Call for Abstracts

We welcome submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Development of learning models: e.g., deep belief nets, deep Boltzmann machines, deep neural nets, high-order sparse coding, and hierarchical generative models.
  • Theoretical foundations: Under what conditions does the feature hierarchy achieve a better regularization or statistical efficiency? How can we make deep models be more robust to dealing with highly ambiguous or missing sensory inputs?
  • Inference and optimization: Can we develop better optimization or approximation techniques that would allow us to learn feature hierarchies more efficiently without significant human intervention?
  • Biologically-inspired models: How to learn biologically inspired feature hierarchies in visual and auditory signal processing?
  • Using side information: In unsupervised learning of feature hierarchies, how to explore data structures, e.g. spatial 2D- layout, sequential dynamics, additional auxiliary features?
  • Relationships to kernel learning and transfer learning: Can we develop algorithms that are capable of extracting high-level feature representations that can be transferred to unknown future tasks?
  • Success in real-world applications: understanding of natural scenes, recognition of objects and events, auditory coding of speech and music, natural language processing, semantic indexing, and retrieval of documents and images.

This is a one-day workshop. The program will feature invited talks, poster spotlights, a demo session, and a panel discussion. Submissions will be reviewed by the organizing committee on the basis of relevance, significance, technical quality, and clarity. Accepted abstracts will be invited to give a two-minute spotlight oral presentation and a poster presentation. Demos will be in parallel with the poster session.

Abstracts should be 1-to-2 pages long, and adhere to ICML format. Please email your submissions to: kyu@sv.nec-labs.com

Important Dates:

  • Deadline for Submissions: April 24, 2009
  • Notification of Decision: May 08, 2009
  • Workshop: Thursday, June 18, 2009

Organizers:

  • Kai Yu, NEC Laboratories America, kyu@sv.nec-labs.com
  • Ruslan Salakhutdinov, University of Toronto, rsalakhu@cs.toronto.edu
  • Yann LeCun, New York University, yann@cs.nyu.edu
  • Geoffrey E. Hinton, University of Toronto, hinton@cs.toronto.edu
  • Yoshua Bengio, University of Montreal, bengioy@iro.umontreal.ca