ILPnet2 End-User Club

ILP technology transfer is promoted by ILPnet2 through its end-user club, consisting of industrial and other potential users of the results of ILP research. The current members of this club and their business fields are:

Amer World Research, Nicosia (CY) - market research
Atlantis Telecom, Prague (CZ) - telecommunications
Center for Computational Linguistics, Prague (CZ) - language research
Center of Dutch Language and Speech, Antwerpen (BE) - language research
Dialogis, Bonn (DE) - data mining
Hydrometeorological Institute of Slovenia, Ljubljana (SI) - environmental protection
Imperial Cancer Research Fund, London (UK) - health care research
KD Labs, Zurich (CH) - knowledge discovery
Kiminkii, Utrecht (NL) - data mining
Morphologic, Budapest (HU) - language engineering
National Institute of Chemistry, Ljubljana (SI) - biochemistry research
Research Institute for Child Health, Brno (CZ) - medical research
Sentient Machine Research, Amsterdam (NL) - computer systems and services
Studio PHI, Ljubljana (SI) - marketing
Syllogic, Amersfoort (NL) - computer systems and services
Virtech, Sofia (BG) - electronic commerce

The end-user club encourages contacts between its members and the network nodes with the objective to achieve tighter co-operation and application-oriented RTD projects. Visits between club members and nodes is supported to cailitate co-operation between the two sides on practical problems. Members of the end-user club benefit from the access to the expertise of the network nodes, including information on ILP research results relevant to their application area and access to prototype ILP systems developed by the nodes.

ILPnet2 supports the organisation of events targeted specifically to members of the end-user club, including:

Short seminars on ILP and its applications.
Meetings to present problems to ILP experts.
Data analysis workshops where end-user club members bring their data to be analysed by ILP techniques.
Competitions, where end-user club members will have the opportunity to pose challenging problems to the ILP community by making their datasets available. Comparative studies will be produced at the close of such challenges, providing useful feedback on the successes and shortcomings of ILP in the given application domain.

Other goals and objectives of the network which can be of interest for EUC members are:

Maintaining an archive of descriptions of successful applications, case studies, data sets, and experiences with ILP.
Maintaining an archive of ILP software systems for different platforms.
Maintaining an ILPnet2 WWW site that will provide a variety of information on ILP.
Electronic publication of an ILP Newsletter.
Electronic publication of a series of ILP Technical reports.
Collecting thesis abstracts of PhD, MSc and BSc theses related to ILP.
Maintaining a bibliographic database related to ILP.
Supporting the organisation of ILP workshops
Organising summer schools on ILP and its applications

Part of the ILPnet2 budget will be reserved for travel and subsistence costs of members of the end-user club attending ILP- related events.

Who can be a member?

Typically, members of the end-user club will not have extensive experience in ILP, but will have practical problems and will be highly interested in solving them.

The end-user club will encourage contacts between its members and the network nodes by any of the means described above, in order to achieve tighter co-operation and more application-oriented RTD projects.

What has been done?

ILPnet2 has actively pursued industrial relations through its End- User-Club, consisting of industrial and other non-academic institutions interested in practical applications of ILP. It has supported the organization of educational events/seminars targeted at specific groups of end-users, e.g., in life sciences or in the business sector (see the list below).

As part of the International Summer School on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (Caminha, Portugal, 28 September - 4 October 1998) there has been a meeting of the end-user club in the form of a problem presentation workshop, where end-users presented their problem domains and discussed them with ILP experts. There has also been a seminar on Inductive Logic Programming and Knowledge Discovery as part of the same Summer School.
The industrial day Achieving competitive advantages with data mining and decision support was held at the Convention Centre Festival Hall in Bled, Slovenia on 29 June 1999. It was co-located with the 16th International Conference on Machine Learning ICML-99, organized in Bled on 27-30 June 1999. As one of the activities of the Solomon European Network, the industrial day was aimed at enhancing awareness and spreading the use of the technologies of Data Mining and Decision Support in European industry, business and public services.
In May 2000, a seminar on Data Analysis in Life Sciences was organized at the Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia. The seminar was intended for researchers and other professionals in the life sciences, including bioinformatics, biology, chemistry, medicine, molecular biology, and related fields, whose work requires the analysis of data.
In August 2000, a tutorial ILP for learning language in logic was held at the Twelfth European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information (ESSLI-2000) in Birmingham. The course provided an introduction to inductive logic programming with an emphasis on applications in learning language in logic
The Data Mining, Decision Support, Meta- Learning and ILP, Forum for Practical Problem Presentation and Prospective Solutions Worshop was held on September 12 in Lyon, France, associated with PKDD2000. It was organized by ILPNET2 together with the METAL and the SOL-EU-NET projects. The presented papers are available online.

ILpnet2 has also supported data analysis workshops tailored to individual end-users, where ILP experts work together with domain experts to solve specific data analysis problems. Three such workshops have been organized, where data from protein interaction assays, environmental data and linguistic data have been successfully analyzed with ILP and other techniques. An example report of a data analysis workshop (the one treating data from protein interaction assays) can be found here.

Who to contact?

For any information, email: ilpnet2- euc.adm@ncc.up.pt

Peter Flach, University of Bristol (UK): Administrative coordinator of ILPnet2
Saso Dzeroski, Jozef Stefan Institute (SI): Scientific coordinator of ILPnet2
Pavel Brazdil , University of Porto (P): end-user club coordinator
Carlos Soares, University of Porto (P): secretary of end-user club (address: LIACC, R. Campo Alegre, 823, 4150 Porto, Portugal; phone: +351-2-6078830; fax: +351-2-6003654)

C Soares, csoares@oat.ncc.up.pt,