Connectionists: Call for Summer Team Research Proposals

[Jason Eisner]

16th Annual JHU Summer Workshop
CALL FOR TEAM RESEARCH PROPOSALS
Deadline: Wednesday, November 18, 2009.

http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops/ws10/CFP

The Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins
University invites one-page research proposals for a
Summer Workshop on Language Engineering, to be held
in Baltimore, MD, USA, June 21 to July 30, 2010.

Proposals should be suitable for a six-week team exploration, and
should aim to advance the state of the art in any of the various
fields of Human Language Technology (HLT).  This year, proposals in
related areas of Machine Intelligence that share techniques with
HLT, such as Computer Vision (CV), are also strongly solicited.

Proposals are welcome on any topic of interest to HLT, CV and
technically related areas.  For example, proposals may address
novel topics or long-standing problems in one of the following
areas.

* SPEECH TECHNOLOGY:  Proposals are welcomed that address any
  aspect of information extraction from speech signal (message,
  speaker identity, language,...). Of particular interest are
  proposals for techniques whose performance would be minimally
  degraded by input signal variations, or which require minimal
  amounts of training data.

* NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: Proposals for knowledge discovery
  from text are encouraged, as are proposals in traditional
  fields such as parsing, machine translation, information
  extraction, sentiment analysis, summarization, and question
  answering.  Proposals may aim to improve the accuracy or enrich
  the output of such systems, or extend their reach by improving
  their speed, scalability, and coverage of languages and genres.

* VISUAL SCENE INTERPRETATION: New strategies are needed to
  parse visual scenes or generic (novel) objects, analyzing an
  image as a set of spatially related components.  Such strategies
  may integrate global top-down knowledge of scene structure (e.g.,
  generative models) with the kind of rich bottom-up, learned
  image features that have recently become popular for object
  detection.  They will support both learning and efficient search
  for the best analysis.

* UNSUPERVISED AND SEMI-SUPERVISED LEARNING: Novel techniques
  that do not require extensive quantities of human annotated data
  to address any of the challenges above could potentially make
  large strides in machine performance as well as lead to greater
  robustness to changes in input conditions.  Semi-supervised and
  unsupervised learning techniques with applications to HLT and CV
  are therefore of considerable interest.

Research topics selected for investigation by teams in
past workshops may serve as good examples for your proposal
(http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops).

An independent panel of experts will screen all received proposals
for suitability. Results of this screening will be communicated
no later than November 20, 2009. Authors passing this initial
screening will be invited to Baltimore to present their ideas
to a peer-review panel on December 4-6, 2009.  It is expected
that the proposals will be revised at this meeting to address any
outstanding concerns or new ideas. Two or three research topics and
the teams to tackle them will be selected for the 2010 workshop.

We attempt to bring the best researchers to the workshop
to collaboratively pursue the selected topics for six weeks.
Authors of successful proposals typically become the team leaders.
Each topic brings together a diverse team of researchers and
students.  The senior participants come from academia, industry
and government.  Graduate student participants familiar with
the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated
performance. Undergraduate participants, selected through a
national search, are rising seniors: new to the field and showing
outstanding academic promise.

If you are interested in participating in the 2010 Summer
Workshop we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for
consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed.  If your
proposal passes the initial screening, we will invite you to join
us for the December 4-6 meeting in Baltimore (as our guest) for
further discussions aimed at consensus.  If a topic in your area
of interest is chosen as one of the two or three to be pursued
next summer, we expect you to be available for participation
in the six-week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad
commitment at this juncture, just a good faith understanding
that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will
actively pursue it.  We in turn will make a good faith effort to
accommodate any personal/logistical needs to make your six-week
participation possible.

Proposals should be submitted via e-mail to clsp at jhu.edu by
4PM EST on Wed, November 18, 2009.