Connectionists: RLDM2017

[Richard Sutton]

Dear friends and colleagues,

I would like to call your attention to the upcoming Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM) to be held next June 11-14 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The special thing about this conference is that it is explicitly multidisciplinary, bringing together folks from all the different fields trying to figure out how learning and decision making work: neuroscience, artificial intelligence,  control theory, psychology, operations research, economics, robotics, signal processing, and others. This will be the third time we have held this meeting. Last year, it was held in Edmonton at the University of Alberta, and in 2013 it was held in Princeton at Princeton University. It has been a smallish meeting, attended by a few hundred researchers, focused on what the different fields can learn from each other. I have found it extremely valuable, and I recommend the meeting to you for learning about what is going on in the attempt to understand the mind in the broadest possible terms.  And if your own work might be of interest to other fields, why not submit a short paper describing it in cross-disciplinary terms? Submissions are due February 19, 2017. 

The conference itself will consist of invited talks of broad interest, talks selected from the submitted papers, and wonderful poster sessions where you can meet informally with like-minded people who are nevertheless working in different fields. The emphasis is on sharing of ideas across disciplines, so it is not a problem if the work you submit to this meeting has already been published within your discipline. There is a much wider world out there with which to share perspectives.

-Rich Sutton

p.s. for more information go to http://rldm.org.