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CFP – IJCAI workshop on Social Web Mining

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

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

Introduction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Topics:

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

· Active learning

· Matchmaking

· Mobile recommender systems

· Multi-task learning

· Learning graph matching

· Learning to rank

· Online and contextual advertising

· Online learning

· Privacy in social networks

· Preference learning or elicitation

· Social network mining

· Social summarization

· Tag recommendation

· Transfer learning

· Web graph analysis

Program:

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

· Invited Speakers

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

o Bhaskar Mehta , Google Zurich, Switzerland

o Jurgen Van Gael, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK

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

· Oral and Poster Presentation: details coming soon

Submission and Key Dates:

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

· Submission deadline: 20 April 2011

· Author notification: 15 May 2011

· Camera ready: 25 May 2011

· Workshop date: 18 July 2011

Program Co-Chair:

· Francesco Bonchi, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain

· Wray Buntine, NICTA – ANU, Australia

· Ricard Gavalda, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain

· Shengbo Guo, Xerox Research Centre Europe, France

Program Committee:

· Tiberio Caetano, NICTA – ANU, Australia

· Wei Chen, Microsoft Research Asia, China

· Peter Christen, Australian National University, Australia

· Nello Cristianini, University Of Bristol, UK

· Hakim Hacid, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France

· Jian Huang, Google Pittsburgh, USA

· Jure Leskovec, Stanford University, USA

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

· Sherif Sakr, NICTA – UNSW, Australia

· Scott Sanner, NICTA – ANU, Australia

· Markus Schedl, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

· Fabrizio Silvestri, ISTI CNR, Italy

· Julia Stoyanovich, University of Pennsylvania, USA

· Aixin Sun, National University of Singapore, Singapore

· Antti Ukkonen, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain

· Jie (Jessie) Yin, CSIRO, Australia

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

Workshop Contact:

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

For further information, please visit our website:

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

Final call for paper and deadline extension for CHIME 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Machine Learning Survey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call for Contributions and Registration: Cosmology Meets ML

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks,
Michael Hirsch on behalf of the LOC and SOC

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

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

DIBCO 2011 – Document Image Binarization Contest

Call for Participation

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

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

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

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

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

Important Dates

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

The DIBCO 2011 Organizing Committee

I. Pratikakis1, B. Gatos2 and K. Ntirogiannis2

1Democritus University of Thrace, Greece

2National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Greece

Machine Learning Summer School 2011 in Bordeaux

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

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

Deadline for application: * April 15, 2011 *

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

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

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

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

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

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

CfP: Google Summer of Code – Shogun Machine Learning Toolbox (Deadline April 8, 19hrs UTC)

Call for Participation
======================

We are looking for interested students to join us in improving the
shogun machine learning toolbox (http://www.shogun-toolbox.org) in this
years google summer of code.

Timeline
========
Application deadline is April 8, 19hrs UTC and the program will run from
April to the end of August (cf.
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/events/google/gsoc2011 )

About Google Summer of Code
===========================
Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers students stipends
($5000 / per student) to write code for open source projects.
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2011

About the shogun machine learning toolbox
=========================================
SHOGUN is a machine learning toolbox, which is designed for unified
large-scale learning for a broad range of feature types and learning
settings. It offers a considerable number of machine learning models
such as support vector machines for classification and regression,
hidden Markov models, multiple kernel learning, linear discriminant
analysis, linear programming machines, and perceptrons. Most of the
specific algorithms are able to deal with several different data
classes, including dense and sparse vectors and sequences using floating
point or discrete data types. We have used this toolbox in several
applications from computational biology, some of them coming with no
less than 10 million training examples and others with 7 billion test
examples. With more than a thousand installations worldwide, SHOGUN is
already widely adopted in the machine learning community and beyond.

SHOGUN is implemented in C++ and interfaces to MATLAB, R, Octave,
Python, and has a stand-alone command line interface. The source code is
freely available under the GNU General Public License, Version 3 at
http://www.shogun-toolbox.org.

How to Apply
============
– To apply for shogun, select one or multiple topics from our ideas
list http://www.shogun-toolbox.org/gsoc-ideas.html or propose topics you
are highly interested in – we might be very interested too 🙂

– Before applying, please ensure that you have your working environment
set up, i.e. checkout shogun from git and successfully compiled its
relevant parts (see instructions on http://www.shogun-toolbox.org) and
indicate that you have done so.

Please note that we have an application template that following will
incredibly help us to process your application. It is at the bottom of
the website (link follows below). This webpage also has the register for
GSoC application link

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2011/shogun

If you have further questions don’t hesitate to ask on the shogun
mailinglist (shogun-list(at)shogun-toolbox.org, please note that you have
to be subscribed in order to post) or on irc.freenode.net channel
#shogun.

Additional Resources
=====================
– In case you are unsure if you are good enough or have other questions
check out the student FAQ.

http://www.booki.cc/gsocstudentguide/_v/1.0/am-i-good-enough/

– Some general guidelines how to make a good impression 🙂

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2011/03/dos-and-donts-of-google-summer-of-code.html

IFCS/GfKl 2011 Session on Dissimilarities and Dissimilarity Based Methods

A PASCAL funded invited session on
Dissimilarities and Dissimilarity Based Methods
will take place as part of the IFCS/GfKl 2011 conference,
August 30 to September 2, 2011 in Frankfurt/Main.
http://www.online.uni-marburg.de/gfkl2011/

Invited speakers are

Ahlame Douzal Chouakria, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble

Ahmed Albatineh, Florida International University

Daniel Muellensiefen, Goldsmiths University of London

Floriana Esposito, Università degli Studi “Aldo Moro”, Bari

There will be a presentation by myself as well.

The aim of the invited session is to inspire systematic and general discussion about the construction and meaning of dissimilarity measures in data analysis by bringing together experts who have investigated the use and choice of dissimilarity measures for various kinds of data (time series, symbolic data, presence/absence data, musical melodies, high dimensional data), and who have a general interest in the design and application of dissimilarity measures. In applied data analysis, dissimilarities are often constructed in an ad hoc-fashion, and reference to general principles is not normally made (I gave an invited plenary lecture about this on a previous IFCS conference in Ljubljana, see Hennig and Hausdorf 2006).

Reference:
C. Hennig and B. Hausdorf: Design of dissimilarity measures: a new dissimilarity measure between species distribution ranges. Batagelj, V.; Bock, H.-H.; Ferligoj, A.; Ziberna, A. (Eds.): Data Science and Classification, Springer, Berlin 2006, 29-38.

Postdoctoral jobs in Astrocomputing at Southampton

Four postdoctoral fellowships are available to work in the’4 PI SKY’
project in the Astronomy group at the University of Southampton. 4 PI
SKY is a major initiative led by Professor Rob Fender and funded via a
European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant, at the level of 3
MEuro. The project has the goal of dramatically improving our detection
and understanding of transient astrophysical events, via both
development of novel techniques and scientific exploitation. For more
information on the project see http://www.4pisky.soton.ac.uk .

Professor Fender heads a world-leading group focussing in the areas of
observational black hole astrophysics and the new field of radio
transients. He is a principal investigator of the Transients Key Science
Project for LOFAR, and of the ThunderKAT transients Key Science Project
for MeerKAT, the South African SKA pathfinder, as well as being a
co-investigator in the transients projects on the Australian SKA
pathfinder, ASKAP.

The Astronomy group at Southampton are world renowned in the area of
galactic and extragalactic high-energy astrophysics, and are part of the
School of Physics & Astronomy, one of the UK’s top scientific
departments. In this project we will be working closely with the School
of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton, who are
world-leaders in the area of agent technology and signal analysis.

The positions are available for an initial period of two years, although
money is in hand to extend positions to five years, depending on
performance. The starting salary range is £27,319 – £33,600, with
funding for travel and computing hardware. The preferred start date for
the positions is the 2nd half of 2011. Preference will be given to
applicants with experience in radio astronomy and/or computer science,
depending on the position applied for.

For more details of individual jobs see:

http://jobregister.aas.org/job_view?JobID=39171