ILPnet2: ILP Network of Excellence
(NoE Nr. 977102)

Progress Report for the Period 01/09/2001 to 31/08/2002

Background, objectives and workplan for the fourth year

ILPnet2 is the Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) Network of Excellence consisting of over 20 universities and research institutes. In addition the network actively pursues industrial relations through its End-User Club (EUC), consisting of companies and other non-academic institutions interested in practical applications of ILP. ILPnet2 succeeds ILPnet, the ILP European Scientific Network.

The mission of ILPnet2 is defined by the following long-term objectives:

Originally, ILPnet2 was supposed to take place in the period September 1998 to August 2001, but a one-year no-cost extension until 31st August 2002 was arranged. The plan for the fourth and final year of ILPnet2 was to continue with activities related to the dissemination of information on ILP and its application and complete some of the activities planned for but not completed in year three. The latter include the organization of a summer school on ILP and its applications and the establishment of an ILP toolbox for educational purposes. It was also planned to extend ILPnet2 with several new nodes/associate nodes and to make some additions to the End-User-Club. An itemized workplan for year four was thus as follows:

Activities in the fourth year

Below we report on the activities of ILPnet2 in the fourth year and relate them to the above workplan. Highlights include the organization of a summerschool on ILP (and in particular relational data mining) and its applications, as well as the ILP toolbox for educational purposes, which was established and made available to ILPnet2 members. Other activities include the publication of the ILP Newsletter, significant updates of the WWW resources (library, systems and application descriptions), and supporting the organization of ILP-2002. More detailed information on ILPnet2 activities can be found starting at the ILPnet2 website at http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~ILPnet2/.

Extending ILPnet2 and its End-User-Club

Several additions were made to ILPnet2 and its End-User-Club (EUC). In particular, 7 associate nodes were added: Imperial College (UK), University of Strasbourg (F), University of Bari (I), University of Bologna (I), University of Ferrara (I), Institut National des Sciences Appliquees de Lyon (F), and Technical University of Valencia (E). Two companies were added to the EUC: KD Labs, Zurich (CH), and Kiminkii, Utrecht (NL). At the end of the fourth year, ILPnet2 thus comprises 25 nodes, 12 associate nodes and 16 members of the EUC.

Educational event and workshops

ILPnet2 supported the organization of the Summer School on Relational Data Mining, held in Helsinki, 17-18 August 2002. The summer school was organized by the Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, with the help and support of the University of Helsinki. The 8 lecturers presented 12 lectures covering both the basic and advanced issues in the theory and applications of relational data mining, a discipline that has sprung up from ILP and is concerned with data mining of multi-relational databases. The slides from the lectures are available in electronic form from the web site of the school. The school was attended by 34 participants from 13 countries. A detailed report on the school can be found in the appendix.

ILPnet2 also supported the organization of the annual conference on ILP. The Twelfth International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP-2002), took place 9-11 July 2002 in Sidney, Australia. The conference featured two invited talks, 19 presentations in the regular papers track and 10 presentations in the work-in-progress track. Many node members and several members of the EUC actively participated in the conference. A report on ILP-2002 can be found in the appendix.

ILP educational toolbox

In the final year of ILPnet2, the development of an ILP Toolbox, to be used for educational purposes, was completed. The toolbox was developed by the University of Magdeburg and is based on the data mining toolbox KEPLER, developed by GMD and DIALOGIS. It includes three ILP tools (two for rule induction and one for subgroup discovery) incorporated within a graphical environment, together with several propositional tools. It also includes tutorial cases of using the three ILP tools on illustrative problems as well as a realistic problem (predicting mutagenesis). The ILP Toolbox is currently only available to ILPnet2 nodes through the ILPnet2 CSCW Workspace.

ILPnet2 website

ILPnet2 exploits the Internet as the main medium of information dissemination. Information disseminated in this way includes bibliographic information (also technical reports and thesis abstracts), information on ILP systems and information on ILP applications and datasets. In this respect, ILPnet2 expands on activities undertaken by ILPnet, the ILPnet2 predecessor.

In year four, many new entries were submitted to the ILPnet2 on-line library. These include, among others, the papers from the workshop Multi-Relational Data Mining organized in conjunction with the KDD-2002 conference, as well as ILP-related papers from several other conferences. The library now contains about 1100 entries.

Information on ILP systems was expanded in year four: 5 new entries were added, and 4 entries updated. There are now 57 entries at the ILPnet2 systems page. The ILPnet2 applications and datasets page was also updated: 12 new entries were added and several existing entries updated, resulting in a total of 72 entries. New entries were added in all application areas: engineering, environmental sciences, life sciences, and natural language processing.

Other information available through the ILPnet2 website includes the ILP newsletter, a list of ILP-related events and a list of educational materials. The ILP Newsletter had three issues in the fourth year of ILPnet2. In addition to being distributed via email, the newsletter is also available through the ILPnet2 website at IJS. The list of ILP-related events, created in year two, was maintained and contains about 20 events for 2002. The list of educational materials contains pointers to ten ILP-related university courses, as well as other educational materials, which include on-line versions of lectures/slides of ILP related tutorials. The list was updated with several new entries, most notably with the slides from the summerschool on Relational Data Mining, and now contains about 20 entries.

ILPnet2 brochure

A brochure presenting ILPnet2 was prepared, which gives an overview of the activities of ILPnet2, highlighting the more important achievements. The brochure was distributed to participants of the Summer School on Relational Data Mining. It accompanied the presentation of ILPnet2 at the European Project Presentation Day (19 August 2002) at ECML/PKDD-2002 (13th European Conference on Machine Learning - ECML and 6th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases - PKDD), Helsinki, Finland. The brochure was also distributed to the participants of ECML/PKDD-2002. The updated version of the brochure, included as Appendix II, can be considered as a final report for ILPnet2.

Appendix: Reports on Events Sponsored by ILPnet2

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