CFP: ECML-SUEMA workshop

ECML – SUEMA 2010 workshop :
Supervised and Unsupervised Ensemble Methods and their Applications
September 20, 2010 – Barcelona, Spain
http://suema10.dsi.unimi.it

Dear Colleague,
we are pleased to invite you to submit a paper to the
workshop Supervised and Unsupervised Ensemble Methods and Their
Applications (SUEMA 2010), organized in the context of the European
Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge
Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD 2010).

The workshop is organized with the support of the PASCAL2 (Pattern Analysis,
Statistical Modelling and Computational Learning) European Network of
Excellence.

We are very pleased to announce the PASCAL2 invited speaker,
Grigorios Tsoumakas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece);
he will give a talk on “Ensemble Methods for Multi-Label Data”.

SUEMA 2010 intends to provide a forum for researchers in the field
of Machine Learning and Data Mining to discuss topics related to
ensemble methods and their applications.

More information about the topics of the workshop are available at the
workshop web-site: http://suema10.dsi.unimi.it

With best regards

Oleg Okun, Matteo Re and Giorgio Valentini.

— IMPORTANT DATES

Submission 28st June 2010
Notification 19th July 2010
Camera Ready 28st July 2010

— Submission of papers

The authors should submit the papers by e-mail to the workshop chairs
Oleg Okun (olegokun(at)yahoo.com),
Matteo Re (re(at)dsi.unimi.it),
Giorgio Valentini (valentini(at)dsi.unimi.it).

All papers will be peer reviewed based on originality, technical content
and experimental evaluation.

— Workshop Registration

All workshop participants are required to register for the main conference.

— Workshop proceedings

ECML/PKDD will publish all accepted workshop papers on a CD.

As for previous SUEMA editions, workshop chairs are managing to publish
the extended versions of the workshop papers in an edited book or in a
special issue of a machine learning-oriented journal.

—— Main topics

The main topics of the conference include (but are not limited
to):

New ensemble methods raised from new real world supervised and
unsupervised learning problems

Application of ensemble methods in various branches of science
and technology: bioinformatics, medical informatics, computer
security, economics, ecology, meteorology and weather forecast,
image analysis and signal processing, satellite image analysis.

Multi-class, multi-label, multi-path ensemble methods for
hierarchically structured taxonomies.

Fusion of multiple-source/multi-sensor data

Unsupervised ensemble methods for discovering structures in
unlabeled real data

Unsupervised ensemble approaches to assess the
reliability/validity of clusters discovered in real data

Combination techniques and methods to generate multiple base
learners from different features and data

Dynamic member selection for including into an ensemble

Heterogeneous ensembles of base learners

Variants of re-sampling-based methods (bagging, boosting)

Ensemble methods for supervised multi-class classification and
regression

Supervised and unsupervised ensemble methods for structured
domains

Ensemble methods for adaptive incremental learning

— SUEMA Scientific Program Committee

Nicolo’ Cesa-Bianchi, University of Milano, Italy
Carlotta Domeniconi, George Mason University, USA
Robert Duin, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
Mark Embrechts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
Ana Fred, Technical University of Lisboa, Portugal
Joao Gama, University of Porto, Portugal
Giorgio Giacinto, University of Cagliari, Italy
Larry Hall, University of South Florida, USA
Ludmila Kuncheva, University of Wales, UK
Francesco Masulli, University of Genova, Italy
Petia Radeva, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
Juan Jose’ Rodriguez, University of Burgos, Spain
Fabio Roli, University of Cagliari, Italy
Paolo Rosso, Polytechnic University Valencia, Spain
Carlo Sansone, Federico II University of Napoli, Italy
Jose’ Salvador Sanchez, University Jaume I, Spain
Grigorios Tsoumakas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Jordi Vitria’, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
Ioannis Vlahavas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Terry Windeatt, University of Surrey, UK

— Workshop Chairs

Oleg Okun
Matteo Re
Giorgio Valentini

CfP: ADAPTIVE 2010 || November 21-26, 2010 – Lisbon, Portugal

CALL FOR PAPERS, TUTORIALS, PANELS

ADAPTIVE 2010: The Second International Conference on Adaptive and Self-adaptive Systems and Applications

November 21-26, 2010 – Lisbon, Portugal

General page: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2010/ADAPTIVE10.html

Call for Papers: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2010/CfPADAPTIVE10.html

Submission deadline: June 20, 2010

Sponsored by IARIA, www.iaria.org

Extended versions of selected papers will be published in IARIA Journals: http://www.iariajournals.org

Please note the Poster Forum and Work in Progress options.

The topics suggested by the conference can be discussed in term of concepts, state of the art, research, standards, implementations, running experiments, applications, and industrial case studies. Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal in the following, but not limited to, topic areas.
All tracks are open to both research and industry contributions, in terms of Regular papers, Posters, Work in progress, Technical/marketing/business presentations, Demos, Tutorials, and Panels.

Before submission, please check and conform with the Editorial rules: http://www.iaria.org/editorialrules.html

ADAPTIVE 2010 Tracks (tracks’ topics and submission details: see CfP on the site)

Fundamentals and design of adaptive systems

Fundamentals on adaptive and self-adapting systems; Frameworks and architectures for adaptive supporting platforms; Architectures for adaptive applications; Specification of adaptive behavior; Specification of adaptive structures and topologies; Design and implementation of adaptive components; Composition of adaptive behaviors and structures; Adaptive individual and collective behavior and structures; Adaptive deterministic and non-deterministic behavior; Semantic modeling

Adaptive entities

Adaptive environments; Adaptive hardware configurations; Adaptive software applications; Adaptive protocols; Adaptive algorithms; Adaptive and interactive interfaces; Adaptive filters; Adaptive clock speeds; Adaptive schedulers; Adaptive load balancers

Adaptive mechanisms

Adaptive real-time strategies; Learning-based adaptive strategies; Adaptive mechanisms (trees, ant algorithms, fuzzy-logic, etc. ); Agent based-adaptive mechanisms; Policy- based adaptation; Feedback-based adaptive systems; Context-aware adaptation; User-aware adaptation
Adaptive applications

Adaptive artificial intelligence in computer wargames; Intelligent complex adaptive systems; Adaptive virtualization; Adaptive social networks; Adaptive entertainment applications; Adaptive disaster recovery systems; Anticipative adaptive systems; Fault-tolerant adaptive systems; Adaptive ad hoc networks; Application domains, e,g., building (AEC projects, simulation models, facility management), tourism, etc.; Adaptive economic applications (finance, stock exchange, regulatory decisions, etc.); Adaptive vehicular traffic

Self-adaptation

Theory of self-adaptation and control; Self-adaptive networks, systems, and applications; Self-adaptive services; Self-adaptive behavior and topology/structure; Specification of self-adaptive behavioral control
Self-adaptation applications

Self-monitoring and self-management; Self-configuration, self-healing, self-management; Self-defense, self-protection, self-diagnosis; Self-adaptation of overlay networks; Self-adaptation in ad hoc sensor networks; Context-aware self-adaptation of networks and services
Computational Trust for Self-Adaptive Systems

Trust models for adaptive systems; Trust models for self-organizing and autonomics systems; Agent-based trust models for cooperation; Privacy and Security in self-organizing and adaptive systems; Human and social factors involved in trust and adaptation; Applications of trust and security on adaptive systems, with a focus on web-based applications, social networks, social search; Trust models for self-organizing systems of information (wikis, forums, blogs.); Trust and personalisation for enabling adaptation; Models for learning trust and the evolution of trust; Decentralised trust models; Case studies; Theoretical trust models for self-adaptation
Metrics for adaptive and self-adaptive systems

Stability and convergence; Optimal (self-) adaptation; Accuracy validation of (self-) adaptation; Real-time (self-) adaptive performance

==========

IARIA Publicity Board

Committee members: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2010/ComADAPTIVE10.html

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

Postdoc position in ML and bioinformatics, 2011, IDIAP (Switzerland)

Postdoctoral position in machine learning and bioinformatics at the
Idiap Research Institute (CH), starting January 2011.

The IDIAP Research Institute (www.idiap.ch), associated with EPFL
(Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne) seeks a qualified
candidate for a postdoctoral research position in machine learning and
bioinformatics.

The research will be conducted in the project “Understanding Brain
Morphogenesis” funded by the Swiss Science Foundation. The goal of the
project is to automatically capture the dynamic changes in morphology
of neurons extending neuronal processes as observed by high content
video time-lapse microscopy. Analysis of the data will allow to
understand how neuron behavior responds to genetic perturbations
generated using RNA interference technology.

The work will be conducted in collaboration with groups from the
University of Basel, the University of Geneva, and the École
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

The candidate should have a strong background in machine learning and
bioinformatics and excellent programming skills. The position is for
18 months, and salaries are competitive.

Idiap is located in Martigny in Valais, a scenic region in the south
of Switzerland surrounded by the highest mountains of Europe, which
offer multiple recreational activities, including hiking, climbing,
and skiing, as well as varied cultural activities, all within close
proximity to Lausanne and Geneva. Idiap is an equal opportunity
employer and offers a young, multicultural environment where English
is the main working language.

For further details and application please contact:

François Fleuret (francois.fleuret(at)idiap.ch)

Workshop on Mobile Social Signal Processing

First International Workshop on Mobile Social Signal Processing
http://sspnet.eu/2010/03/mssp/
Lisbon – September 7th, 2010
In conjunction with Mobile HCI 2010

Mission

Given their status as a preeminent form of social interaction, mobile phone conversations have been the subject of relatively limited investigation, in terms of social behavior. This leaves open a major gap when two important developments take place. On one hand, Mobile HCI often deals with advanced mobile phones containing a large number of sensors (e.g., GPS, accelerometers, magnetometers, capacitive touch) and with sufficient processing power to capture with unprecedented richness behavior and context of users (e.g., position, movement, hand grip, proximity of social network members, gait type, auditory context). On the other hand, the computing community, in particular Social Signal Processing (SSP), makes significant efforts towards automatic understanding (via analysis of verbal and nonverbal behavior) of social interactions captured with multiple sensors.

This workshop bridges the above mentioned gap by gathering SSP and Mobile HCI researchers.

Cross-pollination will identify research questions at the frontier between the two domains bringing significant novelty in both SSP and Mobile HCI.

Important Dates

Full paper submission: June 15th, 2010
Notification of Acceptance: June 25th, 2010 Camera ready paper submission: June 30th, 2010
Workshop: September 7th, 2010

Workshop articles will be published in a volume of the Springer LNCS series and participants are expected to submit six to eight pages long papers in LNCS/LNAI format.

Topics

Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):

• Conversational behavior analysis

• Social Location and Context – measurement, analysis and use

• SSP in design of mobile interactions

• SSP in mobile entertainment and wellbeing

• Databases and SSP based content retrieval

• Cognitive modeling, automatic understanding, and synthesis of social phenomena

General Chairs

Alessandro Vinciarelli (University of Glasgow/Idiap Research Institute) Rod Murray-Smith (University of Glasgow) Herve’ Bourlard (Idiap Research Institute/EPFL)

For more information, please visit the workshop website:

http://sspnet.eu/2010/03/mssp/

NIPS 2010 Call For Demonstrations

http://nips.cc/Conferences/2010/CallForDemonstrations
Demonstration Proposal Deadline: Monday September 20, 2010

The Neural Information Processing Systems Conference 2010
http://nips.cc/Conferences/2010/ has a Demonstration Track running in
parallel with the evening Poster Sessions, December 6-8, 2010, in
Vancouver, Canada.

Demonstrations are an opportunity to showcase:
• Hardware technology
• Software systems
• Neuromorphic and biologically-inspired systems
• Robotics
or other systems, which are relevant to the technical areas covered by NIPS
(see Call for Papers http://nips.cc/Conferences/2010/CallForPapers) .
Demonstrations must show novel technology and must be live, preferably with
some interactive parts. A demonstration is not just another poster
presentation or a slide show, the action part is important.

Submissions:
Submission of demo proposals at the following URL:
https://nips.cc/Conferences/2010/DemoForm.php

You will be asked to fill a questionnaire and describe clearly:
• the technology demonstrated
• the elements of novelty
• the live part
• the interactive part
• the equipment brought by the demonstrator
• the equipment required at the place of the demo

Evaluation Criteria: Submissions will be refereed on the basis of
technical quality, novelty, live action, potential for interaction.

Demonstration chair: Isabelle Guyon

Fully funded postdoctoral and PhD positions in Machine Learning and Computational Biology

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral position and a PhD position
at the Department of Computer Science of Royal Holloway, University of
London.

The successful candidates will work with Alberto Paccanaro on developing
novel approaches to protein function prediction. Candidates should have
a PhD degree (for the postdoctoral position) or an MSc degree or
equivalent (for the PhD position) in a relevant quantitative field (e.g.
Computer Science, Statistics, Engineering), excellent programming
skills, and a keen interest in computational biology.

The successful candidates will have the opportunity to collaborate with
members of the interdisciplinary Centre for Systems and Synthetic
Biology (Computer Science and Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway),
including: Laci Bogre, Alessandra Devoto, Peter Bramley, Paul Fraser,
Enrique Lopez and Paul Devlin. The posts are therefore ideal for people
with a computer science or maths background who are looking to move into
computational biology.

The postdoctoral position is for 18 months, the PhD position is for the
whole duration of the program (3 years). Both positions are full-time,
starting in summer 2010.

The starting salary for the postdoctoral post is up to 31,117 GBP per
annum, inclusive of London Allowance.

Please note that the funding for the PhD position is available to EU
nationals only.

Informal enquiries may be directed to Alberto Paccanaro
email: alberto(at)cs.rhul.ac.uk
tel: +44-1784-414239
homepage: http://www.cs.rhul.ac.uk/home/alberto/
lab page: http://www.paccanarolab.org/

Applicants for the postdoctoral position: details and an application
form are available at http://www.rhul.ac.uk/personnel/Ads/X0510-5664.html

Applicants for the PhD position: please email your CV to Alberto Paccanaro

*** The closing date for the receipt of applications for both posts is
June 15, 2010. ***

We positively welcome applications from all sections of the community.

NIPS 2010 Call For Workshops

CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS
http://nips.cc/Conferences/2010/CallForWorkshops

Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) — Natural and Synthetic
NIPS*2010 Post-Conference Workshops — December 10 and 11, 2010
Whistler Resort & Spa and Westin Hilton, BC, CANADA

Following the regular program of the Neural Information Processing
Systems 2010 conference in Vancouver, BC, Canada, workshops on a
variety of current topics in neural information processing will be
held on December 10 and 11, 2010, in Whistler, BC, Canada. We invite
researchers interested in chairing one of these workshops to submit
proposals for workshops. The goal of the workshops is to provide an
informal forum for researchers to discuss important research questions
and challenges. Controversial issues, open problems, and comparisons
of competing approaches are not only encouraged but preferred as
workshop topics. Representation of alternative viewpoints and
panel-style discussions are also particularly encouraged. Potential workshop
topics include, but are not limited to:

Active Learning, Attention, Audition, Bayesian Networks, Bayesian
Statistics, Benchmarking, Biophysics, Brain-Machine Interfaces, Brain
Imaging, Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Biology and
Bioinformatics, Computational Complexity, Control,
Genetic/Evolutionary Algorithms, Graphical Models, Hippocampus and
Memory, Human-Computer Interfaces, Implementations, Kernel Methods,
Mean-Field Methods, Music, Network Dynamics, Neural Coding, Neural
Plasticity, Neuromorphic Systems, On-Line Learning, Optimization,
Perceptual Learning, Robotics, Rule Extraction, Self-Organization,
Signal Processing, Spike Timing, Speech, Supervised/Unsupervised
Learning, Time Series, Topological Maps, and Vision.

Detailed descriptions of previous workshops may be found at:
http://nips.cc/Conferences/2009/Program/schedule.php?Session=Workshops
There will be six hours of workshop meetings per day, split into
morning and afternoon sessions, with free time between the sessions
for ongoing individual exchange or outdoor activities. Selected
workshops may be invited to submit proceedings for publication in the
post-NIPS workshops monographs series published by the MIT Press.

Workshop organizers have several responsibilities, including:

* Coordinating workshop participation and content, including arranging
short informal presentations by experts, arranging for expert
commentators to sit on discussion panels, formulating discussion
topics, etc.

* Providing the program for the workshop in a timely manner for the workshop
booklet.

* Moderating the discussion, and reporting its findings and conclusions
to the group during the evening plenary sessions.

* Writing a brief summary and/or coordinating submitted material for
post-conference electronic dissemination.

Submission Instructions

A nips.cc account is required to submit the Workshops application. Please
follow the url below and check the required format for the application well
before the deadline for workshop proposals. You can edit your application
online right up until the deadline.

Interested parties must submit a proposal by 23:59 UTC on July 2, 2010
(note that this deadline is earlier than previous years, to allow
workshops more time for their calls for submissions). Proposals should
be submitted electronically at the following url:

https://nips.cc/Workshops

Preference will be given to workshops that reserve a significant
portion of time for open discussion or panel discussion, as opposed to
a pure “mini-conference” format.

We suggest that organizers allocate at least 50% of the workshop
schedule to questions, discussion, and breaks. Past experience
suggests that workshops otherwise degrade into mini-conferences as
talks begin to run over. For the same reason, we strongly recommend
that each workshop include no more than 12 talks per day.

NIPS does not provide travel funding for workshop speakers. In the
past, some workshops have sought and received funding from external
sources to bring in outside speakers. In any case, the organizers of
each accepted workshop can name two individuals to receive free
registration for the workshop program.

Neil D. Lawrence
University of Manchester
NIPS*2010 Workshops Chair

The 2010 Monte Verita’ Workshop: Frontiers in Neuroengineering: Call for Abstracts

The 2010 Monte Verita’ Workshop: Frontiers in Neuroengineering
Ascona, Switzerland, September 5-9th, 2010
http://www.neuroinf.org/meeting/meeting10/MonteVerita/

The deadline for discounted registration is approaching quickly: June 5th, 2010 !!

Neuroengineering is a rapidly growing discipline that takes its lymph from
the increasing cross-fertilization of many areas of technology and science.
By means of neuroengineering, advances in diverse technologies and in cellular
and molecular biology converge into powerful tools to improve our understanding
and treatment of neural (dis)functions.
Recently such a discipline has gone beyond the concept of a simple application
of engineering principles to central nervous system (CNS) comprehension, leading
to the emergence of one of the more exciting interdisciplinary research fields
in modern neurosciences.

Neuroengineering applies novel approaches to the study of the brain by bringing
together tools from computational neuroscience, information theory, electronics,
electrophysiology, biomaterials, nanotechnologies and tissue engineering, towards
understanding, repairing, replacing, enhancing, and exploiting the electrical
properties of the nervous system.

Understanding the brain is one of the key grand challenges of modern science.
In Neuroengineering such challenge extends from fundamental research on computation
in the central nervous system to new frontiers in neural prosthetics.
Because of its cultural tradition and its special atmosphere, Monte Verita’ is the
ideal settings to bring together students, researchers, professionals and world-
leaders of a discipline that is not any longer in its infancy and that is becoming
fully mature.

== Second Call for Papers ==

We invite Authors to participate with contributions in all topics related to Neuroengineering,
from novel (nano)materials interfacing the nervous system or as tools for basic research, to
novel enabling technologies, and from basic neurobiology and electrophysiology to neuroprosthetics.
We aim at covering topics across levels of investigations, from the single-neuron to the network-
and the system levels.

The workshop will consist of invited speakers and registered participants, though it will be limited to a maximum of 100 people.

The workshop will include extra time for audience discussion of the presentations, allowing
the group to have intense debates and creative discussions on the issues, challenges, and
the new ideas in the field.

Depending on the number and quality of the contributions, a special issue of a
journal might be organized, and selected contributions invited after the workshop, conveying and
summarizing the most important and relevant conclusions.

We are in close contact with previous and new sponsors and we are trying to setup a number
of student travel grants and best poster awards. We will keep the web site and the participants
updated.

We strongly encourage the participation of young researchers and their active and “disinhibited”
participation to the scientific meeting, to honor the cultural and historical atmosphere of the
meeting venue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verit%C3%A0).

Download the workshop flier here !!

Invited speakers:
Gabriel A. Silva, UCSD, USA
John Donoghue, Brown U, USA
Micha E. Spira, Hebrew U, Israel
Henry Markram, EPFL, Switzerland
Shimon Marom, Technion, Israel
Jessica Winter, Ohio State U, USA
Vladimir Parpura, UAB, USA
Laura Ballerini, Univ. Trieste, Italy
Sophie Pautot, U Dresden, Germany
Carmen Bartic, KULeuven, Belgium
Yahel Hanein, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Luca Berdondini, IIT, Italy
Sandro Carrara, EPFL, Switzerland
Eshel Ben-Jacob, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Michele Giugliano, U Antwerpen, Belgium
:
(others to be announced)

— Important Dates —

Early registration: June 5th, 2010

— Submission —

All abstract should be submitted following the template, the guidelines and
the procedures indicated online, for publication in the workshop abstract book.
All participants are required to register online.

Looking forward to meeting you in Monte Verita’!

The Workshop Organizers

Positions for 2 PhD researchers or Postdocs in Computational Linguistics

Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (UiL OTS)
Deadline for application: May 5, 2010
————————————————————————

This is a summary of the full announcement, which is available at:
http://www.phil.uu.nl/~yoad/vici/ad-proj45.pdf

Vacancy Number: 681018

Job titles: 2 PhD researchers or Postdocs in Computational Linguistics (1 fte each)

Job descriptions:
These positions are part of a five-year research programme ‘Between Logic and Common Sense’ funded by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research NWO. The programme, supervised by Dr. Yoad Winter, investigates the interaction between word meanings and sentence meanings. While word meanings are often related to common sense aspects of semantic concepts, sentence meanings are derived using logical operators. The program will study how the two modules interact. Three issues will be addressed:
o How should formal theories of meaning be modified in order to incorporate methods and ideas from the study of common concepts?
o What psycholinguistic evidence exists that supports this interaction?
o How can interactions between word meaning and logical meaning be exploited for automatic treatment of reasoning in natural language (entailment)?
The program combines methods from formal semantics, experimental psycholinguistics and machine learning.

The programme comprises two post-doctoral projects and three PhD projects. See below for a link to the programme and general descriptions of the projects:
http://www.phil.uu.nl/~yoad/vici/ViciProgram-Winter.pdf
http://www.phil.uu.nl/~yoad/vici/projects.html

The current opening is for:

PhD/postdoc project 1 (vacancy no. 681018-A) starting date 1-10-2010 (negotiable, postdoc between 1 Oct 2010 and 1 Feb 2011):
The project, supervised by Dr. Yoad Winter, uses annotated entailments for developing machine learning algorithms that recognize unseen entailments on the basis of lexical/syntactic tools and resources. The learning model will use a semantically annotated corpus as a training set for acquiring semantically relevant information from other resources (e.g. WordNet, Penn Treebank, OpenCyc) when parsing entailments.
The project uses methods from computational linguistics and machine learning.
For a more detailed project description: http://www.phil.uu.nl/~yoad/vici/projects.html#4

PhD project 2 (vacancy no 691018-B) starting date 1-10-2010 (negotiable):
The project, supervised by Dr. Yoad Winter, develops a computational version of formal semantic theory that is suitable for annotating a corpus of textual entailments. The PhD researcher will accompany actual annotation of an entailment corpus. The annotated corpus and annotation principles will be used for the automatic acquisition of textual entailments.
The project uses methods from computational linguistics and formal semantics.
For a more detailed project description: http://www.phil.uu.nl/~yoad/vici/projects.html#5

Qualifications:
Applicants for a postdoc employment hold a PhD (completed at least one month prior to employment), as well as demonstrated capacities as an independent researcher, in the form of publications. You have a PhD in statistical computational linguistics, with specific experience in machine learning techniques.

Applicants for a PhD position have a MA/MSc in computer science or computational linguistics, with specific experience in machine learning techniques. Candidates expecting to graduate by 1 September 2010 can also apply.

How to apply:
Applications should include
o a letter of motivation
o a curriculum vitae including contact and personal details
o the contact details of two referees (names, affiliations and phone numbers or e-mail addresses).
o preferably: two reference letters
In addition, PhD applicants should include
o transcripts of academic results
o an MA thesis or (if the thesis is not available yet) some alternative piece of written work
In addition, postdoc applicants should include:
o PhD thesis
o one selected publication
E-mail applications (preferred) should be sent in pdf or doc format to GW_Humanitiesjobs@uu.nl and should specify the applicant’s name and the vacancy number 681018-A or B in the message as well as in the topic, include a list of attachments in the message, and specify the applicant’s name in each attachment’s title.

Written applications should be sent to the Personnel Department, Kromme Nieuwegracht 46, 3512 HJ Utrecht, The Netherlands. Please refer to the vacancy number 681018-A or B as well as to the website where you found this advertisement.

Deadline for application is May 5, 2010.
Interviews are planned on June 8, 2010.

CFP Workshop on Detection and Identification of Rare Audiovisual Cues @ECML-PKDD

Workshop on Detection and Identification of Rare Audiovisual Cues (DIRAC)
In conjunction with ECML-PKDD (http://www.ecmlpkdd2010.org/)
Barcelona, 24 September 2010

Background

Machine learning builds models of the world using training data from the application domain and prior knowledge about the problem. The models are later applied to future data in order to estimate the current state of the world. An implied assumption is that the future is stochastically similar to the past. The approach fails when the system encounters situations that are not anticipated from the past experience. In contrast, successful natural organisms identify new unanticipated stimuli and situations and frequently generate appropriate responses.
This workshop aims to discuss moving the art of machine recognition from the classical signal processing/pattern classification paradigm to human-like information extraction.
This means, among other things, to move from interpretation of all incoming data to reliable rejection of non-informative inputs, from passive acquisition of a single incoming stream to active search for the most relevant information in multiple streams, and from a system optimized for one static environment to autonomous adaptation to new changing environments, thus forming the foundation for a new generation of efficient cognitive information processing technologies.

Aims and Scope

The workshop aims to bring together researchers and students from different disciplines (machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, computer vision, speech processing, neurophysiology, psychophysics, robotics, …) in order to present and discuss in an informal atmosphere new approaches for identifying and reacting to unexpected events in information-rich environments. To achieve this goal we are soliciting two types of contributions: a) mature research results, and b) interesting preliminary results or stimulating position statements. In addition, the workshop will feature at least one discussion session to allow for a more interactive and engaging experience.

Topics of Interest

The workshop’s topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• learning from small samples
• unusual/abnormal event detection
• trend analysis
• novelty detection
• classification-based/clustering-based/nearest neighbor based/statistical/information theoretical /spectral/ …
• contextual anomaly detection
• audio-visual perception of humans
• human-computer interaction modeling
• speech processing
• image and video processing
• multimodal processing, fusion and fission
• multimodal indexing, structuring and summarization
• annotation and browsing of multimodal data
• machine learning algorithms and their applications to the topics above

Paper submission

Contributions must be in English and formatted according to the Springer-Verlag LNCS/LNAI guidelines. At the time of submission, the papers must not be under review or accepted for publication elsewhere. Papers will be reviewed by at least two members of the Workshop Committee. Papers will be reviewed on the basis of technical quality, originality, significance, and clarity. All submissions will be handled electronically.

Contributions should be in PDF format and submitted to the following email address: paul.konijn@esat.kuleuven.be

Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and will appear in the conference proceedings. At least one author of each paper must register for the conference and attend the workshop to present the paper.

Important dates

• Deadline for submissions: 21 June 2010
• Notification: 12 July 2010
• Early registration:
• Camera ready: 21 July 2010
• Workshop day: 24 September 2010

Workshop Chairs

Jörn Anemüller, Carl von Ossietzky University (Germany)
Daphna Weinshall, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
Luc van Gool, K.U. Leuven (Belgium) and ETHZ (Switzerland)
Hynek Hermansky, Johns Hopkins University (USA) and Brno University of Technology (Czech Republic)
Luc De Raedt, K.U. Leuven (Belgium)

Programme Committee

• Barbara Caputo, IDIAP, (Switzerland)
• Honza Cernocky, Brno University of Technology (Czech Republic)
• Nicolo Cesa-Bianchi, University of Milan La Statale (Italy)
• Vittorio Ferrari, ETH Zurich (Switzerland)
• Frank Ohl, Leibniz Institute (Germany)
• Francesco Orabona, University of Milan La Statale (Italy)
• Tomas Pajdla, Czech Technical University (Czech Republic)
• Misha Pavel, OHSU (USA)
• Tinne Tuytelaars, K.U.Leuven (Belgium)
• Rufin Vogels, K.U.Leuven (Belgium)
• Stefan Wabnik, Fraunhofer Institute (Germany)