Gathering of world’s experts in pattern analysis

A workshop which will bring together the world’s top researchers in pattern analysis will take place this week.

The Analysis of Patterns workshop, which will take place at the Centre “Ettore Majorana” for Scientific Culture in Erice, Italy from 28 October to 6 November 2005, will enable the world’s scientific communities committed to developing common principles of modern pattern analysis to come together and share their experiences.

A number of lectures and presentations on the theme of pattern analysis and related developments will be given by eminent academics. Among those speaking are: Gregory Chaitin, IBM T J Watson Research Centre, Esko Ukkonen, University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, Dan Gusfield, University of California, Davis and Alberto Apostolico, University of Padova and Georgia Institute of Technology.

According to Professor John Shawe-Taylor of ECS, together with Professor Nello Cristianini and Professor Raffaele Cerulli one of the three workshop organisers, pattern detection and discovery is at the centre of many disciplines, ranging from classical statistics to modern artificial intelligence, including bioinformatics, web analysis and much more.

He commented: ‘Pattern analysis can be applied to many different fields. For example, we could consider analysing the patterns in the brain which form when people are listening to different musical expressions so that we can see which musical patterns create different effects from pleasure to angst.’

The fact that researchers from different disciplines have been working on pattern analysis for 30 years, has given rise to several separate communities working independently on related topics.

The workshop will provide them with an opportunity to develop a unified conceptual understanding of pattern analysis, recognition and matching, machine learning systems, data mining, statistics and a range of sub-disciplines.