NIPS*97 Workshop on Autoassociators

[Nathalie Japkowicz]

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			NIPS*97 Workshop Announcement
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	   Advances in Autoencoder/Autoassociator-Based Computations

			Date: Friday December 5, 1997 

			Location: Breckenridge, Colorado 

      Organizers: Nathalie Japkowicz, Mark A. Gluck and Stephen J. Hanson 
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Workshop Description: 
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Autoencoders/Autoassociators have had a troubled history. At first believed 
to have great potential for image compression and speech processing, they 
were subsequently shown not to outperform Principal Component Analysis (PCA), 
a linear dimensionality-reduction method, even in the presence of 
nonlinearities in their hidden layer. Nonetheless, because of their intriguing 
nature, their study was pursued and it was shown that under certain 
circumstances, they are capable of performing various types of nonlinear 
dimensionality-reduction tasks. More recently, they were also shown to be very 
competent in learning algorithm's reliability estimation, novelty detection, 
cognitive modeling of the hippocampus and of the natural language grammar 
acquisition process. Furthermore, they appear promising for time-series 
analyses when used in recursive mode. Despite their various successes, however, 
autoencoders/autoassociators have had a difficult time re-establishing
themselves fully and the extent of their capabilities remains controversial. 
The purpose of this workshop is to attempt to revive this extremely powerful, 
yet conceptually simple device in order to generate a more elaborate 
understanding of their inner-workings and to explore the various practical 
and cognitive applications for which they can be useful. More specifically, 
we are hoping to bring together theoretical and experimental researchers from 
both engineering and cognitive science backgrounds, who have studied 
autoencoders/autoassociators, used them in various ways, or designed and 
studied novel autoencoder/autoassociator-based architectures of interest.
We believe that by enabling the sharing of ideas and experiences, this forum 
will help understand autoencoders/autoassociators better and generate new 
research directions. In addition, autoencoder/autoassociator-based systems 
will be compared to other types of autoassociative schemes and their strengths 
and weaknesses evaluated against them. 

List of Speakers:
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       * Pierre Baldi 
       * Horst Bischof/Andreas Weingessel/Kurt Hornik 
       * Kostas Diamantaras 
       * Zoubin Ghahramani/Sam Roweis/Geoffrey Hinton 
       * Mohamad Hassoun/Agus Sudjianto 
       * Robert Hecht-Nielsen 
       * Nathalie Japkowicz/Stephen J. Hanson/Mark A. Gluck 
       * Erkki Oja 
       * Jordan Pollack 
       * Holger Schwenk 
       * Andreas Weingessel/Horst Bischof/Kurt Hornik 

(An additional two or three speakers will perhaps join the program)


Titles and abstracts of the talks 
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Posted at: http://paul.rutgers.edu/~nat/Workshop/workshop.html