Connectionists: CFP - NIPS workshop on statistical models of networks

[Kevin Murphy]

Dear colleagues,

I would like to invite you to participate in a workshop on
"Statistical models of networks" on the 7th or 8th of December at
NIPS'07 in Whistler, B.C. See this URL for details:
   http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/nips07NetworkWorkshop/

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together people from different
disciplines - computer science, statistics, biology, physics, social
science, etc - to discuss foundational issues in the modeling of
network and relational data. In particular, we hope to discuss various
open research issues, such as

- How to represent graphs at varying levels of abstraction, whose
topology is potentially condition-specific and time-varying

- How to combine techniques from the graphical model structure
learning community with techniques from the statistical network
modeling community

- How to integrate relational data with other kinds of data (e.g.,
gene expression or text data)

Six stellar invited speakers (Adrian Raftery, Peter Hoff, Stephen
Fienberg, Stanley Wasserman, Volker Tresp, Jasmine Zhou) have already
accepted. However, we are seeking additional contributions from the
community, in order to broaden the scope and to form the basis of
fruitful discussion. If you would like to contribute, then please send
a 1-2 page abstract by October 15, 11:59pm PST to murphyk at cs.ubc.ca.
(Details below.)

I am looking forward to seeing you there!

Kevin Murphy
Lise Getoor
Eric Xing
Raphael Gottardo



SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Researchers interested in contributing should send an extended
abstract of 1-2 pages in PDF format to murphyk at cs.ubc.ca
by October 15, 2007, 11:59pm PST. No special style is required.
Note that previously published work *is* acceptable (unless it appears
in the main NIPS'07 conference), as long as it is clearly marked as such.

Acceptance decisions will be made by October 31st. Decisions will be
made by the four organizers, based on relevance, quality and balance
of topics. Due to time constraints, accepted abstracts can only be
presented as a poster and/or a short spotlight. However, all accepted
abstracts will also be posted in the online proceedings.