Connectionists: EWRL08 call for contributions

[Remi Munos]

Please distribute to anyone who may be interested:

(apologies for multiple postings)


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2nd 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
* Theorical 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
* Pier Luca Lanzi
* Francisco Melo
* Ann Nowe
* Martijn van Otterlo
* Jan Peters
* Olivier Pietquin
* Pascal Poupart
* Martin Riedmiller
* Daniil Ryabko
* Régis Sabbadin
* Bruno Scherrer
* Olivier Sigaud
* Rich Sutton
* Csaba Szepesvari
* Athanasios Vasilakos
* 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: April 10, 2008 (Extended)
Notification of Acceptance: May 10, 2008
Workshop: June 30 - July 3, 2008
(The week before ICML'08,  COLT'08 and UAI'08 in Helsinki)

EWRL'08 is a FREE event, there won't be any registration fee. But, we
kindly request you to complete a registration form for organizational
purposes.  Registration form will be online on April 1, 2008.

Limited travel grants are available to help fund travel and
accommodation for (PhD) students. Interested students should visit our
web site and fill-in the application form until April 30, 2008. Please
contact us for more information.

SUBMISSION
----------

* Paper: Papers should be prepared in LNCS format and should not
 exceed 14 pages. We also encourage short papers (4-6 pages) from
 students that present ongoing research. A poster may be designed
 alongside a presentation. Posters will be exhibited during the
 workshop so as to help people interactions.

 After the workshop, a selection of papers will be published as a
 "Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence" volume by Springer. Papers
 submitted to other conferences can be submitted to EWRL'08,
 regardless of their acceptance in these conferences. However, only
 those that are copyright free are eligible for being published in the
 proceedings. We welcome papers that have been accepted to ICML 2008
 (for presentation only); such papers are exempt from the reviewing
 process, and authors can submit either just the title, the abstract,
 or the article itself.

 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.

Lille, the third largest metropolitan area in France, lies on the
Brussels-Paris-London connection and is easily accessible by
high-speed TGV trains or by plane. More information can be found at
the web site of Lille Tourist office (http://www.lilletourism.com).

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