Onlife

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology seeks applicants for a post-doctoral research position to work on projects relating to applications of ontology in medicine and biology. The successful candidate will work with ontology researchers in the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences in Buffalo, New York. He or she will have expertise in at least two of the following areas: ontology, logic, philosophy of science, bioinformatics, biology, medicine, computer science. Further details are available from Barry Smith or under posting number 0900040 at http://ubjobs.buffalo.edu .

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG and Bani present: THE INFLUENCERS Festival of media action and radical entertainment February 5-6-7 2009 Center of Contemporary Culture Barcelona, Spain http://www.theinfluencers.org featuring: BLU, Improv Everywhere, Julius Von Bismarck, Survival Research Labs, Swoon, Wolfgang Staehle, Wu Ming, Ztohoven Welcome to the 5th edition of The Influencers! Curated by Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG and Bani, The Influencers is a cult festival exploring unconventional weapons of mass communication. Over the past six years The Influencers has been defined as a gallery of unclassifiable projects, an investigation on guerrilla communication, a demonstration of present-day science fiction, a talk show you won't see on TV. The Influencers is a three intense days event spent interweaving tales of subversion, manipulation and the transformation of live elements of contemporary culture. See you all in Barcelona! More Info: Cristi...

Trondheim, NTNU, Dragvoll - March 9-13, 2009 Lecturers (course) Prof. Charles Ess, Drury University, USA Prof. John Weckert, Charles Sturt University, Australia Associate professor May Thorseth, NTNU, Norway PhD Research fellow Johnny Hartz Søraker, Twente University, Netherlands Further contributors to workshop part (which is part of the course) Dr. Annamaria Carusi, Oxford University, UK Prof. Dag Elgesem, University of Bergen, Norway (One or two more contributors) There will be a combination of plenary lectures, presentations and discussions of essay proposals. Course description Virtuality will be scrutinized from different perspectives in this combined course and workshop. We believe that virtuality is philosophically and ethically relevant to a range of different aspects of life in a world where most people make use of modern information and communication technologies - most obviously, the Internet, but certainly also Internet-enabled mobile devices. And, as online communications...

LA-CAP09 - Call for Papers COMPUTING AND PHILOSOPHY: LA-CAP 2009 Mexico City, Mexico, June 22-23, 2009 LA-CAP09 is the first Latin American Conference on Computing and Philosophy will be held on the Campus of the National University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, Mexico. One of the aims of this conference is to build the Latin American section of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP): see IACAP for further informations. Conference Chair: Francisco Hernández Quiroz (UNAM – México) Juan Manuel Durán (UNC - Argentina) IMPORTANT DATES • March 1, 2009. End of submission of extended abstract. • March 29, 2009. Notification of acceptance. • May 17, 2009. Early registration deadline. • June 22-23, 2009. Conference. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS • Prof. Wilfried Sieg. Carnegie Mellon. USA. • Prof. Víctor Rodríguez. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Argentina We are expecting the confirmation of two more keynote speakers....

CiE 2009 is the fifth in a series of conferences organised by CiE (Computability in Europe), a European network of mathematicians, logicians, computer scientists, philosophers, physicists and others interested in new developments in computability and their underlying significance for the real world. Previous meetings took place in Amsterdam (2005), Swansea (2006), Siena (2007) and Athens (2008). The scope of the conference is broad, and includes the history and philosophy of computability and computer science. The Programme Committee especially encourages submissions in these areas. The deadline for submission of papers has just been extended to February 1. For the call for papers, click on the title of this blog.

Call for papers, for the 4th International and IJCAI-09 Workshop on EXPLANATION-AWARE COMPUTING (ExaCt 2009) 11-12 July 2009, Pasadena, CA, USA Paper submission deadline: March 6, 2009** Both within AI systems and in interactive systems, the ability to explain reasoning processes and results can have substantial impact. Within the field of knowledge-based systems, explanations have been considered as an important link between humans and machines. There, their main purpose has been to increase the confidence of the user in the system’s result (persuasion) or the system as a whole (satisfaction), by providing evidence of how it was derived (transparency). More recently, in recommender systems good explanations have also been used to help to inspire user trust and loyalty (trust), and make it quicker and easier (efficiency) for users to find what they want (effectiveness). Additional AI research has focused on how computer systems can themselves use explanations, for example to f...

The Second Multidisciplinary Workshop on Identity in the Information Society (IDIS 09): Call for Papers Date: 5 June 2009 Venue: London School of Economics, London, UK Following the successful IDIS 08 workshop held at Lago Maggiore in June 2008, we are pleased to release a Call for Papers for the second Annual Workshop on Identity in the Information Society (IDIS 09), to be held on June 5, 2009 in London, England, at the campus of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The workshop aims to provide an opportunity to present leading edge research, exchange ideas, encourage collaboration, and build communities across the various research groups working on contemporary identity topics and in related fields of privacy and security. The theme of the Second Multidisciplinary Workshop on Identity in the Information Society is “Identity and the Impact of Technology”. The workshop will seek to explore the relationship between the ways in which identity and technology have mutually...

The IEG organises a series of philosophy research seminars this term on the philosophy of information, entitled " The Nature and Scope of Information ". The seminar series is kindly supported and hosted by the Department of Engineering Science. The seminars are meant to provide an opportunity, to members of our research group and other invitees, to interact with leading philosophers, scientists and scholars working on information-related issues, broadly conceived. For more information about the seminars, the speakers and the location please visit the website . Here is a quick guide. In Hilary, there will be four seminars, which will take place on Tuesdays, from 16.30 until 18.30, room LR7, Department of Engineering Science, Parks Road, Oxford. Programme : 27th January - Hannes Leitgeb, University of Bristol, The Prospects of Formal Philosophy . 10th February - Jon Williamson, University of Kent, Do probability and causality exist? 24th February - Richard Bradley, London Sch...

Call for Nominations DEADLINE: 04:02:2009 The International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems has established an award to recognize publications that have made influential and long-lasting contributions to the field. Candidates for this award are papers that have proved a key result, led to the development of a new subfield, demonstrated a significant new application or system, or simply presented a new way of thinking about a topic that has proved influential. A list of previous winners of this award is appended below. This award is presented annually at the AAMAS Conference, in this case AAMAS-09 in Budapest in May. Winning papers must have been published at least 10 years before the award presentation, therefore this year's eligible set comprises papers published in 1999 or earlier, in any recognized forum (journal, conference, workshop). To nominate a publication for this award, please send the full reference plus a brief statement (150 words or fewer) a...

OVERVIEW For the non-specialist, the whole notion of Artificial Intelligence challenges fundamental understandings of what it is to be human, with enormous implications for how we conceive ourselves, our artefacts and our societies. AI’s foundational goal was the construction of autonomous sentience. Yet, 55 years afterTuring’s seminal paper, publicly visible achievements, beyond science fiction speculations or media exaggerations, still lie in faltering steps in voice and image recognition, surveillance, computer games and virtual environments, not in truly intelligent everyday machines. This symposium will offer a major forum for the discussion of the social understanding of Artificial Intelligence, in particular the curious spaces between popular expectations of machines that meet our every whim, fears of humans enslaved or eliminated by crazed super-brains, and the sober reality of toasters that still burn the bread. At the start of the 21st century, it is timely to refl...

A reminder that, if you wish to submit papers to any of the next three IACAP (International Association for Computing and Philosophy) conferences, the deadlines are approaching: NA-CAP submission deadline: February 1st 2009 North-American CAP - Indiana University http://ia-cap.org/na-cap09/ E-CAP submission deadline: February 23rd 2009 European CAP - Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona http://ia-cap.org/e-cap09/ LA-CAP submission deadline: March 1st, 2009 Latin-American CAP - National University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City http://ia-cap.org/la-cap09/

A new website for Charles Ess' recent book (disclaimer: I wrote the Foreword): Summary This is the first textbook on the central ethical issues of digital media, ranging from computers and the Internet to mobile phones. It is also the first book of its kind to consider these issues from a global perspective, introducing ethical theories from multiple cultures. It further utilizes examples from around the world, such as the publication of “the Mohammed Cartoons”; diverse understandings of what “privacy” means in Facebook or MySpace; why pirating CDs and DVDs may be justified in developing countries; and culturally-variable perspectives on sexuality and what counts as “pornography.” Readers and students thus acquire a global perspective on the central ethical issues of digital media, including privacy, copyright, pornography and violence, and the ethics of cross-cultural communication online. The book is designed for use across disciplines – media and communication studies, comput...

I just spent far too much time enjoying Dexter. Four quick comments. to feel just a pinch less guilty (no spoilers): He owns a nice laptop and uses it quite regularly. He likes databases but we never see him (Seasons 1 and 2) checking Wikipedia (if he did, he would know there is more information about him there than he could stomach). He is very neat and tidy and almost autistically careful about order, but we never see him running an antivirus, or an anti-malware program. He is on the phone quite often. About (1), you may like to know that he uses a Apple (Mac) powerbook (this may explain n. 3) and an Oakley S.I. bag . According to the linked article, the latter is discontinued and can only be bought on eBay. About (2), just click on http://dexterwiki.sho.com/ About (3), if you fancy some strange furniture, look here . For anything else, try this great website . About (4), he uses a Motorola i885 on the Boost network but in Season 2 he also seems rather fond of a Motorola Razor , pr...