Connectionists: Neuro Thursday at NIPS

[Terry Sejnowski]

NEURO-THURSDAY at NIPS:

Thusday, December 6 - 8:30 AM - Noon - Vancouver

Thursday, December 6 (the final day of the Conference), will be devoted to Neuroscience, 
and will consist of a fascinating invited talk by Professor Manabu Tanifuji (Riken) 
on the monkey visual cortex, plus six outstanding plenary talks. 
In addition, all of the Neuroscience posters will take place on Wednesday night, 
allowing early arrivals to interact with researchers. The Wednesday night 
poster program will also contain many posters on Machine learning and Computer Vision, 
focused on topics that are also relevant to Neuroscience.

All of the morning events (including the Wednesday night Poster Session and the 
Spotlights that precede it) will be available for the special "Neuro-Thursday" 
registration rate of $50.

For those attending the entire Conference, "Neuro-Thursday" is included in the registration price.

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Deep Learning Workshop: Foundations and Future Directions

Thursday, December 6 - 2:00 to 5:30 PM - Vancouver

Theoretical results strongly suggest that in order to learn the kind of complicated 
functions that can represent high-level abstractions (e.g. in vision, language, 
and other AI-level tasks), one may need "deep architectures", which are composed of 
multiple levels of non-linear operations (such as in neural nets with many hidden layers). 
Searching the parameter space of deep architectures is a difficult optimization task, 
but learning algorithms (e.g. Deep Belief Networks) have recently been proposed to 
tackle this problem with notable success, beating the state-of-the-art in certain areas.

This Workshop is intended to bring together researchers interested in the question of 
deep learning in order to review the current algorithms' principles and successes, 
but also to identify the challenges, and to formulate promising directions of investigation. 
Besides the algorithms themselves, there are many fundamental questions that need to be addressed: 
What would be a good formalization of deep learning? What new ideas could be exploited to 
make further inroads to that difficult optimization problem? What makes a good high-level 
representation or abstraction? What type of problem is deep learning appropriate for?

There is no charge for this Workshop or for the bus to Whistler that will leave after the Workshop; 
however, a separate registration is required.

To register:   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~lisa/twiki/bin/view.cgi/Public/DeepLearningWorkshopNIPS2007 

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NIPS Whistler Workshops 

Friday December 7 - Saturday December 8, 2007

The post-Conference Workshops will be held at the Westin Resort and Spa and the 
Westin Hilton in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada on December 7 and 8, 2007.
The Workshops provide multi-track intensive sessions on a wide range of topics. 
The venue and schedule facilitate informality and depth. 

Partial List of Workshop Topics and Organizers:

Beyond Simple Cells: Probabilistic Models for Visual Cortical Processing
        Richard Turner, Pietro Berkes, Maneesh Sahani

Hierarchical Organization of Behavior: Computational, Psychological and Neural Perspectives
        Yael Niv, Matthew Botvinick, Andrew Barto

Large Scale Brain Dynamics 
        Ryan Canolty, Kai Miller, Joaquin Qui<F1>onero Candela, Thore Graepel, Ralf Herbrich

Mechanisms of Visual Attention
        Jillian Fecteau, Dirk Walther, Vidhya Navalpakkam, John Tsotsos

Music, Brain and Cognition. Part 1: Learning the Structure of Music and Its Effects On the Brain
        David Hardoon, Eduardo Reck-Miranda, John Shawe-Taylor

Music, Brain and Cognition. Part 2: Models of Sound and Cognition
        Hendrik Purwins, Xavier Serra, Klaus Obermayer

Principles of Learning Problem Design
        John Langford, Alina Beygelzimer

Representations and Inference on Probability Distributions
        Kenji Fukumizu, Arthur Gretton, Alex Smola
        
The Grammar of Vision: Probabilistic Grammar-Based Models for 
Visual Scene Understanding and Object Categorization
        Jan Peters, Marc Toussaint

A complete list of all 25 workshop and links for more information:
http://nips.cc/Conferences/2007/Program/schedule.php?Session=Workshops

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