PASCAL Bootcamp – First call for participation

Pascal2 Machine Learning Bootcamp – Marseille France
First call for participation

The LIF-Marseille organises the second machine learning bootcamp of the European Network of Excellence PASCAL (Pattern Analysis, Statistical modelling and ComputAtional Learning) . This school will be held during summer 2010, from July 5th (afternoon) to July 13th (morning), on the campus of Saint Charles in Marseille.

Objective and Targeted Audience
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The bootcamp is an international event which consists in a week of course (lectures, practical and lab sessions) designed for Master students or students just about to start a PhD. It aims at training good-level students from various scientific fields to major thematics of PASCAL network, particularly machine learning.

Preliminary Program
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* Introduction to Machine Learning
* Probability and Mathematical Needs
* Graphical Models
* Kernel Methods
* Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing
* Clustering
* On-Line Learning

Accommodation
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We have booked 10 shared rooms with 4 beds each in an hotel in the centre of Marseilles (close to the port), the hotel is totally reserved for the bootcamp participants during one week. The hotel, Breakfasts and lunches (except the lunch of Sunday 11) are included and covered by our sponsors, only the dinners are at your own expense.

Inscription
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Due to the limited number of available rooms, we may select the candidates, see the website for more details.
Application deadline: 15th May 2010.

Website
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http://bootcamp.lif.univ-mrs.fr

Previous Bootcamp
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Barcelona during summer 2007.
http://lsi.epsevg.upc.es/~bootcamp07

Program Committee
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* John Shawe-Taylor, University College London
* Colin de la Higuera, Université de Nantes
* François Denis, Université de Provence
* José Luis Balcázar, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
* Alexis Nasr, Université de la Méditerranée
* Rémi Eyraud, Université de Provence

Sponsors
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PASCAL2 Network of Excellence
Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale de Marseille
Université de la Méditerannée
Université de Provence

Pattern recognition challenges in neuroimaging

1st ICPR workshop on brain decoding:
Pattern recognition challenges in neuroimaging
In conjunction with the 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition
August 22, 2010, Istanbul, Turkey

http://miplab.unige.ch/icpr2010/

Many of the challenges facing brain decoding are also highly relevant to
the field of pattern recognition at large – classification of multivariate
time-series, dimensionality reduction, and causal modelling to name a few.

This workshop wants to bring together researchers in pattern recognition
and neuroimaging for fruitful exchanges of experiences and recent
developments in brain decoding, both on the methodological side and the
application side. The temporal and spatial proximity with the leading
pattern recognition conference ICPR is a great opportunity to learn about
newest scientific developments in order to expand brain decoding methodology.

SCOPE
The topics of interest include:
* Data representations for brain decoding
– Voxel and feature selection
– Linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction
– Sparse timecourse representations
* Classifiers for high-dimensional learning
– Regularisation schemes
– Subspace methods
– Interpretability and validation
* Applications of brain decoding
– Visual processing
– Man-machine interfaces
– Clinical applications
– Deception detection

SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS
Authors should prepare full 4-pages papers (double-column, IEEE style).
Manuscripts will be evaluated by 2 reviewers.

Proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Science Society in electronic
format. They will be permantently available on the IEEExplore and IEEE CS
Digital Library online repositories, and indexed in IEE INSPEC, EI
Compendex (Elsevier), and others.

DATES AND DEADLINES
– April 8, 2010: Paper submission deadline (extended)
– May 8, 2010: Acceptance Notification
– May 14, 2010: Early registration deadline
– June 1, 2010: Camera-ready paper due
– August 22, 2010: Workshop

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Rafeef Abugharbieh, University of British Columbia (Canada)
Tulay Adali, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (USA)
John Ashburner, University College London (UK)
Mick Brammer, King’s College London (UK)
Vince Calhoun, Yale University (USA)
Thomas Ethofer, University of Tübingen (Germany)
Christian Gaser, University of Jena (Germany)
Ghassan Hamarneh, Simon Fraser University (Canada)
David Hardoon, Institute for Infocomm Research (Singapore)
Krzysztof Kryszczuk, IBM Research Zürich (Switzerland)
Raghu Machiraju, Ohio State University (USA)
Andre Marquand, King’s College London (UK)
Julien Meynet, Yahoo! research (France)
Torsten Möller, Simon Fraser University (Canada)
Joao Sato, Federal University of ABC (Brazil)
Sophie Schwartz, University of Geneva (Switzerland)
Stephen Strother, University of Toronto (Canada)
Bertrand Thirion, NeuroSpin Paris (France)
Marc Van Hulle, K.U. Leuven (Belgium)
Patrik Vuilleumier, University of Geneva (Switzerland)

ORGANISING COMMITTEE
Jonas Richiardi, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
and University of Geneva (Swizerland)
Dimitri Van De Ville, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
and University of Geneva (Switzerland)
Christos Davatzikos, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Janaina Mourão-Miranda, University College London and King’s College
London (UK)
contact: wbd2010 _AT_ listes.epfl.ch

CLEF-Lab on Plagiarism Detection and Wikipedia Vandalism Detection, PAN’10

Call for Participation:
Evaluation Campaign on Plagiarism Detection and Wikipedia Vandalism Detection

held in conjunction with the CLEF’10 conference
in Padua, Italy, September 20-23
http://pan.webis.de

About the Campaign:

Plagiarism detection in text documents is a challenging retrieval task:
today’s detection systems are faced with intricate situations, such as
obfuscated plagiarism or plagiarism within and across languages.
Moreover, the source of a plagiarism case may be hidden in a large
collection of documents, or it may not be available at all. Informally,
the respective CLEF-Lab task can be described as follows:

1. Plagiarism Detection. Given a set of suspicious documents and a set
of source documents, the task is to find all plagiarized sections
in the suspicious documents and, if available, the corresponding
source sections.

Following the success of the 2009 campaign and based on our experience
we will provide a revised evaluation corpus consisting of artificial and
simulated plagiarism.

Vandalism has always been one of Wikipedia’s biggest problems. However,
the detection of vandalism is done mostly manually by volunteers, and
research on automatic vandalism detection is still in its infancy.
Hence, solutions are to be developed which aid Wikipedians in their
efforts. Informally, the respective CLEF-Lab task can be described as
follows:

2. Wikipedia Vandalism Detection. Given a set of edits on Wikipedia
articles, the task is to identify all edits which are vandalism,
i.e., all edits whose editors had bad intentions.

Participants are invited to submit results for one or both of the tasks.

Important Dates:

open Registration
Jun 01, 2010 Result submission deadline
Jun 15, 2010 Notification of performance
Jul 15, 2010 Paper submission deadline
Aug 02, 2010 Notification of reviews
Sep 01, 2010 Final paper deadline
Sep 20-23, 2010 Evaluation lab at CLEF conference

Campaign Organization:

Webis @ Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
http://www.webis.de

NLEL @ Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
http://www.dsic.upv.es/grupos/nle

University of the Aegean
http://www.icsd.aegean.gr/lecturers/stamatatos

Bar-Ilan University
http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel

Contact:

E-mail: pan(at)webis.de
Campaign Web page: http://pan.webis.de

CFP – Workshop on applications of pattern analysis

Workshop on Applications of Pattern Analysis
1 – 2 September 2010, Cumberland Lodge (Windsor, UK)
Submission deadlines: may 9th for abstract; may 16th for full paper.
www.pascal-network.org/wapa2010

DESCRIPTION

Pattern Analysis and Statistical Learning cover a wide range of
technologies and theoretical frameworks, and significant activity in
the past years has resulted in a remarkable convergence and many
advances in the theory and principles underlying the field.

Bringing these technologies to real world demanding applications is
however often treated as a separate problem, one that does not
directly affect the field as a whole. It is instead important to
consider the field of Pattern Analysis as fully including all issues
involved with the applications of this technology, and hence all
issues that arise when deploying, scaling, implementing and using the
technology.

We call for contributions in the form of Demo papers, Case Studies, Working
Systems, Real World Applications and Usage Scenarios. Challenges may
stem from the violation of common theoretical assumptions, from the
specific types of patterns and noise arising in certain scenarios, or
from the problem of scaling up the implementation of state of the art
algorithms to real world sizes, or from the creation of integrated
software systems that contain multiple pattern-analysis components.

We are also interested in new application areas, where Pattern
Analysis has been deployed with success, and in issues involving the
visualisation and delivery and exploitation of the patterns discovered
by PA technologies. Systems working in noisy and unstructured
environments and situations are particularly interesting.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE
We welcome papers (and possibly also related demos) in all of the areas
described above. Papers should be max 7 pages long, in PDF, using
the provided style file which is available on the workshop website, describing a working system that makes use of Pattern Analysis technology and for which interesing challenges were
encountered and overcome during its deployment, or an application that
has benefited another field of research.
Papers describing software and web demos are
welcome, as are case studies.

Submissions should be sent by email to wapa2010@pascal-network.org.
Abstracts are due on may 9th, and full papers on may 16th, 2010.

Proceedings will be published containing the accepted papers within
the JMLR Proceedings Series:
http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/proceedings/

IMPORTANT DATES

9 May 2010
Deadline for abstract submission

16 May 2010
Deadline for paper submission

28 June 2010
Notification of Acceptance

31 August 2010
Workshop arrival at 4pm

1 – 2 September 2010
Workshop

ORGANISERS:

Tom Diethe
University College London

John Shawe-Taylor
University College London

Nello Cristianini
University of Bristol

CFP: Shared Control for BMI

2010 IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
Workshop on Brain-Machine Interfaces

Brain-machine interfaces (BMI) offer the possibility of a new generation of technologies that allow users to directly control devices directly via the nervous system. BMIs can be used to develop new communication pathways to restore and augment sensory and motor function in disabled individuals. At the core of BMI system design is a controller that must accommodate the seamless interaction between systems of neurons with electronics and robotics. This workshop solicits papers in any area of BMI, but it will prioritize contributions on innovations in signal processing, controls, and robotics to revolutionize information handling between the nervous system and computing machines.

The concept of “sharing control” between humans and machines has its roots back to the early history of Cybernetics. Compared to that early history, the challenges for BMIs involves developing control systems capable of handling biological signals that are sparse, noisy and dynamic in nature. Moreover, these systems are operating in a wide variety of dynamic environments encountered in the activities of daily life. One of the goals of this workshop is to identify leading advancements in Cybernetics theory that can improve performance in BMIs through cooperative control. Several examples of such systems include intelligent robotics that can assist with obstacle avoidance or accurate grasping, and adaptive algorithms that can learn the robot’s optimal behavior from the user’s nonstationary brain signals.

Of particular interest in this workshop are the principles that allow bi-directional communication and assistance between the user’s nervous system and the device being controlled as well as how to support the dynamic sharing of roles and responsibilities of a control task. In addition, topics sought include the design of collaborative, cognitive workspaces and signal analysis that supports a shared understanding of the task and environment.

The workshop will feature some prominent invited speakers active in research on “shared control” in BMI and other fields such as robotics and human-computer interaction.

Best contributions presented during the workshop will be invited to submit an extended version to a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics – Part B that will undergo a normal full review process. The theme of this special issue of SMC-B is “Shared Control in Brain-Machine Interfaces”, and submissions are open to active researchers in the field independently of whether or not they participate in this workshop.

Place & Dates: Istanbul, Turkey. October 10-13, 2010. http://www.smc2010.org

PAPER SUBMISSIONS:
Papers should follow the IEEE format and conference guidelines. The template is available at: http://www.smc2010.org/SMC2010_Paper_Format.zip
Send a PDF copy of your paper to
jose.millan AT epfl.ch
with the title “SMC’10-BMI Workshop”.

ORGANIZERS:
José del R. Millán, Ph.D.
EPFL, Switzerland (http://people.epfl.ch/jose.millan)

Jose M. Carmena, Ph.D.
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA (http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~carmena)

Justin C. Sanchez, Ph.D.
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA (http://nrg.mbi.ufl.edu)

Michael Smith, Ph.D.
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Schedule:
Deadline for submissions: April 15th, 2010
Notification of review: May 15th, 2010
Final manuscript due: June 27th, 2010

PDRA in Single Molecule Statistical Signal Processing

Single Molecule Statistical Signal Processing

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral research assistant to work under the supervision of Professor Hagan Bayley (Oxford Chemistry) and Dr Nick Jones (Oxford Physics) on a research project for an initial period of one year. The project involves the development of advanced statistical signal processing techniques to facilitate low-cost, rapid nanopore-based DNA sequencing, with the eventual aim of making reliable base calls from long DNA strands driven through the nanopore. The group is located in the Chemistry Research Laboratory at Oxford www.chem.ox.ac.uk/ Find out more about the Bayley research group at www.chem.ox.ac.uk/researchguide/hbayley.html and the Jones group at www.physics.ox.ac.uk/cm/cmt/jones/

Applicants should either already have a PhD in a relevant subject area, or have submitted their thesis prior to taking up the post. The applicant should have a working knowledge of modern statistical signal processing methods; Effective Matlab (or equivalent), programming skills, a good background understanding of relevant physical applied mathematics and statistics.

The post will be based in the Chemical Biology Group of the Chemistry Research Laboratory, Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TA. The researcher will also have a desk in the Physics department. For further particulars of the post, including how to apply, visit our website http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/jobs.asp . These should be obtained before an application is made. Informal enquiries should be addressed to max.little@physics.ox.ac.uk or hagan.bayley(at)chem.ox.ac.uk Please quote reference DQ10001/HB in all correspondence.

Further Details are available for download here: http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/jobs/DQ10001-HB-FPs.pdf or by e-mail to recruitment(at)chem.ox.ac.uk quoting reference DQ10001/HB.
Application deadline for this post is 16 April 2010

CFP Media Retargeting Workshop at ECCV 2010

MEDIA RETARGETING WORKSHOP

in conjunction with ECCV 2010, September 10, Crete, Greece

http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/MRW2010

OVERVIEW

Media retargeting is the process of adapting media content such as
images or video to the characteristics of different output devices.

Media retargeting has received considerable attention in computer
vision and graphics research in the recent years due to the growing
variability in capture devices and displays (small displays in mobile
devices, large high resolution displays in home cinema systems) and
the availability of huge amounts of image and video data. Besides
converting video between different display sizes, the spectrum of
problems related to media retargeting also comprises issues such as
color adaptation between different dynamic ranges, or the automatic
conversion of 2D to 3D footage for upcoming stereoscopic consumer
display devices.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and
practitioners from all areas of computer vision, machine learning,
and computer graphics, and to stimulate the discussion about shared
concepts and recent progress on topics ranging from perceptual content
analysis over efficient optimization algorithms for retargeting to
systematic evaluation of already existing techniques.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

We invite high quality, original submissions for presentation during
the workshop. Contributions from the following areas are especially
welcome:

* video or image retargeting of aspect ratio and resolution
* color retargeting between low and high dynamic ranges
* visual saliency estimation
* attention estimation and perceptual metrics
* temporal retargeting and content summarization
* retargeting of stereoscopic content
* monocular video to stereo conversion
* relevant optimization techniques
* systematic evaluation and user studies of relevant methods
* perceptual studies of retargeting results
* multi-modal retargeting (e.g. video and sound)

DATES

* Full paper submission: June 16, 2010
* Notification of acceptance: July 9, 2010
* Camera ready version of accepted papers: July 13, 2010

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

* Ariel Shamir, Efi Arazi School of Computer Science, Herzliya

ORGANIZERS
* Thomas Deselaers, ETH Zurich
* Alexander Hornung, Disney Research Zurich
* Olga Sorkine, New York University

Structured Models in Computer Vision – Call for Papers

__________________

CALL FOR PAPERS
__________________

STRUCTURED MODELS IN COMPUTER VISION

Workshop at CVPR 2010, June 14th, San Francisco, USA

Zurich, 16-20 August 2010

http://SMiCV2010.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/

email: smicv2010(at)tuebingen.mpg.de

submission deadline: 27 March 2010

OVERVIEW

A central question in Computer Vision is how human prior knowledge can
be integrated in order to build efficient and accurate learning
systems. Computer Vision and Machine Learning Researchers have come up
with many different models to incorporate their prior knowledge about
the domain structure – such as probabilistic graphical models,
conditional random fields, or structured support vector machines –
which have been applied successfully to many different areas of
application. The goal of this workshop is to bring together
researchers from different directions of Computer Vision and Machine
Learning, and to stimulate the discussion about the shared concepts,
the recent progress and the remaining problems of learning and
inference algorithms for structured representations in Computer
Vision.

FORMAT

The workshop will be a one-day event with one morning and two
afternoon sessions.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

We invite high quality, original submissions for presentation during
the workshop. Contributions from the following areas are especially
welcome:
* object recognition and localization
* image scene analysis
* human pose estimation
* image and video segmentation
* video analysis/surveillance
* shape analysis
* medical image analysis
We also invite submissions from related domains including theoretic
results relevant to the workshop’s topic.

Emphasis of the submissions should lie on aspects relevant to the
workshop topic, e.g. new learning methods for structured models,
modeling of new problems with prior knowledge of domain structure, or
efficient algorithms for inference in structured models. Papers must
be in PDF format and should not exceed 8 pages (CVPR format). All
submissions are subject to a double-blind review process by the
program committee. Further details about the submission process can be
found on the workshop homepage.

BEST PAPER PRIZE

The best paper will be awarded a google sponsored cash prize of 500US$.

DATES

* Deadline for submission of papers: 27th March 2010
* Notification of acceptance: 21th April 2010
* Camera-ready submission: 5th May 2010
* Workshop date: 14th June 2010

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

* Daniel Huttenlocher, Cornell
* Antonio Torralba, MIT
* Thomas Hofmann, Google

ORGANIZERS

* Christoph Lampert, IST Austria
* Vittorio Ferrari, ETH Zurich
* Peter Gehler, ETH Zurich

The organizers can be contacted through smicv2010(at)tuebingen.mpg.de

ILP 2010, Florence (Italy) June 27-30, 2010

The 20th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP 2010) will be held in Firenze, Italy, from Sunday 27th to Wednesday 30th June 2010. The conference is sponsored by PASCAL2 (as a non-core event).

ILP started in 1991 and is the premier international forum on logic-based and relational learning. The conference has recently explored several intersections to statistical learning and other probabilistic approaches, expanding research horizons significantly.

ILP 2010 will feature a tutorial day on June 27
Structural Decomposition Methods: Identifying easy instances of hard problems by Francesco Scarcello and Gianluigi Greco
Multivariate Models for Relational Learning by Volker Tresp

Confirmed keynote speakers so far are
Michael Kifer (Stony Brook University): AI Journal keynote speaker, Rule Interchange Format: Logic Programming’s Second Wind?
David Poole (University of British Columbia), Pascal keynote speaker, Probabilistic Relational Learning and Inductive Logic Programming at a Global Scale

A limited number of discounted student registrations are available, thanks to generous support from the Association for Logic Programming

Machine Learning Journal is our generous sponsor for the best student paper award.

More information on the conference website: http://ilp2010.dsi.unifi.it/

Machine Learning at Nokia Berlin

Vacancy details available at http://www.pascal-network.org/vacancies/nokia_ml.pdf