An Invited Session on Chance Discovery in 
The Fourth IEEE International Workshop on 
Soft Computing as Transdisciplinary Science and Technology 
(WSTST 2005), May25-27 2005,
Muroran, Hokkaido, Japan 
  (http://bank.csse.muroran-it.ac.jp/~wstst05/)

Chance Discovery: 
Process and Tools for Decision in Complex Environment

* Submission Deadline December 10, 2004 *

[Session Concept]
Researchers in finance, artificial intelligence, cognitive 
science, risk/change management, marketing science, seismology, 
and ... (counting 100 other disciplines) are coming to be 
more and more interested in events and situations that 
significantly affect decision making.  Such events viewed as 
opportunities or risks, full of uncertainty, are "chances."

A chance can be a rare event or a situation, providing
opportunities or risks for human decision making in dynamic
environment. Noticing such an event and explaining its 
significance has been called "chance discovery" since 2000 and 
brought interested researchers across disciplines and hundreds 
of business people to workshops and conference sessions on
chance discovery. 

That is, chance discovery means discovery of chance, rather 
than discovery by chance. The essential aspect of a chance is 
that it can be the seed of new and significant changes in
the near future. Being aware of a rare or novel important event
without ignoring it as noise is essential for future success.

The process of discovering a chance may rely on computational 
techniques from artificial intelligence, such as machine
learning, knowledge representation, non-monotonic reasoning, 
image understanding, etc. As well, human centric approaches from 
cognitive, social, and management sciences, to understanding
individual decisions and group decisions and actions are very 
important. Methods of computer-supported collaborative work, 
standing on the intersection between computation and management 
methods are recently opening the central gate to chance discovery.

This session of is open to submissions for 
 - philosophical foundations of chance discovery such as 
  non-monotonic reasoning, the role of manipulation, etc,
 - approaches from cognitive science to insightful thoughts 
  and decisions, 
 - computational approaches (data mining/visualization, 
  evidence extraction, link discovery, rare-event predictions,
  communication analysis, etc.)
 - creation-support methods with human-machine interactions, 
 - studies on the management of a organization in a dynamic 
  environment, 
 - social psychology on the basis of organization management, 
 - applications to marketing, development of new products,
  finding and managing customers' opinions, medical treatment, 
  etc.,
 - planning and evaluating scenarios in business,  
 - theories on actors in complex systems,
 - ...
 - ...
... (counting 1000 other disciplines),
where researchers may find it meaningful to regard a "chance" 
as a meaningful matter to consider.

[Meetings in the Past]
Chance Discovery has been well established in conferences and with 
a number of workshops and publications in the U.S., Europe, and Asia
as the following list:

 - International Workshop at the Annual Conference of the Japanese 
  Society of AI 2001,
 - International Workshop at the Pacific Rim International AI 
  conference 2002, 
 - The AAAI Fall Symposium of Chance Discovery 2002, Cape Cod. 
 - International Workshop at the 10th International Conference on 
 Human Computer Interaction 2003,
 - The First European Workshop on Chance Discovery at ECAI 2004
 - Several international conferences, e.g., KES 2000 through 2004,
 with special sessions on Chance Discovery.
 - Book "Chance Discovery" from Springer Verlag (2003),  and
  the appearing book "Readings in Chance Discovery" 
  
This special session in WSTST, aims at finding a path to chance 
discoveries from the aspect of soft computing. That is,
Soft Computing (SC) has an evolving collection of methodologies, 
for exploiting the tolerance for achieving robustness in an uncertain
environment. We expect methods of soft computing can drastically 
push humans and robots to chance discovery, and the presentations of 
a soft computation method as a tool for chance discovery will show 
its way to wide range of social contribution.

[ALL SUBMISSIONS SHOULD BE SENT TO]
 8 TO 10 PAGES IN THE FORM PRESENTED IN SPRINGER FORMAT:
   SEE http://bank.csse.muroran-it.ac.jp/~wstst05/cfp.html 
 AND SENT TO: The Chance Discovery Consortium 
     
 BY: the special deadline 10 December, 2004

[Other Important Dates]
Acceptance Notification: 08 January, 2005
Authors Registration: 15 January, 2005
Camera Ready Due: 24 January, 2005
WSTST05:  25-27 May, 2005

[Session Chair, and address of inquiries]
Yukio Ohsawa, Dr.
E-mail: osawa@gssm.otsuka.tsukuba.ac.jp
 - Associate Professor, Graduate School of Business Sciences,
  University of Tsukuba 
  http://www.gssm.otsuka.tsukuba.ac.jp/staff/osawa
 - Associate Professor on The Century 21 COE,
  Graduate School of Information Science and Technology,
  The University of Tokyo
 - General Director, The Chance Discovery Consortium
  http://www.chancediscovery.com
Office: GSSM, University of Tsukuba, 3-29-1 Otsuka, Bunkyo-ku 
Tokyo 112-0012 Japan Fax: +81-3-3942-6829