The Institute Conferences

National Cancer Institute support for scientific conferences.

In this paper, we discuss the value of scientific conferences to both the discipline area and the individual participants and trace the growth in grant support of biomedical meetings by the National Institutes of Health and, in particular, the National Cancer Institute.

The Message Understanding Conferences

The latest in a series of natural language processing system evaluations was concluded in October 1995 and was the topic of the Sixth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-6) in November, co-chaired by Ralph Grishman (NYU) and Beth Sundheim (NRaD). Participants were invited to enter their systems in as many as four different task-oriented evaluations. The Named Entity and Coreference tasks enta...

Conferences in the nanoworld.

The Text Retrieval Conferences

There have been two Text REtrieval conferences frRECs); TREC-1 in November 1992, with 28 participants, and TREC-2 in August 1993, with 31 participants. This conference was inspired by the very successful MUC effort, and by the availability of the new large English test collection built for TIPSTER. Whereas an important goal for ARPA was to investigate a broad range of detection (retrieval) tech...

The Gordon conferences—R.I.P.?

Until the late'80s, the Gordon Research Conferences were regarded as the premier research meetings in biology, but their prestige has declined rapidly in recent years. The unique position occupied by the Gordon Conferences in American (and indeed international) science makes this decline a matter of concern to the entire community. What is the cause of the problem, and what can be done about it...