The British Classification Society exists to encourage the co-operation and exchange of views and information among those interested in principles and practice of classification in any discipline where they are used. Its membership includes anthropologists, archaeologists, astronomers, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, forensic scientists, geologists, information specialists, librarians, psychologists, soil scientists and statisticians. The Society organises meetings, some by itself, but often jointly with societies representing application areas for classification.
About the Society and membership form in PDF, and in Word.
President: Prof
Fionn Murtagh, Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway
University of London
Past President:
Dr Nick Fieller, Department of Probability and Statistics,
University of Sheffield
Secretary:
Dr Jo Padmore, Management School, University of Sheffield
Treasurer: Clive Moncrieff, Natural History Museum, London
Committee Member:
Dr Christian Hennig,
Department of Statistical Science, University College London
Committee Member:
Prof Boris Mirkin,
Department of Computer Science, Birkbeck College
Committee Member:
Trevor Ringrose,
Applied Mathematics and OR Group, Cranfield University
The 2010 Kolmogorov Lecture will be presented by Professor Robert Merton (Harvard Business School), winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics. The lecture is at 6pm, 23rd February 2010, Windsor Building Auditorium, Royal Holloway, University of London.
See further information at: www.kolmogorov.clrc.rhul.ac.uk.
Travel details for Royal Holloway, Egham, Surrey: www.rhul.ac.uk/visitors-guide
20 November 2009, Royal Holloway, University of London.
Agenda
14:00 - 14:05 Welcome,
Fionn Murtagh
14:05 - 14:40 Presentation,
Berthold Lausen
14:40 - 15:00 Presentation,
Pedro Contreras
15:00 - 15:20 Coffee break
15:20 - 17:00 BCS meeting
Multivariate data analysis, and related areas - classification and clustering, psychometrics, low-dimensional or other interpretation-friendly visualizations derived from heterogeneous measurements, measurement theory and data coding/encoding, multivariate correlation, underlying variables, multidimensional features, etc. etc. - are all bread and butter methodologies within the remit of the British Classification Society. The selection of appropriate and/or best data analysis methodologies are a result of a number of issues: the overriding goals of course, but also the availability of well formatted, and ease of access to such, data. The meeting will focus on the early stages of the analysis pipeline.
There is a strong movement towards openness and accesibility in the products of research and scholarly work, cf.
1) Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research
Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the
International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (in press),
Madrid, Spain. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13804
2)
Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2006) Earlier Web Usage Statistics
as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American
Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 57(8)
pp. 1060-1072.
3)
Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Oppenheim, C., McDonald, J. W., Champion,
T. and Harnad, S. (2006) Extending journal-based research impact
assessment to book-based disciplines.
The BCS meeting will be addressed by Drs Les Carr and Tim Brody, of the Intelligence, Agents, Media group, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.
An aim of this meeting is to discuss and plan the writing of a BCS white paper on data analysis methodologies in the context of what can be considered as open, objective and universal in a metrics context of scholarly and applied research. A part of this discussion is the extent to which unified (perhaps discipline-based) perspectives are desirable over and above the support of a plurality of perspectives.
The "Analysis Methodologies for Post-RAE Scientometrics" meeting will be directly followed by the AGM of the BCS. Discussion items will include:
1) With two journals now supported by the IFCS (International Federation
of Classsication Societies), viz. Journal of Classification, and
Advances in Data Analysis and Classification, what can or should the
BCS do to support both? Can both journals be part of a BCS membership
subscription?
2) Linkage with CSNA.
3) Towards a BCS Vision for IFCS.
4) Linkage with Royal Statistical Society; British Computer Society.
5) Future meetings (including with GfKl in July 2008).
Following the meeting, a position paper was written. Position paper on Open Access and science and scholarly metrics: text. xs
Venue: Lecture Centre which is the main Brunel teaching building, Theatre 068.
Timetable
10:00-12:30 Talks: surveys and state of the art
12:30-14:00 Lunch on campus
14:00-15:30 Discussion on organisational perspectives:
15:45-17:00 Discussion on research and funding perspectives:
establishing a national research Network, and
possible plans for a research network at European level.
Dinner from 18:30
Speakers
10:00-10:30 - Xiaohui Liu (Brunel), on bioinformatics
10:30-11:00 - Bob Nichol (Portsmouth), on cosmology
11:00-11:20 -
Mel Janowitz (DIMACS), on formal concept analysis and its relation to
clustering
11:20-11:40 - Boris Mirkin (Birkbeck), on
"Neigbourhood Similarity Clustering for Complex Data and Domain Knowledge"
(applied in Bioinformatics)
11:40-12:20 -
Peter Willett (Sheffield), on virtual screening techniques for chemical
databases
Boris Mirkin, Buck McMorris, Mel Janowitz, Mel Janowitz, Xiaohui Liu, Xiaohui Liu, Fionn Murtagh, (photos from phones of Buck and Fionn) following the British Classification Society/Classification Society of North America meeting in Brunel University, 2 Feb. 2007.
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| The Society is one of the founding members of the International Federation of Classification Societies. The Federation holds conferences every two years. Recent venues have been Edinburgh, Paris, Kobe, Rome, Namur, Krakow, and Ljubljana. In 2008, the IFCS Conference was in Dresden. In 2011, the IFCS Conference will be in St. Andrews. |
The Member Societies of the IFCS are:
Associação Portuguesa de Classificação e Análise de Dados (CLAD)
British Classification Society (BCS)
Central American and Carribean Society of Classification and Data Analysis (SoCCCAD)
Classification Society (formerly the Classification Society of
North America, CSNA)
Gesellschaft für Klassifikation (GfKl)
Irish Pattern Recognition and Classification Society (IPRCS)
Japanese Classification Society (JCS)
Korean Classification Society (KCS)
Société Francophone de Classification (SFC)
Società Italiana di Statistica (SIS)
Sekcja Klasyfikacji i Analizy Danych PTS (SKAD)
Vereniging voor Ordinatie en Classificatie (VOC)
Group-at-Large
