The previous CFP contained some typos - we apologize for that; here is the
corrected version.
[Apologies if you receive this more than once]
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Call For Papers
The NIPS 2003 Workshop on
Robust Communication Dynamics in Complex Networks
http://www.research.ibm.com/nips03workshop/
Held at Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference
Whistler, Canada, on December 12-13, 2003
http://www.nips.cc
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Overview and Goals
=====================
Large-scale distributed systems with complex patterns of communication
between elements abound in both nature (e.g., genetic pathways) and in
man-made systems (e.g., Internet, email networks, and the World Wide Web).
The main objective of this workshop is to explore how various local
communication schemes in distributed systems (e.g., gossip-style/epidemic
protocols) and message-passing schemes for inference (e.g., Belief
Propagation) may robustly achieve global objectives, such as accurate
global computation, in the presence of various forms of noise, errors
and attacks, and how their performance is affected by network dynamics
and topology. The workshop aims at cross-fertilization among several
research areas that has attracted an immense current interest, including:
* belief-propagation schemes for probabilistic inference and their
close relationship to free energy approximations
* distributed machine learning which was touched upon in last year's
NIPS workshop on Multi-Agent Learning
* statistical dynamics of complex network phenomena, a rapidly growing
multi-disciplinary research topic that combines methods from computer
science, statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, econometrics and
social network theory to study common problems in many systems
exhibiting complex network structure. This topic has attracted much
recent attention in the scientific literature as well as in popular
publications (e.g., Watts, "Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected
Age," 2003), but so far has not been presented at NIPS.
Invited Speakers:
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Kenneth Birman (Cornell Univ.)
Christos Faloutsos (Carnegie Mellon Univ.)
Michelle Girvan (Cornell Univ.)
Bert Kappen (Univ. of Nijmegen)
Jon Kleinberg (Cornell Univ.)
Gyorgy Korniss (RPI)
Marc Mezard (Univ. de Paris Sud)
Jared Saia (Univ. of New Mexico)
Jonathan Yedidia (MERL)
Suggested Topics
==================
The list of possible topics includes (but is not limited to) the following:
* Dynamics and topological properties (e.g., small-world, scale-free,
clustering) of real-world large-scale networks (e.g., Internet,
World Wide Web, biological pathways, social networks)
* Communication protocols and information propagation algorithms
on such networks ('epidemic' protocols, 'gossip-based' algorithms)
* Propagation algorithms for inference on various graphical models
such as Markov and/or Bayesian networks, constraint networks
* Free energy (Kikuchi approximations) and related cost functions
* Variants of propagation algorithms (e.g., belief propagation and its
generalizations, survey propagation, constraint propagation, etc.)
* Accuracy and convergence of propagation algorithms
* Applications of propagation algorithms to various problems
(e.g., web search, distributed computing, error-correcting coding,
image analysis, probabilistic diagnosis, collaborative learning)
Format
========
This is going to be a 2-day workshop. There will be eight invited talks
(roughly 40 minutes each) and shorter contributed talks from researchers
in industry and academia, as well as a panel discussion. We will hold a
poster session if we receive a sufficient number of good submissions.
The workshop will emphasize relatively high-level perspectives, including
surveys of different fields and problem domains. The workshop is
intended to be accessible to the broader NIPS community and to encourage
communication between different fields.
Submission Instructions
============================
We invite submissions of extended abstracts (up to 2 pages, not including
bibliography) for the short contributed talks and/or posters. The
submission should present a high-level description of recent or ongoing
work related to the topics above. We will explore the possibility of
publishing papers based on invited and submitted talks in a special issue
of an appropriate journal.
Email submissions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] as attachments
in Postscript or PDF, no later than October 22, 2003.
Important Dates and Deadlines
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* October 22, 2003: Deadline for the submission of extended
abstracts (1-2 pages not including bibliography)
* October 28, 2003: Notification of acceptance/rejection
Organizing Committee
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Dr. Rajarshi Das, IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory
Dr. Cristopher Moore, University of New Mexico
Dr. Irina Rish, IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory
Dr. Gerry Tesauro, IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory
Workshop Information
==========================
Workshop URL: http://www.research.ibm.com/nips03workshop/
Workshop Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
NIPS URL: http://www.nips.cc
