News Archives

3 Research internships at FBK

The “Human Language Technologies” Research Unit of Bruno Kessler Foundation
(FBK) is seeking candidates for three research internship positions in the following
areas:

– Statistical Machine Translation
– Automatic Speech Recognition
– Software development for NLP

The internship are intended to provide a strong theoretical and experimental background
to graduate students interested in applying for a PhD scholarship to start in June 2011.

Requirements, salary, and application procedure are specified in
http://risorseumane.fbk.eu/sites/risorseumane.fbk.eu/files/Call%20HLT_INTERNSHIP2
011_0.pdf

Closing date: 29 January 2011

20 Ph.D. studentships at Scottish Universities, deadline 28th Feb

The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (http://www.sicsa.ac.uk) invites applications for up to 20 international prize studentships from outstanding PhD candidates to Scottish universities. The studentships are open to citizens and residents of any country.

SICSA studentships cover living costs and fees at the UK/EU level and successful candidates may apply for further fee support. We will consider applicants in any area of computer science and informatics but may give preference to students who are working in SICSA theme areas:

* Next-generation Internet
* Multi-modal interaction
* Modelling and abstraction
* Complex systems engineering

Students must have or must expect to be awarded a 1st class honours degree or an MSc with Distinction or equivalent GPA scores. Your degree must be in a discipline that is relevant to your proposed field of research.

For more details of how to apply for a SICSA prize studentship, see the SICSA web pages (http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/graduate-academy/prize-studentships/applying-for-a-sicsa-prize-studentship).

The deadline for applications is 28th February 2011.

PhD studentships in Complex and Disordered Systems at King’s College London

PhD studentships in Complex and Disordered Systems
King’s College London
Department of Mathematics

The Disordered Systems group at King’s College London expects to have several vacancies for entry into the PhD programme in autumn 2011. The group (see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/nms/maths/research/dissys) has broad-ranging research interests in the application of tools from statistical mechanics to complex and disordered systems, including

– physics: soft matter (phase behaviour and flow), fracture and packing, non-equilibrium and glassy systems
– mathematics: sparse random matrix spectra, localization
– biology: metabolic and protein interaction networks, random graph ensembles, DNA stretching, survival statistics
– econophysics: collective effects in operational risk
– machine learning: learning and statistical inference on graphs

Funding is available through various sources (see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/pg/funding/sources/index.aspx), including competitive departmental (DTA) studentships which cover a stipend and fees for UK residents or fees for EU residents, and a range of funding schemes provided by King’s Graduate School (see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/pg/school/GraduateSchool.aspx). Most funding application deadlines are on 1 Feb 2011 or shortly thereafter, and supporting references need to be received by the deadline, so interested candidates are encouraged to apply as soon as possible.

All applications for PhD study should be made online at https://myapplication.kcl.ac.uk/
Further information on admissions can be found at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/pg/admissions/TypesofProgrammes.aspx
Note that Graduate School funding requires a separate funding application form and case for support (see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/pg/funding/sources/gradsch.aspx).

Interested candidates are welcome to contact Prof Peter Sollich (peter.sollich(at)kcl.ac.uk) or any other member of the research group with questions regarding research interests, application procedures etc.

CFP – 14th International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems

14TH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON LEARNING CLASSIFIER SYSTEMS

to be held as part of the

2011 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2011)
July 12-16, Dublin, Ireland

Organized by ACM SIGEVO
20th International Conference on Genetic Algorithms (ICGA) and the
16th Annual Genetic Programming Conference (GP)

One Conference – Many Mini-Conferences 15 Program Tracks

PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR WORKSHOP: April 7th, 2011

Workshop Website:
http://home.dei.polimi.it/loiacono/iwlcs2011

———————————————————————

The Fourteenth International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems
(IWLCS 2011) will be held in Dublin, Ireland during the Genetic and
Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2011), July 7-11, 2010.

Originally, Learning Classifier Systems (LCSs) were introduced by
John H. Holland as a way of applying evolutionary computation to
machine learning and adaptive behavior problems. Since then, the LCS
paradigm has broadened greatly into a framework that encompasses many
representations, rule discovery mechanisms, and credit assignment
schemes.

Current LCS applications range from data mining, to automated
innovation and the on-line control of cognitive systems. LCS research
includes various actual system approaches: While Wilson’s
accuracy-based XCS system (1995) has received the highest attention
and gained the highest reputation, studies and developments of other
LCSs are usually discussed and contrasted. Advances in machine
learning, and reinforcement learning in particular, as well as in
evolutionary computation have brought LCS systems the necessary
competence and guaranteed learning properties. Novel insights in
machine learning and evolutionary computation are being integrated
into the LCS framework.

Thus, we invite submissions that discuss recent developments in all
areas of research on, and applications of, Learning Classifier
Systems. IWLCS is the event that brings together most of the core
researchers in classifier systems. Moreover, a free introductory
tutorial on LCSs is presented the day before the workshop at GECCO
2011. Tutorial and IWLCS workshop thus also provide an opportunity
for researchers interested in LCSs to get an impression of the
current research directions in the field as well as a guideline for
the application of LCSs to their problem domain.

Topics of interests include but are not limited to:

– Paradigms of LCS (Michigan, Pittsburgh, …)

– Theoretical developments (behavior, scalability and learning bounds, …)

– Representations (binary, real-valued, oblique, non-linear, fuzzy, …)

– Types of target problems (single-step, multiple-step, regression/function approximation,…)

– System enhancements (competent operators, problem structure identification and linkage learning, …)

– LCS for Cognitive Control (architectures, emergent behaviours, …)

– Applications (data mining, medical domains, bioinformatics, …)

Submissions and Publication

—————————

Submissions will be short-papers up to 8 pages in ACM format. Please
see the GECCO-2011 information for authors for further details.
However, unlike GECCO, papers do not have to be submitted in
anonymous format.

All accepted papers will be presented at IWLCS 2011 and will appear
in the GECCO workshop volume. Proceedings of the workshop will be
published on CD-ROM, and distributed at the conference. Authors will
be invited after the workshop to submit revised (full) papers that,
after a thorough review process, are to be published in the next
post-workshop proceedings volume (scheduled for 2013), in the
Springer LNCS/LNAI book series.

All papers should be submitted in PDF format and e-mailed to:

loiacono(at)elet.polimi.it

Important dates

—————

* Paper submission deadline: April 7, 2011
* Notification to authors: April 14, 2011
* Submission of camera-ready material: April 26, 2011
* Conference registration: May 2, 2011
* GECCO-2011: July 12-16, 2011

Committees

———-

– Organizing Committee

* Daniele Loiacono, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

(email: loiacono@elet.polimi.it)

* Albert Orriols-Puig, La Salle – Ramon Llull University, Spain

(email: aorriols@salle.url.edu)

* Ryan Urbanowicz, Dartmouth College, USA

(email: ryan.j.urbanowicz@dartmouth.edu)

– Advisory Committee

* Jaume Bacardit, University of Nottingham (UK).

* Ester Bernado-Mansilla, Universitat Ramon Llull (Spain).

* Will Browne, Victoria University of Wellington (NZ).

* Martin V. Butz, Universitat Wurzburg (Germany)

* Jan Drugowitsch, University of Rochester (USA).

* Tim Kovacs, University of Bristol (UK)

* Pier Luca Lanzi, Politecnico di Milano (Italy)

* Xavier Llora, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)

* Wolfgang Stolzmann, Daimler Chrysler AG (Germany)

* Keiki Takadama, Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan)

* Stewart Wilson, Prediction Dynamics (USA)

Further information

——————-

For more details, please visit the workshop website at:
http://home.dei.polimi.it/loiacono/iwlcs2011

GECCO is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery Special
Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO). SIG
Services: 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY, 10121, USA,
1-800-342-6626 (USA and Canada) or +212-626-0500 (Global).

Tenure positions in Machine Learning

We would like to advertize the opening of positions for different tenure research positions at the INRIA, France. Statistical learning is one of the eligible topics. This is a nationwide campaign.
Two INRIA research groups located in Lille are particularly interested in applicants in statistical learning:
– SequeL: http://sequel.lille.inria.fr, contact: philippe.preux(at)inria.fr and remi.munos(at)inria.fr
– Mostrare: http://mostrare.inria.lille.fr, contact: remi.gilleron(at)inria.fr
Other groups may be interested in other locations in France.

All information, incl. application form, is available on the web:
– http://en.inria.fr/institute/recruitment/offers/five-junior-research-scientist-positions-vacant/competitive-selection-2011 for junior researchers (~ PhD + short post-doc)
– http://en.inria.fr/institute/recruitment/offers/three-experienced-research-scientists-positions-vacant/competitive-selection-2011 for experienced researchers (~ PhD + longer post-doc)
– http://en.inria.fr/institute/recruitment/offers/ten-senior-reseach-scientist-position-are-vacant/competitive-selection-2011 for senior researchers (~ PhD + 5 to 10 years of experience in research)

It is essential that you get in touch with the teams before you apply.

Best,

R. Gilleron & Ph. Preux

PASCAL CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge

Part of the EU Network of Excellence PASCAL Challenge Program with support from EPSRC project CHiME. Participation is open to all.

http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/chime/challenge.html

The object of the challenge is to separate and recognise spoken command utterances appearing in background recordings made in a noisy domestic living room using binaural microphones. The challenge is motivated by the demands of real distant-microphone speech recognition applications and in particular the need to deal with multiple and highly varied interfering sound sources. The challenge has been designed to draw participation from multiple disciplines including signal processing, computational hearing, machine learning and speech recognition. Evaluation will be through speech recognition results but participants will be allowed to submit either separated signals, robust speech features or the outputs of complete recognition systems. We are interested in measuring the performance of both emerging techniques and established approaches.

A full description of the challenge, including details of the source separation and recognition tasks, the noisy speech data sets, and the rules for participation can be found on the PASCAL CHiME Challenge web site.

http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/chime/challenge.html

Results of the Challenge will be presented at a dedicated one-day workshop, “Machine Listening in Multisource Environments” to be held as a satellite event of Interspeech 2011 in Florence, Italy. Participants will be invited to submit abstracts or full papers for presentation at this event.

A Special Issue of the journal Computer Speech and Language on the theme of Speech Separation and Recognition in Multisource Environments will be published as an outlet for extended workshop papers.

Schedule:

Now: Data and evaluation tools are available for download
30 March: Final test data are released
14th April: Submission deadline for Challenge workshop abstracts/papers.
21st April: Submission deadline for Challenge results.
1st September: CHiME Workshop, Florence, Italy

Organisers:

Jon Barker, University of Sheffield, UK
Emmanuel Vincent, INRIA Rennes, France
Phil Green, University of Sheffield, UK
Heidi Christensen, University of Sheffield, UK
Ning Ma, University of Sheffield, UK

CFP: EMMCVPR 2011

The 8th International Conference on Energy Minimization in Computer
Vision and Pattern Recognition (EMMCVPR)

July 25-27, 2011
Saint Petersburg, Russia

http://emmcvpr11.csd.uwo.ca/

CALL FOR PAPERS

Energy Minimization Methods have become an established computational
paradigm in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. EMMCVPR is a
regular bi-annual international conference dedicated to advancing the
state-of-the-art regarding development and applications of energy
minimization methods. As with the previous editions, the proceedings
will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes on Computer Science
(LNCS) series. The size of the paper will be limited to 14 pages. The
scientific program of EMMCVPR 2011 will include the presentation of
invited plenary talks and contributed research papers. For more
information check out the conference web site at www.emmcvpr.org

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: March 25, 2011

Methods of interest include but are not limited to:

Combinatorial Optimization
Convex Programming and Relaxations
PDE and Variational Methods
TV and Continuous Convex Optimization
Stochastic Optimization
Spectral Methods
Graphical Models
Statistical Methods and Learning

Application areas include but are not limited to:

Object Recognition and Detection
Scene Understanding
Segmentation and Grouping
Restoration and Inpainting
Color and Texture
Computational Photography
Photo and Video Editing
Motion and Tracking
Matching and Registration
Medical Image Analysis
Pose Estimation
Action and Event Recognition
Shape Analysis
Shape-from-X
Stereo and 3D Reconstruction
Multiview Geometry
Vision for Graphics
Other Applications

Key-note speakers: Andrew Blake (Microsoft Research), Emmanuel Candes
(Stanford University), Alan Yuille (University of California Los
Angeles)

Program chairs: Yuri Boykov (University of Western Ontario), Fredrik
Kahl (Lund University), Victor Lempitsky (University of Oxford)
Organizational support: Frank Schmidt and Andrew Delong (University of
Western Ontario), Anna Medvedeva (local support)

EXTENDED DEADLINE – CFP: ICANN 2011 – Machine learning re-inspired by brain and cognition

Third Call for Papers: ICANN 2011

The Twentieth Anniversary ICANN is back at its roots:
Machine learning re-inspired by brain and cognition

International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks
14 – 17 June 2011, Espoo, Finland
http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann2011

IMPORTANT DATES: Submission deadline extended!

Submission of full papers: February 15, 2011
Notification of acceptance: April 1, 2011
Camera-ready paper
and author registration: April 15, 2011
Advance registration before: April 15, 2011

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

The International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN)
is the annual flagship conference of the European Neural Network
Society (ENNS). In 2011, ICANN returns to its roots after 20 years.
The very first ICANN in 1991 was organized at Helsinki University
of Technology in Espoo, Finland. We invite all neural network
researchers worldwide to join us in celebrating this 20th
anniversary of ICANN and to see the latest advancements in our fast
progressing field.

ICANN 2011 will have two tracks: Brain-inspired computing and
Machine learning research, with PC chairs from both worlds and a
renewed reviewing system. Keynote speakers and competitions will
highlight cross-disciplinary interactions and applications.

CONFIRMED INVITED SPEAKERS:

Riitta Hari, Aalto University, http://ltl.tkk.fi/wiki/Riitta_Hari

Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto, http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/

Aapo Hyvarinen, University of Helsinki, http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ahyvarin/

ORGANIZATION:

General chair: Erkki Oja
Program co-chairs: Wlodzislaw Duch, Mark Girolami,
Timo Honkela, Samuel Kaski
Local chair: Amaury Lendasse
Publicity chair: Jaakko Peltonen
Organizing committee members: Francesco Corona, Krista Lagus,
Yoan Miche, Ilari Nieminen,
Mari-Sanna Paukkeri, Tapani Raiko,
Ricardo Vigario

VENUE:

ICANN 2011 will be held in the Dipoli Congress Center located on
the beautiful campus of Aalto University (former Helsinki
University of Technology), in Espoo (8km west from the city centre
of Helsinki).

CONFERENCE TOPICS:

ICANN 2011 will feature two main tracks: Brain inspired computing
and Machine learning research, with strong cross-disciplinary
interactions and applications. A non-exhaustive list of topics:

– Brain inspired computing: Connectionist cognitive science, Neural
and hybrid architectures and learning algorithms, Neural control
and planning, Reinforcement learning, Computational neuroscience,
Neural dynamics and complex systems, Self-organization, Neuro-
cognitive architectures

– Machine learning research: Graphical models, Bayesian networks,
Kernel methods, Generative models, Relational learning, Online
learning, Dynamical models, Reinforcement learning

– Applications and cross-disciplinary connections: Data analysis,
Pattern recognition, Signal and time series processing, Blind
source separation, Hardware implementations and embedded systems,
Intelligent multimedia, Knowledge management, Multimodal
interfaces, Vision and image processing, Speech and language
processing, Robotics applications, Intelligent control,
Neuroinformatics, Bioinformatics, Biomedical applications, Brain-
computer interfaces, Critical infrastructure systems, Complex
networks

WORKSHOPS:

A call for workshops will be opened in October.

WSOM 2011, the 8th Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps (13-15 June
2011) will be co-located with ICANN 2011.

COMPETITIONS:

Mind reading competition on MEG data

META-NET Multimodal Machine Translation Challenge

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:

Details will be available soon on the web site.

ICANN 2011 is supported by ENNS.

====== See http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann2011 for more details! ======

REMINDER – CfP: JMLR Special Topic on Kernel and Metric Learning

Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) has received significant interest in
the machine learning community. It is reaching a point where efficient
systems can be applied out of the box to various application domains,
and several methods have been proposed to go beyond canonical convex
combinations. Concurrently, research in the area of metric learning
has also progressed significantly, and researchers are applying them
to various problems in supervised and unsupervised learning. A common
theme is that one can use data to infer similarities between objects
while simultaneously solving the machine learning task.

A special topic of the Journal of Machine Learning Research will be
devoted to kernel and metric learning with a special emphasis on new
directions and connections between the various related areas; like
learning the kernel, learning metrics, and learning the covariance
function of a Gaussian process. We invite researchers to submit novel
and interesting contributions to this special issue. Further
information can be found at http://doc.ml.tu-berlin.de/jmlr_mkl .

Important dates
===============

Submission: 1 March 2011
Decision: 1 May 2011
Final versions: 1 July 2011

Topics of Interest
==================
Topics of interest include:

* New approaches to MKL, in particular, kernel parameterizations
different than convex combinations and new objective functions
* New connections between kernel, metric and covariance learning,
e.g., from the perspectives of Gaussian processes, learning with
similarity functions, etc.
* Sparse vs. non-sparse regularization in similarity learning
* Efficient algorithms for metric learning
* Use of MKL in unsupervised, semi-supervised, multi-task, and
transfer learning
* MKL with structured input/output
* Innovative applications

Submission procedure
====================
Authors are kindly invited to follow the standard JMLR format and
submission procedure JMLR submission format, the number of pages is
limited to 30. Please include a note stating that your submission is for
the special topic on Multiple Kernel Learning.

Editors
=======
Soeren Sonnenburg, Berlin Institute of Technology, Berlin, Germany
Francis Bach, INRIA and Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France
Cheng Soon Ong, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland

Teleconference seminar on the UTL challenge

Learning Data Representations or Similarity Measures:
The UTL Challenge

Teleconference presentation, by Isabelle Guyon
Thursday January 20, 2011, 8 am PT, 11 am ET, 5 pm CET
Participation instructions http://www.afia-france.org/tiki-index.php?page=GroupeDeLecture110120IG (please review them in advance)

Is it possible to LEARN from unlabeled data Representations of Similarity Measures for use in supervised learning tasks? The Unsupervised and Transfer Learning challenge offers an opportunity to explore this problem of fundamental and practical interest.
Labeling data is not only expensive, it is tedious. When it comes to your own personal data it is also something you do not want to outsource. To help us tagging fast our personal pictures, videos, and documents, we need systems that can learn with very few training examples. The question is whether we can exploit similar data (labeled with different types of labels or completely unlabeled) to improve data preprocessing.
This presentation will outline the setup of the challenge and review the state of the art in unsupervised and transfer learning. Potential challenge participants are invited to attend and ask questions.

Prizes: $6000 + free registrations + travel awards
Dissemination: Workshops at ICML and IJCNN; proceedings in JMLR W&CP.
Deadline phase 1 (unsupervised learning): February 28, 2011
Deadline phase 2 (transfer learning): April 15, 2011
Challenge website: http://clopinet.com/ul