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ICML has 3(!) Real World Reinforcement Learning Workshops

The first is Sunday afternon during the Industry Expo day. This one is meant to be quite practical, starting with an overview of Contextual Bandits and leading into how to apply the new Personalizer service, the first service in the world functionally supporting general contextual bandit learning.

The second is Friday morning. This one is more academic with many topics. I’ll personally be discussing research questions for real world RL.

The third one is Friday afternoon with more emphasis on sequences of decisions. I expect to here “imitation learning” multiple times 🙂

I’m planning to attend all 3. It’s great to see interest building in this direction, because Real World RL seems like the most promising direction for fruitfully expanding the scope of solvable machine learning problems.

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An ICML unworkshop

Following up on an interesting suggestion, we are creating a “Birds of a Feather Unworkshop” with a leftover room (Duffy/Columbia) on Thursday and Friday during the workshops. People interested in ad-hoc topics can post a time and place to meet and discuss. Details are here a little ways down.

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The New York ML Symposium, take 2

The 201314 is New York Machine Learning Symposium is finally happening on March 28th at the New York Academy of Science. Every invited speaker interests me personally. They are:

We’ve been somewhat disorganized in advertising this. As a consequence, anyone who has not submitted an abstract but would like to do so may send one directly to me (jl@hunch.net title NYASMLS) by Friday March 14. I will forward them to the rest of the committee for consideration.

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Extreme Classification workshop at NIPS

Manik and I are organizing the extreme classification workshop at NIPS this year. We have a number of good speakers lined up, but I would further encourage anyone working in the area to submit an abstract by October 9. I believe this is an idea whose time has now come.

The NIPS website doesn’t have other workshops listed yet, but I expect several others to be of significant interest.