ICANN 2001 WORKSHOP CONTRIBUTIONS

[Christian Schittenkopf (FTC Research)]

[ Moderator's note:  Thanks to Christian Schittenkopf for preparing this 
  summary of the ICANN workshops.  The CONNECTIONISTS list doesn't carry
  announcements for individual workshops associated with a conference
  where we have also carried the call for papers and call for registrations,
  because we were being flooded with too many of these and they are usually
  only of interest to conference attendees.  However, we are happy to carry
  a summary of a conference's entire workshop program as a single posting.

                  -- Dave Touretzky, CONNECTIONISTS moderator         ]



Following the regular program of the ICANN 2001 conference (Aug. 21-24),
four workshops on current topics will be held on Aug. 25 in Vienna.
CONTRIBUTIONS to the WORKSHOPS listed below are highly welcome.
More details on tutorials, conference and workshops can be found at
http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/icann/

Christian Schittenkopf
(Workshop Chair)




Workshop: RECURRENT NEURAL NETWORKS AND ONLINE SEQUENCE LEARNING
Organizers: Douglas Eck and Juergen Schmidhuber, IDSIA

OVERVIEW: A full-day workshop. We define the topic broadly and include
presentations from related areas, although the focus will remain on
recurrent neural networks (RNNs).

RNNs are of interest as they can implement almost arbitrary sequential
behavior. They are biologically more plausible and computationally
more powerful than feedforward networks, support vector machines,
hidden Markov models, etc. Making RNNs learn from examples used to be
difficult though. Recent progress has overcome fundamental problems
plaguing traditional RNNs - now there exist online learning RNNs that
efficiently learn previously unlearnable solutions to numerous tasks,
using not more than O(1) computations per weight and time step:

 Recognition of temporally extended, noisy patterns
 Recognition of regular, context free and context sensitive languages
 Recognition of temporal order of widely separated events
 Extraction of information conveyed by the temporal distance between events
 Generation of precisely timed rhythms
 Stable generation of smooth periodic trajectories
 Robust storage of high-precision real numbers across extended time
intervals

The workshop is intended to discuss recent advances as well as future
potential of RNNs and alternative approaches to online sequence learning.

WORKSHOP FORMAT: Like all ICANN 2001 workshops, this session will take
place in a particularly nice venue, a traditional Heuriger ['hoy-ri-guer]
in Vienna. A "Heuriger" provides a typically Viennese where one can
drink local wine and eat schnitzel while sitting on wooden seats at
wooden tables.

SPEAKERS: We might be able to add one or two additional speakers. If you
are interested in presenting, please contact Doug Eck (doug at idsia.ch)
with a suggested title and abstract. Here is a *tentative* list.

Marco Gori (Universita degli Studi di Siena, Italy)
Steve Grossberg (Boston University, USA)
Sepp Hochreiter (University of Colorado, USA)
Juan Antonio Perez-Ortiz (Universidad di Alicante, Spain)
Nicol Schraudolph (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
Sebino Stramaglia (Istituto Nazionale di Fiscia Nucleare, Italy)
Ron Sun (University of Missouri, USA)
Hans Georg Zimmermann (Siemens AG, Germany)

For details and abstracts see the workshop website at
http://www.idsia.ch/~doug/icann/index.html
For registration see the ICANN website at
http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/icann/




Workshop: KERNEL & SUBSPACE METHODS FOR COMPUTER VISION
Co-organizers: Ales Leonardis, Horst Bischof

http://www.prip.tuwien.ac.at/~bis/kernelws/

Scope of the workshop:

This half-day workshop will be held in conjunction with ICANN 2001
on August 25, 2001 in Vienna.

In the past years, we have been witnessing vivid developments of
sophisticated kernel and subspace methods in neural network and
pattern recognition communities on one hand and extensive use of
these methods in the area of computer vision on the other hand.
These methods seem to be especially relevant for object and scene
recognition. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together scientists
from the neural network (pattern recognition) and computer vision
community to analyze new developments, identify open problems, and
discuss possible solutions in the area of kernel & subspace methods
such as:

       Support Vector Machines
       Independent Component Analysis
       Principle Component Analysis
       Canonical Correlation Analysis, etc.

for computer vision problems such as:

       Object Recognition
       Navigation and Robotics
       3D Vision, etc.

Contributions in the above mentioned areas are welcome.

The program will consist of invited and selected contributed papers.
The papers selected for the workshop will appear in a Workshop
Proceedings which will be distributed among the workshop participants.
It is planned that selected papers from the workshop will be published
in a journal.

Important dates:

Submission Deadline:         31.5.2001
Notification of Acceptance:  29.6.2001
Final Papers Due:            3.8.2001

Submission instructions:

A complete paper, not longer than 12 pages including figures and
references, should be submitted in the LNCS page format. The layout of
final papers must adhere strictly to the guidelines set out in the
Instructions for the Preparation of Camera-Ready Contributions to LNCS
Proceedings.  Authors are asked to follow these instructions exactly.

In order to reduce the handling effort of papers we allow only for
electronic submissions by ftp (either ps or pdf files).

ftp ftp.prip.tuwien.ac.at
[anonymous ftp, i.e.:
Name: ftp
Password: <your email address> ]
cd kernelws
binary
put <your name>.ext
quit

Workshop Registration:
Registration for the Workshop can be done at the ICANN 2001 Homepage
http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/icann/




Workshop: ADVANCES TOWARDS LIFE-LIKE PERCEPTION SYSTEMS
Organizer: Leslie Smith

The aim of the workshop is to discuss neuromorphic systems in sensory
perception: mechanisms, coding schemes, scene analysis (whether visual,
auditory, polfactory other sense), top-down and bottom up processing.
We are particularly interested in the the nature of biological
relevance (and indeed, whether this is really necessary) and the
sensing-perception-action loop.

We seek 1 page contributions by May 31. We are considering organising
publication of the workshop.

For further information, see

http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/icann/txt/workshop-lps.html

Leslie S Smith
lss at cs.stir.ac.uk
tel: +44 1786 46 7435 fax: +44 1786 46 4551
Department of Computing Science and Mathematics, University of Stirling,
Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland, UK