Connectionists: CFP: NIPS*2005 Workshop on automatic discovery of object categories

[Ian Fasel]

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION -- NIPS*2005 WORKSHOP


AUTOMATIC DISCOVERY OF OBJECT CATEGORIES

Friday, December 9, 2005
Westin Resort, Whistler, British Columbia

http://objectdiscovery.cc

Recent years have seen explosive progress in the development of  
reliable, real-time object detection systems. Unfortunately, these  
systems typically require large numbers of carefully hand-segmented  
training images, making it extremely costly to develop more than a  
few special-purpose applications (e.g. face or car detectors).  A  
system capable of effortlessly learning to identify and localize  
thousands of different object categories has thus become a new "grand  
challenge" in computer vision and learning.

The goal of this workshop is to help establish and accelerate  
progress in the recently emerging field of learning about objects  
from images or video containing little or no training information.   
The emphasis will be on learning to identify both the presence and  
location of objects in arbitrary scenes -- which is a somewhat  
different problem from, e.g., scene categorization, or discrimination  
between a collection of already-segmented objects (although these may  
indeed be complementary methods). More than just a technological  
challenge, this topic brings up fundamental new issues that will  
require the development of new concepts and new methods in learning  
and classification, and clearly crosses disciplinary boundaries into  
diverse areas such as neuroscience, robotics, developmental  
psychology, and others.

This workshop will bring together pioneering figures in this area to  
assess the state of the art, establish future research goals, and  
agree on methods for assessing progress.  The workshop will include  
invited presentations, contributed talks, a poster session, and  
plenty of time for hopefully lively discussion.

Although we do wish to hear about specific systems, we are equally  
interested in "where are we" and big-picture discussions to help  
bring focus to the topic.  Important questions to focus on include:

• Feature-representations
• Fusion of multi-modal information
• Integration of bottom-up "saliency" information and top-down models
• Use of partially and weakly labeled data, and reinforcement signals
• Discriminative vs. generative vs. hybrid approaches
• Datasets for training and evaluating progress in artificial systems
• The developmental progression of object learning in humans and animals

SUBMISSIONS

We anticipate accepting six to eight 20-minute contributed talks and a
number of posters.  If you would like to present your work, please
submit from a one page abstract to a complete manuscript as soon as  
possible to:
       ianfasel at mplab.ucsd.edu
Abstracts based upon previously published work are welcome. Please
submit early!


DETAILS

Website:
http://objectdiscovery.cc

Important Dates:
Monday, October 24 - Submission Deadline
Monday, October  31 - Acceptance Notification
Friday, December 9 - The Workshop

NIPS Workshop Registration & Hotel Info:
http://www.nips.cc/Conferences/2005/

Workshop Inquiries:
ianfasel at mplab.ucsd.edu
movellan at mplab.ucsd.edu


ORGANIZERS
Ian Fasel and Javier Movellan
UCSD Machine Perception Laboratory
http://mplab.ucsd.edu