CFP for a special issue "Chance Discovery"
New Generation Computing (Ohmsha Ltd. and Springer Verlag)

Your submission deadline came to be extended for the Special Issue on Chance Discovery from Journal of New Generation Computing. The original deadline was 31st Dec, and the new is

February 20, 2002.

This is the decision of the publisher, for publishing regular volumes to include papers accepted for non-special issues. Thank you very much for attentions to and circulations of the CFP.

The brand new version of CFP!!

*** Call for Papers ***

New Generation Computing (Ohmsha Ltd. and Springer Verlag) welcomes 
contributions for a special issue "Chance Discovery," edited by 
Yukio Ohsawa and Akinori Abe (planned for Vol. 20, No. 4, May 2002). 

[The Scope of Chance Discovery]

A "chance" here means an event or a situation with significant impact on human decision 
making -- a new event/situation that can be conceived either as an opportunity or as a risk.
The "discovery" of a chance is to become aware of and to explain the significance of a 
chance, especially if the chance is rare and its significance is unnoticed. Desirable 
effects of opportunities should be actively promoted, whereas preventive measures should 
be taken in the case of discovered risks. In other words, chance discovery aims to provide 
means for inventing or surviving in the future, rather than predicting the future.

The essential aspect of a chance (risk or opportunity) is that it can be the seed 
of new and significant changes in the near future. The discovery of new opportunities 
might be more beneficial than reliance on past frequent success-patterns (usually used 
in prediction methods), because they are not known yet by oneself or one's business 
rivals. The discovery of new risks might be indispensable to avoid or lessen damage, 
because they cannot be explained by past frequent damage-patterns. Therefore, being 
aware of a novel important event without ignoring it as noise in the data is essential 
for a future success. Besides data mining methods for finding rare but important 
events from time-series, it is also important to draw humans attention to such events, 
i.e., to make humans ready to catch chances. In this sense, human-information 
interactions are highly relevant to chance discovery. Furthermore, chance discovery can 
be seen as an extension of risk management to computer-aided problem solving where 
novel situations are involved.

This special issue of New Generation Computing Journal is intended to bring together 
studies from artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, social and 
cognitive sciences, marketing researches, risk management, knowledge discovery and 
data mining, and other related domains, for presenting breakthroughs to real-world 
chance discoveries.

[Relevant Areas]

We welcome submissions of research papers on having human/agents/robots discover 
chances, e.g. (not restricted to),
- New products worth to promote sales 
- Potential customers to send advertising mails
- Risks due to side-effects of a new drug
- Signs of great earthquakes in the future
- Keywords in documents, indicating significantly beneficial directions for activities 
in the real human society 
- New keywords on the World-Wide Web which show attractive future trends
- Leading opinions in chat rooms or BBS,
- Behaviors of young people which might lead to their fatal crimes
- Theories for Chance Discovery
- Logical foundations for Chace Discovery
- New methods for Chance Discovery etc
Topics from information visualization and other human-information interaction designs,
for aiding human awareness and discovery of chances, will also be regarded as very 
significant submissions. 

[Instructions for Submission]

* Submission Deadline of Papers: *** February 20, 2002 *** 

Please send a paper (in English) following author's instructions in http://www.ohmsha.co.jp/ngc/.
Style files are available from this instruction page. For a template, please see 
sample in http://www.gssm.otsuka.tsukuba.ac.jp/staff/osawa/sample.tex. 

The paper submission should not exceed ten pages in this format. In submission, please send 
- three hardcopies to the following post address, or
- send an electronic version by e-mail (.ps or .pdf) to the e-mail address below.

[Contact Information]

Yukio OHSAWA, Guest Editor of the Special Issue on Chance Discovery, 
New Generation Computing (Ohmsha Ltd., and Springer Verlag)
Address: GSSM, University of Tsukuba, 3-29-1 Otsuka, Bunkyo-ku Tokyo 112-0012 Japan 
Fax: +81-3-3942-6829 
E-mail: osawa@gssm.otsuka.tsukuba.ac.jp