Connectionists: MAchine INtelligence @ NIPS: Call for abstracts and participation

[Marco Baroni]

(Apologies for multiple postings)

What: MAchine INtelligence workshop at NIPS 2016 (MAIN at NIPS)
When and Where: Fri Dec 9th 2016, 9am-12.30pm and 2pm-5.30pm
Where: Centre Convencions Internacional, Barcelona (Spain) (co-located with
NIPS)
Website: https://mainatnips.github.io/

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE APPROACHING: Sunday, October 9th

*** Motivation ***

Recent years have seen the success of machine learning systems, in
particular deep learning architectures, on specific challenges such as
image classification and playing Go. Nevertheless, machines still fail on
hallmarks of human intelligence such as the flexibility to quickly switch
between a number of different tasks, the ability to creatively combine
previously acquired skills in order to perform a more complex goal, the
capacity to learn a new skill from just a few examples, or the use of
communication and interaction to extend one's knowledge in order to
accomplish new goals.

This workshop aims to stimulate theoretical and practical advances in the
development of machines endowed with human-like general-purpose intelligence,
focusing in particular on benchmarks to train and evaluate progress in
machine intelligence. The workshop will feature invited talks by top
researchers from machine learning, AI, cognitive science and NLP, who will
discuss with the audience their ideas about what are the most pressing
issues we face in developing true AI and the best methods to measure
genuine progress. We are moreover calling for position statements from
interested researchers to complement the workshop program (see below).

The workshop will also introduce the new Environment for
Communication-Based AI (CommAI-env) to the research community, encouraging
discussion on how to make it the ultimate benchmark for communication-based
machine intelligence. The Environment aims at being an interactive
playground where systems can only succeed if they possess the hallmarks of
intelligence we listed above. A prototype of the environment is available
here: https://github.com/facebookresearch/CommAI-env

*** Call for abstracts ***

We invite submission of 3-page abstracts (or shorter) presenting a position
statement on what are the most important challenges to develop general
machine intelligence (with special interest in communication-based
intelligence), and what are the data and benchmarks we need to properly
address such challenges. While all points of view are welcome, we also
encourage critiques of the Environment for Communication-Based AI.
Abstracts must be submitted in PDF format to main.at.nips2016 at gmail.com by
Sunday, October 9th. We will notify acceptance by Sunday, October 23d.
Authors of accepted abstracts are expected to present their ideas in an
oral presentation at the workshop, and to take part in the panel
discussions.

*** Invited speakers ***

* Emannuel Dupoux (Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et
Psycholinguistique, Paris): http://www.lscp.net/persons/dupoux/

* Fernando Diaz (Microsoft Research, New York): http://msr.nyc/fdiaz/

* Raquel Fernandez (Institute for Logic, Language & Computation,
Amsterdam): https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/r.fernandezrovira/

* Brenden Lake (NYU Center for Data Science): http://cims.nyu.edu/~brenden/

* Jürgen Schmidhuber (IDSIA, Lugano): http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/

* Arthur Szlam (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Reserch, New York):
https://research.facebook.com/arthur-szlam

* Julian Togelius (NYU Game Innovation Lab, New York):
http://julian.togelius.com/

*** Organizers ***

Tomas Mikolov, Allan Jabri, Armand Joulin, Klemen Simonic (Facebook)
Marco Baroni, Angeliki Lazaridou, Germán Kruszewski (University of
Trento/Facebook)

*** Program ***

The workshop will feature oral presentations and two panel discussions. The
program will be posted on the workshop website.

*** Important dates ***

* Sunday, October 9th: Abstract submission deadline

* Sunday, October 23d: Notification of acceptance

* Friday, December 9th: Workshop


*** Contact ***

main.at.nips2016 at gmail.com
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