plain text file

Lisa Weiss lisa at cse.ucsc.edu
Wed May 19 13:21:58 EDT 1999


                            COLT '99
      Twelfth ACM Conference on Computational Learning Theory
            Tuesday, July 6 through Friday, July 9, 1999
         University of California, Santa Cruz, California

The workshop will be held on campus, which is hidden away in the redwoods 
on the Pacific Coast of Northern California.  The workshop is in 
cooperation with the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and 
Computation Theory (SIGACT) and the ACM Special Interest Group on 
Artificial Intelligence (SIGART).

  1. Flight tickets: San Jose Airport is the closest, about a 45
minute drive.   San Francisco Airport (SFO) is about an hour and 
forty-five minutes away, but has slightly better flight connections.

  2. Transportation from the airport to Santa Cruz:
The first option is to rent a car and drive south from San Jose on
Hwy 880, which becomes Hwy 17 or from San Francisco take either Hwy
280 or 101 to Hwy 17.  When you get to Santa Cruz, take
Route 1 (Mission St.) north.  Turn right on Bay Street and follow
the signs to UCSC.  Commuters must purchase parking permits for $4.00/day
M-F (parking is free Saturday and Sunday) from the information kiosk at
the Main entrance to campus or the conference satellite office.  Those 
staying on campus can pick up permits with their room keys.  Various van 
services also connect Santa Cruz with the the San Francisco and San Jose 
airports.  The Santa Cruz Airporter (831) 423-1214 (or (800) 497-4997 
from anywhere) has regularly scheduled trips (every two hours from 9am 
until 11pm from San Jose International Airport ($30 each way), and 
every two hours from 8am until 10pm from SFO, ($35 each way) from either 
airport. ABC Transportation (831) 464-8893 
((800) 734-4313 from California (24hr.)) runs a private sedan service 
($47 for one, $57 for two, $67 for three to six from San Jose Airport 
to UC Santa Cruz, $79 for one, $89 for two, and $99 for three to six 
from SFO to UCSC, additional $10 after 11:30 pm, additional $20 to 
meet an international flight) and will drop you off at your room. Book 
at least 24 hours in advance.

  3. Conference and room registration:
Please fill out the enclosed form and send it to us with your payment.
It must be postmarked by June 1 and received by June 5 to obtain the 
early registration rate and guarantee the room.  Conference housing is 
limited by the available space, and late registrants may need to 
seek off-campus accommodations.

Your arrival: This year we will be at the Kresge apartments.
Enter the campus at the Main Entrance, which is the intersection of 
High and Bay Streets. (Look for the COLT signs.) Bay St. turns 
into Coolidge Dr., continue on this road, which becomes McLaughlin Dr.,
until you reach the stop sign at the T in the road, turn left onto Heller 
Dr., and then you will make a right turn into the Kresge East Apts 
parking lot.  Housing registration will be at the Kresge East Apts 
parking lot from 2:00 to 4:00 pm on Monday.  Keys, meal cards, parking 
permits, maps, and information about what to do in Santa Cruz will be 
available.  The office will remain open until 10:00 pm for late arrivals.  
Arrivals after 10:00 pm:  stop at the Main Entrance Kiosk and have 
the guard call the College Proctor, who will meet you at the Satellite 
Office and give you your housing materials.  Please be prepared to show 
I.D. or you will not be permitted on campus.  Problems?  Please go 
directly to the Kresge Satellite Office, or contact the Conference 
Director at (831) 459-2611.  The Kresge College Conference Office is 
located in Apt. Building R11-Apt 1111.  From the Kresge East Apts 
parking lot continue on Heller Dr. to the Porter College entrance, 
turn right into Porter College, follow the road around (curving right) 
to Kresge College.  At Kresge College, park in the first lot on your 
left and look for signs for the Conference Office. Please do not park 
in spaces with posted restrictions at any time.  In case of emergency, 
dial 911 from any campus phone.

The weather in July is mostly sunny with occasional summer fog.  Even 
though the air may be cool, the sun can be deceptively strong; those 
susceptible to sunburn should come prepared with sunblock.  Bring 
T-shirts, slacks, shorts, and a sweater or light jacket, as it cools 
down at night. For information on the local bus routes and schedules, 
call the Metro Center at (831) 425-8600.

Bring swimming trunks, tennis rackets, etc. You can get day
passes for $5.00 (East Field House, Physical Education Office) 
to use the recreation facilities on campus.

For questions about registration or accommodations, contact  
COLT'99, Computer Science Dept., UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA  95064.  
The e-mail address is colt99 at cse.ucsc.edu, and fax is (831)459-4829.
For emergencies, call (831)459-2263.

4. General Conference Information:
The Conference Registration will be at 8:30 Tuesday, outside the 
Porter dining hall.  Late registrations will be at the same location 
during the technical sessions.  All lectures will be in the Porter 
dining hall.  A banquet will be held Tuesday from 6:30--8:00pm
outside the Porter dining hall.

The workshop has been organized to allow time for informal discussion
and collaboration.  

COLT `99 CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
----------------------------

MONDAY, July 5
--------------

2:00-4:00 pm, Housing Registration, Kresge East Apts Parking Lot.

Note:  All technical sessions will take place in the Porter Dining Hall.

TUESDAY, July 6
---------------

SESSION 1:  9:00 - 10:30

9:00-9:30 
The Robustness of the p-norm Algorithms
Claudio Gentile and Nick Littlestone

9:30-10:00 
Minimax Regret under Log Loss for General Classes of Experts
Nicolo Cesa-Bianchi and Gabor Lugosi

10:00-10:30 
On Prediction of Individual Sequences Relative to a set of Experts
Neri Merhav and Tsachy Weissman

10:30 - 11:00  BREAK

SESSION 2: 11:00 - 12:00

11:00-11:20 
On Theory Revision with Queries
Robert H. Sloan and Gyorgy Turan

11:20-11:40 
Estimating a Mixture of Two Product Distributions
Yoav Freund and Yishay Mansour

11:40-12:00 
An Apprentice Learning Model
Stephen S. Kwek

12:00 - 2:00 LUNCH

SESSION 3: 2:00 - 3:00
 
2:00-2:20 
Uniform-Distribution Attribute Noise Learnability
Nader H. Bshouty, Jeffrey C. Jackson and Christino Tamon

2:20-2:40 
On Learning in the Presence of Unspecified Attribute Values
Nader H. Bshouty, and David K. Wilson

2:40-3:00 
Learning Fixed-dimension Linear Thresholds from Fragmented Data
Paul W. Goldberg

3:00 - 3:30 BREAK

TUTORIAL 1: 3:30-5:30

3:30-5:30 
Boosting
Yoav Freund and Rob Schapire

7:30-9:30 RECEPTION - Kresge Town Hall Area

WEDNESDAY, July 7
-----------------

9:00-10:00
INVITED TALK: by David Shmoys
Approximation Algorithms for Clustering Problems

10:00-10:30 BREAK

SESSION 4:  10:30-12:10

10:30-10:50 
An Adaptive Version of the Boost-by-majority Algorithm
Yoav Freund

10:50-11:10 
Drifting Games
Robert E. Schapire

11:10-11:30 
Additive Models, Boosting, and Inference for Generalized Divergences
John Lafferty

11:30-11:50 
Boosting as Entropy Projection
J. Kivinen and M. K. Warmuth

11:50-12:10 
Multiclass Learning, Boosting, and Error-Correcting Codes
Venkatesan Guruswami and Amit Sahai

12:10-2:00 LUNCH

SESSION 5:  2:00-3:00

2:00-2:20 
Theoretical Analysis of a Class of Randomized Regularization Methods
Tong Zhang

2:20-2:40 
PAC-Bayesian Model Averaging
David McAllester

2:40-3:00 
Viewing all Models as `Probabilistic'
Peter Grunwald

3:00-3:30 BREAK

TUTORIAL 2: 3:30-5:30

3:30-5:30
Reinforcement Learning
Michael Kearns and Yishay Mansour

6:30-8:00 BANQUET - Porter Dining Hall

THURSDAY, July 8
----------------

SESSION 6:  9:00-10:30

9:00-9:20 
Reinforcement Learning and Mistake Bounded Algorithms
Yishay Mansour

9:20-9:40 
Convergence Analysis of Temporal-difference Learning Algorithms
Vladislav Tadic

9:40-10:00 
Beating the Hold-Out
Avrim Blum, Adam Kalai and John Langford

10:00-10:20 
Microchoice Bounds and Self Bounding Learning Algorithms
John Langford and Avrim Blum

10:30-11:00 BREAK

SESSION 7:  11:00-12:00

11:00-11:20 
Learning Specialist Decision Lists
Atsuyoshi Nakamura

11:20-11:40 
Linear Relations between Square-Loss and Kolmogorov Complexity
Yuri A. Kalnishkan

11:40-12:00 
Individual Sequence Prediction - Upper Bounds and Application for
Complexity
Chamy Allenberg

12:00-2:00 LUNCH

SESSION 8:  2:00-3:00

2:00-2:20 
Extensional Set Learning
S. A. Terwijn

2:20-2:40 
On a Generalized Notion of Mistake Bounds
Sanjay Jain and Arun Sharma

2:40-3:00 
On the Intrinsic Complexity of Learning Infinite Objects from Finite
Samples
Kinber, Papazian, Smith, and Wiehagen

2:20-2:30 
Concept Learning with Geometric Hypotheses
David P. Dobkin and Dimitrios Gunopulos

Friday, July 9
--------------

TUTORIAL 3: 9:00-11:00

9:00-11:00
Large Margin Classification
Peter Bartlett, John Shawe-Taylor, and Bob Williamson

11:00-11:30 BREAK

SESSION 9:  11:30-12:10

11:30-11:50 
Covering Numbers for Support Vector Machines
Ying Guo, Peter L. Bartlett, John Shawe-Taylor, and Robert C. Williamson

11:50-12:10 
Further Results on the Margin Distribution
John Shawe-Taylor and Nello Cristianini

12:10-2:00 LUNCH

SESSION 10: 2:00-3:40

2:00 - 2:20
Attribute Efficient PAC-learning of DNF with Membership Queries
Nader H. Bshouty and Jeffrey C. Jackson and Christino Tamon

2:20 - 2:40
On PAC Learning Using Winnow, Perceptron, and a Perceptron-Like Algorithm
Rocco A. Servedio

2:40 - 3:00
Extension of the PAC Framework to Finite and Countable Markov Chains
David Gamarnik

3:00 - 3:20
Learning Threshold Functions with Small Weights using Membership Queries
E. Abboud, N. Agha, N.H. Bshouty, N. Radwan, F. Saleh

3:20 - 3:40
Exact Learning of Unordered Tree Patterns From Queries
Thomas R. Amoth, Paul Cull, and Prasad Tadepalli

3:40  CONFERENCE ENDS 

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Please fill in the information needed for registration and  
accommodations.  Make your payment by check or international money order, 
in U.S. dollars and payable through a U.S. bank, to UC Regents/COLT '99.
Mail this form together with payment (by June 4, 1999 to avoid the 
late fee) to:

COLT '99
Computer Science Department
University of California
Santa Cruz, California  95064

Payment may also be made by VISA or MC but will have a $15 surcharge
and you can fax or email the form.  Questions:  e-mail colt99 at cse.ucsc.edu, 
fax (831)459-4829.  Confirmations will be sent by e-mail.  Anyone 
needing special arrangements to accommodate a disability should 
enclose a note with their registration.

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION
=======================

Name: ________________________________________________________________

Affiliation: _________________________________________________________

Address: _____________________________________________________________

City: _____________________________    State: ________  Zip: _________

Country: _____________________________

Telephone: _____________________________

Email address: __________________________

The registration fee includes a copy of the proceedings and the banquet
dinner. 

ACM/SIG Members: $175 

Non-Members: $240 

Full time students:  $100 

Reg. Late Fee: $50 
  (rec'd after June 4) 

Extra banquet tickets: ____ (quantity) x $25 = _______________

How many in your party have dietary restrictions?  

Vegetarian: _____ Other: _____

SHIRT SIZE, please circle one: 	medium 	large 	x-large 

ACCOMMODATIONS AND DINING
-------------------------

Accommodation fees are $67 per person for a double and $80 for a single 
per night at the Kresge Apartments.  Cafeteria style breakfast 
(7:00 to 8:00am), lunch (12:00 to 1:00pm), and dinner (6:30 to 7:30pm) 
will be served in the College Eight Dining Hall.  Doors close at the 
end of the time indicated, but dining may continue beyond this time.  
The first meal provided is dinner on the day of arrival and the last 
meal is lunch on the day you leave.  NO REFUNDS can be given after June 7.
Those with uncertain plans should make reservations at an off-campus 
hotel.  Each attendee should pick one of the following options:

PACKAGE #1: Mon., Tue., Wed., Thurs. nights: $268 double, $320 single. 	

PACKAGE #2: Tue., Weds., Thurs. nights: $201 double, $240 single. 

OTHER housing arrangement. 

Each 4-person apartment  has a living room, a kitchen, a common bathroom, 
and either four single separate rooms, two double rooms, or two single 
and one double room.  We need the following information to make room 
assignments:

Gender (M/F): __________ 	Smoker (Y/N): ___________

Roommate Preference: ________________________________

For shorter stays, longer stays, and other special requirements, you 
can get other accommodations through the Conference Office.  Make 
reservations directly with them at (831) 459-2611, fax (831) 459-3422,
and do this soon as on-campus rooms for the summer fill up well in 
advance.  Off-campus hotels include the Dream Inn (831) 426-4330 and
the Ocean Pacific Lodge (831) 457-1234 or (800) 995-0289.

AMOUNT ENCLOSED:

Registration total   	_________________

VISA/MC $15 Charge  	_________________

Extra Banquet tickets  	_________________

Accommodations   	_________________

Mark Fulk Award* 	_________________

TOTAL        		_________________

* The optional Donation for the Mark Fulk Award is tax deductible in 
  the U.S.A., please see Carl Smith for receipt.



More information about the Connectionists mailing list