Rudstroem: AI at Stockholm University

1988-08-06T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Stuart A. Umpleby: The Cooperative Construction of Realities: Conversations between American and Soviet Scientists

1988-06-20T00:00:00+02:00

Dipl.-Ing. Renate Pitrik: Strukturierung in Software-, Datenbank- und wissensbasierten Systemen: Konzepte, Spezifikation, Toolunterstützung

1988-06-16T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Henning Herrestad and Dr. Dag Syvert Maesel: The F*KUS Project

1988-04-28T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Luc Steels: Artificial Intelligence and Complex Dynamics

1988-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Karl E. Kürten: Kritische Phänomene und Selbstorganisation in neuronalen Zufallsnetzwerken und Zellularautomaten

1988-02-24T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Jürgen Maass: Die mathematisierte Welt im schwarzen Kasten - die black box als Medium der Mathematisierung

1987-12-03T00:00:00+01:00

Jürgen Claus: Expertensystem-Künstler: Kunst - Elektronik - Forschung

1987-11-11T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Michael McRobbie: On the Computational Investigation of Logical Space: An ANU Perspective

1987-10-08T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Thomas Bernold: Computer und Telekommunikation: Dimensionen einer unsichtbaren Revolution

1987-09-02T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Robert Hecht-Nielsen: Neurocomputer Applications

1987-08-25T00:00:00+02:00

Dipl.-Ing. Georg Dorffner: Eine Neo-Linguistische Theorie des Sprachverstehens

1987-08-05T00:00:00+02:00

Dipl.-Inf. Gudula Retz-Schmidt: Bildverstehen in der Künstlichen Intelligenz.

1987-06-15T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Allan Janik: Discussing Technologies

1987-05-25T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Gert Pfurtscheller: Untersuchung kongnitiver Hirnleistungen mit Hilfe des dynamischen EEG-Mappings.

1987-05-20T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Leonard Talmy: Non-Reductionist Properties of Language.

1987-05-13T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Ingela Josefson: Wissen und Erfahrung.

1987-04-28T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Stein Braten: The Third Position: Between Artificial Intelligence and Autopoetic Reduction.

1987-03-19T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Werner Svoboda: Erfahrungen mit fortschrittlichen System-Design-Methoden

1987-01-15T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. M. Wirsing: Algebraische Spezifikation: Semantik, Implementierung und Transformation

1986-12-03T00:00:00+01:00

Doz. Dr. Stanislaw Topinski: Automatische Analyse des Belastungselektrokardiogramms unter Anwendung von nichtklassischen Kriterien.

1986-10-07T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Donald Michie: Inductive Programming

1986-08-22T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl: Forschung und Lehre in Artificial Intelligence.

1986-04-23T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Franz Pichler: Probleme der Systemtheorie mit Anwendungen in der Informationstechnik

1986-03-17T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Axel Pinz: Bildverstehen am Beispiel des Vision Expert Systems "VES"

1986-02-25T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Kurt Fedra: Modellgestützte Entscheidungshilfe für sozio-technische und Umweltprobleme

1986-02-19T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Math. Dr. Heinz Schwärtzel: Industrielle Nutzung wissensbasierter Systeme.

1986-01-30T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Gerold Porenta: Computermodelle extrapyramidaler Erkrankungen.

1985-12-12T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Helmut Kirchner: Roboterkalibrierung und Störungsrechnung

1985-12-02T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. R. Banerji: Recent Progress in Machine Learning

1985-06-24T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Elohim: Cybernetics and Systems for the Progress of Less Developed Countries

1985-06-19T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Tuncer Ören: Many Facets of Simulation (A Taxonomy of Traditional and Artificial Intelligence Aspects)

1985-04-24T00:00:00+02:00

Doz. Dr. Janos Acs: Zur Anwendung des Risk Management in der strategischen Planung

1985-02-27T00:00:00+01:00

Peter Hoffmann: Managen wie die Natur

1984-12-12T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Henri Wermus: Ein Modell für kognitive Prozesse an Hand der Ergebnisse der Piaget'schen Psychogenese

1984-12-05T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Len Troncale: Linkage Propositions between Seventy-Five Systems Concepts: Towards a "System" of Systems Concepts

1984-11-28T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl: Artificial Intelligence für den Krieg! Artificial Intelligence für den Frieden?

1984-11-06T00:00:00+01:00

Doz. Dr. Helmut Kirchner: Part Recognition, Part Inspection, Part Location.

1984-06-13T00:00:00+02:00

Professor Dennis L. Meadows: Techniques for Implementing the Results of Computer Models

1984-06-06T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Stuart Umpleby: A Global Strategy for Human Development

1984-05-30T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Masaoki Komata: Equipment-Life Management System for Large Plants

1984-05-28T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Ernst Braun: Technologiepolitik

1984-05-23T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Richard Duke: Games for Senior Managers: Three Case Studies.

1984-02-22T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Susan Marcus: Visualizing Information Graphics for Complex Systems.

1984-01-20T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl:

1984-01-12T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Adolf Adam: I Ching und Kabbala als Informationssysteme.

1983-11-23T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Manfred Zumtobel: Erfahrungen mit der Innovationsberatung.

1983-11-16T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl: Zukunft und Auswirkungen der Artificial Intelligence

1983-07-20T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. James Grier Miller: Applications of General Living Systems Theory.

1983-07-13T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Stuart Umpleby: Toward the Cooperative Development of an Epistemology for Cooperation

1983-06-22T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. M. Karpovsky: Spectral Methods for Design and Testing of Binary and Multivalued Logical Networks.

1983-06-20T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Tuncer Ören: Structured Representation of Algorithms and Programs: An Improvement over Nassi-Schneiderman Diagrams

1983-06-14T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. John Casti: Surprises, Catastrophes and Model Complexity

1983-06-08T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Witold Jacak: Videosensorgeführte adaptive Steuerung für Industrieroboter

1983-05-26T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Yves Kodratoff: Completion of Re-write Systems and Program Synthesis from Specifications

1983-04-20T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Ronald M. Lee: Expert vs. Management Decision Support Systems

1983-02-23T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Manfred Peschel: Wachstumsdynamik und Strukturbildung

1983-02-09T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Tibor Vasko: Innovation, Structural Change and Long Waves

1982-11-03T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. David Berlinsky: Models of the World: Philosophical Perspectives and Problems

1982-10-20T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Roger Wets: Stochastische Optimierung: Eine Einführung durch Beispiele

1982-05-26T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Adi Shamir: New Cryptography: A Survey.

1982-05-25T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Walter Lowen: Human Information Processing as a Model for Intelligent Robots

1982-05-10T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Lars Bergmann: "Small Economies"

1982-05-05T00:00:00+02:00

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Kaindl: Grundlegende Aspekte der heuristischen Programmierung

1982-04-28T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Anatol Rapoport: Gegenüberstellung von 2 Ansätzen zur Systemtheorie.

1982-03-17T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Mag. Alfred Kobsa: Künstliche-Intelligenz -Forschung und Psychologie.

1982-03-08T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. DDr. Curt Christian: Kurt Gödel: Seine Bedeutung für die Mathematik, Logik und Informatik.

1982-03-04T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Andras Pellionisz: A Tensor Model of the Cerebellum

1982-03-02T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Hieronymus Gruber: System, Interpreter, Implementierung - neue mathematische Konzepte als Grundlage einer allgemeinen Technologie

1982-02-17T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Ad van Rotterdam: Relative Contributions of Intracortical and Thalamo-Cortical Processes on the Generation of Alpha Rhythm Revealed by Partial Coherence.

1982-02-03T00:00:00+01:00

Univ.-Lektor Paul E. Martin: Ein Systemansatz zur Steuerung und Vereinfachung von Informationsstrukturen.

1982-01-20T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Johannes Retti: Knowledge Engineering (Modellbildung und Wissensverarbeitung).

1982-01-11T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. H. Maurer: Bildschirmtext-Computerzugriff für jedermann.

1981-12-15T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. John Casti: Mathematical System Theory and System Modeling.

1981-12-10T00:00:00+01:00

Mike Busboom: Neue Wege der Kommunikation für Sehbehinderte durch Mikroelektronik

1981-11-11T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Werner Horn: Methoden der Artificial Intelligence.

1981-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Johann Millendorfer: Hemmfaktoren bei der Entwicklung komplexer Systeme

1981-11-04T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Richard Mattesich: Über Beziehungen zwischen Informations- und Zielbegriffen.

1981-10-12T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Manfred Peschel: Entgegen einer Systemtheorie für Wachstumsprozesse

1981-10-07T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Ingeborg Steinacker: Artificial Intelligence - Intelligente Leistungen dummer Maschinen.

1981-10-05T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Norman T. J. Bailey: The Simplification of Compartmental Models Infectious Disease Dynamics

1981-08-05T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Judea Pearl: The Complexity and Quality of Game-Playing by Machines

1981-07-22T00:00:00+02:00

Richard Zerner: Gitarrenkonzert

1981-06-25T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Bela Banathy: Design in the Context of Social Systems

1981-06-09T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Richard S. Caputo: The Solar West Europe Study

1981-05-26T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Pranas Zunde: Semiotische Aspekte der Modellierung am Beispiel von Informationssystemen

1981-05-20T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Georgio Leonardi: Limits of the rationality paradigm in customers spatial choice behavior

1981-05-06T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Adolf Hübner: Der Energiezustand 'Elektron' als autoreproduktiver Regelkreis: Eine sprachanalytische Beschreibung

1981-04-23T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. John Beaumont: Urban Structure: An Exploratory Application of Q-Analysis in Relation to Central Place Theory.

1981-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Horst Wedde: Modellierung der Kooperation partiell autonomer Systemkomponenten mit Hilfe von Interaktionssystemen

1981-04-08T00:00:00+02:00

Univ.-Ass. Dr. Werner Schimanovich: Computer-Spiele

1981-03-25T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Bernd Schmeikal: Subjekt-Objekt-Relationen

1981-03-18T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. D. F. Costello: Issues Surrounding Intellectual Property Management in United States Colleges and Universities

1981-03-12T00:00:00+01:00

Mr. Alec Lee, Area Chairman, Management and Technology, IIASA: A Command and Control System--Twenty-five Years After

1981-01-20T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Andrzej Wierzbicki: System and Decision Sciences Area at IIASA - A General Overview and an Example of Research Activities

1981-01-14T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Manfred Peschel: Polyoptimierung als Entscheidungshilfe für industrielle Probleme

1980-12-18T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Giandomenico Majone: Comparative Perspectives in Health Policy: The Case of Occupational Health Standards

1980-12-03T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schleidt: Analyse von Verhaltensmustern mit Hilfe von Mustererkennungs-Algorithmen

1980-11-27T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Bernd Reusch: Begriffliche Zusammenhänge zwischen Kryptologie und Informatik

1980-11-18T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. H. R. Atkin: The Methodology of Q-Analysis.

1980-07-17T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Judea Pearl: GODDESS: A Goal-directed Decision-support system.

1980-07-08T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Vojtech Licko: Rate Sensing in Biological Control

1980-07-03T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. George J. Klir: Reconstructability Analysis.

1980-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. Gerard deZeeuw: What knowledge will justify 'better' action.

1980-06-26T00:00:00+02:00

Prof. Dr. George E. Lasker: Cybernetic Model of Man.

1980-06-24T00:00:00+02:00

Dr. Carl Hammer: Die Zukunft der Datenverarbeitung: Der Versuch einer Vorhersage

1980-03-20T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Nicholas V. Findler: Recent Trends in Artificial Intelligence

1980-03-17T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Franz Pichler: Datenschutz mit elektronischen kryptographischen Verfahren.

1980-01-29T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Giandomenico Majone: The Craft of Systems Analysis.

1980-01-15T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Werner Horn: Computerunterstuetzte Diagnose und Therapie: Krankheitsmodelle als Anwendung der Artificial Intelligence.

1979-12-17T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Michael Dempster: Some Reflexions on Mental Modelling.

1979-12-12T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Ryszard Jakubowski: Hierarchical Description and Recognition of Patterns for Purposes of Designing.

1979-10-11T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. John M. Richardson: Quantitative Characterization of Materials.

1979-08-20T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Manfred Peschel:Dynamische Probleme der Evolution.

1979-08-09T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Werner u. Dr. Elisabeth Leinfellner: Systemtheorie und Semantik.

1979-08-02T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Maria Nowakowska: When is a Risky Decision better than a Safe One?

1979-07-06T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Gordon Pask: Origins of Distinction.

1979-07-05T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Rene Thom: Quantum formalism as expression of intersubjective symmetry breaking.

1979-07-03T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Ferenc Sebestyen:On Space Domain Analysis of Biopotentials.

1979-06-27T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Judea Pearl: Domain-independent Decision-aiding Systems.

1979-06-21T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. R. Tomlinson: Management Problems Arising from Technological Development.

1979-06-20T00:00:00+01:00

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Hans Millendorfer: Mechanismen der langfristigen Entwicklung des energie- und informationsverarbeitenden Systems "Gesellschaft"

1979-06-13T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Dr. Joseph Weizenbaum: Was sind und sollen Computer in der Medizin.

1979-06-08T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. Karl Trincher: Zur Thermodynamik der biologischen Evolution.

1979-06-05T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. B. Schmeikal: Die zerbrochene Ganzheit oder Die synergetische Struktur der Gesellschaft.

1979-05-22T00:00:00+01:00

Prof. Jerzy Jaron: Teleologische Systeme

1979-05-15T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. R. Maderthaner: Psychokybernetik.

1979-05-02T00:00:00+01:00

Dr. R. Cavallo: A Methodological Framework for Social System Investigation.

1979-02-21T00:00:00+01:00