Harvest Programme Call – Spring 2011

Do you have a good idea for some really cool software, useful and/or
fun for people out there, but you are missing the team, the money, or
the place?

This announcement is for you: read it carefully!

PASCAL2 invites submissions of proposals for Harvest Projects

Important dates

– Expression of intention to submit: May 15, 2011
– Deadline proposal submissions: May 29, 2011
– Notification of acceptance: June 24, 2011

Inquiries: anytime.

There are many innovative things we would be able to do, but we never
find the time, we don’t have the money, students/programmers are
needed and hard to find. Still it would be real fun to devise a smart
code, to see people using it, and to have your name on the Pascal Hall
of Fame 🙂 The Pascal Harvest Programme aims at making it possible,
easy, and rewarded. The main idea behind Harvest is: put together in a
room a team for long enough to produce an innovative software for a
real application. PASCAL2 will pick up the bills.

Sounds interesting? Please check out all you need to know on the
programme website:

(Internal) http://pascallin2.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Programmes/HA/
(External) http://www.pascal-network.org/?q=node/19

For this call we are open to all three scenarios in:

http://pascallin2.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Programmes/HA/harvest_webpage.html#IP
http://www.pascal-network.org/?q=node/19#ipr

————————————————————————

A Harvest project proposal should address the following points in 4-8
pages:

* Problem description: what is the project going to do? Why is it
interesting? Why is Machine Learning relevant?
* Specification and validation. How do we assess performance?
* Expected staffing, location and duration. How many persons will be
needed? For how long?
* Milestones, time-line.
* Requested funding.
* Content of the training, if any, that will be delivered to
participants.

An example proposal can be downloaded from the programme website.
Notice that for this Call we do not expect the team to be
already formed.

Proposals will be evaluated by independent experts. Criteria used in
the evaluation will be:

* Application interest: is this going to be useful to someone?
* State of the art: is the problem still challenging for
scientific/technical/other reasons? Not challenging still not done
yet? Might it lead also to a good paper?
* Impact outside PASCAL: will anyone outside the machine-learning,
optimization and statistics community like it? Can this be viewed
as a generic proof of principle? Of what?
* Training: will junior participants learn interesting and useful
things?
* Management and planning: is the project going to deliver on its
promises?
* Timeliness: can you make this happen soon?

Other things being equal, preference will be given to projects related
to robotics or to cognitive systems, or related to ongoing challenge
or PASCAL Thematic Programmes.

An email stating the intention to submit a proposal should be
addressed to Nicola dot Cancedda at xrce dot xerox dot com and sebag
at lri dot fr by May 15, 2011. Actual submissions should be done
through the PASCAL2 Harvest Programme page by May 29, 2011:

http://pascallin2.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Programmes/HA/Request/

In the meanwhile, prospective proposers are most welcome to create
wiki pages under:

http://pascallin2.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Wiki/HarvestWikiHome

These pages can be used to discuss ideas, attract potential
participants, find a nice host, share interests, divide and conquer a
problem, …

If you have an exciting idea for a project but you are missing the
infrastructure to host it, write it on the wiki and let the programme
organizers know: PASCAL2 is a large network, and maybe someone can
find a place for you. Proposing, organizing, and hosting a Harvest
project will constitute an important contribution to PASCAL2. All such
activity will be taken into account when allocating site funding in
subsequent years.

For all inquiries please write to Nicola dot Cancedda at xrce dot
xerox dot com and sebag at lri dot fr.

DEADLINE EXTENSION: AMAI Spec. issue on graph mining

DEADLINE EXTENSION for the AMAI Special Issue on
Local Pattern Mining in Graph-Structured Data

New Submission Deadline: JUNE 15, 2011

Special Issue Guest Editors:
Tanya Y. Berger-Wolf (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA) Tamas Horvath
(University of Bonn; Fraunhofer IAIS, Sankt Augustin, Germany)

Mining graph-structured data has developed, over the last decade, into a separate
research field of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. Examples of real-world
graph-structured data include the Web graph, social, biological, telecommunication,
utility, road and transportation networks, as well as relational data. These and many
other occurrences of graph-structured data are arising and growing with enormous
dynamics in the digital universe. Accordingly, there is an increasing demand for
effective automated processing of massive graph-structured data. In this field of
research, there is a distinguished interest in mining local patterns, i.e., patterns that are
characteristic only for a subset of the input data, but still “interesting” according to some
user specified criteria. Such local patterns have been utilized in various ways in diverse
data processing tasks. For example, frequent patterns, the most common type of local
patterns, proved to be useful ingredients for predictive and descriptive data analysis or
for information retrieval.

The goal of this special issue is to present recent results on formal aspects of local
pattern mining in graph-structured data. The topics of interest include but are not limited
to:

– computational complexity of local pattern mining in the single- and multi-transactional
problem settings,
– efficient algorithms and heuristics for well-motivated problems,
– predicates and criteria for pattern interestingness,
– local vs. global pattern mining,
– local pattern mining with constraints,
– general approximation and randomized algorithms,
– sampling techniques for local pattern mining,
– non-standard pattern languages and pattern matching operators,
– local patterns in link mining and network analysis,
– local pattern mining in dynamic and evolving graphs,
– temporal local patterns

Submission Details:

Submissions to this special issue should follow the submission
guidelines of AMAI

http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/journal/10472.

Papers submitted for this special issue must contain formal results as
well as be original and not submitted simultaneously for publication
elsewhere. Extended versions of workshop and conference papers can also
be submitted; in this case the major changes with respect to the
original version must be listed in an accompanying letter.

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline: July 15, 2011
Author Notification: September 15, 2011
Final Paper Deadline: November 15, 2011
Special Issue: Early 2012 (tentative)

For further questions, please contact the guest editors at
tanyabw(at)uic.edu (T.Y. Berger-Wolf) and tamas.horvath(at)iais.fraunhofer.de
(T. Horvath)

20 PhD studentships at Scottish Universities, application deadline 2nd May

The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (http://www.sicsa.ac.uk) invites applications for up to 20 international prize studentships from outstanding PhD candidates to Scottish universities. The studentships are open to citizens and residents of any country.

SICSA studentships cover living costs and fees at the UK/EU level and successful candidates may apply for further fee support. We will consider applicants in any area of computer science and informatics but may give preference to students who are working in SICSA theme areas:

* Next-generation Internet
* Multi-modal interaction
* Modelling and abstraction
* Complex systems engineering

Students must have or must expect to be awarded a 1st class honours degree or an MSc with Distinction or equivalent GPA scores. Your degree must be in a discipline that is relevant to your proposed field of research.

For more details of how to apply for a SICSA prize studentship, see the SICSA web pages (http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/graduate-academy/prize-studentships).

The deadline for this round of applications is 2nd May 2011, although applicants should submit an application to the host institution as early as possible to ensure that their application is processed in time.

Any queries regarding applications for studentships can be directed to admin(at)sicsa.ac.uk.

CFP – IJCAI workshop on Social Web Mining

Call For Papers: International Workshop on Social Web Mining, co-located with IJCAI, Barcelona, Spain, 18 July 2011

WWW: http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~sguo/swm.html

Introduction:

There is increasing interest in social web mining, as we can see from the ACM workshop on Social Web Search and Analysis. It is not until recently that great progresses have been made in mining social network for various applications, e.g., making personalized recommendations. This workshop focuses on the study of diverse aspects of social networks with their applications in domains including mobile recommendations, service providers, electronic commerce, etc.

Social networks have actually played an important role in different domains for about a decade, particularly in recommender systems. In general, traditional collaborative filtering approaches can be considered as making personalized recommendations based on implicit social interaction, where social connections are defined by some similarity metrics on common rated items, e.g., movies for the Netflix Prize.

With the recent development of Web 2.0, there emerges a number of globally deployed applications for explicit social interactions, such as Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. These applications have been exploited by academic institutions and industries to build modern recommender systems based on social networks, e.g., Microsoft’s Project Emporia that recommends tweets to user based on their behaviors.

In recent years, rapid progress has been made in the study of social networks for diverse applications. For instance, researchers have proposed various tensor factorization techniques to analyze user-item-tag data in Flickr for group recommendations. Also, researchers study Facebook to infer users’ preferences.

However, there exist many challenges in mining social web and its application in recommender systems. Some are:

· What is the topology of social networks for some specific application like LinkedIn?

· How could one build optimal models for social networks such as Facebook?

· How can one handle the privacy issue caused by utilizing social interactions for making recommendation?

· How could one model a user’s preferences based on his/her social interactions?

We hope to gather scientific researchers and industry in order to discuss the challenges, exchange ideas, and promote collaborations across different groups.

Topics:

The workshop will seek submissions that cover social networks, data mining, machine learning, and recommender systems. The workshop is especially interested in papers that focus on applied domains such as web mining, mobile recommender systems, social recommender systems, and privacy in social web mining. The following list provides examples of the types of areas in which we encourage submissions. The following comprises a sample, but not complete, listing of topics:

· Active learning

· Matchmaking

· Mobile recommender systems

· Multi-task learning

· Learning graph matching

· Learning to rank

· Online and contextual advertising

· Online learning

· Privacy in social networks

· Preference learning or elicitation

· Social network mining

· Social summarization

· Tag recommendation

· Transfer learning

· Web graph analysis

Program:

The workshop program consists of four invited talks, a number of oral presentations, a poster session, and a panel discussion session. Detailed information is given as follows:

· Invited Speakers

o Ricardo Baeza-Yates , Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain

o Bhaskar Mehta , Google Zurich, Switzerland

o Jurgen Van Gael, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK

o Qiang Yang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China

· Oral and Poster Presentation: details coming soon

Submission and Key Dates:

We use the EasyChair for paper submission. The paper format is the same as that of IJCAI 2011 ( Click here for details ), and the maximum number of pages is 10. Please note that a selection of workshop papers will be invited to a special issue of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology.

· Submission deadline: 20 April 2011

· Author notification: 15 May 2011

· Camera ready: 25 May 2011

· Workshop date: 18 July 2011

Program Co-Chair:

· Francesco Bonchi, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain

· Wray Buntine, NICTA – ANU, Australia

· Ricard Gavalda, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain

· Shengbo Guo, Xerox Research Centre Europe, France

Program Committee:

· Tiberio Caetano, NICTA – ANU, Australia

· Wei Chen, Microsoft Research Asia, China

· Peter Christen, Australian National University, Australia

· Nello Cristianini, University Of Bristol, UK

· Hakim Hacid, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France

· Jian Huang, Google Pittsburgh, USA

· Jure Leskovec, Stanford University, USA

· Ernesto William De Luca, Technical University of Berlin – DAI-Labor, Germany

· Sherif Sakr, NICTA – UNSW, Australia

· Scott Sanner, NICTA – ANU, Australia

· Markus Schedl, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

· Fabrizio Silvestri, ISTI CNR, Italy

· Julia Stoyanovich, University of Pennsylvania, USA

· Aixin Sun, National University of Singapore, Singapore

· Antti Ukkonen, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain

· Jie (Jessie) Yin, CSIRO, Australia

· Yi Zhang, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

Workshop Contact:

Email: Shengbo (dot) Guo(at)xrce.xerox.com
+33 (0)4 76 61 50 47 (Phone)
+33 (0)4 76 61 50 99 (Fax)
Mailing address: 6, chemin de Maupertuis, 38240 Meylan, France

For further information, please visit our website:

http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~sguo/swm.html

Final call for paper and deadline extension for CHIME 2011

First International Workshop on
Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME 2011)
In conjunction with Interspeech 2011, September 1st, 2011, Florence, Italy
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/chime/workshop
———————————————————-

Important Dates:
* Deadline for submission of papers: April 21st, 2011 (was April 14th)
* Notification of acceptance: June 2nd, 2011
* Final version of submission: June 14th, 2011
* Workshop: September 1st, 2011

Overview:
CHiME 2011 is an ISCA-approved satellite workshop of Interspeech 2011
that will consider the challenge of developing machine listening
applications for operation in multisource environments, i.e. real-world
conditions with acoustic clutter, where the number and nature of the
sound sources is unknown and changing over time. CHiME will bring
together researchers from a broad range of disciplines (computational
hearing, blind source separation, speech recognition, machine learning)
to discuss novel and established approaches to this problem. The
cross-fertilisation of ideas will foster fresh approaches that
efficiently combine the complementary strengths of each research field.

The workshop will also be hosting the PASCAL CHiME Speech Separation and
Recognition Challenge. This is a binaural, multisource speech separation
and recognition competition supported by the EU PASCAL network and the
UK EPSRC. If you wish to participate, please visit the Challenge Website.
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/chime/challenge.html

Call for Participation:
We invite original submissions for oral or poster presentation during
the workshop. Relevant research topics include (but are not limited to),

* automatic speech recognition in multisource environments,
* acoustic event detection in multisource environments,
* sound source detection and tracking in multisource environments,
* music information retrieval in multisource environments,
* sound source separation or enhancement in multisource environments,
* robust feature extraction and classification in multisource environments,
* scene analysis and understanding for multisource environments.

Abstracts or full-papers are to be submitted by 21st April. After the
workshop participants will be invited to submit extended versions of
their papers to a peer-reviewed *special issue* of the journal, Computer
Speech and Language on the theme of Multisource Environments.

Organising Committee:
Dr Jon Barker, University of Sheffield, UK
Dr Emmanuel Vincent, INRIA Rennes, France
Prof. Dan Ellis, Columbia University, USA
Prof. Phil Green, University of Sheffield, UK
Dr. John Hershey, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, USA
Prof. Walter Kellermann, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Prof. Hiroshi Okuno, Kyoto University, Japan

ISBA 2012 – World Meeting of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis

This is an advance notice that the ISBA 2012 World Meeting — the
premier conference of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis
(ISBA) — will be held in beautiful Kyoto, Japan, from June 25 to June
29, 2012. Preliminary program and announcements can be found at

http://www2.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~isba2012/

The call for abstracts, including the call for special topic
contributed sessions, will be coming out in June 2011. An email
containing the call for participation will be sent out then.

This announcement was sent on behalf of Igor Pruenster (igor(at)econ.unito.it).

Machine Learning Survey

Request for participation from Yee Whye Teh, Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL

Machine learning is an emerging and fast changing scientific area that
is crossing many disciplinary boundaries. What I often find amazing
about the community is how diverse it is, drawing inspiration from so
many sources, and getting applied in, and transforming so many
different fields.

To help me understand the machine learning community better, and to
solicit opinions of members of the community with regards the role and
place of machine learning in relation to other disciplines and in the
university, I have put together a survey, at:

https://opinio.ucl.ac.uk/s?s=13907

I would really appreciate it if you can spend 5-10 minutes completing
it, thank you very much! If you are busy just think of it as
procrastination 🙂

This survey is conducted as part of the UCL Post Graduate Certificate
in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education course on curriculum
development PGCLTHE-D
(http://www.ucl.ac.uk/calt/masters/modules/EDUCGC02.html). No
personally identifying information will be collected.

If you are interested in the outcome of the survey I will be happy to
get in touch with you after it has closed (please just drop me an
email separately).

Best regards
Yee Whye Teh
http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~ywteh

Call for Contributions and Registration: Cosmology Meets ML

Registration and abstract submission for a small number of contributed
talks is now open for two overlapping workshops in London 3-6 May 2011.

Tue 3 – Wed 4 May: Cosmology Meets Machine Learning Workshop

Wed 4 pm – Fri 6 May: GREAT10 PASCAL Challenge Workshop

Please see the meeting webpage http://cmml2011.wikispaces.com for more
information.

Description:
The workshops aim to bring together computer scientists and cosmologists
to explore the application of computational statistics and machine
learning techniques to data analysis problems in cosmology. They are held
jointly by the Centre of Computational Statistics and Machine Learning and
the Astrophysics Group of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at
University College London.

Submission:
We invite abstracts on topics in the following areas:
– challenging problems in cosmology data analysis
– applications of machine learning methods in cosmological data analysis
problems
– work related to the GREAT10 Challenge

Submissions should not exceed 200 words and will be judged on technical
merit, the potential to generate discussion, and their ability to foster
collaboration within the community.
Submissions should be sent to: london_may11(at)sarahbridle.net

Important dates:
11 April 2011 Abstract submission deadline
15 April 2011 Notification of acceptance
18 April 2011 Registration deadline
3-6 May 2011 Workshops

Thanks,
Michael Hirsch on behalf of the LOC and SOC

Scientific Organising Committee: Tom Kitching, Frederic Courbin, John
Shawe-Taylor, Bernhard Schoelkopf, Mark Girolami, Michael Hirsch, Sarah
Bridle

Local Organising Committee: Joe Zuntz, Michael Hirsch, Tomasz Kacprzak,
Barney Rowe, Lisa Voigt, Sarah Bridle

DIBCO 2011 – Document Image Binarization Contest

Call for Participation

DIBCO 2011 – Document Image Binarization Contest
in conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR’11), September 18-21, 2011, Beijing, China.
http://utopia.duth.gr/~ipratika/DIBCO2011/

Document image binarization is an important step in the document image analysis and recognition pipeline. Therefore, it is imperative to have a benchmarking dataset along with an objective evaluation methodology in order to capture the efficiency of current document image binarization practices. Following the success of DIBCO 2009 organized in conjunction with ICDAR’09 as well as of H-DIBCO 2010 organized in conjunction with ICFHR 2010, the follow-up of these contests in the framework of ICDAR 2011 is organized. The general objective of DIBCO 2011 is to record recent advances in document image binarization using established evaluation performance measures and a benchmarking dataset that is representative of the potential challenges met in the binarization process.

The DIBCO 2011 dataset will contain images that range from gray scale to color and from machine printed to handwritten. For the preparation of the participants using the new dataset, the existing publicly available datasets of previous contests (DIBCO 2009 and H-DIBCO 2010) along with the corresponding ground truth could be used.

We invite all researchers in the field of Document Image Binarization to register for participating in DIBCO 2011. An agreement will be signed by the participants and the organizers in order to protect the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of the submitted software. The description of the methods and the evaluation scores will be presented during a dedicated ICDAR 2011 session. A report on the competition will be published in the ICDAR 2011 conference proceedings.

Note: You may participate in this contest even if you do not plan to attend the ICDAR 2011 conference.

Important Dates

Registration is open due to 9/5/2011
Submission of executable due to 16/5/2011

The DIBCO 2011 Organizing Committee

I. Pratikakis1, B. Gatos2 and K. Ntirogiannis2

1Democritus University of Thrace, Greece

2National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Greece

Machine Learning Summer School 2011 in Bordeaux

Machine Learning Summer School 2011, Bordeaux, France. September 4-17, 2011

http://mlss11.bordeaux.inria.fr/

Deadline for application: * April 15, 2011 *

The 18th Machine Learning Summer School will be held near Bordeaux, France, from September 4 to September 17 2011. This edition is co-organized by INRIA and PASCAL.

The school will provide tutorials and practical sessions on basic and advanced topics of machine learning by leading researchers in the field. The summer school is intended for students, young researchers and industry practitioners with an interest in machine learning and a strong mathematical background.

The school will address the following topics: Learning theory, Bayesian inference, Monte Carlo methods, Sparse methods, reinforcement learning, robot learning, boosting, kernel methods, Bayesian nonparametrics, convex optimization and graphical models.

Confirmed speakers:
– Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi (University of Milan)
– Arnaud Doucet (University of British Columbia)
– Peter Green (University of Bristol)
– Rémi Gribonval (INRIA Rennes)
– Rémi Munos (INRIA Lille)
– Jan Peters (MPI for Biological Cybernetics)
– Robert Schapire (Princeton)
– Bernhard Schölkopf (MPI for Biological Cybernetics)
– Yee Whye Teh (University College London)
– Lieven Vandenberghe (UC Los Angeles)
– Martin Wainwright (UC Berkeley)

The application process is now open at the following address (DL: *April 15, 2011*)
http://mlss11.bordeaux.inria.fr/application.html

The organizing committee:
François Caron, Manuel Davy, Pierre Del Moral, Pierrick Legrand, Manuel Lopes, and Rémi Munos