Dear all.
The second submission deadline for the NIPS Workshop on Transactional
Machine Learning and E-Commerce is Mon 20th Oct. Please see below for
details.
Amos Storkey
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ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
NIPS Workshop on Transactional Machine Learning and E-Commerce
December 2014, Montreal, Canada
http://nips.cc/Conferences/2014/Program/event.php?ID=4298
http://workshops.inf.ed.ac.uk/ml/nipstransactional/
Second Submission Deadline : Monday, 20 October 2014. We accept novel or
recently published work for presentation.
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Background
In the context of building a machine learning framework that scales, the
current modus operandi is a monolithic, centralised model building
approach. These large scale models have different components, which have
to be designed and specified in order to fit in with the model as a
whole. The result is a machine learning process that needs a grand
designer. It is analogous to a planned economy.
There is an alternative. Instead of a centralised planner being in
charge of each and every component in the model, we can design incentive
mechanisms for independent component designers to build components that
contribute to the overall model design. Once those incentive mechanisms
are in place, the planner need no longer have control over each
individual component. This is analogous to a market economy.
The result is a transactional machine learning. The problem is
transformed to one of setting up good incentive mechanisms that enable
the large scale machine learning models to build themselves. It turns
out that many of the issues in incentivised transactional machine
learning are also common to the issues that turn up in modern e-commerce
setting. These issues include issues of mechanism design, encouraging
idealised behaviour while modelling for real behaviour, issues
surrounding prediction markets, questions of improving market
efficiencies, and handling arbitrage, issue on matching both human and
machine market interfaces and much more. On the theoretical side, there
is a direct relationship between scoring rules, market scoring rules,
and exponential families via Bregman Divergences. On the practical side,
the issues that turn up in auction design relate to issues regarding
efficient probabilistic inference. The chances for each community to
make big strides from understanding the developments in the others is
significant. This workshop will bring together those involved in
transactional and agent-based methods for machine learning, those
involved in the development of methods and theory in e-commerce, those
considering practical working algorithms for e-commerce or distributed
machine learning and those working on financially incentivised
crowd-sourcing. The workshop will explore issues around incentivisation,
handling combinatorial markets, and developing distributed machine
learning. However the primary benefit will be the interaction and
informal discussion that will occur throughout the workshop.
Workshop Outline
We have many invited speakers who have agreed to contribute to an
exciting programme, including
Robin Hanson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hanson)
Kevin Leyton-Brown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Leyton-Brown)
David Parkes (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~parkes/)
David Wolpert (http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/profile/dhw/)
Sebastian Lahie (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/slahaie/)
Jenn Wortman Vaughan (http://www.jennwv.com/)
Bobby Kleinberg (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~rdk/)
Aaron Roth (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~aaroth/)
The workshop programme and further details are available on the workshop
website. http://workshops.inf.ed.ac.uk/ml/nipstransactional/
Submission
If you wish to contribute a talk (in any area that could relate to the
idea of transactional machine learning as described above) or
poster+spotlight (in any area relating to transactional machine
learning, e-commerce or economics) to this workshop, then please submit
a title and abstract, and a pdf to the site below. Submissions should be
sent by 20 October 2014 (though if you have something of interest after
the deadline, we may still be interested to hear - however space is
limited).
Submission Site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nipstrans2014
Organizers
----------------------
Amos Storkey, University of Edinburgh
Jake Abernethy, University of Michigan
Mark Reid, Australian National University
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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