Cactus Language • Preliminaries 1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2025/03/30/cactus-language-preliminaries-1/
❝Picture two different configurations of such an irregular shape,
superimposed on each other in space, like a double exposure photograph.
Of the two images, the only part which coincides is the body. The two
different sets of quills stick out into very different regions of space.
The objective reality we see from within the first position, seemingly
so full and spherical, actually agrees with the shifted reality only in
the body of common knowledge. In every direction in which we look at all
deeply, the realm of discovered scientific truth could be quite different.
Yet in each of those two different situations, we would have thought the
world complete, firmly known, and rather round in its penetration of the
space of possible knowledge.❞
— Herbert J. Bernstein • “Idols of Modern Science”
The task before us is to describe the syntax of a family of formal languages
intended for use as a sentential calculus, and thus interpreted for the purpose
of reasoning about propositions and their logical relations.
To carry out our discussion we need a way of referring to signs as if they
were objects like any others, in other words, as the sorts of things which
can be named, indicated, described, discussed, and renamed if necessary,
which can be placed, arranged, and rearranged within a suitable medium of
expression — or else manipulated in the mind — which can be articulated and
decomposed into their elementary signs, and which can be strung together in
sequences to form complex signs.
Signs having signs as their objects are known as “higher order signs”,
a topic which demands an adequate level of formalization, but in due time.
The present discussion needs a quicker way to get into the subject, even if
it settles for informal means which cannot be rendered absolutely precise.
Resources —
Cactus Language • Preliminaries
• https://oeis.org/wiki/Cactus_Language_%E2%80%A2_Part_1#Cactus_Language_.E2.…
Survey of Animated Logical Graphs
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/03/18/survey-of-animated-logical-graphs…
Survey of Theme One Program
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/02/26/survey-of-theme-one-program-6/
Regards,
Jon
As before, I often have conflicts on Wednesdays. But when I got back, I went through some of my backlog of notes that raise important issues. This is about a note from October 2024 that I had intended to comment on, but it got buried long ago.
As Mihai Nadin wrote below, C. S. Peirce made important comments about the issues discussed in these notes. He represented them in graphs about graphs, and the modern term is 'metalanguage'.
Farther below, Hans Polzer wrote "We tend to overlook the enormous amount of information we humans create about things that don’t actually exist in the natural world, at least not in the sense of material objects.... The physical properties of such representations bear no inherent relationship to the things they represent, such as the deed to a piece of property or a movie (which itself may represent something that doesn’t actually exist in the natural world)."
The fact that these things don't "exist" in some sense does not mean that we can ignore them. Money, for example, is just a number. You can say that it refers in some complex way to some gold bars in some distant place, but the connection is so remote that it's ignored by every computer program that processes numbers about money.
Similar principles apply to everything in our computer systems. Nothing physical is ever stored in transistors or transmitted across wires, thin air, or the vacuum of outer space. All of it is language about something. And a large amount of that "something" is more language about something else.
In the bottom note below, Alex talks about higher order logic. That's not quite right. It's more accurate to say that it is related to terms and terminology about physical things. The word 'metalanguage' is more appropriate.
And there is no limit to the number and kinds of metalanguage that anyone might want or need to say about something. A bank, a grocery store, a stock broker, and their customers all talk about money, but they say very different things for very different reasons.
As usual, there is a huge amount of commentary that could be debated about these issues. And by the way, the question whether any of these words are mapped to and from some formal notation is irrelevant to the fundamental problems of interpreting the symbols in some program.
John
----------------------------------------
From: "Nadin, Mihai" <nadin(a)utdallas.edu>
This is the semiotics of the subject. Discussed many times by our Forum. Indeed, without referencing C.S. Peirce on the matter we will not make progress. In this vein: syntax and semantics are important. But sign processes are driven by the pragmatics: representations have a purpose or can be associated with purposes. Mihai Nadiin
From: hpolzer via ontolog-forum <ontolog-forum(a)googlegroups.com>
Understood, Ravi. I was just trying to illustrate with some examples of what I meant by the virtual world created by humans in addition to the natural world that John was referring to in his email. We tend to overlook the enormous amount of information we humans create about things that don’t actually exist in the natural world, at least not in the sense of material objects. Of course, we often create physical representations of some types of such things, but even there many of those representations have been reduced to bit patterns on some digital storage media, aka, “the cloud”. The physical properties of such representations bear no inherent relationship to the things they represent, such as the deed to a piece of property or a movie (which itself may represent something that doesn’t actually exist in the natural world). That general problem was one of the big challenges faced by Sagan and crew when working on the Voyager plaque/disk.
Hans
From: ontolog-forum(a)googlegroups.com <ontolog-forum(a)googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Ravi Sharma
Hans
Human made markers have been in use for a long time but used to operate in their own small areas of applications.
For example Ujjain India Meridian is where their astronomers calculated time for a millennia or two.
When they tried to apply this in today's context they found that both US and India will be split by the dateline.
Some strange results like metric - US (old British) units' lack of conversion led to space missions failures.
But hope we can correct all such aberrations going forward!
Staying with as close to reality as you suggest, I support.
Regards
Thanks.
Ravi
On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 10:43 AM deddy <deddy(a)davideddy.com>
For a natural language, almost every word has a continuous range of meanings.
And this is only for "natural" language.
See classic George Miller "Ambiguous Words"
13 simple Robert Frost words offer 3.6 TRILLION combinations.
https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/ambiguous-words
So far no acknowledgement at all of the existance of "unnatural language."
Unnatural language being the strings / labels / terms used INSIDE software applications. Many universes of written but minimally spoken terminology that AFAIK is entirely ignored in the current interest in AI & ontologies.
For those who expect "meaning" from statistics... long, long, long ago I encountered an insurance company that had found 70 different "names" for the concept "policy number."
AI LLMs / ontologies address this ... how?
David Eddy
> -------Original Message-------
> From: John F Sowa <sowa(a)bestweb.net>
>
> Alex,
>
> There are two very different issues: (1) Syntactic translation from
> one notation to another; (2) Semantic interpretation of the source or
> target notations.
>
> For a formally defined notation, such as FOL or any notation that is
> defined by its mapping to FOL, there is a single very precise
> definition of its meaning.
>
> For a natural language, almost every word has a continuous range of
> meanings. The only words (or phrases) that have a precise meaning are
> technical terms from some branch of science or engineering. Examples:
> hydrogen, oxygen, volt, ampere, gram, meter...
>
> If you translate a sentence from a natural language to formal
> language, that might narrow down the meaning in the target language,
> But that very precise meaning may be very differentt from what the
> original author had intended.
>
> Summary: Translation is not magic. It cannot make a vague sentence
> precise.
>
> John
> _______________________________________
>
> FROM: "Alex Shkotin" <alex.shkotin(a)gmail.com>
>
> John,
>
> Let me clarify what I meant by "English is HOL" by example.
>
> Sentence: "I see a blue jay drinking out of the birdbath."
>
> HOL-structure: (I see ((a (blue jay)) (drinking (out of)) (the
> birdbath)))
>
> where
>
> "of" is an unary operator used in postfix form, applied to "out" being
> an argument. As a result we get "(out of)" an expression or term.
>
> But this term is itself an unary operator used in postfix form,
> applied to "drinking" to create a term "(drinking (out of))", being
> binary operator in infix form being applied to two arguments: left
> one: "(a (blue jay))", and right one: "(the birdbath)".
>
> As a result we have a proposition which is a right argument for
> another binary operator in infix form "see", which has the left
> argument "I".
>
> And we are talking here not about Logic, but about Language.
>
> In every syntactically correct phrase, words are combined: one word is
> applied to another. The result is something like molecules, but in the
> World of Words.
>
> How to get this structure from a chain of words? How to work with
> these structures to get what? Some pictures? True|false value?
>
> This is the question
>
> Alex.
This is a technical issue, but it does have political ramifications.
A recent survey by Nature shows that 75.3% of researchers who responded to the following question replied YES: Are you a US researcher who is considering leaving the country following the disruptions to science prompted by the Trump administration?
Excerpt below from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00938-y
___________________
75% of US scientists who answered Nature poll consider leaving
More than 1,600 readers answered our poll; many said they were looking for jobs in Europe and Canada
The massive changes in US research brought about by the new administration of President Donald Trump are causing many scientists in the country to rethink their lives and careers. More than 1,200 scientists who responded to a Nature poll — three-quarters of the total respondents — are considering leaving the United States following the disruptions prompted by Trump. Europe and Canada were among the top choices for relocation.
The trend was particularly pronounced among early-career researchers. Of the 690 postgraduate researchers who responded, 548 were considering leaving; 255 of 340 PhD students said the same.
Trump’s administration has slashed research funding and halted broad swathes of federally funded science, under a government-wide cost-cutting initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk. Tens of thousands of federal employees, including many scientists, have been fired and rehired following a court order, with threats of more mass firings to come. Immigration crackdowns and battles over academic freedom have left researchers reeling as uncertainty and disruption permeate all aspects of the US research enterprise.
Decision to leave
Nature asked readers whether these changes were causing them to consider leaving the United States. Responses were solicited earlier this month on the journal’s website, on social media and in the Nature Briefing e-mail newsletter. Roughly 1,650 people completed the survey.
Many respondents were looking to move to countries where they already had collaborators, friends, family or familiarity with the language. “Anywhere that supports science,” wrote one respondent. Some who had moved to the United States for work planned to return to their country of origin.
But many more scientists had not planned on relocating, until Trump began gutting funding and firing researchers. “This is my home — I really love my country,” says a graduate student at a top US university who works in plant genomics and agriculture. “But a lot of my mentors have been telling me to get out, right now.”
This student lost her research support and her stipend when the Trump administration shut down funding for the US Agency for International Development. Her adviser found emergency funds to support her in the short term, but she is scrambling to apply for teaching-assistant positions — now extremely competitive — to carry her through the rest of her programme.
She had already been considering doing a postdoctoral fellowship abroad because of her interest in international agriculture. Losing her funding and watching some of her colleagues get fired solidified that into a plan of action. “Seeing all of the work stopped is heartbreaking,” she says. “I’ve been looking very diligently for opportunities in Europe, Australia and Mexico.”
The student hopes to return to the United States in the future if the upheaval in the research landscape settles down. But for now, the Trump administration “has made it very clear” that her area of interest, global food systems, “is not going to be a priority or a focus”, she says. “If I want to work in that space, I’m going to have to find somewhere else that prioritizes that.” Private US funding, such as through philanthropy, is an option, but she anticipates that she would be competing with a glut of formerly federally funded projects.
Opportunities abroad
Another respondent says that the disruptions have been “particularly horrible” for early-career scientists such as himself. “The PIs [principal investigators] I’ve spoken to feel they’ll be able to weather this storm,” he says. “As early-career investigators, we don’t have that luxury — this is a critical moment in our careers, and it’s been thrown into turmoil in a matter of weeks.”
Hi all.
FYI.
Regards,
Simon
From: Peggy Cellier
Sent: 28 March 2025 17:17
Dear colleagues,
We are extending the article submission deadline to April 7, 2025 (AoE).
Please note that this deadline is firm.
For more details, please have a look to the CFP below.
Best regards,
CONCEPTS chairs
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2nd International Joint Conference on Conceptual Knowledge Structures (CONCEPTS 2025)
Cluj-Napoca, România- September, 8th-12th, 2025
https://concepts2025.conference.ubbcluj.ro/
29th Intl. Conf. on Conceptual Structures (ICCS)
19th Intl. Conf. on Formal Concept Analysis (ICFCA)
18th Intl. Conf. on Concept Lattices and their Applications (CLA)
CONCEPTS, the International Conference on Conceptual Knowledge Structures is a merger of the three conferences CLA, ICCS, and ICFCA, which have been essential venues for researchers and practitioners working on theoretical and applied aspects of formal concept analysis and representation of conceptual knowledge, as well as closely related areas, such as data mining, information retrieval, knowledge management, and discovery.
CONCEPTS 2025, the second conference in this new series, aims to continue the tradition and standards of previous conferences and to become a key annual meeting for all members of the three communities, CLA, ICCS, and ICFCA, to keep abreast of the advances and new challenges in the field.
Main topics include but are not limited to:
· Fundamental aspects of Formal Concept Analysis (e.g., FCA theory, concept lattices, algorithms and computational complexity)
· Conceptual graphs, graph-based models for human reasoning
· Knowledge spaces and learning spaces
· Fuzzy, relational, and/or triadic conceptual structures
· Conceptual knowledge acquisition, management, exploration, analysis, and/or visualization
· Probabilistic or approximative approaches to conceptual knowledge
· Bridging conceptual structures to information sciences, artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, database theory, software engineering, and other areas of computer science
· Ontologies, semantic web, knowledge graphs, and their relation to conceptual knowledge structures such as concept lattices and conceptual graphs.
· Conceptual structures in natural language processing and linguistics
· Understanding real-world data and modeling real-world phenomena with conceptual structures (e.g., applications in digital humanities, cybersecurity, biology, medicine, social network analysis)
· Psychology, philosophy, and conceptual structures.
Submission details:
Submissions are invited on significant, original (previously unpublished) research on the topics of the conference:
· Regular papers up to 16 pages and short papers up to 8 pages are to be published by Springer in the LNAI series as a proceedings volume.
All submissions will be subject to single-blind peer review. Accepted papers have to be presented at the conference on-site. Therefore, at least one author per paper has to register timely and attend the conference on-site.
***Regular and short papers***
- Abstract submission: March 31, 2025 (AoE)
- Full paper submission: April 7, 2025 (AoE) Firm deadline
- Notification of acceptance: May 21, 2025
- Camera-ready papers due: June 5, 2025
Submission link: <https://equinocs.springernature.com/home> https://equinocs.springernature.com/service/concepts2025
Please select the appropriate category for your submitted manuscript, “regular paper” or “short paper.” Please visit the page <https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gu…> Information for authors<https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gu…> on Springer's website for templates and formatting style.
Organization:
General and Conference Chair:
Christian Săcărea, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania
Program Chairs:
Peggy Cellier, IRISA/INSA Rennes, France
Bernhard Ganter, TU Dresden, Germany
Rokia Missaoui, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada
Local organizer Committee:
Christian Săcărea, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, România
Diana Cristea, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca,
Diana Șotropa, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Executive Board:
Jaume Baixeries, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain
Radim Belohlavek, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic
Tanya Braun, University of Münster, Germany
Madalina Croitoru, University of Montpellier, France
Sébastien Ferré, University of Rennes, France
Sergei Kuznetsov, HSE University, Moscow, Russia
Rokia Missaoui, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada
Amedeo Napoli, LORIA, Nancy, France
Sergei Obiedkov, TU Dresden, Germany
Manuel Ojeda-Aciego, University of Malaga, Spain
Uta Priss, Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Wolfenbüttel, Germany
Gerd Stumme, University of Kassel, Germany
Program Committee:
Jaume Baixeries, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain
Alexandre Bazin, LIRMM, Montpellier, France
Mike Behrisch, Technische Universität Wien, Austria
Sadok Ben Yahia, Technology University of Tallinn, Estonia
Karell Bertet, La Rochelle University, France
Inma P. Cabrera, Universidad de Málaga, Spain
Peggy Cellier, IRISA/INSA Rennes, France
Maria Eugenia Cornejo Piñero, University of Cádiz, Spain
Christophe Demko, La Rochelle University, France
Xavier Dolques, Université de Strasbourg, France
Dominik Dürrschnabel, Universität Kassel, Germany
Sébastien Ferré, IRISA université de Rennes, France
Bernhard Ganter, TU Dresden, Germany
Alain Gely, université de Lorraine, France
Tom Hanika, University of Hildesheim, Germany
Tobias Hille, University of Kassel Germany
Marianne Huchard, LIRMM, Univ. Montpellier, France
Mohamed Hamza Ibrahim, University of Quebec in Outaouais, Canada
Dmitry Ignatov, HSE University, Moscow, Russia
Mehdi Kaytoue, Infologic R&D, France
Blaise Blériot Koguep Njionou, Université de Dschang, Cameroun
Francesco Kriegel, TU Dresden, Germany
Sergei Kuznetsov, HSE University, Moscow, Russia
Leonard Kwuida, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Florence Le Ber, Université de Strasbourg, France
Pierre Martin, University of Montpellier, France
Jesús Medina, University of Cádiz, Spain
Rokia Missaoui, University of Quebec in Outaouais, Canada
Amedeo Napoli, LORIA, Université de Lorraine, France
Sergei Obiedkov, TU Dresden, Germany
Manuel Ojeda-Aciego, Universidad de Málaga, Spain
Jan Outrata, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic
Tim Pattison, Defence Science and Technology Group, Australia
Carmen Peláez-Moreno, Univ. Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Uta Priss, Ostfalia Hochschule of Applied Sciences, Wolfenbüttel, Germany
Sandor Radeleczki, University of Miskolc, Hungary
Eloísa Ramírez Poussa, Universidad de Cádiz, Spain
Sebastian Rudolph, TU Dresden, Germany
Baris Sertkaya, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Henry Soldano, Université Paris 13, France
Petko Valtchev, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
Gerd Stumme, University of Kassel, Germany
Martin Trnecka, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic
Francisco José Valverde-Albacete, Univ. Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
We look forward to meeting you in Cluj-Napoca.
Please, feel free to contact us for any further information.
Sincerely yours,
Peggy Cellier, Bernhard Ganter, and Rokia Missaoui
CONCEPTS 2025 Program chairs
Email contact address: concepts25(a)lists.cs.uni-kassel.de<mailto:concepts25@lists.cs.uni-kassel.de>
Following is a slightly edited copy of a note with that title. As I have been saying, hybrids that use symbolic methods are essential for evaluating and correcting the results generated by LLMs.
One way to limit the amount of errors and hallucinations is to limit the amount of text that is being processed by the LLMs. But that contradicts people like Elon M. who has been using a huge amount of Nvidia chips, time, electricity, cooling, and $$$.
Elon is processing larger and larger amounts of input data, but he is also getting larger and larger amounts of irrelevant data as well as garbage and propaganda generated by people who are dumping the worst kind of stuff into the WWW.
Evaluation by symbolic methods is essential. There are people in Kenya who are being traumatized by companies that hire them to find and flag the garbage. They need the money, but it would be better to use symbolic AI methods that can detect the garbage without turning poor people into lunatics. The Kenyan people have nightmares, and some have committed suicide after spending 8 hours a day, every day reading that stuff.
And the fact that they need to hire poor people shows that LLMs, by themselves, cannot do the evaluation. That is a task that our Permion Inc. company does by using symbolic AI methods for evaluation. For examples, see the methods that our purely symbolic VivoMind system did from 2000 to 2010: https://jfsowa.com/talks/cogmem.pdf
You can skip to the final section for three examples of applications by the old VivoMind methods. Those are applications that customers specified and paid for. None of them can be done today by LLMs. But the new Permion hybrid methods can do all three kinds: symbolic, neural, and neurosymbolic.
The Permion and VivoMind methods can also do multiple languages, including language switching in the middle of a sentence. That is important for processing technical writing that mix human languages with texts from all kinds of notations for science, engineering, and all kinds of products and system.
One of the VivoMind applications dealt with texts about organic chemistry, which mixes symbols for millions of molecules with English text. Another application mixes computer jargon and programming langages with English text. And the system has to relate information in multiple computer languages with software specifications and application data. All that was done from 2000 to 2010.
John
----------------------------------------
From: "Anand Sanwal" <anand.sanwal(a)cbinsights.com>
AI agent problems
March 18, 2025
Talk is cheap
Hi there.
As AI agents dominate the conversation, customers are growing skeptical about whether they can live up to the hype.
In March, we’ve interviewed 40+ customers of AI agent products and are hearing of 3 primary pain points right now:
- Reliability
- Integration headaches
- Lack of differentiation
1. Reliability
This is the #1 concern raised by organizations adopting AI agents, with nearly half of respondents citing reliability & security as a key issue in a survey we conducted in December.
According to CBI’s latest buyer interviews, AI agent reliability varies dramatically across providers. Many customers report a gap between marketing and reality.
"Whatever was promised didn't work as great as said," one LangChain user told us about the company’s APIs. "We encountered cases where we were getting partially processed information, and the data we were trying to scrape was not exactly clean or was hallucinating."
For many customers, reliability is largely a function of how complex the data and use cases are. For instance, the LangChain customer saw ~80% accuracy for simpler tasks, but “for complex tasks, the accuracy dropped to around 50%.”
Organizations are tackling the reliability issue with 1) human oversight; and 2) more extensive model training.
An Ema customer, for instance, first has a subject-matter expert review outputs, and once “more than 90% of the responses that we have tested are now accurate, we let it fly.”
A customer for CrewAI, which orchestrates teams of AI agents into “crews,” takes an even more involved approach:
The customer still needs to intervene with their own ML algorithms when CrewAI is unable to handle outliers or unconventional data structures. If CrewAI is able to tackle these cases in the future, “that would be a huge leap forward.”
2. Integration headaches
Integration limitations rank as another top customer pain point.
For one, lack of interoperability poses long-term challenges, as this Cognigy customer notes:
An Artisan AI customer echoes this: “It was a bit of a gamble that we were signing up for a product where they didn't have quite all the integrations that we wanted.”
Where customers see real value from these tools is when they can support seamless data flow, especially through customers' existing tech stacks. This buyer went with Decagon because of its integrations:
3. Lack of differentiation
More than half of private capital flowing into the AI agent space has gone to horizontal applications — but these markets, like customer support and coding, are becoming highly saturated.
"There's so many short-term moats, but in the long term there is no moat," one customer observed. "Whatever you build will be rapidly reproduced."
In a crowded market, specialization will determine success.
Hebbia, for instance, has tailored its solution to financial players. An exec at a PE firm framed this as a selling point when getting internal buy-in: “When I bring tools to the deal team that live and breathe diligence and deal execution, ensuring that it's aligned to what they know and understand and [that it] speaks their language is incredibly important.”
While many horizontal AI agents are actively deploying or even scaling their solutions, vertical AI agents remain nascent, with half still in the first 2 levels of Commercial Maturity.
They’ll gain more momentum this year as enterprises prioritize solutions that are highly tailored to the needs of individual industries.
TLDR — Tech loves drama, right?
Here's a roundup of recent tech drama:
- Let’s make a Deel: HR and payroll platform Rippling is suing its rival Deel for allegedly planting a spy to access Rippling’s internal sales pipeline data and customer interactions. Rippling CEO Parker Conrad confirmed they set up a “honeypot” to prove that Deel’s senior leadership was orchestrating the illegal activity — and the double agent fell for it. When served with a court order, the spy locked himself in a bathroom and allegedly tried to flush his phone down the toilet. Rippling is seeking damages.
- Huawei in hot water: Belgian police arrested multiple individuals in a corruption probe involving forgery and falsified documents linked to Chinese tech giant Huawei. Authorities believe lobbyists paid off European Parliament members with cash, expensive gifts, and luxury trips to promote Huawei’s business interests in the region. Huawei denies wrongdoing but insists it is taking the allegations “seriously."
- Dirty laundry: Indian authorities arrested Lithuanian national Aleksej Besciokov, co-founder of Russian crypto exchange Garantex, at the request of the US. Besciokov is accused of facilitating money laundering linked to North Korean hackers and other cybercriminals. The arrest follows the US government’s seizure of Garantex’s website and $26M in frozen assets. Garantex, now under fire, claims it has plans to compensate customers for blocked funds.
- Lilac claps back: Former employees of lithium tech startup Lilac Solutions sued the company, claiming exposure to toxic chemicals left them with severe health issues. The Breakthrough Energy Ventures-backed firm fired back with its own lawsuit, accusing the workers of leaking trade secrets. OSHA has already hit Lilac with multiple citations, and a legal battle is now brewing over safety, whistleblower retaliation, and IP theft. Oh my.
- Apple vs. UK: Apple is fighting a UK order demanding that it build a “back door” into its security systems. Privacy activists are suing the government, calling the demand a major privacy violation. Apple already pulled its iCloud Advanced Data Protection from the UK after getting a secret government order. Now, US lawmakers are jumping in, pushing the UK to be more transparent about its legal process.
- Scalpel scandal: AI imaging firm ChemImage is suing Johnson & Johnson, claiming the healthcare giant stole its tech after a multibillion-dollar partnership went south. J&J argues the contract was scrapped because ChemImage failed to meet key milestones, while ChemImage says J&J bailed to cut losses on its struggling surgical robotics venture. The Manhattan federal court trial will decide whether ChemImage gets its patents and IP back, as well as $180M in contract termination penalties.
New research traces the source of the IndoEuropean languages to a location about 6,500 years ago. This is about a thousand years earlier than the Yamnaya people who invented the wheel. The authors of this hew method used genetic evidence to determine the location and the estimated date when the speakers of the protolanguage began to spread.
This new location is farther south than the Yamnaya source, and that puts it closer to the Hittites, who spoke an early version of IndoEuropean. That may be the reason why Hittite is quite a bit different from other IndoEuropen languages, which may have diverged from the Yamnayas about a thousand years later.
Following are the first few paragraphs. The full article includes a map.
John
_________________________
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/02/landmark-studies-track-sourc…
Researchers place Caucasus Lower Volga people, speakers of ancestor tongue, in today’s Russia about 6,500 years ago
A pair of landmark studies, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, has finally identified the originators of the Indo-European family of 400-plus languages, spoken today by more than 40 percent of the world’s population.
DNA evidence places them in current-day Russia during the Eneolithic period about 6,500 years ago. These linguistic pioneers were spread from the steppe grasslands along the lower Volga River to the northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, with researchers dubbing them the Caucasus Lower Volga people. Genetic results show they mixed with other groups in the region.
“It’s a very early manifestation of some of the cultural traditions that later spread across the steppe,” said senior author David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and human evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. . .
2nd International Joint Conference on Conceptual Knowledge Structures (CONCEPTS 2025)
Cluj-Napoca, România- September, 8th-12th, 2025
https://concepts2025.conference.ubbcluj.ro/
29th Intl. Conf. on Conceptual Structures (ICCS)
19th Intl. Conf. on Formal Concept Analysis (ICFCA)
18th Intl. Conf. on Concept Lattices and their Applications (CLA)
CONCEPTS, the International Conference on Conceptual Knowledge Structures is a merger of the three conferences CLA, ICCS, and ICFCA, which have been essential venues for researchers and practitioners working on theoretical and applied aspects of formal concept analysis and representation of conceptual knowledge, as well as closely related areas, such as data mining, information retrieval, knowledge management, and discovery.
CONCEPTS 2025, the second conference in this new series, aims to continue the tradition and standards of previous conferences and to become a key annual meeting for all members of the three communities, CLA, ICCS, and ICFCA, to keep abreast of the advances and new challenges in the field.
Main topics include but are not limited to:
· Fundamental aspects of Formal Concept Analysis (e.g., FCA theory, concept lattices, algorithms and computational complexity)
· Conceptual graphs, graph-based models for human reasoning
· Knowledge spaces and learning spaces
· Fuzzy, relational, and/or triadic conceptual structures
· Conceptual knowledge acquisition, management, exploration, analysis, and/or visualization
· Probabilistic or approximative approaches to conceptual knowledge
· Bridging conceptual structures to information sciences, artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, database theory, software engineering, and other areas of computer science
· Ontologies, semantic web, knowledge graphs, and their relation to conceptual knowledge structures such as concept lattices and conceptual graphs.
· Conceptual structures in natural language processing and linguistics
· Understanding real-world data and modeling real-world phenomena with conceptual structures (e.g., applications in digital humanities, cybersecurity, biology, medicine, social network analysis)
· Psychology, philosophy, and conceptual structures.
Submission details:
Submissions are invited on significant, original (previously unpublished) research on the topics of the conference:
· Journal-track papers up to 26 pages, to be published in a special issue of the <https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/international-journal-of-approximate-…> International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (IJAR)<https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/international-journal-of-approximate-…>;
· Regular papers up to 16 pages and short papers up to 8 pages are to be published by Springer in the LNAI series as a proceedings volume.
All submissions will be subject to single-blind peer review. Accepted papers have to be presented at the conference on-site. Therefore, at least one author per paper has to register timely and attend the conference on-site.
Important dates and submission instructions:
***Journal-track submissions***
- Full paper submission: March 23, 2025 (AoE)
- Paper reviews sent to authors: May 9, 2025
- Revised submission: June 9, 2025
- Notification of acceptance: July 6, 2025
Manuscripts must be submitted via the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning online submission system (Editorial Manager®):
https://www.editorialmanager.com/ija/default2.aspx
Please select the article type “VSI: CONCEPTS 2025” when submitting your manuscript online.
***Regular and short papers***
- Abstract submission: March 24, 2025 (AoE)
- Full paper submission: March 31, 2025 (AoE)
- Notification of acceptance: May 21, 2025
- Camera-ready papers due: June 5, 2025
Submission link: <https://equinocs.springernature.com/home> https://equinocs.springernature.com/service/concepts2025
Please select the appropriate category for your submitted manuscript, “regular paper” or “short paper.” Please visit the page <https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gu…> Information for authors<https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gu…> on Springer's website for templates and formatting style.
Organization:
General and Conference Chair:
Christian Săcărea, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania
Program Chairs:
Peggy Cellier, IRISA/INSA Rennes, France
Bernhard Ganter, TU Dresden, Germany
Rokia Missaoui, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada
Local organizer Committee:
Christian Săcărea, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, România
Diana Cristea, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca,
Diana Șotropa, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Executive Board:
Jaume Baixeries, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain
Radim Belohlavek, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic
Tanya Braun, University of Münster, Germany
Madalina Croitoru, University of Montpellier, France
Sébastien Ferré, University of Rennes, France
Sergei Kuznetsov, HSE University, Moscow, Russia
Rokia Missaoui, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada
Amedeo Napoli, LORIA, Nancy, France
Sergei Obiedkov, TU Dresden, Germany
Manuel Ojeda-Aciego, University of Malaga, Spain
Uta Priss, Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Wolfenbüttel, Germany
Gerd Stumme, University of Kassel, Germany
Program Committee:
Jaume Baixeries, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain
Alexandre Bazin, LIRMM, Montpellier, France
Mike Behrisch, Technische Universität Wien, Austria
Sadok Ben Yahia, Technology University of Tallinn, Estonia
Karell Bertet, La Rochelle University, France
Inma P. Cabrera, Universidad de Málaga, Spain
Peggy Cellier, IRISA/INSA Rennes, France
Maria Eugenia Cornejo Piñero, University of Cádiz, Spain
Christophe Demko, La Rochelle University, France
Xavier Dolques, Université de Strasbourg, France
Dominik Dürrschnabel, Universität Kassel, Germany
Sébastien Ferré, IRISA université de Rennes, France
Bernhard Ganter, TU Dresden, Germany
Alain Gely, université de Lorraine, France
Tom Hanika, University of Hildesheim, Germany
Tobias Hille, University of Kassel Germany
Marianne Huchard, LIRMM, Univ. Montpellier, France
Mohamed Hamza Ibrahim, University of Quebec in Outaouais, Canada
Dmitry Ignatov, HSE University, Moscow, Russia
Mehdi Kaytoue, Infologic R&D, France
Blaise Blériot Koguep Njionou, Université de Dschang, Cameroun
Francesco Kriegel, TU Dresden, Germany
Sergei Kuznetsov, HSE University, Moscow, Russia
Leonard Kwuida, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Florence Le Ber, Université de Strasbourg, France
Pierre Martin, University of Montpellier, France
Jesús Medina, University of Cádiz, Spain
Rokia Missaoui, University of Quebec in Outaouais, Canada
Amedeo Napoli, LORIA, Université de Lorraine, France
Sergei Obiedkov, TU Dresden, Germany
Manuel Ojeda-Aciego, Universidad de Málaga, Spain
Jan Outrata, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic
Tim Pattison, Defence Science and Technology Group, Australia
Carmen Peláez-Moreno, Univ. Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Uta Priss, Ostfalia Hochschule of Applied Sciences, Wolfenbüttel, Germany
Sandor Radeleczki, University of Miskolc, Hungary
Eloísa Ramírez Poussa, Universidad de Cádiz, Spain
Sebastian Rudolph, TU Dresden, Germany
Baris Sertkaya, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Henry Soldano, Université Paris 13, France
Petko Valtchev, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
Gerd Stumme, University of Kassel, Germany
Martin Trnecka, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic
Francisco José Valverde-Albacete, Univ. Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
We look forward to meeting you in Cluj-Napoca.
Please, feel free to contact us for any further information.
Sincerely yours,
Peggy Cellier, Bernhard Ganter, and Rokia Missaoui
CONCEPTS 2025 Program chairs
Email contact address: concepts25(a)lists.cs.uni-kassel.de<mailto:concepts25@lists.cs.uni-kassel.de>
