WSOM 2012 opened in Santiago, Chile

WSOM 2012, Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps takes place in the summerly city of Santiago, Chile from 12th to 14th of December, 2012. The conference is organized by the University of Chile, Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Science. The conference site is the School of Engineering. Pablo Estévez serves as the general chair, José Príncipe as the co-chair and Pablo Zegers as the program chair.

The honorary chair, Teuvo Kohonen, the inventor of the original self-organizing map algorithm, presented his greetings to the conference audience through a video presentation. Among other things, he reminded of the fact that the SOM-based scientific literature consists currently of over 12,000 scientific publications. Academician Kohonen mentioned that his article "Essentials of the self-organizing map" will be published in the Neural Networks journal and is already available online.

During the three days, 33 papers are presented in a single track by participants and authors from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Romania and South Africa. The two plenary talks are by Barbara Hammer on "How to visualize large data sets" and by José Príncipe on "Self-organization using information theoretic learning". Pavlos Protopapas gives an invited talk on "Data mining for astronomy". The conference proceedings are published by Springer.