PASCAL Visual Object Classes Recognition Challenge 2011

We are running the PASCAL Visual Object Classes Recognition Challenge
again this year. As in 2010 there are 20 object classes for the main
competitions. Participants can recognize any or all of the classes,
and there are classification, detection and pixel-wise segmentation
competitions. This year the action classification taster competition
has a new “other” category, and there is also a taster competition on
person layout (detecting head, hands, feet). There is also an
associated large scale visual recognition taster competition organized
by www.image-net.org.

We remind users that the PASCAL VOC Challenge evaluation server
is available at http://host.robots.ox.ac.uk:8080/ and is currently providing
evaluations and downloads for the VOC 2008, 2009 and 2010 challenges.

The development kit (Matlab code for evaluation, and baseline algorithms)
and training data is now available at:

http://pascallin.ecs.soton.ac.uk/challenges/VOC/voc2011/index.html

where further details are given. The timetable of the challenge is:

* 25 May 2011: Development kit (training and validation data plus
evaluation software) made available.

* June 2011: Test set made available.

* 10 October 2011. Deadline for submission of results.

* 7 November 2011: Workshop in association with ICCV 2011, Barcelona.

Mark Everingham
Luc Van Gool
Chris Williams
John Winn
Andrew Zisserman

PhD studentship in the area of data analysis and modelling

Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCL

*** Vacancy Information ***
A 3 year PhD studentship is available within the Physics and Astronomy Department, University College London, supervised by Dr Serena Viti. The studentship is available to start from 1st October 2011, or as soon as possible thereafter. The studentship is co-funded by Columba Systems Ltd, a London-based company that provides future financial event data. The PhD student will undertake the bulk of their research within the Physics and Astronomy Department at UCL, where the main project will deal with the statistical analysis and interpretation of grids of chemical and radiative transfer models covering astronomical conditions from local to high redshift galaxies. The student will also spend a significant amount of time working at Columba Systems where they will be analysing Columba’s historical corporate events database and other financial data sources. The ultimate aim is to produce a ‘back testing datapack’ including tools and statistical methodology for testing financial models against historic data. The student will be required to learn a significant amount about financial terms and data models.

*** Application ***
To apply for this studentship, please send a CV to Dr Serena Viti by e-mail (sv(at)star.ucl.ac.uk) in the first instance, explaining why you are interested in this PhD position.

*** Person Specification ***
Candidates must have obtained a Masters Degree or equivalent in Physics, Statistics, Astronomy or a related Engineering field by the 1st of October 2011 and within the past four years. The successful applicant must have completed one or more undergraduate-level courses in statistics, preferably including time series analysis. He or she must have strong computer skills and ideally be familiar with databases, SQL and XML.

*** Eligibility ***
All EU nationalities are eligible to apply.

*** Contact details ***
Dr Serena Viti
sv(at)star.ucl.ac.uk

Academic vacancies at Bristol

Positions at Univ of Bristol, Engineering:

Senior Lecturer/Reader in Microelectronics (vacancy ref. 16309)

Lecturer in Engineering Mathematics (vacancy ref. 16332)

Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction (vacancy ref. 16340)

Senior Lecturer/ Reader in Computational Neuroscience (vacancy ref. 16341)

The posts are currently advertised on the University website http://www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/all-jobs/academic-jobs/ and http://www.jobs.ac.uk/.

Postdoctoral fellowships in machine learning and computational biology

Seven postdoctoral fellowships in machine learning and computational
biology are available in the lab of William Stafford Noble in the
Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington,
Seattle, WA, USA.

Our research group develops and applies computational techniques for
modeling and understanding biological processes at the molecular
level. Our research emphasizes the application of statistical and
machine learning techniques, such as dynamic Bayesian networks and
support vector machines. We apply these techniques to various types of
biological data, including DNA and protein sequence data, shotgun
proteomics mass spectrometry data, and a variety of high-throughput
genomic data types. More information is available at
http://noble.gs.washington.edu.

The following projects are available:

o Structure of mammalian genomes: Last year, in collaboration with
Tony Blau’s lab, we published a detailed description of the
three-dimensional architecture of the yeast genome in vivo. We have
recently received NIH funding to continue this work in mammalian
systems. The postdoc involved in this project would work on
developing and applying statistical methods for interpreting the raw
sequencing data, for relating these data to known classes of
functional elements, and for improving our ability to infer 3D
structure from observed pairs of interactions.

o Clonal population of cancer: More recently, also in collaboration
with Tony Blau, we have been developing next generation sequencing
strategies for characterizing the population of clones in a single
cancer by assaying paired cancerous and non-cancerous samples. This
project will employ dynamic Bayesian network models to infer the
clonal population structure.

o Genomics and proteomics of Plasmodium: Our lab is about to embark in
a new research direction, focusing on analyses of Plasmodium
falciparum, the parasite responsible for the most lethal form of
malaria. In collaboration with Karine Le Roch’s lab at UC
Riverside, we will investigate local and global DNA structure, with
the goal of building a computational model of gene regulation in
this organism. We will also be applying our expertise in
interpreting shotgun proteomics data to help shed light on the
differences between RNA and protein expression.

o Local chromatin structure and gene regulation: This project involves
investigating the relationship between DNA sequence and chromatin
structure of the human genome. Computational models, such as
dynamic Bayesian networks or support vector machines, will be
employed to investigate the competitive binding of proteins to
nuclear DNA and to understand their collective influence on gene
regulation. This project is a collaboration with Prof. Zhiping Weng
at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

o Integration of functional genomics data: This project will be
carried out in the context of the NIH ENCODE Consortium, the aim of
which is to discover all of the functional elements in the human
genome. Our lab’s role in this consortium is to develop
unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning methods for
identifying new instances and new types of functional elements.

o Machine learning for mass spectrometry analysis: In collaboration
with Mike MacCoss’s lab here in Genome Sciences, as well as Jeff
Bilmes’ lab in Electrical Engineering, we have developed a series of
machine learning and statistical methods for interpreting shotgun
proteomics data sets. The postdoc working on this project will have
opportunities to develop new methods for quantifying proteins,
interpreting targeted proteomics data, identifying modified
proteins, etc.

o Genomics and proteomics of auditory pathways: Dr. Ed Rubel’s lab, in
the UW Department of Otalaryngology, studies auditory pathways in
the developing mouse brain. A collaboration involving Ed, Mike
MacCoss and our lab will collect a series of RNA and protein samples
from microdissected mouse brains at particular time points. These
samples will be subjected to shotgun proteomics and RNAseq analysis,
with the goal of identifying genes and proteins involved in
development of these pathways. The postdoc working on this project
would have the opportunity to work in any of the three collaborating
labs.

An ideal candidate would have training both in machine learning and
computational biology. However, talented individuals who lack
significant background in one of these two areas will also be
considered. Starting dates for most projects are flexible.

The Department of Genome Sciences was founded in September 2001 as the
fusion of the Departments of Genetics and Molecular Biotechnology.
Research in the department addresses leading edge questions in biology
and medicine by developing and applying genetic, genomic and
computational approaches that take advantage of genomic information
now available for humans, model organisms and a host of other species.
Nine faculty are members of the National Academy of Sciences,
including 2001 Nobel Prize winner Dr. Lee Hartwell. Five training
faculty are Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The
department moved into the new William H. Foege Building in 2006.

The University of Washington is consistently ranked as one of the top
research universities in the country and has more than 25,000
undergraduates and 9,000 others enrolled in its professional and
graduate programs. Seattle is considered one of the nation’s most
beautiful and livable cities, boasting an array of cultural
activities, parks, sports teams and restaurants, and serving as the
gateway to National Parks and Forests, as well as boating, skiing and
hiking areas.

The University of Washington is a culturally diverse community, and we
strongly encourage applications from women and minority
candidates. The University of Washington is an Affirmative
Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Please
submit a CV, research statement and names of at least three references
to william-noble(at)uw.edu.

ECML/PKDD 2011 MIND Workshop, September 9, Athens, Greece

Call for Papers

ECML/PKDD 2011 MIND Workshop (Mining Complex Entities from Network and
Biomedical Data)

Co-located with ECML/PKDD 2011, European Conference on Machine Learning
and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases

Friday 9th September 2011, Athens, Greece

http://www.di.uniba.it/~loglisci/MIND2011/

The main goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and
practitioners from the areas of Data Mining, Text Mining, Information
Extraction, and Machine Learning working on network-represented data, such
as Biomedical data. MIND aims at promoting an interdisciplinary forum on
research fields which have been studied separately so far but have had
little attention together.

We kindly invite you to consider participating to this event and
submitting a contribution to share your methodology and results.

You may find more information about MIND 2011 in the following links:

http://www.ecmlpkdd2011.org/workshops.php (ECML/PKDD 2011 Workshops Web page)

http://www.di.uniba.it/~loglisci/MIND2011/ (Home Page of MIND 2011)

Please also note that selected papers will be invited to be extended for a
journal submission at the Journal of Social Network Mining (IJSNM), or at
a special issue of the Journal of Biomedical Semantics, depending on the
nature and the application areas of the paper.

***************Important Dates******************
# Paper submission deadline: June 20, 2011
# Notification of acceptance: July 8, 2011
# Camera-ready of accepted papers: July 21, 2011
# Workshop day: September 9, 2011
************************************************

*****************Organizers*********************
Stefano Ferilli, University of Bari
Corrado Loglisci, University of Bari
Michael Schroeder, Biotechnology center (BIOTEC), TUD
George Tsatsaronis, Biotechnology center (BIOTEC), TUD
Iraklis Varlamis, Harokopio University of Athens (HUA)
************************************************

**************Program Committee*****************
Sophia Ananiadou, University of Manchester, UK
Pantelis Bagos, University of Central Greece, Greece
Marenglen Biba, University of New York Tirana, Albania
Michelangelo Ceci, University of Bari, Italy
Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Heiko Dietze, Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC), Technical University of
Dresden, Germany
Nicola Di Mauro, University of Bari, Italy
Martin Hofmann-Apitus, Fraunhofer Institut für Algorithmen und
Wissenschaftliches Rechnen (SCAI), Germany
Yiannis Kompatsiaris, Informatics and Telematics Institute, Greece
Patrick Lambrix, Linköping University, Sweden
Alberto Lavelli, FBK Institute, Italy
Ulf Leser, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Dimitris Mavroeidis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
Einat Minkov, Unversity of Haifa, Israel
Claire Nedellec, INRIA, France
Goran Nenadic, University of Manchester, UK
Kjetil Nørvåg, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Jong Park, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea
Fabio Pinelli, ISTI-CNR, Italy
Heri Ramampiaro, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Stefan Schulz, Medical University Graz, Austria
Fabrizio Sebastiani, IST-CNR, Italy
Alfonso Valencia, Spanish National Cancer Research Center, Spain
************************************************

We look forward to seeing you in Athens!

Call for Papers 4DMOD ICCV Workshop

IEEE International Workshop on Dynamic Shape Capture and Analysis (4DMOD)

International Conference on Computer Vision ICCV 2011, Barcelona, Spain

Workshop date: November 13th 2011

http://campar.in.tum.de/FourDMod/WebHome

Deadline for Paper Submission: July 1st 2011

Modeling shapes that evolve over time, analyzing and interpreting their motion has been a subject of increasing interest to many research communities including computer vision, graphics and medical imaging. Recent evolutions in acquisition technologies including 3D depth cameras (ToF and Kinect), multi-camera systems, marker based motion capture, ultrasound and CT scans have enabled capture of real dynamic scenes. This has focused research on the creation of 4D spatio-temporal models from scene measurements and subsequent analysis and interpretation. A number of applications including human motion capture, dynamic shape modeling and animation, temporally consistent 3D reconstruction and motion analysis have emerged. The purpose of this workshop is to provide a venue for researchers investigating modeling dynamic scenes from various sensor modalities to present their work, exchange ideas and identify challenging open-problems.

Keynote Speakers:
Michael Black, MPI Saarbrucken, Germany
Christian Theobalt, Brown University USA/MPI Tuebingen, Germany

High-quality papers are invited which present novel research related to any aspect of modeling and analysis of dynamic scenes, including but not restricted to:
• 4D acquisition of real-world dynamic scenes
• Shape recovery of dynamic 3D scenes
• Temporally consistent tracking of deformable surfaces
• 4D Representation
• 4D Reconstruction from Medical Images
• Deformation surface models
• Free-viewpoint and 3D video
• Marker-less human motion capture (articulated and surface based)
• Monocular and multi-view deformable surface capture
• Animation and texture transfer
• Deformable surface tracking for medical applications
• Deformable Shape Matching
• Motion analysis
• Shape analysis
• Shape segmentation
• Learning of model deformations
• Space-time geometry processing
• Applications of 3D video and 4D modeling

Papers must describe high-quality, original research in areas related to modeling and analysis of dynamic scenes and their applications. By submitting a manuscript to 4DMOD, the authors assert that the submitted papers are not substantially similar to any paper published or submitted elsewhere. All submissions will be handled electronically. No double submission to other conferences is allowed. Instructions on paper submission can be found at:

http://campar.in.tum.de/FourDMod/WebHome

All papers will be subject to peer review and published by the IEEE and will be part of the ICCV workshop proceedings distributed on the conference DVD. Submitted papers must comply with the ICCV style and length requirements (up to 8 pages). 4DMOD reviewing is double blind, all papers should follow the usual guidelines for preservation of anonymity.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: July 1st 2011

Notification of Acceptance: August 1st 2011

Final camera-ready paper submission: September 1st 2011

Workshop date: November 13th 2011

Workshop and Challenge on Robust activity recognition

Call for Participation

Robust machine learning techniques for human activity recognition
A full day workshop at the IEEE conf on Systems, Man and Cybernetics 2011
October 9-12, Anchorage, USA
http://www.opportunity-project.eu/workshopSMC
——————————————————–

Human activity recognition can be used to devise assistants that
provide proactive support by exploiting the knowledge of the user’s
context, determined from sensors located on-body. The design and
development of these systems pose important challenges to the machine
learning community as they typically involve high-dimensional,
multimodal streams of data characterised by a large variability; where
data portions may be missing or labels can be unreliable.

Notwithstanding the large amount of research endeavours aimed at
tackling these issues, the comparison of different approaches is often
not possible due to the lack of common benchmarking tools and datasets
that allow for replicable and fair testing procedures across several
research groups. The aim of this workshop is to discuss and compare
different methods for robust activity recognition, as well as putting
forward the need for common resources for such comparison. To promote
such comparison, the workshop is associated to an activity recognition
challenge (see below) where contributed methods will be evaluated on a
public
benchmark database of daily activities recorded using a multimodal
network of on-body sensors.

Invited Speakers
——————
Prof. Dr. Paul Lukowicz, Universität Passau
Dr. Thomas Ploetz, Newcastle University

Important dates
—————
June 28, 2011: Submission deadline
July 1, 2011: Acceptance/rejection notification
July 5, 2011: Camera ready due
October 9, 2011: Workshop

Contact: activityrecognition.challenge(at)gmail.com

————————————————————
————————————————————
Activity recognition Challenge
http://www.opportunity-project.eu/challenge

As mentioned above, there are established benchmarking problems for
activity recognition. We intend to address this issue by setting up a
challenge on activity recognition addressing key questions in
activity recognition such as classification based on multimodal
recordings, activity spotting and robustness to noise. To this end we
provide a benchmark database of daily activities recorded in a sensor
rich environment.

Prizes will be awarded to participants that achieve the best
performance, and the overall lessons and results obtained from this
challenge will be presented at the associated workshop at the IEEE
Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics 2011. Moreover, we are
currently arranging the future publication of selected contributions in
a top journal in the field.

Challenge description: http://www.opportunity-project.eu/challenge

Contact: activityrecognition.challenge(at)gmail.com

Important dates
—————
September 9, 2011: Final submission date
October 9, 2011: Final results and conclusions presented at the SMC workshop

Organisers
———-
Ricardo Chavarriaga, EPFL, Switzerland
Daniel Roggen, ETHZ, Switzerland
Alois Ferscha, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria
Paul Lukowicz, U. Passau, Germany

—————————————-
FP7 FET-Open EU project OPPORTUNITY
Activity and Context Recognition with
Opportunistic Sensor Configurations
http://www.opportunity-project.eu

2nd CFP for ECML PKDD 2011 workshops and co-located events

ECML PKDD 2011 WORKSHOPS
CALL FOR PAPERS
http://www.ecmlpkdd2011.org/workshops.php
Athens, Greece, September 5 and 9, 2011

The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of
Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD) will take place in Athens,
Greece from September 5th to 9th, 2011.
The combined event will comprise a wide program of workshops, to be held on
Monday and Friday, September 5 and 9, immediately preceding and following
the main ECML PKDD 2011 conference.

——————————–
Workshop NEMO
——————————–
Finding patterns of human behaviors in NEtworks and MObility data

http://kdd.isti.cnr.it/nemo/

Chairs
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, – CCNR, Northeastern University, USA
Michele Berlingerio,KDD Lab, ISTI-CNR Pisa, Italy
Dino Pedreschi, KDD Lab, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Pisa,
Italy
Dashun Wang, CCNR, Northeastern University, USA

Sponsor and Award Chair
Mirco Nanni, KDD Lab, ISTI-CNR Pisa, Italy

Contact e-mails
michele.berlingerio(at)isti.cnr.it
dashunwang(at)gmail.com

——————————–
Workshop DMLG
——————————–
Machine Learning and Data Mining in and around Games

http://www-kd.iai.uni-bonn.de/dmlg11/

Chairs
Tom Croonenborghs, Katholieke Hogeschool Kempen
Kurt Driessens, Maastricht University
Olana Missura, University of Bonn, Fraunhofer IAIS

Contact e-mail
dmlg2011(at)iais.fraunhofer.de

——————————–
Workshop PlanSoKD
——————————–
Planning to Learn and Service-Oriented Knowledge Discovery

http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/events/plansokd2011/

Chairs
Jorg-Uwe Kietz, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Simon Fischer, Rapid-I, Germany
Nada Lavrac, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Vid Podpecan, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia

Contact e-mail
juk(at)ifi.uzh.ch

——————————–
Workshop MultiClust
——————————–
Discovering, Summarizing and Using Multiple Clusterings

http://dme.rwth-aachen.de/en/MultiClust2011

Chairs
Emmanuel Muller, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

Stephan Gunnemann, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
Ira Assent, Aarhus University, Arhus, Denmark
Thomas Seidl, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

Contact e-mails
emmanuel.mueller(at)kit.edu
guennemann(at)cs.rwth-aachen.de
ira(at)cs.au.dk
seidl(at)cs.rwth-aachen.de

——————————–
Workshop ISEW
——————————–
Intelligent Techniques in Software Engineering

http://sweng.csd.auth.gr/~isew11/

Chairs
Ioannis Stamelos, Department of Informatics, Aristotle University,
Thessaloniki, Greece
Stamatia Bibi, Department of Informatics, Aristotle University,
Thessaloniki, Greece

Contact e-mails
stamelos(at)csd.auth.gr
sbibi(at)csd.auth.gr

——————————–
Workshop CoLISD
——————————–
Collective Learning and Inference on Structured Data

http://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/CoLISD/CoLISD.html

Chairs
Balaraman Ravindran, Department of CSE, IIT Madras, Chennai, India
Kristian Kersting, Department of Knowledge Discovery, Fraunhofer IAIS,
Germany
Sriraam Natarajan, Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, Winston
Salem, NC
Indrajit Bhattacharya, Department Dept of CSA, Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, India
S. Shivashankar, Department of CSE, IIT Madras, Chennai, India

Contact e-mail
ecml.colisd.chairs(at)gmail.com

——————————–
Workshop DM-FGP
——————————–
Data Mining in Functional Genomics and Proteomics: Current Trends and Future
Directions

http://cajalbbp.cesvima.upm.es/ecmlpkdd11

Chairs
Prof. J.M. Pena UPM, Spain
Dr. A. Fazel Famili NRC, Canada

Contact emails
Fazel.Famili(at)nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
jmpena(at)fi.upm.es

——————————–
Workshop MUSE
——————————–
Mining Ubiquitous and Social Environments

http://www.kde.cs.uni-kassel.de/ws/muse2011/

Chairs
Martin Atzmueller, Knowledge and Data Engineering Group, University of
Kassel, Germany
Andreas Hotho, Data Mining and Information Retrieval Group, University of
Wuerzburg, Germany

Contact e-mails
atzmueller(at)cs.uni-kassel.de
hotho(at)informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de

——————————–
Workshop KD-HCM
——————————–
Knowledge Discovery in Health Care and Medicine

http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~hrangwal/kd-hcm/

Chairs
Huzefa Rangwala, George Mason University, USA.
Andrea Tagarelli, University of Calabria, Italia.
Nikil Wale, Pfizer, USA.
George Karypis, University of Minnesota, USA.

Contact e-mail
kdhcmchairs2011(at)gmail.com

——————————–
Joint ECML/PKDD – PASCAL Workshop LSHC2
——————————–
Large-Scale Hierarchical Classification

http://lshtc.iit.demokritos.gr:10000/

Chairs
George Paliouras, NCSR “Demokritos”, Athens, Greece
Eric Gaussier, LIG, Grenoble, France
Aris Kosmopoulos, NCSR “Demokritos” & AUEB, Athens, Greece
Ion Androutsopoulos, AUEB, Athens, Greece
Thierry Artières, LIP6, Paris, France
Patrick Gallinari, LIP6, Paris, France

Contact e-mail
lshtc_info(at)iit.demokritos.gr

——————————–
Workshop MIND
——————————–
Mining Complex Entities from Network and Biomedical Data

http://www.di.uniba.it/~loglisci/MIND2011/

Chairs
Stefano Ferilli, Department of Computer Science, University of Bari, Italy
Corrado Loglisci, Department of Computer Science, University of Bari, Italy
Michael Schroeder, Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC), Technical University of
Dresden (TUD), Germany
George Tsatsaronis, Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC), Technical University of
Dresden (TUD), Germany
Iraklis Varlamis, Department of Informatics and Telematics, Harokopio
University of Athens (HUA), Greece

Contact e-mails
ferilli(at)di.uniba.it
loglisci(at)di.uniba.it
ms(at)biotec.tu-dresden.de
george.tsatsaronis(at)biotec.tu-dresden.de
varlamis(at)gmail.com

CFP: 9th European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL), co-located with ECML-PKDD 2011

***

9th European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL-9)
– co-located with ECML PKDD 2011
– submission deadline: June 10, 2011

http://ewrl.wordpress.com/ewrl9-2011/

***

Call For Papers:

The 9th European workshop on reinforcement learning (EWRL-9)
invites reinforcement learning researchers to participate in
the revival of this world class event. We plan to make this an
exciting event for researchers worldwide, not only for the
presentation of top quality papers, but also as a forum for
discussion of open problems and future research directions.

We are calling for papers from the entire reinforcement
learning spectrum, with the option of either 3 page position
papers (on which open discussion will be held) or longer 12
page LNAI format research papers. We encourage a range of
submissions to encourage broad discussion.

Proceedings of this workshop will be published by Springer in the
LNAI (LNCS) series.

Double submissions are allowed, however in the event that an EWRL
paper is accepted to another conference proceedings or journal,
copyright restrictions prevent it from being reprinted in the official
EWRL Springer LNCS proceedings. The paper would still be considered,
however, for acceptance and presentation at EWRL.

We will offer at least one best paper prize of Euro 500.

We encourage submissions from a range of sub-topics including
(but not limited to):

* Exploration/Exploitation in RL
* (Function) approximation in RL
* Knowledge Representation in RL
* Theoretical aspects of RL
* Policy search and policy gradient methods
* Multiagent RL
* Empirical evaluations in RL
* Kernel methods for RL
* Partially observable (PO) RL
* Bayesian RL

PASCAL2 Invited Keynote Speakers:

* Peter Auer – University of Leoben
* Kristian Kersting – Fraunhofer IAIS, University of Bonn
* Peter Stone (Tentative) – University Of Texas, Austin
* Csaba Szepesvari – University Of Alberta

Submission details:

* Deadline: June 10, 2011
* Page limit: 3 pages for position papers; 12 pages for regular papers
* Springer LNAI format: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
* Submission site: http://ewrl.wordpress.com/ewrl9-2011/paper-submissions/

Cheers,
Scott Sanner, Marcus Hutter, Matt Robards, and Peter Sunehag (Organizers)

EWRL-9 gratefully acknowledges the support of the Australian National
University (ANU), NICTA, and the PASCAL2 network.

Two Chairs of Statistics at UCL

The Department of Statistical Science at UCL is currently undergoing a
programme of expansion. As part of this expansion the Department invites
applications for two Chairs of Statistics from candidates with outstanding
research records of international excellence. The two appointees will be
expected to provide research leadership as well as to contribute to the
Department’s undergraduate and postgraduate teaching programmes. An
initial task will be to provide input into the recruitment of two new
lecturers. More experienced candidates may be considered for the future
Headship of the Department.

The successful candidates will have internationally recognised track
records of research and will be able to contribute to the strong research
profile of the Department. They are expected to have continuing track
records of external research grant funding and doctoral research
supervision, experience of teaching at undergraduate or postgraduate level
and excellent interpersonal, oral and written communication skills.

Both posts are available from 1 October 2011. Salary is negotiable on the
professorial scale but will not be less than £61,960 per annum inclusive
of London Allowance. Provision of an additional market supplement on top
of the basic salary is currently under review.

Further particulars including a job description, person specification and
details of how to apply can be accessed at
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/statistics/department/jobs. Informal enquiries may be
addressed to Professor Valerie Isham, Head of Department, tel.
+44(0)20-7679-1868, email valerie(at)stats.ucl.ac.uk.

We particularly welcome female applicants and those from an ethnic
minority, as they are currently under-represented within UCL at this
level.

Closing date: 26 June 2011

Interviews date: interviews to be held in July 2011