Connectionists: NIPS 2014 Call for Workshops

[Chris Hiestand]

NIPS*2014 Post-Conference Workshops 
Friday December 12 and Saturday December 13, 2014 
Palais des Congrès de Montréal/Convention and Exhibition Center, 
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Following the NIPS*2014 main conference, workshops on a variety of current
topics will be held on Friday December 12 and Saturday December 13, 2014, in
Montreal, Canada. We invite researchers interested in chairing one of these
workshops to submit workshop proposals. The goal of the workshops is to
provide an informal forum for researchers to discuss important research
questions and challenges. Controversial issues, open problems, and
comparisons of competing approaches are encouraged as workshop topics. There
will be seven hours of workshop meetings per day, split into morning and
afternoon sessions, with free time between the sessions for individual
exchange or outdoor activities. Note that this year, there is no skiing at
NIPS; the workshop schedule will thus differ from past NIPS workshops (the
morning session will be 8:30am-12pm, and the afternoon session will be
3pm-6:30pm).

Potential workshop topics range from Neuroscience to Bayesian Methods to
Representation Learning to Kernels to Clustering, and include Application
Areas such as Computational Biology, Speech, Vision or Social Networks.
Detailed descriptions of previous workshops may be found at:
http://nips.cc/Conferences/2013/Program/schedule.php?Session=Workshops

Workshop organizers have several responsibilities, including: Coordinating
workshop participation and content as well as providing the program for the
workshop in a timely manner.


Submission Instructions

A nips.cc account is required to submit the Workshops application. Please
follow the URL below and check the required format for the application well
before the proposal deadline. You can edit your application online right up
until this deadline. We have funding to video record a limited number of
workshops for later online viewing. Workshop proposals should state if they
wish their workshop to be recorded.

Interested parties must submit a proposal by 
**23:59 UTC on Friday August 2nd, 2014**

Proposals should be submitted electronically at the following URL:
https://nips.cc/Workshops/


Preference will be given to one-day workshops that reserve a significant
portion of time for open discussion or panel discussion and to workshops with
a greater fraction of confirmed speakers. We suggest that organizers allocate
sufficient time for questions, discussion, and breaks. Past experience
suggests that workshops otherwise degrade into mini-conferences as talks
begin to run over. Organizers should explicitly state the expected fraction
of time for discussion & questions and the expected number of talks per day
at the end of the proposal. We strongly recommend that each workshop include
no more than 12 talks per day.

We would like to attempt to partially unify the NIPS workshop important dates
across all of the workshops. Therefore, please consider using the following
date guidelines for your workshop in order to provide program information in
time for publication:

We suggest workshop organizers to adopt the following schedule:

* Workshop acceptance notification will be on August 14th, 2014
* Your workshop should be publicized on or before August 21st, 2014.
* Internal submission deadline should be on or before October 9th, 2014.
* Internal acceptance decisions should be mailed out on or before October
23rd, 2014.
* Submit finalized workshop organizers, abstract, and URL on or before
October 30th, 2014.

NIPS does not provide travel funding for workshop speakers. In the past, some
workshops have sought and received funding from external sources to bring in
outside speakers. The organizers of each accepted workshop can name four
individuals per day of workshop to receive free workshop registration.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions:
<workshop-chairs at nips.cc>

Francis Bach and Amir Globerson 
NIPS*2014 Workshops Chairs

Web URL: http://nips.cc/Conferences/2014/CallForWorkshops