Connectionists: Call for Contributions: NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning Open Source Software 2006

[Soeren Sonnenburg]

  Workshop on Machine Learning Open Source Software 2006
============================================================
( http://www.fml.tuebingen.mpg.de/raetsch/workshops/MLOSS06 )

The NIPS workshop on Workshop on Machine Learning Open Source Software
(MLOSS) will held in Whistler (B.C.) on the 8th or 9th of December, 2006.

Important Dates
---------------

* Submission Date: October 26th, 2006
* Notification of Acceptance: November 9th, 2006
* Workshop date: December 8 or 9th, 2006

Description
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Open source tools have recently reached a level of maturity which
makes them suitable for building large-scale real-world systems. At the same
time, the field of machine learning has developed a large body of powerful
learning algorithms for a wide range of applications. Inspired by similar
conferences in bioinformatics (BOSC) or statistics (useR), our aim is to
build a forum for open source software in machine learning. The workshop's
ultimate goal is to bring existing and freshly developed toolboxes and
algorithmic implementations to people's attention.

Program Commitee
----------------

* Jason Weston (NEC Princeton, USA)
* Gökhan BakIr (MPI Tuebingen, Germany)
* Alexander Smola (NICTA Canberra, Australia)
* Gunnar Rätsch (FML Tuebingen, Germany)
* Lieven Vandenberghe (University of California LA, USA)
* Chih-Jen Lin ( National Taiwan University Taipei, Taiwan)
* William Stafford Noble (University of Washington, Seattle, USA)
* Klaus-Robert Mueller (Fraunhofer Institute First, Germany)

Call for Contributions
----------------------

The organizing committee is currently seeking abstracts for talks at MLOSS
2006. MLOSS is a great opportunity for you to tell the community about your
use, development, or philosophy of open source software in machine learning.
This includes (but is not limited to) numeric packages (e.g.
R,octave,numpy), machine learning toolboxes and implementations of
ML-algorithms. The committee will select several submitted abstracts for
20-minute talks. Accepted abstracts will be published on the web site.

If you are interested in speaking at MLOSS, please send us an email at 
mloss at tuebingen.mpg.de before October 28th, 2006 with:

* an abstract (1 page A4)
* a URL for the project page, if applicable
* information about the open source license used for
  your software or your release plans.

Note: Submissions must adhere to a recognized Open Source License (cf.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ ) and the source code must be available
at the time of presentation.

Planned format:
---------------

The workshop will be a mixture of talks (including a mandatory demo of the
software) and panel/open/hands-on discussions.

Invited Speakers:
-----------------

* Python with scipy - Travis Oliphant 
* CVXOPT - Lieven Vandenberghe
* R  - Kurt Hornick or John MainDonald
* Torch Ronan Collobert or Samy Bengio or Johnny Marithoz

Organizers:
-----------

* Soeren Sonnenburg, Mikio Braun - Fraunhofer FIRST
* Cheng Soon Ong - MPI for Biological Cybernetics 
	  and Friedrich Miescher Laboratory
* S.V.N. Vishwanathan - National ICT Australia
-- 
Soeren Sonnenburg - Fraunhofer FIRST      Tel: +49 (30) 6392 1882
Kekulestr. 7, 12489 Berlin, Germany       Fax: +49 (30) 6392 1805