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

[Marco Baroni]

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/

*** 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 to the research community, encouraging discussion on
how to make it the ultimate benchmark for 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. We
will soon make a prototype of the Environment available, so that
researchers interested in submitting position statements to the workshop
can experiment with it and take it into account in their proposals.

*** 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 encourage
in particular critiques of the Environment for Communication-Based AI. To
facilitate this, we will make a prototype of the Environment publicly
available by Sunday, September 18th (downloading instructions will be
posted on the workshop webpage: https://mainatnips.github.io/). 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/

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

* Josh Tenenbaum (MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Boston):
http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/josh.html

* 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, September 18th: Release of Environment for Communication-Based AI
prototype

* 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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