DM: 2nd Cfp AAAI spring symposium on Predictive Toxicology

[Giuseppina Gini]

I apologize in case you receive this more than once.

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______  DEADLINE IS APROACHING: abstracts due by October 30   
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                   CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION

Symposium:
PREDICTIVE TOXICOLOGY OF CHEMICALS: EXPERIENCES AND IMPACT OF AI TOOLS

Stanford University (CA), March 22-24, 1999

within the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Spring
Symposium Series



AI and related techniques play a major role in toxicity prediction. 
The
goal of computational toxicity prediction is to describe the 
relationship
between chemical properties, on the one hand, and biological and
toxicological processes, on the other. This symposium will highlight 
the
potential of different AI approaches, either individually and 
combined, for
computational toxicity prediction.

Success in this research depends on the contribution of experts from
different areas, and we invite participation from researchers in all
related fields. We welcome AI researchers who have applied learning
techniques to domains outside toxicity prediction and are in search 
of new
areas.

Some of the questions to be addressed in the symposium are:

- How do we represent chemical information?  Several methods have been
proposed.  Are they equivalent?  How do we evaluate them?  Are 
results from
different experiments reproducible?

- How can machine learning (including ANN, fuzzy logic, GA, ILP, ...)
techniques be used?  AI tools have yet to be fully evaluated in this
domain.  Which techniques are better for toxicity prediction, 
especially
given our changing understanding of toxicology?  Are hybrid approaches
better?

- Are current experimental data sets sufficient for AI techniques? Do 
they
have sufficient accuracy?  How do we take advantage of existing data 
sets?
Can we use techniques from data mining and reasoning under 
uncertainty?

To achieve a common background among both computer scientists and 
chemists,
there will be short introductory presentations on the state of the 
art in
computational techniques, machine learning, chemical descriptors, and
toxicological prediction. The rest of the sessions will include
presentations (oral and poster) with a discussion on the open 
problems.

Submission information

Potential participants should submit an abstract describing work in
progress, completed work, positions, or even open questions for 
discussion.

Abstracts should be submitted electronically to Giuseppina Gini
(gini@elet.polimi.it), including title, author's name(s), affiliation,
mailing address, e-mail, phone and fax numbers.
Deadline for abstract submission is October 30, 1998. Notification of
acceptance will be given by November 14. Participants may be invited 
to
submit a longer version of their paper. All contributions will be 
collected
in working notes. Some financial assistance is available for student
participation.
Further information and format for submissions will be posted on a 
WWW home
page at: http://www.elet.polimi.it/AAAI-PT.
See also the page of the American Association of Artificial 
Intelligence:
http://www.aaai.org/

Organizing committee

Giuseppina C. Gini, (chair)
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione,  Politecnico di Milano,
piazza L. da Vinci 32, 20133 Italy
Telephone: (+39) 02-23993626; FAX: (+39) 02 - 23993411;
Email address: gini@elet.polimi.it
WWW Homepage: http://www.elet.polimi.it/people/gini/index.html
Alan R. Katritzky, (cochair), University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
(katritzky@chem.ufl.edu)
Emilio Benfenati, Istituto Mario Negri, Milan, Italy 
(benfenati@irfmn.mnegri.it)
Daniel L. Boley, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 
(boley@cs.umn.edu)
Adolf Grauel, University of Paderborn, Soest, Germany
(grauel@ibm5.uni-paderborn.de)
Marco Valtorta, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
(mgv@usceast.cs.sc.edu)
Yin-tak Woo, EPA, Washington, DC
(WOO.YINTAK@epamail.epa.gov)


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Giuseppina Gini
address: Dip. di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano
          piazza L. da Vinci 32, I-20133 MILANO
fax: (+39) 2-2399.3411
phone: (+39) 2-2399.3626e-mail - gini@elet.polimi.it
home page: http://www.elet.polimi.it/people/gini/
http://www.elet.polimi.it/AAAI-PT for AAAI Spring Symposium on 
Predictive
Toxicology