Connectionists: NIPS 2009 workshop on Learning from Multiple Sources with Applications to Robotics, Call for contributions

[jaakko.peltonen@tkk.fi]

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                       CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

        NIPS 2009 workshop on Learning from Multiple Sources
                   with Applications to Robotics
               Whistler, BC, Canada, December 12, 2009

         http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~srogers/lms09/index.htm
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Important Dates:
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Submission of extended abstracts: October 27, 2009

Notification of acceptance: November 6, 2009



Workshop Description:
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Learning from multiple sources denotes the problem of jointly
learning from a set of (partially) related learning problems /
views / tasks. This general concept underlies several subfields
receiving increasing interest from the machine learning community,
which differ in terms of the assumptions made about the dependency
structure between learning problems. In particular, the concept
includes topics such as data fusion, transfer learning, multitask
learning, multiview learning, and learning under covariate shift.
Several approaches for inferring and exploiting complex
relationships between data sources have been presented, including
both generative and discriminative approaches.

The workshop will provide a unified forum for cutting edge
research on learning from multiple sources; the workshop will
examine the general concept, theory and methods, and will also
examine *robotics* as a natural application domain for learning
from multiple sources. The workshop will address methodological
challenges in the different subtopics and further interaction
between them. The intended audience is researchers working in
fields of multi-modal learning, data fusion, and robotics.

(More detailed background information is available at the
workshop website.)

The workshop includes a morning session focused on theory/methods,
and an afternoon session focused on the robotics application.

The workshop is a core event of the PASCAL2 Network of Excellence.


PASCAL2 Invited Speakers:
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Morning Session: Chris Williams - University of Edinburgh

Afternoon Session: to be announced


Submission Instructions:
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We invite submission of extended abstracts to the workshop.
Extended abstracts should be 2-4 pages, formatted in the NIPS
style: http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/StyleFiles
Unlike the main NIPS conference, identities of authors do not
need to be removed from the extended abstracts.

Extended abstracts should be sent in .PDF or .PS file format by
email, to either D.Hardoon at cs.ucl.ac.uk or gleen at cis.hut.fi.
Acceptance to the workshop will be determined based on peer
review of each extended abstract.

Submissions are expected to represent high-quality, novel
contributions in theory/methods of learning from multiple sources,
or high-quality, novel contributions in application of learning
from multiple sources to robotics (see below).

To encourage participants from the machine learning community to
test their algorithms in the domain of robotics, we will make
available a dataset, with computed features, representative of
open research issues in robotics. Robotics-oriented papers
submitted to the workshop are strongly encouraged to contain an
experimental evaluation on the database made available by the
organizers. The obtained results will be presented by the
organizers during the workshop.


Submitted extended abstracts may be accepted either as an oral
presentation or as a poster presentation; there will be only a
limited number of oral presentations in the morning and afternoon
sessions.

Accepted extended abstracts will be made available online at the
workshop website.

Depending on the quality of submissions, we will consider
preparing a special issue of a journal or a collected volume on
the topic of the workshop. A separate call for papers will then
be issued after the workshop for the special issue/collected
volume. Last year's "Learning from Multiple Sources" workshop led
to a special issue in Machine Learning (currently in progress).


Organisers
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* Barbara Caputo - Idiap Research Institute.
* Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi - Università degli Studi di Milan.
* David Hardoon - Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R).
* Gayle Leen - Helsinki University of Technology.
* Francesco Orabona - Idiap Research Institure.
* Jaakko Peltonen - Helsinki University of Technology.
* Simon Rogers - University of Glasgow.


Programme Committee
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* Cedric Archambeau - Xerox Research.
* Andreas Argyriou - Toyota Technological Institute.
* Claudio Gentile - Università dell'Insubria.
* Mark Girolami - University of Glasgow.
* Samuel Kaski - Helsinki University of Technology.
* Arto Klami - Helsinki University of Technology.
* John Shawe-Taylor - University College London.
* Giorgio Valentini - Università degli Studi di Milan.


Contact Persons
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For questions about the workshop, contact David R. Hardoon at
D.Hardoon AT cs.ucl.ac.uk.