CONALD Conference Announcement

[Diane Stidle]

      CONFERENCE ON AUTOMATED LEARNING AND DISCOVERY (CONALD)

                        June 11-13, 1998 
          at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA


The Conference on Automated Learning and Discovery (CONALD'98) will
bring together leading researchers from scientific disciplines
concerned with learning from data. It will cover scientific research
at the intersection of statistics, computer science, artificial
intelligence, databases, social sciences and language
technologies. The goal of this meeting is to explore new, unified
research directions in this cross-disciplinary field.

The conference features eight one-day cross-disciplinary workshops,
interleaved with seven invited plenary talks by renowned
statisticians, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists. The
workshops will address issues such as: what is the state of the art,
what can we do and what is missing? what are promising research
directions? what are the most promising opportunities for
cross-disciplinary research?

CONALD differs from other meetings in the field in its broad,
interdisciplinary scope. The goal of CONALD is to characterize the
state-of-the-art in automated learning and discovery, and to identify
promising cross-disciplinary research directions. The format will be
very much tailored towards open discussions and free exchange of
ideas. This meeting will be summarized by a written report that will
be made available to the scientific community and NSF.



___Plenary speakers________________________________________________

        * Tom Dietterich
        * Stuart Geman
        * David Heckerman
        * Michael Jordan
        * Daryl Pregibon
        * Herb Simon
        * Robert Tibshirani


___Workshops_______________________________________________________

        * Visual Methods for the Study of Massive Data Sets
                organized by Bill Eddy and Steve Eick
        * Learning Causal Bayesian Networks
                organized by Richard Scheines and Larry Wasserman
        * Discovery in Natural and Social Science
                organized by Raul Valdes-Perez
        * Mixed-Media Databases
                organized by Shumeet Baluja, Christos Faloutsos, 
                Alex Hauptmann, and Michael Witbrock
        * Learning from Text and the Web
                organized by Yiming Yang, Jaime Carbonell,
                 Steve Fienberg, and Tom Mitchell
        * Robot Exploration and Learning
                organized by Howie Choset, Maja Mataric
                and Sebastian Thrun
        * Machine Learning and Reinforcement Learning for 
                Manufacturing
                organized by Sridhar Mahadevan and Andrew Moore
        * Large-Scale Consumer Databases
                organized by Mike Meyer, Teddy Seidenfeld
                and Kannan Srinivasan


___Deadline_for_paper_submissions__________________________________

        * February 16, 1998


___More_information________________________________________________

        * Web:     http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~conald
        * E-mail:  conald at cs.cmu.edu

For submission instructions, consult our Web page or contact the
organizers of the specific workshop.  A limited number of travel
stipends will be available. The conference will be sponsored by CMU's
newly created Center for Automated Learning and Discovery. Additional
financial support will be provided by the National Science Foundation
(NSF).