Connectionists: CFP: NIPS 2005 Workshop - Game Theory, Machine Learning and Reasoning under Uncertainty

[Iead Rezek]

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                          CALL FOR PAPERS

      Game Theory, Machine Learning and Reasoning under Uncertainty

                          Workshop at the
                Neural Information Processing Systems
                            (NIPS) 2005


                   http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gmr05.html

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OVERVIEW


Game theory is concerned with understanding the decision processes and
strategic actions of competing individuals. Having initially found
applications in economics and diplomacy, game theory is increasingly
being used to understand the interactions that occur within large
multi-agent systems, and has been applied in areas as diverse as
allocating resources within grid computing and coordinating the
behaviour of multiple autonomous vehicles.

Recent research has highlighted the benefits that may result from
examining the interface between machine learning and game
theory. While classical game theory makes limited provision for
dealing with uncertainty and noise, research in machine learning, and
particularly probabilistic inference, has resulted in a remarkable
array of powerful algorithms for performing statistical inference from
difficult real world data. Machine learning holds the promise of
generalising game theory to deal with the uncertain, data-driven
domain that we encounter in real-world applications (for example, the
timely and decentralised flight coordination for Europe's future Open
Skies initiative or the dynamic and responsive data fusion of
multi-modal physiological time series in intensive care.)

In addition, whilst techniques from graphical models have
suggested computationally tractable algorithms for analysing games
that consist of a large number of players, insights from game
theory are also inspiring new work on strategic learning behaviour
in probabilistic inference and are suggesting new algorithms to
perform intelligent sampling in Markov Monte Carlo methods.

CALL FOR PAPERS

To investigate these issues and reflect the range of questions that
the workshop addresses, we invite submissions from researchers who
have made contributions to this nascent field and also practitioners
from a wide range of backgrounds. Of particular interest is research
concerning (but not limited to) the following issues:

     1. Considered separately, what are the current limitations of
     game theory and probabilistic inference and what can be
     achieved by integrating the two?

     2. What are the specific points of correspondences between game
     theory and probabilistic inference that can be used to incorporate
     new developments in probabilistic inference into game theory 
applications
     and vice versa. Some of the examples of such correspondences and their
     inclusions that could be addressed are
         - dynamic behaviour of probabilistic inference mechanisms
         through game theoretic interaction models,
         - structured belief models in computational game
         theory algorithms,
         - quantitative bounds on Nash equilibria,
         - MCMC sampling with intelligent particles.

     3. What are the applications which are most likely to
     benefit from an explicitly inferential game theory?


The workshop paper should be no more than 8 pages in length and
written in standard NIPS format. Please also indicate whether you are
interested in an oral or poster presentation. We also welcome position
papers and work of researchers from industrial/application background
to reflect the future practical needs to the research area. Please
submit an article only if at least one of the authors is certain to
attend.


IMPORTANT DATES

14   September 2005       Call for papers
23   October   2005       Deadline for paper submissions
05   November  2005       Notification of paper acceptance
9/10 December  2005       Workshop

ORGANISERS

The ARGUS project (www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~argus), and in particular

  Iead Rezek, University of Oxford (irezek at robots.ox.ac.uk)
  Alex Rogers, University of Southampton (a.rogers at ecs.soton.ac.uk)

and

  David Wolpert, NASA Ames Research Center

INQUIRIES

Please direct any inquiries regarding the workshop to
Iead Rezek, (irezek at robots.ox.ac.uk) or Alex Rogers 
(a.rogers at ecs.soton.ac.uk)