Connectionists: Fw: NIPS Workshop CFP - Value of Information in Inference, Learning and Decision-Making

[Gerry Tesauro]

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                         Call For Papers

           Value of Information in Inference, Learning
                       and Decision-Making

           Workshop held at the 19th Annual Conference
             on Neural Information Processing Systems
                           (NIPS 2005)

               Whistler, CANADA: December 10, 2005
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Overview and Goals
===================

A common fundamental problem of value of information (VOI) analysis
arises in inference, learning and sequential decision-making when
one is allowed to actively select, rather than passively observe,
the input information.  VOI provides a principled methodology that
enables acquiring information in a way that optimally trades off
the cost of information gathering with the expected benefit in some
overall objective (e.g., classification accuracy or cumulative reward).

For example, in Bayesian problem diagnosis VOI analysis aims at selecting
observations (e.g., medical tests) that are most informative about
the unknown variables (e.g., diseases we are trying to diagnose) while
minimizing the cost of collecting the information.  In sequential
decision-making problems, VOI can provide a principled solution to
the well-known "exploration versus exploitation" dilemma, so that one
can optimally trade off the immediate cost of exploratory actions with
expected improvement in future decisions and future reward.  Yet another
example is active learning, where the goal is to minimize the cost of
observations (e.g., the number of labeled samples) while maximizing
the learner's objective function. Finally, selecting the most relevant
subset of features in supervised learning is another example where VOI
analysis can provide a principled solution.

Clearly, these areas differ in their choices of a particular objective
function and the approaches to active exploration, but have a common
goal of selecting explorative actions that maximize the VOI.  In this
workshop, we plan to bring together researchers from several fields
concerned with VOI analysis and hope to ignite cross-fertilization
between the areas.  This could lead to major theoretical progress
as well as practical impact in applications such as medical diagnosis,
quality control in product design, IT systems management and
troubleshooting, and DNA library screening, just to name a few.

Suggested Topics
=================

The list of possible topics includes (but is not limited to) the following:

   *  VOI analysis in probabilistic inference and decision theory
   *  feature selection and attribute-efficient learning
   *  active learning (query learning, selective sampling)
   *  exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning
   *  adaptive versus non-adaptive testing designs
   *  comparison of different action selection criteria and
      objective functions
   *  applications of VOI in diagnosis, systems control and management,
      coding theory, computational biology, neural coding, etc.

Format
=======

This is a one-day workshop following the 19th Annual Conference on Neural
Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2005). There will be several invited
talks and tutorials (roughly 30-40 minutes each) and shorter contributed
talks from researchers in industry and academia, as well as a panel
discussion.
We will hold a poster session if we receive a sufficient number of good
submissions. The workshop is intended to be accessible to the broader NIPS
community and to encourage communication between different fields.

Submission Instructions
========================

We invite submissions of extended abstracts (up to 2 pages, not including
bibliography) for the short contributed talks and/or posters.  The
submission
should present a high-level description of recent or ongoing work related
to the topics above. We will explore the possibility of publishing papers
based on invited and submitted talks in a special issue of an appropriate
journal.

Email submissions to nips05workshop at watson.ibm.com as attachments in
Postscript or PDF, no later than October 24, 2005.

Information
============

   Workshop URL: www.research.ibm.com/nips05workshop/

   Submission: nips05workshop at watson.ibm.com

   NIPS:  http://www.nips.cc


Dates & Deadlines
==================

   October 24: Abstract Submission
   October 31: Acceptance Notification


Organizing Committee
=====================

   Dr. Alina Beygelzimer
   IBM T. J. Watson Research Lab, USA

   Dr. Rajarshi Das
   IBM T. J. Watson Research Lab, USA

   Dr. Irina Rish (primary contact)
   IBM T. J. Watson Research Lab, USA

   Dr. Gerry Tesauro
   IBM T. J. Watson Research Lab, USA


Invited Speakers
=================
   Prof. Craig Boutilier
   University of Toronto

   Prof. Sanjoy Dasgupta
   University of California, San Diego

   Prof. Carlos Guestrin
   Carnegie Mellon University

   Prof. Michael Littman
   Rutgers University

   Prof. Dale Schuurmans
   University of Alberta

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