EPSRC/RSS GRADUATE TRAINING PROGRAMME 2012: ADVANCED COMPUTATIONAL BAYESIAN INFERENCE

Monday 23rd July 2012 – Friday 27th July 2012
School of Mathematics & Statistics, Newcastle University

This is the first of a new series of residential graduate training courses provided by the Royal Statistical Society with support from EPSRC. The courses are national and are mainly aimed at PhD students in their second and third years, though others may be able to attend. There will be two courses running sequentially:

“Modern Computational Statistics: Alternatives to MCMC”, by Professor Paul Fearnhead (Lancaster University). The course will cover Sequential Monte Carlo methods, Particle MCMC, Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) and automated ABC.

“Designing Markov chain Monte Carlo methods based on Diffusions and Geodesic Flows on Manifolds: The Differential Geometry of MCMC”, by Professor Mark Girolami (University College London). The course will cover Hamiltonian, Langevin and Riemannian Monte Carlo methods and their use in MCMC.

The course registration fee for GTP 2012 is £150. Accommodation and subsistence will be provided free for EPSRC-funded students from Sunday-Friday. Capacity is limited, so places on the course will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

The aim of the GTP is to provide a series of high level and specialist courses in Statistics and Applied Probability to graduate Statisticians. The 2012 GTP follows on from previous successful EPSRC/RSS programmes running from 2002-2007.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION contact gtp@ncl.ac.uk, or visit http://www.ncl.ac.uk/maths/gtp

TO REGISTER visit http://www.ncl.ac.uk/maths/gtp/registration

You may leave the list at any time by sending the command

SIGNOFF allstat

to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk, leaving the subject line blank.

Call for Participation – VISION AND SPORTS SUMMER SCHOOL

Call for Papers: AIGM’12: algorithmic issues for inference in graphical models

Web site: http://www2.toulouse.inra.fr/AIGM12
In the the framework of the ECAI’2012 conference
August 27/28 2012

Most real (e.g. biological) complex systems are formed or
modelled by elementary objects that locally interact with each
other. Local properties can often be measured, assessed or
partially observed. On the other hand, global properties that
stem from these local interactions are difficult to
comprehend. It is now acknowledged that mathematical modelling is
an adequate framework to understand, be able to control or to
predict the behaviour of complex systems, such as gene regulatory
networks or contact networks in epidemiology. More precisely,
graphical models (GM), which are formed by variables by
deterministic or stochastic relationships, allow researchers to
model possibly high-dimensional heterogeneous data and to capture
uncertainty. Analysis, optimal control, inference or prediction
about complex systems benefit from the formalisation proposed by
GM. To achieve such tasks, a key factor is to be able to answer
general queries: what is the probability to observe such event in
this situation ? Which model best represents my data ? What is
the most acceptable solution to a query of interest that
satisfies a list of given constraints ? Often, an exact
resolution cannot be achieved either because of computational
limits, or because of the intractability of the problem.

Objective

The aim of this workshop is to bridge the gap between Statistics
and Artificial Intelligence communities where approximate
inference methods for GM are developed. We are primarily
interested in algorithmic aspects of probabilistic (e.g. Markov
random fields, Bayesian networks, influence diagrams),
deterministic (e.g. Constraint Satisfaction Problems, SAT,
weighted variants, Generalized Additive Independence models) or
hybrid (e.g. Markov logic networks) models. We expect both

(i) reviews that analyze similarities and differences between
approaches developed by computer scientists and statisticians
in these areas, and

(ii) original papers that propose new algorithms and show their
performance on data sets as compared to state-of-the-art
methods.

Important dates

* Submission deadline : 31st of May
* Notification to authors: 29th of June
* Submission of final version: 13th of July

In the name of the organisation committee
N. Peyrard, S. Robin, T. Schiex

3 post-doc positions open in the SequeL group at INRIA

– Efficient Resource Allocation in Decision-Making under Uncertainty

– Time changing Markov Decision Processes

– Large scale sequential learning

More information regarding those positions, contacts, and application
are available on our website:
https://sequel.lille.inria.fr/SequeL/OpenPositions#postdocs

The postdoctoral candidate will work at SequeL lab at INRIA Lille – Nord
Europe located in Lille. SequeL is an acronym for “Sequential Learning”
and it is one of the major research groups in Europe in machine
learning, sequential learning, and multi-arm bandits. SequeL conjugates
theoretical research to applications of state-of-the-art machine
learning techniques in major IT companies in France.

If interested, please get in touch and send a detailed CV as soon as
possible. The position may start as earlier as April 2012.

Postdoc position, Statistical NLP, Univ. Politecnica Valencia

The Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology group of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia conducts research in Statistical Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning, Speech Recognition, Machine Translation, Image Processing and Multimodal Interaction.
The team is part of the PASCAL 2 European Network of Excellence,
ensuring a strong network of academic collaboration.

We are opening a position for a researcher with a background in the areas of Pattern Recognition, Statistical NLP, Statistical MT and/or Multimodal Interaction, to support our participation in the EU-funded project transLectures (translectures.eu).

Experience and qualifications:

– PhD with experience in at least one of the areas mentioned above.
– Good publication record in these areas.

Preferred starting date: April 2012

Contract duration: 12 months, with possible extensions.

Subject: Researcher position, Statistical NLP

More info and application instructions (in Spanish)

http://http://www.upv.es/entidades/SRH/conypi/802063normalc.html

Note: please add “In the process of applying for validation of the PhD certificate.” to your application form if your PhD certificate is not officially valid in Spain.

PASCAL2 VISIT TO INDUSTRY: CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

Deadline: MARCH 20, 2012

in order to facilitate placement and technology transfer activities, the Pascal2
Internal Visiting Program is now inviting applications for student internships
at industry organizations. This is specifically devoted to PhD and PostDoc students
who are members of Pascal2. We invite both individuals/organizations who have
previously sent in an expression of interest, as well as new ones.

The internship should last 3 to 6 months, while the host organization can in principle
be any enterprise located anywhere in the world.
See http://pascallin2.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Programmes/VP/
(VISIT TO INDUSTRY section) for details.

It is anticipated that the main use of funds under the Pascal2 Visit to Industry
stream will be to partially support travel and subsistence for the visit. The program
is not intended to cover salaries. Applications should be made by the visitor.

A Pascal2 Visit to Industry proposal should address the following main points:

– Activity description: What is the intern supposed to do ? Why is it interesting/relevant
from a scientific and/or technological viewpoint ?
Why is Machine Learning relevant to this activity ? How and to what extent
the internship is facilitating placement of the intern at the host organization ?
– Information on the host organization: Name, legal form, address, country, number
of employees, short description of enterprise activities
– Name and contact details of the person at the host organization (“tutor”) who
will be in charge of advising the intern, and help with him/her integration in the host
environment
– Content of the training (if any) that will be delivered to the intern
– Contribution granted to the intern by the host organization (e.g., accomodation,
small salary)
– Financial contribution requested to Pascal2 Visit to Industry

Proposals will be evaluated in terms of:
– Scientific and/or technological content
– Training content (if any)
– Host environment integration/placement content
– Practical support provided by the host organization to the intern
– Budget requested to Pascal2 Visit to Industry; normally the maximum
allocation will be 1000 euros per month.

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

All enquiries should be directed to: claudiogentileuninsubriait

Please send any extra material accompaying the web submission to Claudio Gentile
(claudiogentileuninsubriait) by March 20th, 2012

Call for papers – Pascal2 workshop on gesture recognition held in conjunction with CVPR

Please consider submitting a paper to the Pascal2 workshop on gesture recognition held in conjunction with CVPR (June 2012, Rhode Island, USA).

Deadline: March 16, 2012

http://gesture.chalearn.org/dissemination/cvpr2012

We will also be holding a Kinect demonstration competition, with $10’000 in prizes offered by Microsoft (proposal deadline May 1st).

Thanks in advance for your participation!

Internship – Multimodal information retrieval and summarization from Personal Electronic Health Records

Unit: TVPA

Proposers Gabriela Csurka
Mario Jarmasz
Duration: 4-6 months
Start Date: March 2012

Please see: http://www.xrce.xerox.com/About-XRCE/Internships/Multimodal-information-retrieval-and-summarization-from-Personal-Electronic-Health-Records

Software Engineer / Web Developer

Company Description
My client fuses text-mining, web analytics, social data mining, and predictive decisioning to understand and engage millions of individuals for major brands like Guinness, Unilever, and Associated News. Projects involve working with companies like Apple, Google, and the major social platforms.

My client’s team holds several patents around predictive analytics for CRM.

They have some very smart (but very fun) people in the team, and have a work hard play hard culture. Their work environment is fast-paced, very interesting, and regularly involves beer, table football and maintaining their pole position in the inter-office table tennis league. Also, they support each team member in their own personal development and training in addition they provide £2k to customize your own tech setup

Role
You will be involved with developing their core analytics platform and associated web, mobile and social apps for clients, as well as researching, designing and implementing new processes in scaling, prediction, and content analytics.

Desired Skills & Experience

Someone who:
• Can develop web applications in a cloud-based Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP environment
• Is familiar with version control systems, specifically Git
• Is comfortable with HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• Has a degree in Computer Science or similar

Experience in:
• Test Driven Development
• Model-View-Controller frameworks, specifically CakePHP
• Emerging data store and processing technologies, such as NoSQL and Stream Processing

A deep understanding in at least one of the following topics:
• Natural Language Processing, specifically semantic extraction
• Recommendation Engines and Predictive Analytics
• Web Analytics Software and Data Mining

The ideal candidate:
• Approaches problems pragmatically, based upon a deep theoretical understanding of the underlying Computer Science concepts
• Is comfortable working in an agile environment

Benefits
• Share options
• £2k to customize your own tech setup

Please send CV and covering letter to Christine@digimobjobs.com.

EACL 2012 – Avignon, France, April 23-27, 2012 – Registration for EACL 2012 is now open

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EACL 2012 NEWSLETTER NO. 2
(February 10, 2012)

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=========================================================

=========================================================

— Important Dates

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http://eacl2012.org

Early Registration Deadline: March 19, 2012
Tutorials and Workshops: April 23-24, 2012
Main conference: April 25-27, 2012

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— Table of Contents

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1. EACL 2012
2. Organizing Committee
3. Registration
4. Accommodation
5. Tutorials
6. Workshops
7. Accepted papers and acceptance rates
8. Sponsors
9. Invited Speakers
10. Student Volunteers and Travel Grants

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1.- EACL 2012

=========================================================

The EACL conference is the triennial conference of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
EACL-2012 will be held in Avignon, France, April 23-27, 2012.
The conference will be organized by the Laboratoire d’Informatique d’Avignon at Avignon University.

The conference will take place at Sainte Marthe University Campus in a genuine university environment, dating back as far as 1303.
The city of Avignon, located at the confluence of the Rhone and Durance rivers, is well known for its ramparts, its famous PontSaint-Benezet and the Palais des Papes, which has been classified a World Heritage of Humanity site.
The city of Avignon is easy to reach by TGV train, plane or car.

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2.- Organizing Committee

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General Chair: Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium)

Program Chairs: Mirella Lapata (University of Edinburgh, UK) and Lluis Marquez (Universitat Politcnica de Catalunya, Spain)

Workshop Committee chairs: Kristiina Jokinen (University of Helsinki, Finland) and Alessandro Moschitti (University of Trento, Italy)

Tutorials Committee chairs: Eneko Agirre (University of the Basque Country, Spain) and Lieve Macken (University College Ghent, Belgium)

Student research workshop chairs: Pierre Lison (University of Oslo, Norway), Mattias Nilsson (Uppsala University, Sweden) and Marta Recasens (University of Barcelona, Spain)
Student research workshop faculty advisor: Laurence Danlos.

System Demonstrations Committee chair: Frederique Segond.

Publications Committee: Adria de Gispert (University of Cambridge, UK) and Fabrice Lefevre (University of Avignon, France)

Sponsorship Committee chair (ACL-wide): Massimiliano Ciaramita

Mentoring service: Caroline Sporleder (Saarland University,Germany) and Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)

Local Organising Committee: Marc El-Beze, (chair), Frederic Bechet (Publicity chair), Yann Fernandez, Stephane Huet (Exhibits local chair, sponsorship), Tania Jimenez, Fabrice Lefevre, Georges Linares, Alexis Nasr, Eric SanJuan, Iria Da Cunha

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3.- Registration

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Registration for EACL 2012 is now open! Please go to the EACL 2012 website at http://www.eacl2012.org for information about registration and online registration.

Early registration deadline is March 19, 2012.

If you need a letter of invitation for visa purpose please contact contact@eacl2012.org

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4.- Accommodation

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A list of hotels with useful information is available from http://eacl2012.org/hotels/index.html

Don’t wait too long to make a reservation, as Avignon is a popular touristic destination the time of the conference.

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5.- Tutorials

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The following tutorials will be presented:

T1: Monday morning session 23/4 (9:00-12:30) (Shuly Wintner)
Computational Linguistic Approaches to Language Acquisition

T2: Monday afternoon session 23/4 (14:00-17:30) (Marco Baroni)
Compositionality in distributional semantics

T3: Tuesday morning session 24/4 (9:00-12:30)
Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining (Bing Liu)

T4: Tuesday afternoon session 24/4 (14:00-17:30) (Marius Pasca)
Web-Based Open-Domain Information Extraction

See http://eacl2012.org/tutorials/index.html for more information.

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6.- Workshops

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Two-day Workshops:

W0: Joint workshop of ROBUS and UNSUP: Robust Unsupervised Learning in Natural Language Processing.

W1: Joint workshop of ESIRMT and HYTRA: Exploiting Synergies between Information Retrieval and Machine Translation and Hybrid Approaches to Machine Translation.

W2: Joint workshop of LINGVIS and UNCLH: Visualization of Language Patters and Uncovering Language History from Multilingual Resources.

Monday Workshops:

W3: CL&W 2012: Second Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Writing. Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects of Document Creation and Document Engineering.

W4: Workshop on Computational Approaches to Deception Detection

W5: Innovative hybrid approaches to process textual data

Tuesday Workshops:

W6: ATANLP: Second Workshop on Applications of Tree Automata Techniques in Natural Language Processing (ATANLP)

W7: SASN2012: Workshop on Semantic Analysis in Social Networks

W8: COGNITIVE2012: Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition and Loss.

W9: LATECH2012: Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities.

See http://eacl2012.org/workshops/index.html for more information.

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7.- Accepted Papers and Acceptance Rates

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Main conference papers: Please see the list of accepted papers for the main conference session at:
http://eacl2012.org/accepted-papers

Acceptance rate: 314 submissions, 27% acceptance rate

Student research workshop: Please see the list of accepted papers for the student research papers at: http://eacl2012.org/student-research-workshop
Acceptance rate: 38 submissions, 29% acceptance rate

Demonstration papers: Please see the list of accepted papers for the main conference session at: http://eacl2012.org/system-demonstration
Acceptance rate: 37 submissions, 57% acceptance rate.

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8.- Sponsors

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EACL 2012 gratefully acknowledges the following commitments in sponsorship:

Gold sponsors:
– Appen Butler Hill: http://www.appenbutlerhill.com/
– Google: http://www.google.com/
– Textkernel: http://www.textkernel.com
– Université d’Avignon: http://www.univ-avignon.fr/

Silver sponsors:
– AFCP: http://www.afcp-parole.org/
– ATALA: http://www.atala.org/
– ELDA: http://www.elda.org/
– META-NET http://www.meta-net.eu/
– Laboratoire Informatique Avignon:
http://www.lia.univ-avignon.fr/

Bronze sponsors:
– ETS: http://www.ets.org/
– Flejay: http://flejay.com/
– Laboratoire Parole et Langage, University of Aix-Marseille:
http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/
– Rakuten Institute of Technology:
http://rit.rakuten.co.jp/index_en.html

Conference bag supporter:
– SDL: http://www.sdl.com/en/

Supporters:
– Baobab: https://en.ecom.trans-aid.jp/
– Natural Language Engineering Lab, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia:
http://users.dsic.upv.es/grupos/nle

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9.- Keynote speakers

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Regina Barzilay (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Martin Cooke (Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Spain)
Raymond Mooney (University of Texas at Austin, USA)

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10.- Student Travel Grants

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Five EACL Studentships are available on a competitive basis, covering up to 500 euros of conference expenses (registration, travelling, accommodation). Only students who have a paper accepted at either the EACL main conference or Student Workshop are eligible to apply. Preference will be given to students who have a paper accepted at the Student Workshop and with limited travel funds.

Applications must be emailed to student-workshop@eacl2012.org
and they must include the following documents:
– Applicant’s name, email, affiliation, PhD/masters year, source and amount of yearly income, and overview of the estimated conference costs
– Motivation letter
– Recommendation letter from a university faculty member
– Proof of student status

Important dates:
9 March: studentship applications due
23 March: studentship notifications