Connectionists: CFP: NIPS 2005 Workshop: Intelligence Beyond the Desktop

[Mark A. Paskin]

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                        CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

                    Intelligence Beyond the Desktop

                          a workshop at the

              2005 Neural Information Processing Systems
                          (NIPS) Conference

            Submission deadline: Friday, October 14, 2005

                http://ai.stanford.edu/~paskin/ibd05/

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OVERVIEW

We are now well past the era of the desktop computer. Trends towards  
miniaturization, wireless communication, and increased sensing and  
control capabilities have led to a variety of systems that distribute  
computation, sensing, and controls across multiple devices. Examples  
include wireless sensor networks, multi-robot systems, networks of  
smartphones, and large area networks.

Machine learning problems in these non-traditional settings cannot  
faithfully be viewed in terms of a data set and an objective function  
to optimize; physical aspects of the system impose challenging new  
constraints. Resources for computation and actuation may be limited  
and distributed across many nodes, requiring significant  
coordination; limited communication resources can make this  
coordination expensive. The scale and complexity of these systems  
often leads to large amounts of structured data that make state  
estimation challenging. In addition, these systems often have other  
constraints, such as limited power, or under-actuation, requiring  
reasoning about the system itself during learning and control.  
Furthermore, large-scale distributed systems are often unreliable,  
requiring algorithms that are robust to failures and lossy  
communication.

New learning, inference, and control algorithms that address these  
challenges are required. This workshop aims to bring together  
researchers to discuss new applications of machine learning in these  
systems, the challenges that arise, and emerging solutions.

FORMAT

This one-day workshop will consist of invited talks and talks based  
upon submitted abstracts, with some time set aside for discussion.  
Our (tentative) invited speakers are:

     * Dieter Fox (University of Washington)
     * Leonidas Guibas (Stanford University)
     * Sebastian Thrun, (Stanford University) will speak about the  
machine learning algorithms used in Stanley, Stanford's entry into  
the DARPA Grand Challenge.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Researchers working at the interface between machine learning and non- 
traditional computer architectures are invited to submit descriptions  
of their research for presentation at the workshop. Of particular  
relevance is research on the following topics:

     * distributed sensing, computation, and/or control
     * coordination
     * robustness
     * learning/inference/control under resource constraints (power,  
computation, time, etc.)
     * introspective machine learning (reasoning about the system  
architecture in the context of learning/inference/control)

We especially encourage submissions that address unique challenges  
posed by non-traditional architectures for computation, such as

     * wireless sensor networks
     * multi-robot systems
     * large-area networks

Submissions should be extended abstracts in PDF format which are no  
longer than three (3) pages long in 10pt or larger font. Submissions  
may be e-mailed to ibd-2005 at cs.cmu.edu with the subject "IBD  
SUBMISSION". We plan to accept four to six submissions for 25 minute  
presentation slots. In your submission please indicate if you would  
present a poster of your work (in case there are more qualified  
submissions than speaking slots).

     Call for participation:    Wednesday, August 31, 2005
     Submission deadline:       Friday, October 14, 2005 11:59 PM PST
     Acceptance notification:   Tuesday, November 1, 2005
     Workshop:                  Friday, December 9, 2005

Organizers

     * Carlos Guestrin (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guestrin/)
     * Mark Paskin (http://paskin.org)

Please direct any inquiries regarding the workshop to  
ibd-2005 at cs.cmu.edu.