PASCAL2 Posts

Call for participation: SICSA Summer School – Inference and Dynamics in Interaction

School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow
11th-15th June 2012

—Overview—

This summer school will focus on the use of inference and dynamical
modelling in human-computer interaction. The combination of modern
statistical inference and real-time closed loop modelling offers rich
possibilities in building interactive systems, but there is a
significant gap between the techniques commonly used in HCI and the
mathematical tools available in other fields of computing science.
This school aims to illustrate how to bring these mathematical tools
to bear on interaction problems.

The opportunities for interaction with computer systems are rapidly
expanding beyond traditional input and output paradigms: full-body
motion sensors, brain-computer interfaces, 3D displays, touch panels
are now commonplace commercial items. The profusion of new sensing
devices for human input and the new display channels which are
becoming available offer the potential to create more involving,
expressive and efficient interactions in a much wider range of
contexts. Dealing with these complex sources of human intention
requires appropriate mathematical methods; modelling and analysis of
interactions requires sophisticated methods which can transform
streams of data from complex sensors into estimates of human
intention.

The programme will consist of a set of lectures delivered by experts
of international standing combined with hands-on practical sessions
for constructing and working with the techniques covered in the course
material.

—Audience—

This school will be suitable for PhD students from a range of fields,
especially machine learning, HCI, interaction design and inference.

Although the course will have substantial technical content, no
prerequisites are required beyond a background in computer science.

—Speakers—

The following speakers are confirmed for the summer school:

Simon Rogers (University of Glasgow)
John Williamson (University of Glasgow)
Thomas Hermann (Bielefeld University)
Per Ola Kristensson (University of St. Andrews)
Lars Kai Hansen (Technical University of Denmark)
Mirco Musolesi (University of Birmingham)

—Application/Registration—

Registration is £250, not including accommodation.

Registration *and* accommodation are free for computing science PhD
students from SICSA institutions.

To apply for a position at the Summer School, please go to:
http://idisummerschool.eventbrite.com/

Reshaping the Pascal2 Internal Visiting Program

Dear Pascal2 Researchers,

during the final year of Pascal2, it has been decided to reshape the goals of the
Internal Visiting (IV) Program.

>From now on, the IV Program will assist in the organization and funding of *short* visits
of up to *one month* duration between sites by members of the Network. The visit should
be specifically targeted towards activities (e.g., in the form of grant proposal preparations)
that will pave the way for longer term collaborations between the involved sites.

This funding stream is available to all Pascal2 researchers. Visitors and sites involved
must be members of the Network (either beneficiaries or non-beneficiaries).
It is anticipated that the main use of funds under this program will be to support travel
and subsistence for the visit. The program is not intended to cover salaries.

>From now on, applications under the IV Program will be evaluated in terms of integrative
impact within Pascal2 and beyond, scientific merit, and expense of the proposal.
Normally the maximum allocation for one application will be 3K euros. Keep in mind that
the total budget available to this program for the current (and final) Pascal2 year is 20K euros.

Actual submissions should be done through the Pascal2 IV Program at
http://pascallin2.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Programmes/VP/
and clicking on the Request tab.

Deadline: none, continuous evaluation. It is expected that the list of accepted proposals
will be finalized within 1 to 3 weeks after submission, depending on the requested budget.

All enquiries should be directed to: claudiogentileuninsubriait

PHD POSITIONS IN COMPOSITIONAL DISTRIBUTIONAL SEMANTICS

Three PhD positions/studentships to study compositionality in
distributional semantics are available in the Language, Interaction
and Computation track of the 3-year PhD program offered by the Center
for Mind/Brain Sciences at the University of Trento (Italy)
(www.unitn.it/en/cimec).

The PhD program (start date: November 2012) is taught in English by an
international faculty. The Language, Interaction & Computation track
is organized by the CIMeC-CLIC laboratory, an interdisciplinary group
of researchers studying language and conceptualization using both
computational and cognitive methods (clic.cimec.unitn.it).

The studentships are funded by a 5-year European Research Council
Starting Grant awarded to the COMPOSES (COMPositional Operations in
SEmantic SPACE) project (clic.cimec.unitn.it/composes), that aims at
modeling composition in distributional semantics. The project is
expected to have strong impact on both theoretical and computational
semantics, as well as their cognitive underpinnings.

* Desired Profiles *

Given the interdisciplinary nature of the project, we seek brilliant
students with any of the following backgrounds:

– Machine learning (areas of special interest: regression,
regularization methods, hierarchical regression, autoencoders,
curriculum learning, scaling machine learning to large multivariate
and multi-level problems, dealing with very sparse data);

– Psycholinguistics, experimental linguistics or cognitive science
(areas of special interest: systematic judgment elicitation methods
such as Likert scales or magnitude estimation, crowdsourcing,
semantic processing);

– Formal and/or computational semantics (areas of special interest:
Montague Grammar and its derivatives, distributional semantics)

Advanced programming and mathematical skills are required of
candidates from machine learning. For linguists and cognitive
scientists, programming skills and knowledge of statistics are a big
plus.

If you think that your background is relevant to the research program
outlined on the project website (clic.cimec.unitn.it/composes) and you
have good programming and quantitative skills, please do get in touch
even if you do not fit any of the profiles above.

All prospective students are expected to have an interest in working
in an interdisciplinary environment.

* The Research Environment *

The CLIC lab (clic.cimec.unitn.it) is a unit of the University of
Trento’s Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC,
www.unitn.it/en/cimec), an English-speaking, interdisciplinary center
for research on brain and cognition whose staff includes
neuroscientists, psychologists, (computational) linguists, computer
scientists and physicists.

CLIC consists of researchers from the Departments of Computer Science
(DISI) and Cognitive Science (DISCoF) carrying out research on a range
of topics including concept acquisition, corpus-based computational
semantics, combining NLP and computer vision, combining brain and
corpus data to study cognition, formal semantics and theoretical
linguistics. Modeling composition in distributional semantics is
increasingly a focus point of CLIC, and activity in this area is
growing considerably thanks to COMPOSES funds.

CLIC is part of the larger network of research labs focusing on
Natural Language Processing and related domains in the Trento region,
that is quickly becoming one of the areas with the highest
concentration of researchers in NLP and related fields anywhere in
Europe.

The CLIC/CIMeC laboratories are located in beautiful Rovereto, a
lively town in the middle of the Alps, famous for its contemporary art
museum, the quality of its wine, and the range of outdoors sport and
relax opportunities it offers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rovereto

* Application Information *

The official call of the Doctoral School in Cognitive and Brain
Sciences will be announced shortly, and application details will be
available on the page:

http://www.unitn.it/en/drcimec/10140/admission-doctoral-school-cognitive-and-brain-sciences

We strongly encourage a preliminary expression of interest in the
project. Please contact Marco Baroni (marco.baroni@unitn.it),
attaching a CV in pdf or txt format, or a link to an online CV. For
information about the application process, please contact the school
administrator (phd.cimec@unitn.it).

Teleconference Seminars, Spring 2012

Dear colleagues,

We are organizing a series of teleconference seminars alternating every other week between 2 themes:
– causality
– model selection

In April, the invited speakers are Gavin Cawley, Richard Kennaway, Kristin Bennett, and Ioannis Tsamardinos.

Thursday, April 5 9 am PT Gavin Cawley Model selection – the best place to look for performance gains (see chapters 3 and 13 of “hands-on book”)
Thursday, April 12 9 am PT Richard Kennaway When causation does not imply correlation: robust violations of the faithfulness axiom Abstract
Thursday, April 19 9 am PT Kristin Bennett Multi-level optimization (see chapters 15 of “hands-on book”)
Thursday, April 26 9 am PT Ioannis Tsamardinos Towards Integrative Causal Analysis of Heterogeneous Datasets and Studies

For more information, see https://sites.google.com/a/chalearn.org/readinggroup/home.

Best regards,

Isabelle Guyon

CVMP2012 – European Conference on Visual Media Production

CVMP2012 – European Conference on Visual Media Production
5th & 6th December 2012
VUE Leicester Square, London
http://www.cvmp-conference.org

CALL FOR PAPERS
——————

CVMP 2012 is the 9th annual industry-academic conference series on
media production for film, broadcast and games. Visual media
production brings together expertise in video processing, computer
vision, computer graphics, animation and physical simulation. CVMP
provides a forum for presentation of the latest research advances
combined with key-note and invited talks on state-of-the-art
industry practice in content production and post-production.

High-quality papers are invited which present novel research related
to any aspect of visual media production. Full length submitted papers
will be subject to peer review. The papers will be published in
cooperation with Eurographics and ACM. The top 10% of submissions to
CVMP 2012 will be invited to submit extended papers to IEEE
Transactions on Multimedia.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE FULL PAPER: 11th June 2012
Notification of Full Paper Acceptance: 23rd July 2012
Submission of Camera Ready: 3rd September 2012

Full details are on the website www.cvmp-conference.org

We look forward to receiving you submission.
Abi Bowman
CVMP Conference Secretary

Call for Papers: IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence: Special Issue on Bayesian Nonparametrics

Topic description:
Bayesian nonparametric models are probabilistic models defined over
infinite dimensional parameter spaces. Examples include Gaussian
processes, used in regression and classification, where the parameter
space consists of the set of smooth functions, and Dirichlet process
mixture models for density estimation problems, where the parameter
space is dense in the space of densities. Bayesian nonparametrics
present a flexible framework for modeling complex data and a viable
alternative to model selection, and have gained increasing attention
in machine learning, statistics, and related fields in recent years.

We invite paper submissions for a special issue on Bayesian
nonparametrics to be published in IEEE Transactions in Pattern
Analysis and Machine Intelligence. Original research papers as well as
overview and survey papers are welcome, on topics including, but not
limited to:

• Statistical and learning theory for Bayesian nonparametric methods;
• Novel Bayesian nonparametric models and stochastic processes;
• Novel methodologies for learning and inference, including Monte
Carlo, variational, message-passing, online, and large scale
algorithms.
• Applications, to signal processing, image processing, speech,
language processing and others.

Priority will be given to papers with high novelty and originality for
research papers, and to papers with high potential impact for
survey/overview papers.

Paper submission and review:
We invite interested authors to submit 2-page white papers outlining
their submission by June 30, 2012, by email to
npbayes2012pami@gmail.com
Feedback on the white paper will be provided, and suitable submissions
invited to submit full papers online, by August 31, 2012, through the
TPAMI site at,
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tpami-cs
selecting the choice that indicates this special issue. Peer
reviewing will follow the standard IEEE review process. Full length
manuscripts are expected at this second stage, following the TPAMI
guidelines in
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/peerreviewjournals/author

Time line:
Submission of 2-page white papers: June 30, 2012.
Feedback and invitations to submit full papers: July 15, 2012.
Submission of full papers: August 31, 2012.
First reviews: November 15, 2012.
Revisions due: January 15, 2013.
Decisions announced: February 28, 2013.
Final manuscripts due: March 31, 2013.

Guest editors:
• Ryan P. Adams, Harvard University, rpa@seas.harvard.edu
• Emily Fox, University of Pennsylvania, ebfox@wharton.upenn.edu
• Erik Sudderth, Brown University, sudderth@cs.brown.edu
• Yee Whye Teh, University College London, ywteh@gatsby.ucl.ac.uk

Neural Information Processing Systems Conference and Workshops

December 3-8, 2012
Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA
http://nips.cc/Conferences/2012/

Deadline for Paper Submissions: Friday, June 1, 2012, 11 pm Universal
Time (4 pm Pacific Daylight Time). Submit at:
https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/NIPS2012/

Submissions are solicited for the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference on
Neural Information Processing Systems, an interdisciplinary conference
that brings together researchers in all aspects of neural and
statistical information processing and computation, and their
applications. The conference is a highly selective, single track
meeting that includes invited talks as well as oral and poster
presentations of refereed papers. Submissions by authors who are new to
NIPS are encouraged. The 2012 conference will be held on December 3-6
at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. One day of tutorials (December 3) will precede
the main conference, and two days of workshops (December 7-8) will
follow it at the same location.

Technical Areas: Papers are solicited in all areas of neural
information processing and statistical learning, including, but not
limited to:

* Algorithms and Architectures: statistical learning algorithms, kernel
methods, graphical models, Gaussian processes, neural networks,
dimensionality reduction and manifold learning, model selection,
combinatorial optimization, relational and structured learning.

* Applications: innovative applications that use machine learning,
including systems for time series prediction, bioinformatics, systems
biology, text/web analysis, multimedia processing, and robotics.

* Brain Imaging: neuroimaging, cognitive neuroscience, EEG
(electroencephalogram), ERP (event related potentials), MEG
(magnetoencephalogram), fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging),
brain mapping, brain segmentation, brain computer interfaces.

* Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence: theoretical,
computational, or experimental studies of perception, psychophysics,
human or animal learning, memory, reasoning, problem solving, natural
language processing, and neuropsychology.

* Control and Reinforcement Learning: decision and control,
exploration, planning, navigation, Markov decision processes, game
playing, multi-agent coordination, computational models of classical
and operant conditioning.

* Hardware Technologies: analog and digital VLSI, neuromorphic
engineering, computational sensors and actuators, microrobotics,
bioMEMS, neural prostheses, photonics, molecular and quantum computing.

* Learning Theory: generalization, regularization and model selection,
Bayesian learning, spaces of functions and kernels, statistical physics
of learning, online learning and competitive analysis, hardness of
learning and approximations, statistical theory, large deviations and
asymptotic analysis, information theory.

* Neuroscience: theoretical and experimental studies of processing and
transmission of information in biological neurons and networks,
including spike train generation, synaptic modulation, plasticity and
adaptation.

* Speech and Signal Processing: recognition, coding, synthesis,
denoising, segmentation, source separation, auditory perception,
psychoacoustics, dynamical systems, recurrent networks, language
models, dynamic and temporal models.

* Visual Processing: biological and machine vision, image processing
and coding, segmentation, object detection and recognition, motion
detection and tracking, visual psychophysics, visual scene analysis and
interpretation.

Evaluation Criteria: Submissions will be refereed on the basis of
technical quality, novelty, potential impact, and clarity.

Submission Instructions: All submissions will be made electronically,
in PDF format. As in previous years, reviewing will be double-blind:
the reviewers will not know the identities of the authors. Papers are
limited to eight pages, including figures and tables, in the NIPS
style. An additional ninth page containing only cited references is
allowed. Complete submission and formatting instructions, including
style files, are available from the NIPS website, http://nips.cc.

Supplementary Material: Authors can submit up to 10 MB of material,
containing proofs, audio, images, video, data or source code. Note that
the reviewers and the program committee reserve the right to judge the
paper solely on the basis of the 9 pages of the paper; looking at any
extra material is up to the discretion of the reviewers and is not
required.

Submission process: Electronic submissions will be accepted until
Friday, June 1, 2012, 11 pm Universal Time (4 pm Pacific Daylight
Time). As was the case last year, final papers will be due in advance
of the conference.

Dual Submissions Policy: Submissions that are identical (or
substantially similar) to versions that have been previously published,
or accepted for publication, or during the NIPS review period are in
submission to another peer-reviewed and published venue are not
appropriate for NIPS, with three exceptions listed below. These
exceptions, which have been approved by the NIPS Foundation board in
the interests of speeding up scientific communication and improving the
efficiency of peer review, are as follows:
1.Concurrent submission to other venues is acceptable provided that:
(a) The concurrent submission or intention to submit to other venues is
declared to all venues, (b) NIPS and the concurrent venues are given
permission by the author(s) to coordinate reviewing, and (c) acceptance
to one venue imposes withdrawal from all other venues with the
exception stated in 2 below.
2.NIPS submissions that summarize a longer journal paper, whether
published, accepted, or in submission, are acceptable if the authors
inform NIPS and the journal and give them permission to coordinate
reviewing.
3.It is acceptable to submit to NIPS 2012 work that has been made
available as a technical report (or similar, e.g. in arXiv) as long as
the conditions above are satisfied.

None of the above should be construed as overriding the requirements of
other publishing venues. In addition, keep in mind that author
anonymity to NIPS reviewers might be compromised for authors availing
themselves of exceptions 2 and 3. Authors must declare submissions to
other venues either through the CMT submission form, or via email to
the program chairs at program-chairs@nips.cc.

Authors’ Responsibilities: If there are papers that may appear to
violate any of these conditions, it is the authors’ responsibility to
(1) cite these papers (preserving anonymity), (2) argue in the body of
your paper why your NIPS paper is non-trivially different from these
concurrent submissions, and (3) include anonymized versions of those
papers in the supplemental material.

Demonstrations and Workshops: There is a separate Demonstration track
at NIPS. Authors wishing to submit to the Demonstration track should
consult the Call for Demonstrations. The workshops will be held at Lake
Tahoe, Nevada, December 7-8. The upcoming call for workshop proposals
will provide details.

Web URL: http://nips.cc/Conferences/2012/CallForPapers

Statistical physics of inference and control – Call for participation

On september 12-16 2012, we are organizing a unique small workshop on the interface of statistical
mechanics and control theory. In this meeting, we wish to explore links between robotics, stochastic optimal control, non-equilibrium systems, large deviations and stochastic descriptions of quantum mechanics.

The workshop will take place in the beautiful Albaycin area of Granada, which is on the Unesco world heritage list. See http://www.snn.ru.nl/cyberstat_granada/ for details.

Due to the very interdiscipinary nature of the meeting, tutorial style talks will give introductions into different topics in the morning and we have reserved time for informal discussions in the afternoon.

The meeting is open to a limited number of additional researchers. For registration details see the conference website. If you wish to attend the meeting, please send us an email before June 1.
It is also possible to present a talk at the workshop. If you wish to present a contributed talk,
please send us a title and abstract of your talk before June 1 2012. We will notify your acceptance before July 1 2012.

Looking forward to meeting you in Granada.

The organizers.

Research engineer position in Machine Learning/Computer Vision, INRIA Grenoble

The LEAR research group at INRIA Grenoble is hiring a research
engineer on the topic for multimodal classification of video streams
from audio and video modalities. The position will include front-line
participation in international competition and evaluation campaign
such as TRECVID.

INRIA Grenoble and the LEAR team http://lear.inrialpes.fr provide a
stimulating research environment. The working language is English.
Grenoble lies in the south of France and provides excellent living
conditions.

Your profile:
* PhD degree in computer vision or related areas
* Solid programming skills; the projects involve programming in
Matlab and C
* Solid mathematics and machine learning knowledge
* Creative and highly motivated
* Fluent in English, both written and spoken

Duration: 2 years

Start date: As soon as possible

Contact:
Zaid Harchaoui, zaid.harchaoui@gmail.com;
Matthijs Douze, matthijs.douze@inria.fr;
Cordelia Schmid, Cordelia.Schmid@inria.fr

Please send applications via email, including:
* cover letter
* resume
* graduation marks
* name and email address of three referees

IEEE ICDM 2012 Call for Workshop Proposals

Due by April 6, 2012

ICDM 2012: The 12th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining
Sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society
December 10-13, 2012, Brussels, Belgium

The 12th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2012) invites
proposals for half- or full-day workshops to be held on December 10, 2012.
Workshops are expected to focus on new research directions on, and novel
applications of, data mining.

Each workshop will solicit papers for peer review. Furthermore, as in previous
years, papers that are not accepted by the main conference will be
automatically sent to the workshop selected by the authors when the papers
were submitted to the main conference. By the unique ICDM tradition, all
accepted workshop papers will be published in a formal proceedings by the IEEE
Computer Society Press.

Workshop proposals should be submitted in plain text or PDF, by email to both
Workshop Chairs, Jilles Vreeken and Charles Ling
, and must include the following elements:

– Title and acronym of the workshop
– Duration (full-day or half-day)
– Description of the workshop topic, and a draft version of CFP (not exceeding
500 words)
– Short description on how the organizers plans to attract quality submissions
– Preliminary list of invited speakers (if any)
– Short bio of the organizers
– Tentative program committee
– Contact information of the organizers (including name, affiliation, mailing
address, and e-mail address)

After a workshop proposal is accepted, the organizers should create a Web page
for the workshop and notify the workshop chairs of its URL. The main
conference web site will provide a link to each workshop.

Important Dates

April 6, 2012: Workshop proposal due
April 30, 2012: Notification
May 7, 2011: Each workshop organizer sends out Call for Workshop Papers
August 10, 2012: Due date for full workshop papers
October 1, 2012: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
October 15, 2012: Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers
December 10, 2012: Workshop date

Workshop Co-Chairs
– Jilles Vreeken (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
– Charles Ling (University of Western Ontario, Canada)

You may contact the Workshop Chairs at:
Jilles.Vreeken@ua.ac.be, cling@csd.uwo.ca