Connectionists: EUROPEAN WORKSHOP ON REINFORCEMENT LEARNING (EWRL) 2008

[Remi Munos]

Please distribute to anyone who may be interested:
 
(apologies for multiple postings)
 

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Call for Contributions

 
EUROPEAN WORKSHOP ON REINFORCEMENT LEARNING (EWRL) 2008
 
June 30 - July 3, 2008
 
INRIA Lille-Nord Europe, France

http://ewrl08.futurs.inria.fr

INFORMATION
-----------
 
European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL) is a (biennial)
series of events that is being organized since 1994. To date, the
sequential decision making problem with delayed rewards has been
studied, under various guises, by various communities: machine
learning, control, economics, applied mathematics, psychology and
biology to name the foremost. EWRL'08, the eighth workshop in the
series as well, aims to serve as a forum to discuss the current
state-of-the-art and future research directions in this continuously
growing field. We intend to make this an exciting event not only for
the European RL community but also international researchers from
related areas with many opportunities to share new knowledge and
encourage collaborative work. We also hope to help the emergence of
European projects in the 7th framework program that fall into the
scope of RL. 

EWRL'08 is planned to be a theme oriented event in which each main
theme will be allocated a half-day session including (i) an overview
or tutorial, (ii) technical contributions in the form of long and
short papers, followed by (iii) discussions. There will be two special
sessions; a general discussion session entitled "Where are we heading? -
Current and Future Trends in RL", and a demonstration session entitled
"Real-life Applications of RL". 

Prof. Rich Sutton, University of Alberta, will also be our special guest. 

Topics of interest include but not limited to:

* Exploration vs Exploitation Trade-off
* (Function) Approximation in RL
* Knowledge Representation in RL
* Theoretical RL (Convergence and performance bounds, Complexity issues, 
Sensitivity analysis)
* Multi-Agent RL
* Regret-minimization Algorithms in Games
* Direct Policy Search and Policy Gradient Methods
* Reward design and inverse RL
* Bayesian vs Frequentist Approaches
* RL and Statistical Learning
* Metrics for Empirical Comparisons in RL
* Reducing RL to Inference, Regression and Classification
* RL to Sequence Prediction
* RL from Biological and Psychological Perspectives

More information about the event can be found at EWRL'08 web site

http://ewrl08.futurs.inria.fr
 
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
------------------

Peter Auer
Peter Dayan
Kurt Driessens
Alain Dutech
Yaakov Engel
Damien Ernst
Frederick Garcia
Mohammad Ghavamzadeh
Daniel Kudenko
Michail G. Lagoudakis
Francisco Melo
Ann Nowe
Martijn van Otterlo
Jan Peters
Pascal Poupart
Martin Riedmiller
Daniil Ryabko
Regis Sabbadin
Bruno Scherrer
Olivier Sigaud
Rich Sutton
Csaba Szepesvari
Chris Watkins
Shimon Whiteson
Marco Wiering
Jeremy Wyatt
Martin Zinkevich

EWRL'08 is organized by the team-project SequeL of INRIA Lille-Nord Europe. 
(http://sequel.futurs.inria.fr)

IMPORTANT DATES
---------------

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2008
Notification of Acceptance: April 15, 2008
Workshop: June 30 - July 3, 2008
(The week before ICML'08 together with COLT'08 and UAI'08 in Helsinki)

SUBMISSION
----------

* Paper: Papers should be prepared in LNCS format (at most 8 pages). A
  poster may be designed alongside a presentation. Posters will be
  exhibited during the workshop so as to help people
  interactions. Papers submitted to other conferences can be
  submitted to EWRL'08, regardless of their acceptance in these
  conferences. Please check out EWRL'08 web site for more information
  about submission.

* Tutorial: Please provide the title, speaker, abstract, and a
  plan/draft for the tutorial. An electronic version (pdf) of the
  presentation should be provided on the workshop website. It should be
  delivered at least a week beforehand.

* Demonstration: Please provide the title and abstract of your
  demonstration, as well as any multimedia document that can
  illustrate it.

LOCATION
--------

The workshop will take place at IRCICA building, around the scientific
campus of Lille, northern France.

REGISTRATION FEE AND GRANTS
---------------------------

EWRL'08 is a free event, there won't be any registration fee. Limited
travel grants are available to help fund travel and accommodation for
(PhD) students. Please visit our web site or contact us for more
information.