Connectionists: BAYESIAN COGNITION Winter School

[Jean-Marc Bollon]

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BAYESIAN COGNITION Winter School
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January 6-11, 2008

Chamonix - Mont-Blanc, France

Web : http://bayesian-cognition.org

Rationale:
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Animals and artificial systems alike are faced with the problem of  
making inferences about their environments and choosing appropriate  
responses based on incomplete, uncertain and noisy data.

Probabilistic models and algorithms are flourishing in both life  
sciences and information sciences as ways of understanding the  
behavior of subjects and the neural processing underlying this  
behavior, and building robots and artificial agents that can function  
effectively in such circumstances.

The objective of this winter school is to present the latest advances  
in this subject.

This winter school is a prolongation of the Bayesian Cognition  
workshop held in Paris in January 2006 (Bayesian-Cognition.org)

Program:
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The school is made of 7 tutorial modules (4 hours long) covering the  
following topics made by senior researchers in the field:
-      Probability theory as an alternative to logic (Pierre Bessière  
- CNRS, Grenoble)
-      Satistical learning (Samy Bengio - Google, Mountain View)
-      Probabilistic models of Central Nervous System (Sophie Denève  
- Ecole Normal Supérieur, Paris)
-      Approximate evaluation of Bayesian calculus (Vaclav Smidl -  
UTIA, Prague)
-      Probabilistic Robotics (Wolfram Burgard - Universität Freiburg)
-      Probabilistic interpretation of physiological and  
psychophysical data (Jacques Droulez - Collège de France, Paris)
-      Industrial applications (Emmanuel Mazer - ProBAYES, Grenoble)

There will be also 9 presentations (50 minutes long) made by young  
researchers (typically Postdocs) who will present their thesis work  
in some details.

Finally, there will be a 6 hours practical training session where  
students will have the opportunity to design, write and run short  
Bayesian programs using the ProBT® toolkit (Juan-Manuel Ahuactzin -  
ProBAYES, Grenoble)

Main clientele:
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The winter school is mainly conceived for PhD students in cognitive  
science and robotics interested by the variety of probabilistic  
models and techniques used in these fields.

Master students and postdocs could also find benefits in attending  
this school.

Accomodation:
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The accommodation will be at the Centre Jean Franco in Chamonix,  
France: http://www.centrejeanfranco.asso.fr/

The Centre Jean Franco is the old national school of mountaineering.  
The school moved to new buildings in Chamonix.

It is located downtown Chamonix, 200 hundred meters from the Aiguille  
du midi cable car.

It offer accommodation for at least 60 students by room of 3.
There is a big amphitheatre for the venue of the tutorial.

Evaluation and admission criteria:
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PhD students and PostDocs: Admission will be done on a first  
registered basis for PhD and PostDocs students in cognitive science  
and robotics.

Master students: will be accepted only if some spare room is still  
available on December 1st 2007.

PostDoc Call for presentation:
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There will be 9 presentations (50 minutes long) by PostDocs or young  
researchers in the field who will have the opportunity to present in  
details their PhD work.

Please send a short abstract of your work before November 30th, 2007.

The selected persons will have no registration fee to pay.

Registration:
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For registration please go to the Bayesian-Cognition.org web site

The registration fee (including lodging and meals for 6 days) is : 500€

The winter school is sponsored by the EURON (European Robotics  
Research Network - http://www.euron.org/) and consequently there is a  
200€ discount for any student coming from a EURON member institution.

Contact Person:
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Jean-Marc.Bollon at inrialpes.fr