Call for Abstracts and Participation: Multidisciplinary Symposium on Reinforcement Learning

Call for Abstracts and Participation
Multidisciplinary Symposium on Reinforcement Learning
Dates: June 18-19, 2009
Abstract Deadline: April 10, 2009
Location: Montreal, Canada

In the last 25 years, reinforcement learning research has made great strides and had a significant impact within several fields, including artificial intelligence, optimal control, neuroscience, psychology, economics and operations research. These are diverse areas, with different goals and different evaluation criteria. It is
striking that reinforcement learning ideas are playing new roles in all of them. The Multidisciplinary Symposium on Reinforcement Learning (MSRL) is meant to recognize this confluence of fields, to
celebrate the diversity of reinforcement learning research, and to facilitate the exchange of information among reinforcement learning researchers in all these fields.

The symposium will consist of invited plenary lectures, spanning the breadth of reinforcement learning, and an evening poster session. The confirmed invited speakers are:

-Andrew G. Barto, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
-Dimitri Bertsekas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
-Peter Dayan, University College London, U.K.
-Read Montague, Baylor College of Medicine, USA
-Andrew Ng, Stanford University, USA
-Warren Powell, Princeton University, USA
-Wolfram Schultz, University of Cambridge, U.K.
-Terrence Sejnowski, Salk Institute, USA
-Richard Sutton, University of Alberta, Canada
-Gerald Tesauro, IBM Research, USA
-Benjamin Van Roy, Stanford University, USA

A few other invitations are pending.

The evening poster session is a highlight of the symposium and is a unique opportunity to share your work and network with researchers from the many disciplines that contribute to modern reinforcement learning. For this poster session, MSRL invites abstracts from all areas of reinforcement learning. We are especially interested in work that:

– Highlights the best of RL-related research in any discipline
– Provides general overviews of a research program with an RL component
– Extends RL to new areas or applications
– Tests RL ideas in new ways
– Illustrates the impact of RL in a field

Submissions should consist of an extended abstract of up to 2 pages. Student submissions are particularly encouraged. Please send all submissions to msrl09@rl-community.org by April 10, 2009.

Notifications of acceptance to the symposium will be sent by May 1, 2009.

MSRL will be co-located in Montreal, Canada, with the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), and the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT). For more information, please see the MSRL web site at http://msrl09.rl-community.org.

-MSRL Organizing Committee

Doina Precup, McGill University
Elliot Ludvig, University of Alberta
Richard Sutton, University of Alberta
Shie Mannor, McGill University
Satinder Singh Baveja, University of Michigan