Connectionists: Call for Papers - Deep Learning and Unsupervised Feature Learning Workshop at NIPS 2011

[Adam Coates]

Call for Papers: Deep Learning and Unsupervised Feature Learning Workshop
held in conjunction with Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2011)
December 16 or 17, 2011, Granada, Spain

(This is a one-day workshop, and the date will be determined soon.)

http://deeplearningworkshopnips2011.wordpress.com/

Overview
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In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in algorithms that
learn feature representations from unlabeled data.  Deep learning
algorithms such as deep belief networks, sparse coding-based methods,
convolutional networks, ICA methods, and deep Boltzmann machines have
shown promise and have already been successfully applied to a variety
of tasks in computer vision, audio processing, natural language
processing, information retrieval, and robotics.  In this workshop, we
will bring together researchers who are interested in deep learning
and unsupervised feature learning, review the recent technical
progress, discuss the challenges, and identify promising future
research directions.

The workshop invites paper submissions that will be either presented
as oral or in poster format. Through invited talks, panel discussions
and presentations by the participants, this workshop attempts to
address some of the more controversial topics in deep learning today,
such as whether hierarchical systems are more powerful, and what
principles should guide the design of objective functions used to
train these models. Panel discussions will be led by the members of
the organizing committee as well as by prominent representatives of
the vision and neuroscience communities.

The goal of this workshop is two-fold. First, we want to identify the
next big challenges and propose research directions for the deep
learning community. Second, we want to bridge the gap between
researchers working on different (but related) fields, to leverage
their expertise, and to encourage the exchange of ideas with all the
other members of the NIPS community.

Dates
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- Submission deadline: October 14, 2011
- Acceptance notification: November 11, 2011
- Workshop date: December 16 or 17, 2011 (This is a one-day workshop,
and the date will be determined soon.)

A tentative schedule is available at:
http://deeplearningworkshopnips2011.wordpress.com/schedule

Submissions
------------------------------------
We solicit submissions of unpublished research papers. Papers should
be at most 8 pages (plus 1 additional page containing references only)
and must satisfy the formatting instructions of the NIPS 2011 call for
papers.
Style files are available at http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/StyleFiles.
Please note that the reviewing is double blind, so your manuscript
should not contain authors’ identifying information.
Papers should be submitted through
https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/DLUFL2011/ no later than 23:59 EST
on Friday, October 14, 2011.

We encourage submissions on the following and related topics:
    * unsupervised feature learning algorithms
    * deep learning algorithms
    * semi-supervised and transfer learning algorithms
    * inference and optimization
    * theoretical foundations of unsupervised learning
    * theoretical foundations of deep learning
    * applications of deep learning and unsupervised feature learning
The best papers will be awarded by an oral presentation, all other
papers will have a poster presentation accompanied by a short
spotlight presentation.

Organizers
------------------------------------
    * Adam Coates – Stanford University
    * Yoshua Bengio – University of Montreal
    * Yann LeCun – New York University
    * Nicolas Le Roux – INRIA
    * Andrew Y. Ng – Stanford University