Connectionists: Call for papers: NIPS 2007 Workshop on Representations and Inference on Probability Distributions

[Arthur Gretton]

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               Call for Papers

   Workshop on Representations and Inference 
          on Probability Distributions

     http://nips2007.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/

    
 Event:    NIPS 2007 Workshop
 Location: Whistler, Canada
 Date:     7-8 December 2007 

 Submission deadline:        01 November
 Accept/Reject notification: 10 November

 Supported by the PASCAL network of excellence

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Workshop Overview
=================

When dealing with distributions it is in general infeasible to
estimate them explicitly in high dimensional settings, since the
associated learning rates can be arbitrarily slow. On the other hand,
a great variety of applications in machine learning and computer
science require distribution estimation and/or comparison. Examples
include testing for homogeneity (the "two-sample problem"),
independence, and conditional independence, where the last two can be
used to infer causality; data set squashing / data sketching / data
anonymisation; domain adaptation (the transfer of knowledge learned on
one domain to solving problems on another, related domain) and the
related problem of covariate shift; message passing in graphical
models (EP and associated algorithms); compressed sensing; and links
between divergence measures and loss functions.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together statisticians,
machine learning researchers, and computer scientists working on
representations of distributions for various inference and testing
problems, to discuss the compromises necessary in obtaining useful
results from finite data. In particular, what are the capabilities and
weaknesses of different distribution estimates and comparison
strategies, and what negative results apply?

Speakers:
=========

    * Yasemin Altun, MPI for Biological Cybernetics
    * Tugkan Batu, LSE
    * Shai Ben-David, University of Waterloo
    * Gerard Biau, Paris VI University
    * Carlos Guestrin, CMU
    * Zaid Harchaoui, ENST
    * Piotr Indyk, MIT 
    * John Shawe-Taylor, UCL

Additional speakers (including submitted talks) will be listed on
the website once confirmed.

Call for Contributions
======================

We invite submissions for 15 minute contributed talks or posters. The
intended emphasis is on recent innovations, work in progress, and
promising directions or problems for new research.

If you would like to submit to this session, please send an abstract
to Arthur Gretton (arthur at tuebingen.mpg.de) by November 01, indicating
your preference for a poster or a talk.  Please do not send posters or
long documents. Decisions as to which proposals are accepted will be
sent out on November 10.

Workshop Organisers
===================

Kenji Fukumizu		http://www.ism.ac.jp/~fukumizu
Arthur Gretton		http://www.kyb.mpg.de/~arthur
Alex Smola		http://sml.nicta.com.au/~smola/