[UAI] Re: CFP of a chance discovery session (KES2000)

From: Yukio Osawa (osawa@gssm.otsuka.tsukuba.ac.jp)
Date: Sun Apr 30 2000 - 09:03:41 PDT

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    Dear UAI-mailing list members,

    For making things clear, let me revise the SCOPE of Chance Discovery I
    sent the other day. I appologize for sending seemingly similar mails, but
    please note that the content is revised and made clearer.

    Thank you

    Yukio OHSAWA
    Dr. Eng, Associate Professor in University of Tsukuba
    3-29-1 Otsuka, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112-0012 Japan
    Tel:+81-3-3942-7141, Fax: +81-3-3942-6829

    ***************************************************************
    ******** KES 2000, Special Session on Chance Discovery ********
    ******** 30, 31 August, 1 September 2000, Brighton UK *********
             http://luna.bton.ac.uk/~kes2000/
    ***************************************************************

    *** SCOPE ***
    - The best way to predict the future is to invent the future (Alan Kay) --

    A chance means a new event, which has possibility to become a significant
    advantage (damage) in the future life of people, if appropriate efforts
    are (are not) made. The difference of discovering chances from predicting
    the future is that chances may not really affect the future if people
    ignore the chances or avoid the risks. In other words, a chance is an
    entrance into the way of inventing or surviving the future, rather than
    the future itself - one has to open the door and walk through it.

    Two essential points of a chance (or a risk) are:
    - A chance is not a sheer repetition of past success, but a trigger
      of a new and significant progress. A source of chance is the explosion
      of potential motivations, e.g. potential desires of customers in a market.
    - New chances are more beneficial than past frequent success-patterns,
      because new chances are not known yet by your rivals.
    - New risks are more dangerous than past frequent damage-patterns,
      because you do not know how to avoid them.

    Example 1: When the first rain-umbrella appeared in London, people could
    not tell it would become a popular fashion - they rather felt it strange
    to walk the street with an umbrella. The difficulty of prediction is
    here: there was no time-series of umbrella sales before the first umbrella.
       But this was a chance anyway -- thanks to the efforts of advertising
    the merit of umbrella "umbrella protects you from rain," it prevailed around
    the world. This promotion is a human-information interaction for putting
    the chance (umbrella) into a real future fashion. If the umbrella seller
    was aware that walking with an umbrella looked strange, he could have found
    a chance of selling coats matching with an umbrella.
       Here we find it essential to stimulate potential motivations (i.e. the
    desire to avoid rain in London, and the sense of fashion of people in London),
    for putting a chance into a success. How can we discover the link between
    the potential (unknown) motivations and the new product which is unknown,
    without any frequent patterns ?

    Example 2: When small earthquakes occurred in Kobe and the north of Osaka
    (in Japan) from 1980's, people could not tell what they meant. In fact this
    was a fatal risk -- due to the stress in the land crust of Kobe, between the
    north of Osaka and the trough in the south-east of Japan, 6600 people were
    victimized from the big one of M7.2 in Kobe, 1995. If we knew that the past
    small earthquakes were causing heavy stress at the focal active fault of
    1995, the risk would have been recognized and many people could have been
    helped.
       Here we find it essential to know the potential causes od risk, for
    avoiding a disaster. How can we discover the link between the potential
    (unknown) causes and the new disaster which is unknown (an earthquake of
    M7.2 is a totally different event from one of M3.0 in the past, even if
    both occurred in the same fault which quaked in the past), without any
    frequent past patterns ?

    For both examples, the key issue is focusing attention to a new event which
    is significant for the future, not discarding it as a noise only because it
    is unknown. For telling the significance here, human-information interaction
    for telling the link between the potential motivations and the new event is
    highly contributing to chance discovery.

    Many on-going researches including the discovery of
    - new products worthy to promote the sales, and
      new good customers to send advertising mails, for exploding the sales
    - new risks which should be avoided in business and human life
    - new keywords in research papers showing pionieering and meaningful
      directions of research
    - new keywords in WWW which show attracting future trends
    and information visualizations, for telling how to put the chance into a real
    merit and how to avoid the risk, are very relevant to the session. New
    assertions about chance discovery on previous data are welcomed, as well as
    new data presenting chances.

    *** PAPER SUBMISSIONS ***
    The paper dead line is May 15th, by which no more than 4 pages of IEEE
    format in
    http://luna.bton.ac.uk/~kes2000/#papers
    http://luna.bton.ac.uk/~kes2000/guide.htm
    is welcomed to be sent to me ***electronically***. The most welcomed style
    is a postscript file, gzipped and uuendoded. Please kindly e-mail me
    your will to submit and a short paper abstract, before you submit the paper

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