Connectionists: NIPS 2015 Workshop on Advances in Approximate Bayesian Inference

[Shakir Mohamed]

Call for Participation

We invite researchers in machine learning and statistics to participate in
the:

NIPS 2015 Workshop on Advances in Approximate Bayesian Inference
11 December 2015, Montreal, Canada
www.approximateinference.org
Submission deadline: 2 October 2015

1. Call for Participation

We invite researchers to submit their recent work on the development,
analysis, or application of approximate Bayesian inference. A submission
should take the form of an extended abstract of 2-4 pages in PDF format
using the NIPS style. Author names do not need to be anonymized and
references may extend as far as needed beyond the 4 page upper limit. If
authors' research has previously appeared in a journal, workshop, or
conference (including the NIPS 2015 conference), their workshop submission
should extend that previous work. Submissions may include a
supplement/appendix, but reviewers are not responsible for reading any
supplementary material.

Submissions will be accepted either as contributed talks or poster
presentations. Extended abstracts should be submitted by 2 October; see
website for submission details. Final versions of the extended abstract are
due by 1 December, and will be posted on the workshop website.

2. Workshop Overview

The ever-increasing size of data sets has resulted in an immense effort in
Bayesian statistics to develop more expressive probabilistic models.
Inference remains a challenge and limits the use of these models in
large-scale scientific and industrial applications. Thus we must resort to
approximate inference, which is computationally efficient on massive and
streaming data—without compromising on the complexity of these models. This
workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in order to
discuss recent advances in approximate inference; we also aim to discuss
the methodological and foundational issues in such techniques in order to
consider future improvements.

The resurgence of interest in approximate inference has furthered
development in many techniques: for example, scalability, black box
techniques, and dependency in variational inference; divide and conquer
techniques in expectation propagation; dimensionality reduction using
random projections; and stochastic variants of Laplace approximation-based
methods. Despite this interest, there remain significant trade-offs in
speed, accuracy, generalizability, and learned model complexity. In this
workshop, we will discuss how to rigorously characterize these tradeoffs,
as well as how they might be made more favourable. Moreover, we will
address the issues of its adoption in scientific communities which could
benefit from advice on their practical usage and the development of
relevant software packages.

This workshop is motivated by, and in some ways a successor to, the NIPS
2014 workshop on Advances in Variational Inference. It is supported by the
International Society of Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) and Adobe Creative
Technologies Laboratory.

3. Speakers and Panelists

Invited Speakers
John Cunningham (Columbia University)
Emily Fox (University of Washington)
Rajesh Ranganath (Princeton University)
James Hensman (University of Sheffield)
Andrea Montanari (Stanford University)

Panel: "Tricks of the Trade"
Matt Hoffman (Adobe Research)
Danilo Rezende (Google DeepMind)
David Duvenaud (Harvard University)
Alp Kucukelbir (Columbia University)
Stephan Mandt (Columbia University)

Panel: "On the Foundations and Future of Approximate Inference"
Max Welling (University of Amsterdam)
Yee Whye Teh (University of Oxford)
Andrew Gelman (Columbia University)
Steve MacEachern (Ohio State University)
Manfred Opper (Technische Universität Berlin)

4. Key Dates

Paper submission: 2 October 2015
Travel award application deadline: 2 October 2015
Acceptance notification: 23 October 2015
Travel award notification: 30 October 2015
Notification of type of presentation: 5 November 2015
Final paper submission: 1 December 2015
Workshop: 11 December 2015

Workshop Organizers
Dustin Tran (Harvard University)
Tamara Broderick (MIT)
Shakir Mohamed (Google DeepMind)
Alp Kucukelbir (Columbia University)
Stephan Mandt (Columbia University)
James McInerney (Columbia University)
Matt Hoffman (Adobe Research)
David Blei (Columbia University)
Neil Lawrence (University of Sheffield)
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