Organised by BCS SGAI: The British Computer Society Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence (an ECCAI Member Society)

The scope of the conference comprises the whole range of AI technologies and application areas. AI-2006 reviews recent technical advances in AI technologies and to show how these advances have been applied to solve business problems. Key features of AI-2006 are:

• The Technical Stream presents the best of recent developments in AI, covering a wide range of technical areas.
• The Application Stream is the largest annual showcase in Europe of real applications using AI technology.
• The best papers will be published in a special issue of the journal Knowledge Based Systems.
• The Poster Session is a forum for disseminiating new developments and latest work in progress, especially suited to MSc and PhD students.
• Prizes for Best Paper in each stream and Best Poster.
• The programme also includes tutorials and workshops to provide greater depth in selected topics.
• The Machine Intelligence (MI) competition exhibts working systems that are a significant step toward machine intelligence.
• UKCBR11, the 11th UK CBR Workshop, will be co-located with AI-2006.
• The conference qualifies for the IEE and BCS CPD schemes.
• AI-2006 will be held at Peterhouse College in Cambridge.
• In addition to the formal sessions, the conference programme includes a welcome reception and a Gala Dinner.

AI-2006 offers a valuable opportunity to keep up to date with developments in AI and to share experiences in the practical issues of developing AI systems.

Call for Contributions

Contributions are invited in the form of papers of up to fourteen A4 pages presenting original work in AI. Contributions are welcome to two streams, and a parallel poster session.

Technical Stream:

Areas of interest include (but are not restricted to): knowledge based systems; knowledge engineering; semantic web; constraint satisfaction; intelligent agents; machine learning; model based reasoning; verification and validation of AI systems; natural language understanding; speech-enabled systems; case based reasoning; neural networks; genetic algorithms; data mining and knowledge discovery in databases; robotics and pervasive computing.

Application Stream:

Case studies are welcomed describing the application of AI to real-world problems. Papers in recent years have covered all application domains, including commerce, manufacturing and government, and everymajor AI technique. In addition to case studies and specificapplications of AI, we would welcome papers that discuss issues such as managing the transfer from research to production of AI- based products. Papers are selected to highlight critical areas of success (and failure) and to present the benefits and lessons of value to other developers. Submitted papers should make these points clear. Guidance notes for Application Stream authors are available from the website.

Poster Session:

The Poster Session is intended for the presentation of work which meets the high standards of AI-2006, but which is more topical and preliminary than the work presented in the main two streams. It is an excellent forum for disseminiating new developments and latest work in progress, especially suited to MSc and PhD students.

Papers submitted to the Technical and Application streams will be automatically considered for poster presentation if they fall short of the standards for oral presentation.

For further details, including how to submit, see http://www.bcs-sgai.org/ai2006/

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The field of Artificial Immune Systems is one of the more recent biologically inspired approaches to emerge from computer science. The natural immune system is an adaptive learning system that employs many parallel and complementary mechanisms for self-regulating processes and defense against foreign pathogens. It is a distributed system, capable of constructing and maintaining a dynamical and structural identity and capable of learning to identify previously unseen invaders and remembering what it has learnt. Numerous immune algorithms now exist, based on processes identified within human immune systems. These computational techniques have many potential applications, such as in adaptive distributed control, machine learning, pattern recognition, fault detection, computer security, optimization, and distributed system design.

The aims of ICARIS are to strengthen this emerging research area by exploring different immunological mechanisms and their relation to information processing, system design, and problem solving. The conference will provide a great opportunity for presenting and disseminating the latest work in the field of Artificial Immune Systems and related areas, and continues to be the only conference dedicated entirely to the field of AIS.

A very special session will gather famous theoretical immunologists for a groundbreaking debate. These immunologists are: Antonio Coutinho, Melvin Cohn, Irun Cohen and Zvi Grossman

The conference will have four streams:

• Theoretical Stream: We would like specially for this conference to encourage papers dedicated to computer simulations of real immunology.
• Application Stream: For practical "AIS Success Story" applications in industry, commerce, arts, and academia.
• Technical Stream: For work undertaken, with clear results obtained.
• Conceptual Stream: For discussion papers without results, work in progress papers etc.

Conference Chairs:

• Hugues Bersini, IRIDIA, ULB, Belgium
• Jorge Carneiro, Instituto Gulbenkian, Portugal

For submission instructions please see http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~bersini/Icaris/

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This workshop aims to bring together biologists and computer scientists with an interest in studying the immune system, algorithms inspired by it, and applications of such algorithms. We are particularly interested in encouraging interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation, but welcome all work in these areas. We also hope the workshop will prove of interest to those in related areas (such as evolutionary computation and artificial life) unfamiliar with immune systems.

Artificial and natural immune systems are both currently very active areas of research. Given that artificial immune systems are inspired by their counterparts in nature, it is not unreasonable to look to nature for further inspiration. The flow of ideas can, however, proceed in the other direction, with immune simulations producing hypotheses and evidence for the function of natural immune systems.

For submission instructions please see http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~marshall/ais/ais.html

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Sponsors: The University of East Anglia and The British Computer Society's Specialist Group on AI (BCS-SGAI)

Aims and Objectives: This one day symposium, which will be hosted by UEA, Norwich and held in the prestigious John Innes Conference Centre, is intended to provide a forum for discussion, dissemination and exchange of ideas between practitioners and researchers working within the broad field of Knowledge Discovery and Data mining (KDD). To this end a number of key people will be presenting a "state of the art" review of much of the KDD research work currently in progress within UK institutions. Following the success of UK KDD'05, hosted by the University of Liverpool, it is hoped that the symposium will once again attract delegates, both national and international, who are either directly involved in KDD or have a significant interest in the subject, and that the meeting will consequently afford an opportunity for lively debate and discussion. The symposium will end with a plenary session to discuss future directions and opportunities.

Organising Committee:

• George Smith (Chair) University of East Anglia
• Frans Coenen University of Liverpool
• Alex Freitas University of Kent

For further details including submission instructions please see http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/Research/kdd/ukkdd06/ukkdd06.html

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Special Session on Recent Developments in Artificial Immune Systems organized by Jonathan Timmis http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/jtimmis and Emma Hart http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~emmah

Scope: The immune system is a remarkably complex interacting network of cells. There are many day to day challenges facing the immune system, such as the vast array of stimuli that can infect the host, the continual bombardment of such stimuli (there is no resting for the immune system) and the countless interactions that occur with other processes and systems within the host (such as the neural systems and endocrine or hormonal systems). The remarkable ability if the immune system to react to these stimuli (antigens) and remove the majority of them from our system has fascinated researchers over the years. This immune system has inspired researchers in the area of Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) over the past 10 years to develop a wide range of algorithms inspired by various aspects of immunology. Within AIS, there is no one standard AIS algorithm, however, there are a number of basic flavours of AIS algorithms that draw their inspiration from certain processes within the immune system. To date there are clonal selection, immune network, bone marrow and negative selection algorithms. There are many variations on these algorithms, but there is at least some basic acceptance, for example, of what a clonal selection algorithm consists of and how it should work.

The aim of this session is to consolidate state of the art in AIS, but also to encourage the publication of more 'mould breaking' AIS research. Particular encouragement is given to the submission of applications of AIS in industrial settings and advances in theoretical aspects of AIS. To maintain the interdisciplinarity of AIS, the session encourages the submission of immune modelling results using both computational and mathematical modelling techniques that can inform the development of AIS. In addition, we welcome position papers which provide a discussion of current "hot" topics in the area, for example outlining future directions for the area, or discuss the current state-of-the art. Papers are invited for submission on unpublished work in the following (but not restricted to) areas:

• AIS algorithm developments
• New paradigms in AIS
• Theoretical studies in AIS
• Applications of AIS
• Modelling of immune system components and processes
• Position papers

For submission instructions please see http://www.wcci2006.org/WCCI-Web_paper_submit.html

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