Title:
Software development for directory publishing (30 min)

Speaker:
Randy Goebel
University of Alberta

Abstract:
Pre Print Inc. (PPI), with offices in Edmonton and Dresden, is a software development company that produces software systems for the directory publishing business. We describe the company, its products, and its place in the global market, and the exciting evolution of products they expand to meet the changing demands of the directory publishing business. A key challenge is managing the evolution of media, as the world shifts from paper to electronic media. Of paramount importance are the deployment of modern software development methods, new ideas for multimedia publishing, and the maintenace of constraint-based layout and optimization methods.

To help meet some of these challenges, the company has more than doubled in size in the last year, with continued growth expected, as the demand for existing and new products increases.

Research talk

Title:
Exploiting hypothetical reasoning for data mining (60 min)

Speaker:
Randy Goebel
University of Alberta

Abstract:
Traditional data mining is commercially attractive because association rules are easily interpretable by a non-technical audience. To extend data mining research thus requires a demonstration that more sophisticated learning techniques provide useful and easily interpretable results in more complex application domains.

This presentation argues that three apparently different learning proble ms can be usefully "forced" into a hypothetical reasoning framework. The three problems are the induction of secondary structure in proteins, the induction of layout rules for two dimensional layout problems, and the induction of semantic indexing structures for image retrieval.