Re: [UAI] A perplexing problem - Version 2

2009-02-25 Thread Konrad Scheffler
On Mon, 23 Feb 2009, Francisco Javier Diez wrote:

> Konrad Scheffler wrote:
> > I agree this is problematic - the notion of calibration (i.e. that you can
> > say P(S|"70%") = .7) does not really make sense in the subjective Bayesian
> > framework where different individuals are working with different priors,
> > because different individuals will have different posteriors and they can't
> > all be equal to 0.7. 
> 
> I apologize if I have missed your point, but I think it does make sense. If
> different people have different posteriors, it means that some people will
> agree that the TWC reports are calibrated, while others will disagree.

I think this is another way of saying the same thing - if you define the 
concept of calibration such that people will, depending on their priors, 
disagree over whether the reports are calibrated then it is still 
problematic to prescribe calibration in the problem formulation - because 
this will mean different things to different people. Unless you take 
"TWC is calibrated" to mean "everyone has the same prior as TWC", which I 
don't think was the intention in the original question.

In my opinion the source of confusion here is the use of a subjective 
Bayesian framework (i.e. one where the prior is not explicitly stated and 
is assumed to be different for different people). If instead we use an 
objective Bayesian framework where all priors are stated explicitly, the 
difficulties disappear.

> Who is right? In the case of unrepeatable events, this question would not make
> sense, because it is not possible to determine the "true" probability, and
> therefore whether a person or a model is calibrated or not is a subjective
> opinion (of an external observer).
> 
> However, in the case of repeatable events--and I acknowledge that
> repeatability is a fuzzy concept--, it does make sense to speak of an
> objective probability, which can be identified with the relative frequency.
> Subjective probabilities that agree with the objective probability (frequency)
> can be said to be correct and models that give the correct probability for
> each scenario will be considered to be calibrated.
> 
> If we accept that "snow" is a repeatable event, the all the individuals should
> agree on the same probability. If it is not, P(S|"70%") may be different for
> each individual because having different priors and perhaps different
> likelihoods or even different structures in their models.

I strongly disagree with this. The ("true") relative frequency is not the 
same thing as the correct posterior. One can imagine a situation where the 
correct posterior (calculated from the available information) is very far 
from the relative frequency which one would obtain given the opportunity 
to perform exhaustive experiments.

Probabilities (in any variant of the Bayesian framework) do not describe 
reality directly, they describe what we know about reality (typically in 
the absence of complete information).

> Coming back to the main problem, I agree again with Peter Szolovits in making
> the distinction between likelihood and posterior probability.
> 
> a) If I take the TWC forecast as the posterior probability returned by a
> calibrated model (the TWC's model), then I accept that the probability of snow
> is 70%.
> 
> b) However, if I take "70% probability of snow" as a finding to be introduced
> in my model, then I should combine my prior with the likelihood ratio
> associated with this finding, and after some computation I will arrive at
> P(S|"70%") = 0.70. [Otherwise, I would be incoherent with my assumption that
> the model used by the TWC is calibrated.]
> 
> Of course, if I think that the TWC's model is calibrated, I do not need to
> build a model of TWC's reports that will return as an output the same
> probability estimate that I introduce as an input.
> 
> Therefore I see no contradiction in the Bayesian framework.

But this argument only considers the case where your prior is identical 
to TWC's prior. If your prior were _different_ from theirs (the more 
interesting case) then you would not agree that they are calibrated.
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[UAI] Second CFP: The IJCAI-09 Workshop on Learning Structural Knowledge from Observations (StrucK-09)

2009-02-25 Thread Ugur Kuter
*** Our apologies if you received this announcement multiple times  




CALL FOR PAPERS:

StrucK-09: The IJCAI-09 Workshop on Learning Structural Knowledge from  
Observations


Pasadena, California, USA,  July 12, 2009,
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/ukuter/struck09/

to be held in conjunction with the 21st International Joint  
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09)



*  Paper Submission Deadline: March 6, 2009 *


** DESCRIPTION:

Human cognition organizes knowledge in different complexity levels:  
higher-level knowledge is formed
by first acquiring simple concepts, which are then combined to learn  
complex ones. As a result, many cognitive
architectures use structural models to represent relations between  
knowledge of different complexity. Structural
modeling has led to a number of representation and reasoning  
formalisms including frames, schemas, abstractions,
hierarchical task networks (HTNs), and goal graphs among others. These  
formalisms have in common the use of
certain kinds of constructs (e.g., objects, goals, skills, and tasks)  
that represent knowledge of varying degrees of

complexity and that are connected through structural relations.

In recent years, we have observed increasing interest towards the  
problem of learning such structural knowledge
from observations. These observations range from traces generated by  
an automated planner to video feeds from
a robot performing some actions. Researchers have been addressing  
instances of this problem from different
perspectives in a variety of research communities, among others  
including


-- Machine Learning (including inductive logic programming (ILP))
-- Automated Planning
-- Case-Based Reasoning
-- Cognitive Science

We believe that the time is ripe to get together researchers from  
these and other communities that are looking into
instances of this problem and share ideas and perspectives in a common  
forum. Potential focus topics include but

are not limited to:

- Cognitive architectures and learning techniques such as ILP,  
explanation-based learning (EBL), abstraction,

  generalization, and teleoreactive logic programs
- Formalisms for goal-directed behavior, including hierarchical task  
networks, skill hierarchies, goal networks,

  and annotated goal hierarchies
- Learning behavior from observations over time
- Observations ranging from fully to partially observable inputs and  
from annotated to un-annotated action traces

- Trade-offs between task performance and structural learning
- Learning meta-level knowledge (i.e., how to choose among different  
reasoning/problem-solving functionalities,

  how to manage the trade-offs between task performance and learning)
- Probabilistic and other extensions to structural knowledge to  
represent uncertainty

- Representing and learning continuous information
- Interacting with the external environment during structural learning  
(i.e., information-gathering, execution, etc)

- Learning structural information/data flow from observations


** IMPORTANT DATES:

Paper Submission:  March 6, 2009 *
Notifications of Acceptance/Rejection: April 17, 2009
Camera-Ready Papers: May 8, 2009
Announcement of the Workshop Program: May 22, 2009
Workshop Date: July 12, 2009


** SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:

Paper submissions must be formatted in IJCAI style (see: http://ijcai-09.org/fcfp.html 
 for instructions and
to download file templates). We solicit paper ranging from 2 pages  
(extended abstracts) to 6 pages (full papers).


The submissions will be on the EasyChair Conference Management System (http://www.easychair.org/ 
). You may
access the workshop site at EasyChair by first logging onto EasyChair  
at the following URL:


https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi

You must click on the  "StrucK-09" link that will appear when you  
logged in. If you do not have an EasyChair

username and  password, then you may get one at the following URL:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/account_apply.cgi

If you experience any problems with logging in and  using EasyChair  
paper submissions, please let us know at

struc...@easychair.org.


** WORKSHOP PROGRAM:

The workshop will interleave short presentations, a poster session,  
two or more discussion groups, and a joint
open discussion session. All accepted papers will be asked to present  
a poster; selected participants will be invited

to give 15 minute overviews unless they express a preference not to.

The workshop is aimed to identifying and discussing specific questions  
that are still open and/or that are still
prone to further understanding and research in order to develop  
efficient and intelligent systems. To achieve this
objective, we plan organize break-out working groups during the course  
of the workshop. Each break-out group
will focus on one specific topic in Learning Structural Knowledge

[UAI] Call for Participation: EACL 2009 workshop on Computational Linguistic Aspects of Grammatical Inference

2009-02-25 Thread Menno van Zaanen

Apologies to those of you who receive this more than once.



EACL 2009 workshop on
  Computational Linguistic Aspects of Grammatical Inference
  2nd Call for Participation
  27 February 2009: early bird registration deadline

30 March 2009
   Co-located with
  The 12th Conference of the
  European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Athens, Greece
  http://ilk.uvt.nl/clagi09


Scope

There has been growing interest over the last few years in learning
grammars from natural language text (and structured or semi-structured
text).  The family of techniques enabling such learning is usually
called "grammatical inference" or "grammar induction".

The field of grammatical inference is often subdivided into formal
grammatical inference, where researchers aim to proof efficient
learnability of classes of grammars, and empirical grammatical
inference, where the aim is to learn structure from data.  In this
case the existence of an underlying grammar is just regarded as a
hypothesis and what is sought is to better describe the language
through some automatically learned rules.

Both formal and empirical grammatical inference have been linked with
(computational) linguistics.  Formal learnability of grammars has been
used in discussions on how people learn language.  Some people mention
proofs of (non-)learnability of certain classes of grammars as
arguments in the empiricist/nativist discussion.  On the more
practical side, empirical systems that learn grammars have been
applied to natural language.  Instead of proving whether classes of
grammars can be learnt, the aim here is to provide practical learning
systems that automatically introduce structure in language.  Example
fields where initial research has been done are syntactic parsing,
morphological analysis of words, and bilingual modeling (or machine
translation).

This workshop at EACL 2009 aims to explore the state-of-the-art in
these topics.  In particular, we aim at bringing formal and empirical
grammatical inference researchers closer together with researchers in
the field of computational linguistics.



Preliminary Programme

Session 1
09:00-09:30
  Introduction
09:30-10:30
  Damir Ćavar
  Invited talk: On bootstrapping of linguistic features for
bootstrapping grammars

Session 2: Transduction
11:00-11:30
  Jeroen Geertzen
  Dialogue Act Prediction Using Stochastic Context-Free Grammar
Induction
11:30-12:00
  Dana Angluin and Leonor Becerra-Bonache
  Experiments Using OSTIA for a Language Production Task
12:00-12:30
  Jorge González and Francisco Casacuberta
  GREAT: a finite-state machine translation toolkit implementing a
Grammatical Inference Approach for Transducer Inference (GIATI)

Session 3: Language models and parsing
14:00-14:30
  Alexander Clark, Remi Eyraud and Amaury Habrard
  A note on contextual binary feature grammars
14:30-15:00
  Herman Stehouwer and Menno van Zaanen
  Language models for contextual error detection and correction
15:00-15:30
  Marie-HélÚne Candito, Benoit Crabbé and Djamé Seddah
  On statistical parsing of French with supervised and semi-supervised
strategies
15:30-16:00
  Franco M. Luque and Gabriel Infante-Lopez
  Upper Bounds for Unsupervised Parsing with Unambiguous
Non-Terminally Separated Grammars

Session 4: Morphology
16:30-17:00
  Katya Pertsova
  A comparison of several learners for Boolean partitions:
implications for morphological paradigm
17:00-18:00
  Panel discussion  



Registration

Registration for the workshop is done through the EACL website.
http://www.eacl2009.gr/conference/callforparticipation points to the
EACL Call for Participation.  Registration can be done at
http://www.eacl2009.gr/conference/registration


Programme Committee

Pieter Adriaans, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Labs-Research, USA
Leonor Becerra-Bonache, Yale University, USA
Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Alexander Clark, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Shimon Edelman, Cornell University, USA
Jeroen Geertzen, University of Cambridge, UK
Jeffrey Heinz, University of Delaware, USA
Colin de la Higuera, Université de Saint-Etienne, France (co-chair)
Alfons Juan, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
Frantisek Mraz, Charles University, Czech Republic
Khalil Sima'an, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Richard Sproat, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Menno van Zaanen, Tilburg University, The Netherlands (co-chair)
Willem Zuidema, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands



Organizing Committee

Menno van Zaanen, Tilburg University, The Netherlands (co-chair)
Colin de la Higuera, Université de Saint-Etienne, France (co

[UAI] Internships at Siemens Healthcare

2009-02-25 Thread Raykar, Vikas (H USA)

Internship in Natural language Processing, Machine Learning / Data
Mining

Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) & Knowledge Solutions Group (CKS)
Siemens Healthcare, Malvern, PA, USA

The CKS Group at Siemens Healthcare, USA, is building up a world-class
R&D team that includes software engineers and research scientists in
machine learning, computer vision, probabilistic inference, and natural
language processing. We are looking for outstanding interns for research
and software development in natural language processing and machine
learning with an emphasis on information extraction from unstructured
text. As an intern, you will join our team of scientists in solving
exciting and challenging research problems in the medical and biomedical
fields. Our research is motivated by decision-support and data
processing problems arising in the medical domain and related health
areas; experience or interest in these areas is a plus. Our team
currently conducts research in Bayesian methods, probabilistic
inference, statistical learning theory, optimization, statistics,
natural language processing, data mining and works closely with a team
of image processing scientists. 

Qualifications:
a) Pursuing a Bachelor/Master/PhD in computer
science/statistics/engineering or related discipline.
b) Software skills must include languages like MATLAB/C++/C#/Java,
scripting languages (Perl/Python), and working with databases (SQL).
c) Experience developing web applications (knowledge of AJAX, Java
Servlets, and GWT) is a plus
d) Excellent communication skills.
e) Knowledge of data mining / machine learning / image processing/
medical domain is a plus.

You will be expected to spend at least 10-12 weeks; however there is
much flexibility in the starting and finishing dates (non-summer and
longer internships are also considered). We also consider international
interns. 

In order to apply, please follow these steps:
1) Email your CV and contact number to the address below. Highlight your
coding/research skills and mention the largest size projects you have
worked on.
2) Request one letter of recommendation (preferably from your advisor)
to be emailed to us. 
3) Briefly (e.g., in half a page) tell us about you research interests.
Highlight any prior machine learning/modeling experience with real-life
datasets.

Email the above to vikas.ray...@siemens.com, with the subject "Siemens
Internships".

Siemens HealthCare is located in Malvern, PA. Malvern lies within the
Main Line area of the Philadelphia suburbs (with downtown Philly less
than an hour's drive away). 



This message and any included attachments are from Siemens Medical Solutions 
and are intended only for the addressee(s). 
The information contained herein may include trade secrets or privileged or 
otherwise confidential information. Unauthorized review, forwarding, printing, 
copying, distributing, or using such information is strictly prohibited and may 
be unlawful. If you received this message in error, or have reason to believe 
you are not authorized to receive it, please promptly delete this message and 
notify the sender by e-mail with a copy to central.securityoff...@siemens.com 

Thank you
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[UAI] Fusion'09 Paper Submission Deadline Extended

2009-02-25 Thread Shanchieh Yang
Dear Colleagues,

 

Please accept our apology if you receive multiple copies of this
announcement. The deadline for paper submission to Fusion'09 has been
extended.

 

12th International Conference on Information Fusion Grand Hyatt, Seattle
Washington, USA, 6-9 July 2009 http://www.fusion2009.org 

 

Important Deadlines: 

 

Papers submission   2 March 2009 16 March 2009

Acceptance of papers10 April 2009 17 April 2009

Final papers15 May 2009

Early registration  15 May 2009

 

Overview - The 12th International Conference on Information Fusion will
be held in Seattle, Washington, USA, at the Grand Hyatt Seattle Hotel.
Authors are invited to submit papers describing advances and
applications in information fusion, with submission of non-traditional
topics encouraged. 

 

Conference Site - Pacific Northwest is one of the most scenic parts of
United States and Seattle is the home of some of the world's biggest
technology companies such as Boeing and Microsoft. Seattle is easily
accessible from other parts of North America, Europe, and the Asia
Pacific region. 

 

The Grand Hyatt Seattle has been selected as the site for Fusion 2009.
Nestled conveniently in the heart of downtown's thriving retail and
theatre district, Grand Hyatt Seattle redefines luxury, design and
technology. 

 

Organizing Committee:

 

General Co-Chairs

Robert Lynch, Naval Undersea Warfare Center, USA Chee-Yee Chong, BAE
Systems, USA

 

Executive Chair

Robert Lobbia, Boeing, USA

 

Technical Co-Chairs

Kuo-Chu Chang, George Mason University, USA Mahendra Mallick, Georgia
Institute of Technology, USA

 

Finance Chair

Dale Blair, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

 

Administrative Chair

Tammy Blair, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

 

Publications Chair

Wayne Blanding, York College of Pennsylvania, USA

 

Tutorials/Awards Chair

Ivan Kadar, Interlink Systems Sciences, Inc., USA

 

Special Sessions Chair

Chris Hempel, Naval Undersea Warfare Center, USA

 

Publicity Chair

Shanchieh Jay Yang, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

 

Contact Information

Robert Lynch lync...@npt.nuwc.navy.mil 401-832-8663 Chee Chong
chee.ch...@baesystems.com 650-210-8822

 

Topics of interest include (but not limited to) the following: 

 

1. Foundational tools

Probability theory; Bayesian, neural, set-membership and Dempster-Shafer
approaches; random sets; fuzzy logic; risk-sensitive approaches; fusion
modeling; agents; genetic optimization. 

 

2. Technological advances

Sensor modeling (radar, active and passive sonar, acoustic, seismic,
magnetic, optical, visual); fusion-related hardware, software and
communications technology. 

 

3. Algorithmic developments

Classification; data mining; nonlinear filtering and smoothing; target
tracking and localization; contact-based tracking algorithms; combined
detection/tracking; sensor resource management; distributed fusion;
active and passive data fusion; data registration; image fusion;
database fusion. 

 

4. Application Areas

Situation awareness and decision support in defense and intelligence;
public security; aerospace; computer security; robotics and automation;
intelligent transportation; logistics; automotive; manufacturing;
economics and financial; environmental monitoring; medical care, etc.. 

 

Paper Submissions. Prospective authors are invited to submit papers
electronically through the conference website
(http://www.fusion2009.org), where paper templates and submission
instructions will be available in late 2008. Papers submissions are due
by 2 March 2009 and cannot exceed 8 pages. 

 

Student Paper Program. Fusion 2009 is featuring a student paper program
to encourage the involvement of young engineers and scientists in
information fusion. Conference fees will be discounted for the lead
(student) authors of the papers. Further details are available at the
conference website.

 

___

Shanchieh Jay Yang

Associate Professor

Department of Computer Engineering

Rochester Institute of Technology

Room 09-3425, (O) 1-585-475-6434

http://www.ce.rit.edu/people/yang 

 

 

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Re: [UAI] A perplexing problem - Last Version

2009-02-25 Thread Konrad Scheffler
Dear Paul,

Bayesian inference is still appropriate for both problems. There are two 
issues here: 

1) the subjectivist Bayesian viewpoint is confusing because it does not 
   make it explicit on which information you are conditioning when setting 
   up your prior - it becomes much clearer if you use an objective 
   Bayesian framework (see below).
2) You are describing a situation where your two sources of information 
   are dependent, but you are not quantifying the dependency. As 
   Jean-Louis points out, the problem becomes simple if you are prepared 
   to make an independence assumption (but I think this avoids the 
   difficulty you are asking about: "In part they are using the same 
   background knowledge that Analyst A has"). Below I give the full 
   solution (which unfortunately is only useful if you can quantify the 
   dependencies - for this you need a model of how the analysts go about 
   calculating their reported probabilities).


I'll use "X" as a shorthand for the statement "X is at location Y".
Let's assume all analysts give their statements as a numerical value which 
quantifies their confidence that X is true. Let's call the value provided 
by the spectral analyst B and that provided by the chemical analyst C. 

Let I denote the information available to analyst A before reading the 
reports, so that her prior for X is P(X|I).

We want to know P(X|BCI), which can be written as follows:

P(X|BCI) = P(B|XCI)P(X|CI)/P(B|CI)
where
P(X|CI) = P(C|XI)P(X|I)/[P(C|XI)P(X|I)+P(C|(not X)I)P((not X)|I)]
and
P(B|CI) = P(B|XCI)P(X|CI) + P(B|(not X)CI)P((not X)|CI).

The quantities P(X|I), P((not X)|I), P(C|XI) and P(C|(not X)I) are 
straightforward, but instead of P(B|XI) and P(B|(not X)I) we need to know 
P(B|XCI) and P(B|(not X)CI). Once these are known the answer follows.


Hope this is useful,
Konrad




On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Lehner, Paul E. wrote:

> Austin, Jean-Lous, Konrad,  Peter
> 
> Thank you for your responses.  They are very helpful.
> 
> Your consensus view seems to be that when receiving evidence in the form 
> of a single calibrated judgment, one should not update personal 
> judgments by using Bayes rule.  This seems incoherent (from a strict 
> Bayesian perspective) unless perhaps one explicitly represents the 
> overlap of knowledge with the source of the calibrated judgment (which 
> may not be practical.)
> 
> Unfortunately this is the conclusion I was afraid we would reach, 
> because it leads me to be concerned that I have been giving some bad 
> advice about applying Bayesian reasoning to some very practical 
> problems.
> 
> Here is a simple example.
> 
> Analyst A is trying to determine whether X is at location Y.  She has 
> two principal evidence items.  The first is a report from a spectral 
> analyst that concludes "based on the match to the expected spectral 
> signature I conclude with high confidence that X is at location Y".  
> The second evidence is a report from a chemical analyst who asserts, 
> "based on the expected chemical composition that is typically associated 
> with X, I conclude with moderate confidence that X is at location Y."  
> How should analyst A approach her analysis?
> 
> Previously I would have suggested something like this.  "Consider each 
> evidence item in turn.  Assume that X is at location Y.  What are the 
> chances that you would receive a 'high confidence' report from the 
> spectral analyst, ... a report of 'moderate confidence' from the 
> chemical analyst.  Now assume X is not a location Y, "  In other 
> words I would have lead the analyst toward some simple instantiation of 
> Bayes inference.
> 
> But clearly the spectral and chemical analyst are using more than just 
> the sensor data to make their confidence assessments.  In part they are 
> using the same background knowledge that Analyst A has.  Furthermore 
> both the spectral and chemical analysts are good at their job, their 
> confidence judgments are reasonably calibrated.  This is just like the 
> TWC problem only more complex.
> 
> So if Bayesian inference is inappropriate for the TWC problem, is it also 
> inappropriate here?  Is my advice bad?
> 
> Paul
> 
> 
> From: uai-boun...@engr.orst.edu [mailto:uai-boun...@engr.orst.edu] On Behalf 
> Of Lehner, Paul E.
> Sent: Monday, February 16, 2009 11:40 AM
> To: uai@ENGR.ORST.EDU
> Subject: Re: [UAI] A perplexing problem - Version 2
> 
> UAI members
> 
> Thank you for your many responses.  You've provided at least 5 distinct 
> answers which I summarize below.
> (Answer 5 below is clearly correct, but leads me to a new quandary.)
> 
> 
> 
> Answer 1:  "70% chance of snow" is just a label and conceptually should be 
> treated as "XYZ".  In other words don't be fooled by the semantics inside the 
> quotes.
> 
> 
> 
> My response: Technically correct, but intuitively unappealing.  Although I 
> often council people on how often intuition is misleading, I just couldn't 
> ignore my intuition on this one.
> 
> 
> 
> 

[UAI] ESANN'2009 programme

2009-02-25 Thread esann
(Our apologies if you get multiple copies of this message, despite our
precautions) 

=

   ESANN'2009

17th European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks
  Advances in Computational Intelligence and Learning 

   Bruges (Belgium) - April 22-23-24, 2009

  Preliminary program

=


The preliminary program of the ESANN'2009 conference is now available on the
Web:
   http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/esann
For those of you who maintain WWW pages including lists of related machine
learning and artificial neural networks sites: we would appreciate if you
could add the above URL to your list; thank you very much!

For 17 years the ESANN conference has become a major event in the field of
neural computation and machine learning.  ESANN is a selective conference
focusing on fundamental aspects of artificial neural networks, machine
learning, statistical information processing and computational intelligence.
Mathematical foundations, algorithms and tools, and applications are
covered.  This year, around 100 scientific communications will be presented,
covering most areas of the neural computation and related fields.

The program of the conference can be found at
http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/esann, together with practical information about
the conference venue, registration, etc.  Other information can be obtained
by sending an e-mail to es...@uclouvain.be.




ESANN - European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks - 
Advances in Computational Intelligence and Learning
http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/esann

* For submissions of papers, reviews, registrations:
Michel Verleysen
Univ. Cath. de Louvain - Machine Learning Group
3, pl. du Levant - B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve - Belgium
tel: +32 10 47 25 51 - fax: + 32 10 47 25 98 
mailto:es...@uclouvain.be

* Conference secretariat
d-side conference services
24 av. L. Mommaerts - B-1140 Evere - Belgium
tel: + 32 2 730 06 11 - fax: + 32 2 730 06 00 
mailto:es...@uclouvain.be

 


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[UAI] 7th International Planning Competition: Call for Bids

2009-02-25 Thread Fernando Fernandez Rebollo

[Apologies for cross-posting]

The International Planning Competition Committee is seeking bids from 
potential organisers of the 7th IPC, to complete alongside ICAPS 2010.


Deadline: Proposals to be sent to Derek Long (de...@cis.strath.ac.uk) by 
the end of March, 2009.


The IPC series has been highly influential in promoting the development 
and evaluation of planning systems, including pushing the broad research 
community to examine increasingly ambitious planning problems as the 
series has progressed. The IPC series has been significant in achieving 
a situation in which there are several easily available planners capable 
of solving large and sophisticated planning problems within reasonable 
performance parameters.


The goal of the IPC series is to promote development and evaluation of 
planning technology by:


a) Providing a growing repository of benchmark problems for evaluating 
and testing planning systems


b) Developing new domains and problems that are increasingly realistic 
and relevant and push the state of the art in planning technology


c) Encouraging direct comparison of planning systems and techniques 
through regular competitions


d) Continuing to develop and improve a common language for expressing 
planning domains and problems


e) Encouraging researchers and competitors to make planning software and 
tools publicly available




We wish to encourage broad participation in these activities by both the 
established community and by relative newcomers like graduate students. 
For this reason, our objective is to keep the focus of competitions on 
new challenges, so that there is not a significant barrier for new 
participants, and so that the work done does not degenerate into purely 
software engineering, optimization, and tuning.


Previous organisers include:
1st IPC: Drew McDermott
2nd IPC: Fahiem Bacchus
3rd IPC: Maria Fox and Derek Long
4th IPC: Deterministic: Stefan Edelkamp and Joerg Hoffmann
Probabilistic: Michael Littman and Hakan Younes
5th IPC: Alfonso Gerevini with Yannis Dimopoulos, Patrik Haslum and 
Alessandro Saetti

Probabilistic: Blai Bonet and Bob Givan
6th IPC: Deterministic: Malte Helmert, Minh Binh Do and Yannis Dimopolous
Probabilistic: Dan Bryce and Olivier Buffet
Learning: Alan Fern, Roni Khardon and Prasad Tadepalli

Proposers should not feel constrained to follow the tracks that have 
been used in the past. The responsibilities of the organisers are to 
establish the objectives of the competition, assemble appropriate 
domains, provide the environment for testing and then to perform a 
sufficient analysis of the results to provide a brief summary at ICAPS, 
including identifying competitors who should be rewarded for their success.


In previous competitions some organisers have sought to extend PDDL in 
order to express new features of planning problems. Proposals for 
extensions are considered very carefully and discussed and debated 
amongst members of the research community. The International Planning 
Competition Committee has been formed partly to formalise this process, 
where it is required.


Bids should include the following information:

- The name or names of the IPC7 Chair or Co-Chairs.
- What tracks the proposal covers.
- What are the objectives intended for IPC7 (specific track) should the 
bid be successful.

- Whether language extensions are envisaged.
- A broad indication of the expected structure of the IPC7 track: 
timetable, number of domains and problems, anticipated schedule for 
testing and the process of final evaluation.



Fernando Fernández
Publicity Chair
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