CFP – 6th IAPR Conference on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics

6th IAPR Conference on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics
November 2-4 2011, Delft, The Netherlands

Website: http://prib2011.tudelft.nl/

CALL FOR PAPERS

• Paper submission June 19, 2011

In modern biology, high-throughput measurement devices allow scientists
to gather data at unprecedented rates. To make sense of this data,
computational biologists and system biologists construct quantitative
models, many of which depend on pattern recognition techniques. Their
application is challenging due to the large volumes of data and
background information, noisy measurements and target outputs, highly
diverse data types etc.

The Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics conference series aims to
bring together researchers, practitioners and students from around the
world to present and discuss recent developments and applications of
pattern recognition methods in current bioinformatics, computational
biology and systems biology. Authors are invited to submit full papers
in relevant research areas, which include but are not limited to:
• Bio-sequence analysis
• Gene and protein expression analysis
• Biomarker discovery
• Protein structure and interaction prediction
• Motifs and signal detection
• Metabolic modelling and analysis
• Systems and synthetic biology
• Pathway and network analysis
• Immuno- and chemo-informatics
• Evolution and phylogeny
• Bio-imaging
• Biological databases, integration and visualisation
Pattern recognition techniques of interest include:
• Statistical, syntactic and structural pattern recognition
• Datamining and data-based modeling
• Evolutionary computation
• Bayesian networks and graphical models
• Neural networks and fuzzy systems

SUBMISSION, PUBLICATION AND GRANTS

Papers should be submitted electronically through the conference
website. We will work with Springer to publish accepted papers in its
Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics series (LNBI). A limited number of Ph.D.
student travel grants will be made available; please keep an eye on the
website for more information.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Paper submission June 19, 2011
• Author notification July 25, 2011
• Camera-ready paper August 24, 2011
• Poster abstract submission October 2, 2011

COLT 2011 Call for Participation

The 24rd Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2011) will take
place in Budapest, Hungary, July 9-11, 2011. It will be co-located
with the Foundations of Computational Mathematics conference
(July 4-14, with the LearningTheory@FoCM’11 workshop scheduled for
July 12-14). The invited speakers are William Freeman (MIT) and
David Hand (Imperial College). A list of the accepted papers can be
viewed at http://colt2011.sztaki.hu/accepted_papers.html.

Registration is open at http://colt2011.sztaki.hu/registration.html.
Some deadlines are very soon: the early registration deadline is
May 20, and it is recommended that hotel rooms be booked by May 11.

Also, the deadline for open problem submissions has been extended
to May 11. See http://colt2011.sztaki.hu/cfop.html for details.

8 Research Positions in Speech Synthesis and Speech Recognition

NATURAL SPEECH TECHNOLOGY
http://www.natural-speech-technology.org

Centre for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh Speech Research Group, University of Cambridge Speech and Hearing Group, University of Sheffield

Natural Speech Technology (NST) is an EPSRC Programme Grant, involving the Universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Sheffield. Its objective is to significantly advance the state-of-the-art in speech technology by making it more natural, approaching human levels of reliability, adaptability and conversational richness. NST starts in May 2011, and has a duration of 5 years.

8 research posts in speech recognition and speech synthesis are available on the project.

The overall aim of NST is to develop new speech technologies and theoretical frameworks which are adaptable, personalised, and expressive. These technologies will be closely linked to exemplar applications and the needs of the project User Group. We have four main technical objectives:

1. Learning and Adaptation: Models and algorithms for synthesis and recognition that can learn from continuous streams of data, can compactly represent and adapt to new scenarios and speaking styles, and seamlessly adapt to new situations and contexts almost instantaneously.

2. Natural Transcription: Speech recognisers that can detect “who spoke what, when, and how” in any acoustic environment and for any task domain.

3. Natural Synthesis: Controllable speech synthesisers that automatically learn from data, and are capable of generating the full expressive diversity of natural speech.

4. Exemplar Applications: Deployment of these advances in novel applications, with an emphasis on the health/social domain, personal listeners, and the needs of the User Group stakeholders.

The available positions are listed below, and at http://www.natural-speech-technology.org/jobs.html

To apply: For each position for which you wish to be considered, please apply to the host university using the corresponding web link in the list below (which also gives further information about the position). In addition, please also send an email including which jobs you are applying for and containing your CV as an attachment to:

Closing date: 10 June 2011

AVAILABLE POSITIONS:

1. University of Edinburgh. Science Manager in Speech Technology.

http://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk/vacancies/index.cfm?fuseaction=vacancies.detail&vacancy_ref=3014291

Reporting to the Programme Director, Prof Steve Renals, the Science Manager will ensure synchronisation, motivation and communications between the individual projects that make up the NST Programme Grant, and will also be responsible for developing and maintaining the interactions with the User Group. The Science Manager will work closely with lead researchers of each individual project, ensuring results are communicated across the consortium, and building liaisons with any User Group members for whom the project has relevance.

In addition, the Science Manager is expected to take a leading research role in one or more the individual projects in NST, working on statistical parametric speech synthesis and/or large vocabulary speech recognition.

The successful candidate should have or a PhD in speech processing, computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, engineering, mathematics, or a related discipline. He or she must have excellent programming skills, a background in statistical modelling using Hidden Markov Models, research experience in speech recognition and/or speech synthesis, and a strong publications record in international journals and conferences. He or she will also have experience and evidence of effective independent contribution to collaborative research teams. More broadly, he or she will have a demonstrated ability to lead, design and complete research projects, to solve problems independently and make original contributions to research.

Informal inquiries can be made by email to Prof Steve Renals (s.renals@ed.ac.uk) or Prof Simon King (Simon.King(at)ed.ac.uk)

This post is fixed-term for 2 years, with the possibility of extension.

2. University of Edinburgh. Postdoctoral Research Associate in Speech Synthesis.

http://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk/vacancies/index.cfm?fuseaction=vacancies.detail&vacancy_ref=3014313

This position is concerned with research in statistical parametric speech synthesis. The work will have a particular focus on the development of structured acoustic models which take account of factors such as accent and speaking style, and on the development of machine learning techniques for vocoding. You will have (or be near completion of) a PhD in speech processing, computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, engineering, mathematics, or a related discipline. You will have the necessary programming ability to conduct research in this area, a background in statistical modelling using Hidden Markov Models, speech signal processing, and research experience in speech synthesis.

A background in one or more of the following areas is also desirable: statistical parametric text-to-speech synthesis using HMMs and HSMMs; glottal source modelling; speech signal modelling; speaker adaptation using the MLLR or MAP family of techniques; familiarity with software tools including HTK, HTS, Festival; and familiarity with modern machine learning.

Informal inquiries can be made by email to Prof Steve Renals (s.renals@ed.ac.uk) or Prof Simon King (Simon.King(at)ed.ac.uk)

This post is fixed-term for 2 years, with the possibility of extension.

3. University of Edinburgh. Postdoctoral Research Associate in Speech Recognition.

http://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk/vacancies/index.cfm?fuseaction=vacancies.detail&vacancy_ref=3014315

This position is concerned with research in large vocabulary speech recognition, with a focus on models and algorithms that enable coverage of a wide set of domains. The work will have a particular focus on acoustic model structures factored in terms of acoustic environment, channel condition, band- width, speaker, and speaker style, and on factorised model building that can include supervised and unsupervised sources. You will have (or be near completion of) a PhD in speech processing, computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, engineering, mathematics, or a related discipline. You will have the necessary programming ability to conduct research in this area, a background in statistical modelling using Hidden Markov Models and research experience in speech recognition.

A background in one or more of the following areas is also desirable: subspace Gaussian mixture models; joint factor analysis; speaker adaptation using the MLLR or MAP family of techniques; familiarity with software tools including HTK and Kaldi; experience of the design, construction and evaluation of large vocabulary speech recognition systems; distant speech recognition; and multilingual acoustic modelling.

Informal inquiries can be made by email to Prof Steve Renals (s.renals@ed.ac.uk) or Prof Simon King (Simon.King(at)ed.ac.uk)

This post is fixed-term for 2 years, with the possibility of extension.

4. University of Sheffield. Senior Research Fellow in Speech Transcription.

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ACP385/senior-research-fellow-in-natural-speech-technology-speech-transcription/

You will work on the Natural Transcription theme, addressing wide domain coverage, environment models and canonical acoustic models. Wide domain coverage in speech transcription is concerned with addressing the poor generalisation of recognition systems to new domains. Environment modelling means the automatic learning of acoustic scenarios for the benefit of improved far field recognition performance. Both of these rely on improved adaptability in recognition systems, addressed by the project on canonical acoustic modelling. You are required to work well in research teams and actively contribute to research advancement of the NST programme, the SpandH research group and the Department of Computer Science. All team members are expected to publish or contribute to publication in international conferences and journals at the forefront of the field.

Applicants should have a PhD (or have equivalent experience) in a related subject area. Solid knowledge of Unix type operating systems and programming in C/C++ is required. Applicants should have experience in one or more of the following areas: Acoustic modelling for automatic speech recognition, language modelling for automatic speech recognition, statistical pattern processing and the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK). Applicants are required to have an excellent track record in research of speech recognition and/or machine learning topics. Experience in research management is essential for this position as candidates are expected to take a leading role in site scientific management.

Informal inquiries can be made by email to Dr Thomas Hain (t.hain@dcs.shef.ac.uk) or Prof Phil Green (p.green(at)dcs.shef.ac.uk).

This post is fixed-term for 2 years, with the possibility of extension.

5. University of Sheffield. Research Associate in Speech Transcription

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ACP392/research-associate-in-natural-speech-technology-speech-transcription/

You will be expected to work on NST projects on wide domain coverage, environment models and canonical acoustic models. Wide domain coverage in speech transcription is concerned with addressing the poor generalisation of recognition systems to new domains. Environment modelling means the automatic learning of acoustic scenarios for the benefit of improved far field recognition performance. Both of these rely on improved adaptability in recognition systems, addressed by the project on canonical acoustic modelling.

Applicants should have a PhD (or have equivalent experience) in a related subject area. Solid knowledge of Unix type operating systems and programming in C/C++ is required. Applicants should have experience in one or more of the following areas: Acoustic modelling for automatic speech recognition, language modelling for automatic speech recognition, statistical pattern processing and the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK). Applicants are required to have a good track record in research of speech recognition and/or machine learning topics demonstrated by publications in international journals and conferences. Candidates are required to work well in research teams and actively contribute to research advancement of the NST programme, the SpandH research group and the Department of Computer Science. All team members are expected to publish or contribute to publication in international conferences and journals at the forefront of the field.

Informal inquiries can be made by email to Dr Thomas Hain (t.hain@dcs.shef.ac.uk) or Prof Phil Green (p.green(at)dcs.shef.ac.uk).

This post is fixed-term for 2 years, with the possibility of extension.

6. University of Sheffield. Research Associate in Clinical Applications of Speech Technology.

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ACP387/research-associate-in-natural-speech-technology-clinical-applications/

You will work on the NST project homeService, which will develop personalised, adaptive speech technology allowing users (who may be disabled and may have speech disorders) to interact with environmental control systems and home monitoring devices. The goals are to help people who cannot use conventional (keyboard/ mouse/screen) interfaces, people who prefer not to use such interfaces, in circumstances where conventional interfaces are impractical and for people who cannot communicate with others verbally, because their speech is disordered or they cannot speak at all. To meet these challenges our overarching goal is spoken language technology which adapts to the voice and the needs of an individual, a “personal adaptive listener”.

Applicants should have a PhD (or have equivalent experience) in a related subject area. Solid knowledge of Unix type operating systems and programming in C/C++ is required. Applicants should have experience in one or more of the following areas: Acoustic modelling for automatic speech recognition, language modelling for automatic speech recognition, statistical pattern processing and the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK). Applicants are required to have a track record in research of speech recognition, but must also demonstrate ‘user-facing’ skills, since homeService will be based on a longitudinal study in which NST technology will be deployed in user’s homes. Candidates are required to work well in research teams and actively contribute to research advancement of the NST programme, the SpandH research group and the Department of Computer Science. All team members are expected to publish or contribute to publication in international conferences and journals at the forefr!
ont of the field.

Informal inquiries can be made by email to Prof Phil Green (p.green@dcs.shef.ac.uk) or Dr Thomas Hain (t.hain(at)dcs.shef.ac.uk).

This post is fixed-term for 3 years, with the possibility of extension.

7. University of Cambridge. Two Research Associates in Speech Technology.

http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/hr/jobs/vacancies.cgi?job=8189&wantsFull=1&adv=1

Two positions for Research Associates will be available to work on NST at Cambridge. The five year programme is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the Universities of Edinburgh and Sheffield. It aims to significantly improve the state-of-the-art in large vocabulary speech recognition and speech synthesis. Appointments will be made for up to two years with the possibility of extension.

Applicants must have a very good first degree in a relevant discipline and would normally have a PhD degree in an area related to speech technology. It is expected that candidates will have a good knowledge of software tools including HTK and HTS. A good knowledge of C/C++ is required. In addition, experience in one or more of the following technical areas is necessary: machine learning; acoustic modelling techniques including methods for training and adaptation; HMM-based speech synthesis; language modelling for large vocabulary speech recognition.

Informal inquiries can be made by email to Prof Phil Woodland (pcw(at)eng.cam.ac.uk), Dr Mark Gales (mjfg(at)eng.cam.ac.uk), or Dr Bill Byrne (bill.byrne(at)eng.cam.ac.uk).

This post is fixed-term for 2 years, with the possibility of extension.

ICML 2011 – Call for Participation

The 28th International Conference on Machine Learning
Bellevue, WA, USA
June 28 – July 02, 2011

http://www.icml-2011.org

Early registration deadline: May 24, 2011

Registration: http://www.icml-2011.org/register.php
Hotel Room Reservation: http://www.icml-2011.org/venue.php

Accepted Papers: http://www.icml-2011.org/papers.php
Workshops: http://www.icml-2011.org/workshops.php
Tutorials: http://www.icml-2011.org/tutorials.php

The 28th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) will be held in
Bellevue, WA, USA, June 28 to July 02, 2011. ICML is the premier international
forum for machine learning researchers and practitioners from
academia, industry,
and government to share their ideas, research results and experiences.
The conference will include three days of technical presentations,
one day of tutorials, and one day of workshops. In addition, on June 27, 2011,
the conference will feature a symposium on “Machine Learning in Speech
and Language Processing”,
organized jointly with the Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the International Speech Communication
Association (ISCA).

A banquet, outdoor social events, and a professional Women in Machine
Learning (WiML)
meeting will be organized in conjunction with the conference.

[PAPERS]

The conference will feature 152 technical papers. In addition to oral
presentations,
all papers will be showcased during evening poster sessions. A full listing
of accepted papers is available at:
http://www.icml-2011.org/papers.php

[INVITED SPEAKERS]

* Christopher Bishop, Microsoft Research Cambridge
* Hartmut Neven, Google
* Martin Nowak, Harvard University
* David Ferucci, IBM Research

[WORKSHOPS]

* Structured Sparsity: Learning and Inference
* New Developments in Imitation Learning
* Combining Strategies for Reducing the Label Cost
* Learning Architectures, Representations, and Optimization for Speech
and Visual Information Processing
* Online Trading of Exploration and Exploitation 2
* Planning and Acting with Uncertain Models
* Learning from Unstructured Clinical Text
* Machine Learning for Global Challenges
* Unsupervised and Transfer Learning

[TUTORIALS]

* Introduction to Bandits: Algorithms and Theory
* Machine Learning for Large Scale Recommender Systems
* Collective Intelligence and Machine Learning
* Learning Kernels
* Machine Learning in Ecological Science and Environmental Policy
* Machine Learning and Robotics

[LODGING / CONFERENCE VENUE]

The conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue.
For the discounted ICML conference rate, book your hotel room at:
http://www.icml-2011.org/venue.php

[REGISTRATION]

Register early for discounted conference rates:
http://www.icml-2011.org/register.php

We hope to see you in Bellevue!

[ORGANIZING COMMITTEE]

General Chair:
Zoubin Ghahramani, University of Cambridge

Program Chairs:
Lise Getoor, University of Maryland, College Park
Tobias Scheffer, University of Potsdam

Local Arrangements Chairs:
Dragos Margineantu, Boeing Research & Technology
Tomas Singliar, Boeing Research & Technology

Workshop Chairs:
Jerry Zhu, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Katherine Heller, University of Cambridge

Tutorial Chairs:
Francis Bach, INRIA
Ulf Brefeld, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona

Publicity Chair:
Prem Melville, IBM Research

Funding Chairs:
Alan Fern, Oregon State University
Hal Daumé III, University of Maryland, College Park

Scholarship Chair:
Jesse Davis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Volunteers & Registration Chair:
Jim Schimert, Boeing Research & Technology

Publication Chairs:
Hal Daumé III, University of Maryland, College Park
Kilian Weinberger, Washington University, St. Louis

Joint ICML/ACL/ISCA Symposium Chairs:
Dan Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Hal Daumé III, University of Maryland, College Park
Geoff Zweig, Microsoft Research
Joseph Keshet, Toyota Technological Institute, Chicago

Call for participation: WSOM 2011, 8th Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps

13 – 15 June 2011, Espoo, Finland
Aalto University School of Science and
Dipoli Conference Center

Website: http://www.cis.hut.fi/wsom2011

GENERAL INFORMATION

WSOM 2011 will bring together researchers and practitioners in the
field of self-organizing systems, with a particular emphasis on the
self-organizing maps. It will highlight key advances in these and
closely related fields. WSOM 2011 is the eighth conference in a
series of bi-annual international conferences started with WSOM’97
in Helsinki.

The event will be co-located with the ICANN 2011 conference that
will be organized from 14th to 17th of June, 2011. Conference
programmes, registrations and fees will be coordinated.

VENUE

WSOM 2011 will take place at the Aalto University School of Science
(former Helsinki University of Technology) and Dipoli Conference
Center. They are located in Espoo, in the close vicinity of the
Helsinki capital area. The area is one of the ICT research and
development hot spots in Europe as well as known for its beautiful
and easily accessible nature. The time of the year is particularly
suitable for visiting Finland.

PLENARY SPEAKERS

Barbara Hammer, Bielefeld University:
Topographic Mapping of Dissimilarity Data

Teuvo Kohonen, Academy of Finland:
Contextually Self-Organized Maps of Chinese Words

PROGRAM

WSOM 2011 features 36 oral or poster presentations. The full
program is available at http://www.cis.hut.fi/wsom2011 .

ORGANIZERS

* Honorary chair
Teuvo KOHONEN
Academy of Finland
* General chair
Timo HONKELA
Aalto University School of Science
* Program chair
Jorma LAAKSONEN
Aalto University School of Science
* Local chair
Olli SIMULA
Aalto University School of Science
* Publicity chair
Jaakko PELTONEN
Aalto University School of Science

STEERING COMMITTEE

* Teuvo KOHONEN
* Marie COTTRELL
* Pablo ESTEVEZ
* Timo HONKELA
* Erkki OJA
* Jose PRINCIPE
* Helge RITTER
* Takeshi YAMAKAWA
* Hujun YIN

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

* Guilherme BARRETO
* Yoonsuck CHOE
* Jean-Claude FORT
* Tetsuo FURUKAWA
* Colin FYFE
* Barbara HAMMER
* Samuel KASKI
* Krista LAGUS
* Amaury LENDASSE
* Ping LI
* Thomas MARTINETZ
* Risto MIIKKULAINEN
* Klaus OBERMAYER
* Jaakko PELTONEN
* Marina RESTA
* Udo SEIFFERT
* Olli SIMULA
* Kadim TASDEMIR
* Heizo TOKUTAKA
* Carme TORRAS
* Alfred ULTSCH
* Marc VAN HULLE
* Michel VERLEYSEN
* Thomas VILLMANN
* Lei XU

REGISTRATION

Registration for WSOM 2011 is now open! The on-line registration
is available at http://www.cis.hut.fi/wsom2011 .

In addition to WSOM registration, joint registration to both WSOM
2011 and ICANN 2011 is available. See http://www.cis.hut.fi/wsom2011
for the full range of registration options and prices.

ACCOMMODATION

The closest hotel is Radisson Blu Hotel Espoo, located next to the
workshop venue. See http://www.cis.hut.fi/wsom2011 for accommodation
details.

====== See http://www.cis.hut.fi/wsom2011 for more details! =======

Call for postdoctoral researchers at HIIT, Helsinki (deadline 13 May 2011)

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT conducts basic and
strategic research on information technology. It is a joint research
institute of the Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. HIIT
is a leading IT institute with research ranging from fundamental
methods and technologies to novel applications and their impact on
other sciences, people and society. HIIT’s key competences are in
analysis of large sets of data, probabilistic modeling of complex
phenomena, Internet architecture and technologies, mobile and
human-centric computing, and user-created media.

HIIT now calls for applications for postdoctoral researchers. The
positions will be filled for three years maximum, starting 1 August
2011, or as agreed.

The postdoctoral researchers will undertake research work, teaching
and student supervision in some of HIIT’s research areas, but
preferably providing an extension to the competences presently
available in HIIT. Each postdoc will belong to one or more HIIT
research groups, and be mentored by one or more group leaders /
PI’s. See www.hiit.fi/research

This time, we are searching for postdocs for the following fields:

* We are launching a new focus area for which we are looking for
people in particular working in large-scale computational and
probabilistic modelling, with applications in Text analysis and
recommendations, Context-awareness and user modeling, or Biological
data integration, modelling, and bioinformatics. People involved
include: Antti Oulasvirta and Antti Honkela (contact persons;
firstname.lastname@hiit.fi), Giulio Jacucci, Samuel Kaski and Petri
Myllymäki.

* Brain signal analysis (contact persons: Aapo Hyvärinen, Samuel
Kaski; firstname.lastname@helsinki.fi)

* Computational creativity (contact person Hannu Toivonen,
firstname.lastname@cs.helsinki.fi).

* Excellent applicants in other fields of HIIT are welcome as well
(contact persons: research group leaders and HIIT research programme
directors: http://www.hiit.fi/programmes)

The applications should include:
– A research statement, including preferences on HIIT groups
and topics, and outlining proposed research (at most 3 pages)
– Curriculum vitae
– List of publications with links to pdf-versions of the three
most relevant publications
– Degree certificate of the PhD degree. In case the doctoral
degree is still pending, an up-to-date study transcript and a
plan for completion of the degree should be provided. The
doctoral degree should be completed during 2011.
– Two letters of reference, or email addresses of two senior
academics willing to provide more information.

Deadline: Friday 13 May 2011.

The applications should be submitted using a web form at
https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/25442/lomake.html
The research statement, CV, list of publications and degree
information should be attached in pdf.

The salary for beginning postdoctoral researchers is usually about
3000-3600 euro / month, and for more experienced researchers up to
about 4300 euro / month. The contract includes occupational health and
social security benefits.

The applicants will be informed about the decisions as soon as
possible, at the latest in the end of June 2011.

Contact persons in HIIT for practical information:
Institute secretary Päivi Kuuppelomäki kuuppelo at cs.helsinki.fi,
Research Coordinator Ella Bingham, ella.bingham at hiit.fi (please use
both addresses)
Contact persons in HIIT for scientific information:
The respective research group leaders and HIIT research programme
directors: http://www.hiit.fi/programmes

Research scientist / Engineer in data analysis for the healthcare domain at the Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE), Grenoble, France

Full details at
http://www.xrce.xerox.com/About-XRCE/Career-opportunities/Research-scientist-engineer-in-healthcare-data-analysis

PhD Vacancy at UCL

PhD Studentship at University College London (3.5 years, UK/EU students only)
Title: Synthesizing and Editing Photo-realistic Visual Objects

Project:

Current computer graphics techniques allow us to render almost any object at near photo-realistic quality. However, the standard approach necessitates that the user painstakingly specifies all aspects of the geometric and material properties of the object. This is time-consuming and needs skilled human operators. In this project we will investigate a radically different pipeline for computer graphics that will allow non-experts to rapidly create and edit photo-realistic two-dimensional images of objects. The core idea is to treat an image as a structured collection of fragments of other objects. Based on knowledge of such structured collections (e.g., a face has two eyes above a nose, which is above a mouth, and so forth), we want to create new images by piecing together fragments of library examples. This project is a unique opportunity to learn more about computer graphics and computer vision, and at the same time make a real impact.

We are looking for someone who has:

– A first-class BSc/MSc degree in Computer Science

– Programming experience (C++ and/or Matlab)

– Exposure to computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning

– Previous working experience in a laboratory setting

– Excellent communication skills (oral and reading/writing of papers)

– Ability and willingness to acquire new skills

How to apply:

Applications received by May 24th will receive priority consideration, and are evaluated on a rolling basis. Please send an initial informal inquiry to the prospective supervisor (j.kautz at cs.ucl.ac.uk), citing ‘photo-real objects’ in the subject and outlining your interest and experience. Please include your CV and contact details of two academic referees. Actual applications should then be submitted through UCL (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/prospective- students/graduate-study/index/graduate-study/application-admission), specifying Computer Science as the department and “Jan Kautz” as the supervisor.

Start date: Late September 2011

Eligibility requirements:

The project is funded by EPSRC. Standard eligibility requirements hold, i.e., the candidate must be a UK or European citizen.

EACL 2012 call for papers

EACL 2012
Thirteenth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for
Computational Linguistics
Avignon, France
April 23-27, 2012
http://eacl2012.org

First Call For Papers

Submission deadline: November 4, 2011

EACL 2012 is the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics. The conference invites the
submission of papers on substantial, original, and unpublished
research on all areas of computational linguistics, broadly conceived
to include disciplines such as psycholinguistics, speech, information
retrieval, multimodal language processing. The conference welcomes
theoretical, empirical, and application-orientated papers as well as
papers targeting emerging domains such as bioinformatics and social
media.

The list of topics includes, but is not limited to:

– phonetics, phonology, and morphology
– word segmentation, tagging and chunking
– syntax, parsing, grammar formalisms, and grammar induction
– semantics
– pragmatics, discourse, and dialogue
– generation and summarization
– information retrieval and question answering
– information extraction
– sentiment analysis and opinion mining
– machine translation and multilingual systems
– spoken language processing and language modeling
– dialogue systems and multimodal systems
– language resources and tools
– psychological and mathematical models of language and language acquisition
– machine learning and algorithms for natural language
– natural language processing applications
– domain and genre adaptation of data-driven NLP systems
– evaluation methodology

Important Dates
—————

Paper submission deadline: November 4, 2011
Author response period: December 27-30, 2011
Notification of acceptance: January 13, 2012
Camera-ready papers due: March 9, 2012
Papers available on-line: April 19, 2012
EACL 2012 Conference: April 23 – 27, 2012

All deadlines refer to 11:59pm Samoa time (UTC/GMT -11 hours)

Requirements
————

Papers should describe original work; they should emphasize completed
work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state
of completion of the reported results. A paper accepted for
presentation
at EACL 2012 cannot be presented at any other meeting with publicly
available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to
other conferences or workshops must indicate this on the submission
page. If the paper is accepted by both EACL 2012 and another meeting
or publication, it must be withdrawn from one of them. Furthermore,
its authors must notify the program chairs, within a week of receiving
the EACL 2012 acceptance notification, whether or not they have chosen
EACL 2012 for presentation of their work.

Review and Selection
——————–

Reviewing of papers will be double-blind, and all submissions
will receive three independent reviews.
Final decisions on the program will be made by the Program Committee,
consisting of the Program Co-Chairs and Area Chairs.
Submissions will be assessed with respect to appropriateness, clarity,
soundness/correctness, meaningful comparison, originality/innovativeness,
and impact of ideas or results.

Publication and Presentation
—————————-

All papers that are accepted will be published in the proceedings
of the conference, and will be presented orally or as a poster
presentation as determined by the program committee. The decisions
as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster
presentations will be based
on the nature rather than on the quality of the work.
Authors will be also asked on submission to state their preferred
mode of presentation.
EACL 2012 will continue aiming to give poster presentations a high
status.
There will be no distinction in the conference proceedings between
papers that are assigned different presentation modes.

Submission Information
———————-

All submissions must be submitted electronically as PDF and must
follow the two-column format of EACL proceedings. Authors are strongly
recommended to use the style files available on the conference web
site. Papers may consist of up to nine (9) pages of content and any
number of additional pages containing references only.

EACL 2012 will also accept papers accompanied by the resource(s)
(software or data) described in the paper. In addition to the regular
review of the research quality of the paper, these papers will also be
reviewed for the quality of the resource that is being made
available. Acceptance or rejection decision will be made based on the
quality of both the research and the software/data component.

As reviewing will be double-blind, the paper should not include the
authors’ names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that
reveal the author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith,
1991) …”, should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith
previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”. Authors should not use anonymous
citations and should not include any acknowledgments. Papers that do
not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

The deadline for submission is 11:59pm Samoa Time (UTC/GMT -11 hours)
on November 4, 2011. Additional instructions for electronic submission
will be posted on the conference website at http://eacl2012.org

Mentoring service
—————–

EACL is providing a mentoring (coaching) service for authors from
regions of the world where English is less emphasized as a language of
scientific exchange. Many authors from these regions, although able to
read the scientific literature in English, have little or no
experience in writing papers in English for conferences such as the
E/ACL meetings. If you would like to take advantage of the service,
please upload your paper in PDF format by September 23, 2011 using the
paper submission software for the mentoring service which will be
available at the conference website. Questions about the mentoring
service should be referred to

Invited speakers
—————-

TBA

Best paper awards
—————–

TBA

Organization
————

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

Program Co-Chairs:
Mirella Lapata (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Lluis Marquez (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain)

Area Chairs:
TBA

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

Publications Chairs:
Adri de Gispert (University of Cambridge, UK)
Fabrice Lefevre (University of Avignon, France)

Local Chair:
Marc El-Beze (University of Avignon, France)

Local Co-Chair:
Tania Jimenez (University of Avignon, France)

ENS/INRIA Visual Recognition and Machine Learning Summer School – Application deadline extended to May 9, 2011

ENS/INRIA Visual Recognition and Machine Learning Summer School
Paris, France, 25-29 July 2011

http://www.di.ens.fr/willow/events/cvml2011

*** Application deadline EXTENDED to May 9, 2011 ***

OVERVIEW:
The objective of this summer school is to provide an
overview of some of the latest advances in visual recognition
together with the related machine learning algorithms. The summer
school will take place in central Paris at École normale supérieure
(ENS Ulm). The courses will be given by the leading experts in the
field and will be complemented by poster sessions and social
events. A number of affordable student accommodations at the
price 20 Euro/night will be provided at the ENS campus.

Lecturers:
Francis Bach (INRIA/ENS)
Léon Bottou (Microsoft)
Alexei Efros (CMU)
Martial Hebert (CMU)
Christoph Lampert (IST)
Ivan Laptev (INRIA/ENS)
Jitendra Malik (UC Berkeley)
Jean Ponce (INRIA/ENS)
Cordelia Schmid (INRIA)
Josef Sivic (INRIA/ENS)
Andrew Zisserman (Oxford Univ.)