Many of you are familiar with Plato’s parable of a group of blind men in a cave trying to describe an elephant. Each of them confidently depicts a distinct part of the anatomy that they can grasp, but none of them understands how the whole thing fits together. The perception of each is accurate, but none can comprehend the totality. When it comes to figuring out how to make the Precautionary Principle work with respect to the environment, we need to realize that we are basically in a similar situation. We are required to build a coalition that recognizes that the different pieces of the puzzle are not all together and must be provided by persons working on distinct parts of the problem. The basic concept of the Precautionary Principle is simple. Where the state of the health of the people is at risk, preventing that risk from taking place and actually causing harm to human health or the environment is far better than seeking to cure harm after it occurs. What the major components of the Precautionary Principle are and how these fit together should be thought of as a work in progress, requiring independent input from all the relevant players who

Software engineers, and especially requirements engineers, are vitally concerned with describing the world. Description merits recognition as a discipline in its own right. In this talk some aspects of this putative discipline are briefly explored. 1

Creative Symbolic Interaction brings together the ad-vantages from the worlds of interactive real-time com-puting and intelligent, content-level analysis and proc-essing, in order to enhance and humanize man-machine communication. Performers improvising along with Symbolic Interaction systems experiment a unique ar-tistic situation where they interact with musical (and possibly multi-modal) agents which develop themselves in their own ways while keeping in style. Symbolic in-teraction aims at defining a new artificial creativity paradigm in computer music, and extends to other fields as well: The idea to bring together composition and improvisation through modeling cognitive structures and processes is a general idea that makes sense in many artistic and non-artistic domains. 1.

necessary to highlight the publication activity of those years.. I was reluctant to accept Katy Borner’s invitation to give this keynote talk since I had never heard the term “Knowledge Domains ” before. Furthermore, I am not an expert on the subjection of visualization. Her misperception on that point

is nonconvex, which makes it problematic to optimize under the constraint. Given these difficulties, a natural way to process a chance constraint is to replace it with its safe tractable approximation a tractable convex constraint with the feasible set contained in the one of the chance constraint. In the talk

projects. In this talk, I look at some possible reasons to explain this apparent contradiction and the possibly related confusion in software evolution research. I point out some ways we can make software evolution research more relevant to software engineering practice. My primary goal is to clarify

. In this talk, we introduce the distributed data streaming model, and discuss recent work on tracking complex queries over massive distributed streams, as well as new research directions in this space.

Abstract. Recent comparative studies indicate surprising flexibility of regulatory systems in bacteria. These systems can be analyzed on several levels, and I plan to consider two of them. At the level of regulon evolution, one can attempt to characterize the evolution of regulon content formed by loss, gain and duplications of regulators and regulated genes, as well as gain and loss of individual regulatory sites and horizontal gene transfer. At the level of transcription factor families, one can study co-evolution of DNA-binding proteins and the motifs they recognize. While this area is not yet ripe for fully automated analysis, the results of systematic comparative studies gradually start to coalesce into an understanding of how bacteria regulatory systems evolve.

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Abstract — In this talk we review the work in the field of chaos applications, especially in the formulation of solutions for practical engineering problems. Using a few case studies we illustrate the various common pitfalls in the reporting of chaos applications in engineering. Our objective