Connectionists: ICLR 2020: Call for Workshop Proposals

[Asja Fischer]

Call for workshops: https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2020/CallForWorkshops
Submission site: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICLR2020/

Workshop Chairs: Asja Fischer and Gabriel Synnaeve
Contact: asja.fischer at rub.de and gab at fb.com

Key Dates:
 - Workshop Application Opens Sep 04, 2019
 - Workshop Application Deadline: Oct 25, 2019
 - Workshop Notification: Nov 27, 2019
 - Mandatory Cutoff for Workshop Organizers to Notify Participants of
Accept/Reject Decisions: Feb 25, 2020
 - Workshops: April 26, 2020, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia


The full call for workshop is copied below:
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## Overview

This is the second year that ICLR will have workshops - informal gatherings
of people with similar interests, potentially with keynotes, panels, and
debates, allowing for discussion of work in progress and future directions,
and community building. Workshops will take place on Sunday, April 26th.
Each workshop proposal should specify a full day schedule, accommodating
lunch and/or coffee breaks as appropriate. The exact format of a workshop
is up to your choice, we welcome creative formats. We expect to have
approximatively 15 workshops. Each accepted workshop will receive four (4)
complimentary registrations for organizers to distribute.

## Topics

We are especially interested in organizers proposing novel topics on
emerging themes. Examples of such topics include, but are not limited to:
 - Interpretable machine learning, fairness in machine learning,
transparency, governance and inclusion
 - Uncertainty in representation learning
 - Cognitive and sensori-motor extensions of human capabilities
 - Deep learning / representations learning for scientific discovery
 - Deep learning / representations learning for art and creativity
 - Learning algorithms, program synthesis
 - Privacy in machine learning
 - Energy efficiency in machine learning
 - Representation learning for planning and reinforcement learning
 - Metric learning and kernel learning
 - Sparse coding and dimensionality expansion
 - Hierarchical models
 - Optimization for representation learning
 - Learning representations of outputs or states
 - Implementation issues, parallelization, software platforms, hardware, ML
systems
 - Applications in vision, audio, speech, natural language processing,
robotics, neuroscience, healthcare, or any other field

For more examples, last year ICLR workshops were:
 - Learning from Limited Labeled Data (LLD) Workshop: Representation
Learning for Weak Supervision and Beyond
 - Deep Reinforcement Learning Meets Structured Prediction
 - Deep Generative Models for Highly Structured Data
 - Debugging Machine Learning Models
 - Structure & Priors in Reinforcement Learning (SPiRL)
 - AI for Social Good
 - Safe Machine Learning: Specification, Robustness, and Assurance
 - Representation Learning on Graphs and Manifolds
 - Reproducibility in Machine Learning
 - Task-Agnostic Reinforcement Learning (TARL)

## Highlighted Topics: AI for Social Good

This year, we especially encourage workshops pertaining to “AI for Social
Good”, which topics include, but are not limited to:
 - Healthcare
 - Education
 - Agriculture
 - Energy
 - Pollution
 - Meteorology, Natural disasters
 - Climate change
 - Wildlife, Biodiversity
 - Policy Making

## Selection Criteria

Regarding selection criteria, we took inspiration from the findings of
NeurIPS’s workshop organizers, and last year's ICLR workshop organization.

 1. Topicality: degree to which the proposal is focused on an important and
topical problem, and the degree to which it is expected that the community
will find the workshop interesting, exciting, and valuable.
 2. Intellectual excitement of the topic. Is it likely to break new ground,
or merely reiterate tired, old debates?
 3. Diversity and inclusion, in all forms.
 4. Room for discussion: degree to which the proposed program offers
opportunity for discussion.
 5. Line-up: quality of proposed invited speakers (including scientific
pedigree and presentational ability). Workshop organizers are encouraged to
confirm tentative interest from proposed invited speakers and mention this
in their proposal.
 6. Accessibility: degree to which the organizers have offered means to
engage in the workshop for those unable to attend in person.
 7. Organizational experience and ability of the team.

## Workshop Requirements

 1. Global Notification Deadline Prior to 25th of February 2020: By
submitting a workshop proposal, workshop organizers commit to notifying
those who submit contributions (including talks and posters) to their
workshop of their acceptance status before February 25, 2020 to allow time
for visa acquisition and travel arrangements. A timeline should be included
in the proposal that will allow for this.
 2. Managing Chair and Reviewer Conflicts of Interest
     - Workshop chairs (Asja Fischer and Gabriel Synnaeve) cannot be
organizers or give invited talks at any workshop, but can submit papers and
give contributed talks.
     - Workshop reviewers cannot review any proposal on which they are
listed as an organizer or invited speaker, and may not accept invitations
to speak at any workshop they have reviewed after the workshop is accepted.
     - Workshop chairs and reviewers cannot review or shape acceptance
decisions about workshops with organizers from within their organization.
(For large corporations, this means anyone in the corporation world-wide.)
  3. Managing Organizer Conflicts of Interest
     - Workshop organizers cannot give talks at the workshops they
organize. They can give a brief introduction to the workshop and/or act as
a panel moderator.
     - Workshop organizers should state in their proposal how they will
manage conflicts of interest in assessing submitted contributions. At a
minimum, an organizer should not be involved in the assessment of a
submission from someone within the same organization.
  4. During the reviewing process, workshop chairs may propose to merge
with another proposal if both workshop proposals are exactly on the same
topic. The eventual merge would be at the discretion of both sets of
organizers.

### Proposal

Organizers should submit proposals as a single PDF file. We suggest the
following headings for your proposal, although a proposal can come in any
format that allows the evaluation criteria to be assessed. We expect most
proposals to be around 3 pages.
Suggested headings:
 - Title: Keep the workshop title short and descriptive.
 - Organizers and biographies: Include short biographies that highlight
both organizational experience and technical expertise.
 - Workshop summary: 2-3 paragraphs summarizing the workshop topic,
including the problems you would like to see solved, why these problems are
important, and how the workshop will contribute to their solution.
 - Tentative schedule: Include a list of tentative/confirmed speakers with
a brief description of each (clearly stating which have confirmed). Explain
how you will encourage discussion throughout the day.
 - Diversity commitment: Give an explicit statement on how the workshop
will address diversity of all forms, as described in the guidance above.
 - Access: Describe anything you plan to do to allow those unable to attend
in person to engage, as described in the guidance above.
 - Previous related workshops (if any): List related past workshops at
NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR or other venues, and note if the workshop was
previously submitted to NeurIPS 2019.
 - Plan for funding (if any): List proposed or committed sponsorships and
planned usage of funds. List any need for funding that you think you would
have but is not met yet.
 - Any other relevant information

### Submission

Workshop proposals should be submitted before the 25th of October through
this site: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICLR2020/

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Asja and Gabriel
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