PhD thesis grant: machine learning and multimodal data

The research labs LIF (http://www.lif.univ-mrs.fr) and LSIS (http://www.lsis.org) together propose a PhD thesis in machine learning applied to multimedia data, within the « Web Multimedia Mining » research group. The thesis will take place in Marseille and Toulon, south-east of France (french riviera), starting in fall 2009. It is granted by the French Minister of Education and Research for 3 years.

The thesis aims at theoretically studying co-training style algorithms to fit multimodal concerns, with application to scaled benchmarks of multimedia data, and the participation to the TRECVID international challenge. The description of the thesis can be found at
http://www.lif.univ-mrs.fr/spip.php?article423.

Supervisors: François Denis, PR (LIF), francois.denis (at) lif.univ-mrs.fr and Hervé Glotin, MCF HDR (LSIS), glotin (at) univ-tln.fr.

Conditions for application: candidates must hold a Master Degree in computer science.

Required skills: fundamental computer science, statistics, machine learning, signal processing, multimedia data representation. Algorithmics and programmation. The candidate must have a master degree in computer science. Matlab and C programming are welcome.

How to apply: please contact the supervisors and send them a Curriculum Vitae with recommandations if any. Deadline for application: july 9th, 2009.

Announcement: Workshop on Structure Adapting Methods, Berlin 6-8 November 2009

Workshop on Structure Adapting Methods
Berlin, 6-8 November 2009
http://www.wias-berlin.de/workshops/sam09/

Registration deadline: October 22, 2009

Scope:

One possible way out of the curse of dimensionality problem is based on one or another structural assumption which allows to reduce the complexity/dimensionality of the model. A number of such structural assumptions is popular in the statistical literature including single- and multiple-index, additive, models, projection pursuit and sparse models, among many others. Knowing the structure allows for applying the classical methods to the reduced models. Unfortunately, the exact structural information is rarely available and the related problem is to extract the structural information from the data as an important preprocessing step.

The aim of this workshop is bringing together leading specialists from the field of adaptive estimation for discussing the new approaches, ideas, challenges and addressing the algorithmic and mathematical aspects of this new and actively developing area of mathematical statistics and machine learning.

Preliminary list of invited speakers:

Peter Bühlmann
Alexander Goldenshluger
Yuri Golubev
Wolfgang Härdle
Joel Horowitz
Anatoly Juditsky
Gerard Kerkyacharian
Oleg Lepski
Mikhail Malioutov
Grigory Milstein
Dominique Picard
Ya’acov Ritov
Alexander Tsybakov

2 Lecturerships in Sheffield, UK

Job Title: Lecturer in Automatic Control & Systems Engineering (2 Posts)
Department: Department of Automatic Control & Systems Engineering

Ref No: R07355

Closing Date: 31st August, 2009

Salary: £36,532 – £43,622 per annum with the potential to progress to £49,096

Summary

Outstanding individuals are sought for two lectureship positions to complement and enhance the multi-disciplinary research portfolio of the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering. Research experience and expertise in (i) Robotics (ii) Aerospace and Transport Systems or (iii) Systems Modelling and Optimisation in Healthcare or in Manufacturing is preferred. Applicants with a strong general background in Systems, Signal Processing and Control are also encouraged to apply. If successful, you will be expected to work closely with relevant department and faculty based research centres. You must have a good first degree and a PhD (or equivalent experience) in a related subject. In addition, you should display an ability and willingness to teach
across the range of taught programmes and to work as part of a team.

http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/jobs/academic.html

Open PhD/Post-doc positions ErcStG MiGraNT project

The MiGraNT project (ERC Starting Grant 240186 : Mining Graphs and Networks: a Theory-based approach) has several (3 to 5) open positions for PhD students and post-doctoral researchers.

The MiGraNT project aims at developing a sound theoretical understanding of mining and learning with graphs, and to exploit this theory to construct effective algorithms for significant real-life applications. Key features of the methodology include the integration of insights from graph theory in data mining and learning approaches, the development of efficient prototype algorithms, and the interdisciplinary collaboration with application domain experts to validate the practical value of the work,

Candidates should have a master in computer science, statistics or mathematics, a PhD in data mining, statistics, graph theory, algorithmics or theoretical computer science, or equivalent. Successful candidates can start on 01/12/2009 or later (negotiable), and funding is possible for up to 5 years.

The host institution of the MiGraNT project is the K.U.Leuven, Belgium, The K.U.Leuven has a strong history of machine learning and data mining research, and offers plenty of opportunities for interactions with researchers of application domains such as medicine, biology, chemistry and computer networks.

Candidates are requested to express their interest by sending email to Jan Ramon (see below) before September 15th, including CV, publication list and names of references.

* Location: Machine learning group (http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dtai/ml/), Department of computer science, K.U.Leuven (http://www.kuleuven.be), Leuven, Belgium
* Contact person: Jan Ramon (http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~janr/ ; Jan (dot) Ramon (at) cs (dot) kuleuven (dot) be)
* More information: http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~janr/MiGraNT/

SSPR+SPR 2010 Conferences: Call for Participation

Joint IAPR International Workshops on Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition (SSPR 2010) and Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition (SPR 2010)

18-20 August 2010, Cesme, Izmir, Turkey.

The next joint Statistical Pattern Recognition and Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition Workshops (organised by TC1 and TC2 of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, IAPR) will be held in Cesme, Turkey prior to ICPR 2010 (which itself will be held in Istanbul). The joint workshops aim at promoting interaction and collaboration among researchers working in areas covered by TC1 and TC2. We are also keen to attract participants working in fields that make use of statistical, structural or syntactic pattern recognition techniques (e.g. image processing, computer vision, bioinformatics, chemo-informatics, machine learning, document analysis, etc.). Those working in areas which can make methodological contributions to the field, e.g. methematicians, statisticians, physicists etc, are also very welcome.

The workshop will be held in Cesme, which is a seaside resort on the Aegean coast of Turkey. There area has many interesting attractions including excellent beaches, interesting fishing villages, and nearby archaeological remains and historical sites. These include Cesme castle and the remains of the ancient Greek city of Erythrae. Cesme can be reached by bus from the airport at Izmir, which has good flight connections to Istanbul.

We hope to have a varied programme including invited talks, regular paper and poster sessions, panel sessions and technical committee meetings.

Organisation:

General Chair: Edwin Hancock (University of York)
General co-chair: Ilkay Ulusoy (Middle East Technical University, Ankara)
SPR Programme Chair: Terry Windeatt (University of Surrey)
SSPR Programme Chair: Richard Wilson (University of York)
Publicity Chair: Francesco Escolano (University of Alicante)

Programme Committee: to be confirmed.

Confirmed Invited Speakers:

Narendra Ahuja (UIUC), Chris Bishop (Microsoft Research)

Provisional Dates:

Submission of papers: 1st February 2010
Decisions: 1st April 2010
Camera ready copy: 1st May 2010
Workshops: 18-20 August 2010.

Scope:

Papers may address any topic in statistical, structural or syntactic pattern recognition. Possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

SSPR Topics

Structural Matching
Syntactic Pattern Recognition
Image Understanding
Shape Analysis
Graphical Models
Graph-Based Models
Spectral Methods for Graph Based Representations
Probabilistic and Stochasitc Structural Models for Pattern Recognition
Structural Learning in Spatial or Spatio-Temporal Signals
Kernel Methods for Structured Data
Image and Video Analysis
Intelligent Sensing Systems
Spatio-Temporal Pattern Recognition
SSPR Methods in Computer Vision
Multimedia Signal Analysis
Image Document Analysis
Structured Text Analysis and Understanding
Novel Applications

SPR Topics :

Density Estimation
Large Margin Classifiers
Kernel Methods
Ensemble Methods and Multiple Classifiers
Bayesian Methods
Gaussian Processes
Dimensionality Reduction
Independent Component Analysis
Cluster Analysis
Unsupervised Learning
Data Visualization
Semi-Supervised Learning
Model Selection
Hybrid methods
Comparative Studies
Speech and Image Analysis
Novel Applications

Call for participation: ECML-PKDD ws on Learning from Non-IID Data

Call for Participation
Workshop on Learning from non-IID data: Theory, Algorithms and Practice
During ECML-PKDD 2009
7 September 2009, Bled, Slovenia

Description
———–
Both classification and regression frameworks in Machine Learning were developed under the independently and identically distributed (IID) assumption. Though this assumption helps to study the properties of learning procedures (e.g. generalization ability), and also guides the building of new algorithms, there are many real world situations where it does not hold. This is particularly the case for many challenging tasks of machine learning that have recently received much attention such as (but not limited to): ranking, active learning, hypothesis testing, learning with graphical models, prediction on graphs, mining (social) networks, multimedia or language processing.

This workshop is the first one that adresses specifically the problem of learning from non-IID data. The goal of the workshop is to bring together research works aiming at identifying problems where either the assumption of identical distribution or independency, or both, is violated, and where it is anticipated that carefully taking into account the non-IIDness is of primary importance.
Examples of such problems are:

– Bipartite ranking or, more generally, pairwise classification, where pairing up IID variables entails non-IIDness: if the data may still be identically distributed, they are no longer independent;

– Active learning, where labels for specific data are requested by the learner: the independence assumption is also violated;

– Learning with covariate shift, where the training and test marginal distributions of the data differ: the identically distributed assumption does not hold.

– Online learning from streaming data, when the distribution of the incoming examples changes over time: the examples are not identically distributed.

Keynote Speakers
—————-
Shai Ben-David, University of Waterloo, Canada
Title: Towards theoretical understanding of domain adaptation learning

Nicolas Vayatis, École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, France
Title: Empirical risk minimization with statistics of higher order with examples from bipartite ranking

Workshop Program
—————-
More information on the workshop website
http://www-connex.lip6.fr/~amini/ecml-wk-lniid.html

Program Committee
—————–
Shai Ben-David, University of Waterloo, Canada
Gilles Blanchard, Fraunhofer FIRST (IDA), Germany
Stéphan Clémençon, Télécom ParisTech, France
François Denis, University of Provence, France
Claudio Gentile, University dell’Insubria, Italy
Balaji Krishnapuram, Siemens Medical Solutions, USA
François Laviolette, Université Laval, Canada
Xuejun Liao, Duke University, USA
Richard Nock, University Antilles-Guyane, France
Daniil Ryabko, INRIA, France
Marc Sebban, University of Saint-Etienne, France
Ingo Steinwart, Los Alamos National Labs, USA
Masashi Sugiyama, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Nicolas Vayatis, École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, France
Zhi-Hua Zhou, Nanjing University, China

Organizers
———-
Massih-Reza Amini, National Research Council, Canada
Amaury Habrard, University of Marseille, France
Liva Ralaivola, University of Marseille, France
Nicolas Usunier, University Pierre et Marie Curie, France

Sponsors
——–
-Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale de Marseille (LIF)
http://www.lif.univ-mrs.fr
-PASCAL2 Network of Excellence
http://www.pascal-network.org
-ECML-PKDD 2009 organisation
http://www.ecmlpkdd2009.net

Contribution to PASCAL industrial outreach meeting

We solicit contributions from PASCAL researchers to showcase their (PASCAL sponsored) research within an industrial and business setting.

The SMART-PASCAL industrial outreach meeting will take place on the 7th of September prior to ECML in Bled, Slovenia

http://pascallin2.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Outreach/

Please email potential contributions to nello.cristianini (at) gmail.com

Few Places Still Available: The Analysis of Patterns 2009

You are invited to participate in the third course on:

THE ANALYSIS OF PATTERNS
Pula Science Park (Cagliari)
Pula, Italy
September 27th – October 3rd, 2009
http://www.analysis-of-patterns.net/

Organizers: Nello Cristianini, Fabio Roli, Tijl de Bie

LECTURERS:
* Florent Nicart – Université de Rouen

* Jean Philippe Vert – Mines Paris Tech

* John Shawe-Taylor – University College London

* Nello Cristianini – University of Bristol

* Bart Goethals – University of Antwerp

* Elisa Ricci, Idiap

* Fabio Roli, University of Cagliari

+ Research Seminars (to be announced)

DESCRIPTION

Every aspect of modern society has been affected by the data revolution. Cheap collection, storage and transmission of vast amounts of information have revolutionized the practice of science, technology and business.Ideas from various disciplines have been deployed to help in the task of designing computer systems that can automatically detect and exploit useful regularities (patterns) in general types of data.

This is the third meeting of a series devoted to pursuing a unified theoretical description of the various branches of Pattern Analysis. These include statistical approaches to pattern recognition, combinatorial approaches to pattern matching, grammatical representations of structures, and many more fields of mathematics and computer science. The summer school will aim to emphasize a
fundamental unity in goals and methods in all these diverse fields, to enhance our understanding of the central principles of pattern analysis, and to assist in the development of new pattern analysis approaches.
The meeting is interdisciplinary in nature, and can be seen both as a School for advanced students, and as a Workshop for researchers. Leading researchers in various subfields of pattern analysis will hold tutorials on their subject area, while new ideas will be presented in poster sessions, discussions and short seminars. Students in machine learning, pattern recognition, statistics, optimization, data mining, bioinformatics, are particularly encouraged to apply.

REGISTRATION:
The registration fee for the School is 680 Euro per person for a double room (820 Euro for a single room) and includes 7 nights accommodation, meals and school fees.

Attendance is limited to 50 students and will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

http://www.analysis-of-patterns.net/

Closing date: June 1st, 2009

Postdoc and PhD positions in Machine Learning with applications to Proactive Information Retrieval and Bioinformatics

Helsinki University of Technology

We are looking for two postdocs and one PhD student to join a research group working on machine learning and probabilistic modeling, with applications in bioinformatics, neuroinformatics and information retrieval. The Machine Learning and Bioinformatics Group (http://www.cis.hut.fi/projects/mi) belongs to the Adaptive Informatics Research Centre and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.

——————————————————————–

Postdoc #1 and PhD student: Proactive information retrieval

Proactive or cognitive user interfaces require modeling user behavior and state, in order to provide optimal selection of natural choices for the user in varying contexts. They provide an exciting opportunity for developing advanced probabilistic machine learning methods for inferring the user’s interest from noisy signals like measurements of attention. You will take part in international projects developing e.g. gaze-based information retrieval tools and personalized information navigators.

Keywords: Proactive interfaces, information retrieval, user modeling, probabilistic modeling, graphical models

Postdoc:
1.5 years + option for extension, starting date 1.9.2009 or flexibly thereafter.
Salary range 2523.02 – 4385.49 Euro per month.

PhD student:
4 years, starting date 1.9.2009 or flexibly thereafter.
Salary range 1716.96 – 3208.97 Euro per month.

——————————————————————–

Postdoc #2: Bioinformatics

The aim is to develop models that learn to combine multiple data sources in multiple experimental settings, for systems-level modeling of a new experiment. From machine-learning perspective this is a challenging combination of multi-view and multi-task learning, where the number of samples compared to the dimensionality is very low and fundamental research is needed. From systems biology perspective this is an opportunity to solve some of the central problems in cellular regulation. The project is carried out in collaboration with experts on the data and the biological applications (cancer and plant signaling). You will need particularly skills on machine learning and
probabilistic modeling, as well as good collaboration skills.

Keywords: graphical models, MCMC, relational models, interactomics, multi-view learning, multi-task learning

1 year + option for extension, starting date 1.9.2009 or flexibly thereafter.
Salary range 2523.02 – 4385.49 Euro per month.

——————————————————————–

All positions require a relevant degree, and good skills in a subset of the following fields: computer science, programming, machine learning, statistics, mathematics, and bioinformatics.

In Helsinki you will join the innovative international computational data analysis and ICT community. Among European cities, Helsinki is special in being clean, safe, liberal, Scandinavian, and close to nature; in short, having a high standard of living. English is understood everywhere and the working language is English.

The is no formal deadline, but the applications will be processed starting from the beginning of August. I will not be easily reachable during July. Please attach a CV including a list of publications, copy of study records, and email addressses of 2-3 people willing to give more information. Include a brief description of research interests and send the application by email to

Samuel Kaski, samuel.kaski (at) tkk.fi
Professor of Computer Science
Helsinki University of Technology
http://www.cis.hut.fi/sami

Call for short papers and abstracts, PRIB 2009

4th IAPR International Conference in
Pattern Recognition for Bioinformatics (PRIB 2009)
City Hall, Sheffield, United Kingdom
7 – 9 September 2009
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/ml/prib2009/prib2009.html

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
—————-

Pierre Baldi (University of California, Irvine)
Alvis Brazma (European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge)
Gunnar Raetsch (Max Planck Institute, Germany)
Michael Unser (Ecole Polytechnique Federale, Lausanne)

SCOPE
—–

The International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) sponsored conference aims to bring together top researchers, practitioners and students from around the world to discuss the applications of pattern recognition methods in the field of bioinformatics to solve problems in the life sciences. We are now inviting submissions of short papers (up to 6 pages in LNCS formats)
and poster abstracts (up to 1 page) in all the areas of relevance to the conference. These include:

Bio-sequence analysis
Gene and protein expression analysis
Protein structure and interaction prediction
Motifs and signal detection
Metabolic modelling and analysis
Systems and synthetic biology
Pathway and network analysis
Immuno- and chemo-informatics
Evolution and phylogeny
Biological databases, integration and visualisation
Bio-imaging

Pattern recognition techniques of interest include, but not limited to:
Static, syntactic and structural pattern recognition
Data mining, Data based modelling
Neural networks, Fuzzy systems
Evolutionary computation and swarm intelligence
Hidden Markov models, Graphical models

DEADLINES
———

Short paper/abstract Submission 24 July 2009
Author Notification 30 July 2009
Early Bird Registration 15 July 2009

NB: Authors of short papers and abstracts will be allowed to register at the early bird rate until 31 July 2009.

PUBLICATION
———–

Accepted papers will be published in the PRIB 2009 supplementary proceedings. Authors of both short papers and abstracts will be expected to present a poster at the conference

ORGANISING COMMITTEE
——————–

General Chairs: Visakan Kadirkamanathan (UK), Guido Sanguinetti (UK)
General Co-Chairs: Raj Acharya (USA), Madhu Chetty (Australia)
Programme Chairs: Mahesan Niranjan (UK), Mark Girolami (UK), Jagath Rajapakse (Singapore)
Special Sessions Chair: Cesare Furlanello (Italy)
Tutorials Chair: Florence deAlche-buc (France)
Publicity Chair: Elena Marchiori (Netherlands)
Publications Chair: Josselin Noirel (UK)
Local Organisation Chair: Daniel Coca (UK)
Finance Chair: Andrew Zammit Mangion (UK)
Webmaster: Maurizio Filippone (UK)

CONTACT
——-

For additional information, contact:

PRIB 2009 Secretariat,
Department of Automatic Control & Systems Engineering,
The University of Sheffield,
Mappin Street,
Sheffield S1 3JD,
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 114 2225618
Fax: +44 114 2225661
prib2009 (at) sheffield.ac.uk