NIPS Workshop Announcement (and CFP)

[David Cohn]

--------------------------------------------------------------
       NIPS Workshop on Active Learning and Control
         Announcement (and call for participation)
--------------------------------------------------------------
      organizers: David Cohn, University of Washington
                  Don Sofge, MIT AI Lab

An "active" learning system is one that is not merely a passive
observer of its environment, but instead play an active role in
determining its inputs.  This definition includes classification
networks that query for values in "interesting" parts of their domain,
learning systems that actively "explore" their environment, and
adaptive controllers that learn how to produce control outputs to
achieve a goal.

Common facets of these problems include building world models in
complex domains, exploring a domain to safely and efficiently, and,
planning future actions based on one's model.

In this workshop, our main focus will be to address key unsolved
problems which may be holding up progress on these problems rather
than presenting polished, finished results. Ours hopes are that
unsolved problems in one field may be able to draw on insight from
research in other fields.

Each session of the workshop will begin with introductions to specific
problems in the field by researchers in each area, with the second half
of each session reserved for discussion.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current speakers include:
	Chris Atkeson, MIT AI Lab
	Tom Dietterich, Oregon State Univ.
	Michael Jordan, MIT Brain & Cognitive Sciences
	Michael Littman, BellCore
	Andrew Moore, MIT AI Lab
	Jurgen Schmidhuber, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder
	Satinder Singh, UMass Amherst
	Rich Sutton, GTE
	Sebastian Thrun, Carnegie-Mellon University

A few open slots remain, so if you would be interested in discussing
your "key unsolved problem" in active learning, exploration, planning
or control, send email to David Cohn (pablo at cs.washington.edu) or Don
Sofge (sofge at ai.mit.edu).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
	Friday, 12/6,   Morning        Active Learning
	"       "       Afternoon      Learning Control
	Saturday, 12/7, Morning        Active Exploration
	"         "     Afternoon      Planning

---------------------------------------------------------------------------