MLTV

As part of a PASCAL project, the Slovenians have been filming various machine learning events and placing them on the web here. This includes, for example, the Chicago 2005 Machine Learning Summer School as well as a number of other summer schools, workshops, and conferences.

There are some significant caveats here—for example, I can’t access it from Linux. Based upon the webserver logs, I expect that is a problem for most people—Computer scientists are particularly nonstandard in their choice of computing platform.

Nevertheless, the core idea here is excellent and details of compatibility can be fixed later. With modern technology toys, there is no fundamental reason why the process of announcing new work at a conference should happen only once and only for the people who could make it to that room in that conference. The problems solved include:

  1. The multitrack vs. single-track debate. (“Sometimes the single track doesn’t interest me” vs. “When it’s multitrack I miss good talks”
  2. “I couldn’t attend because I was giving birth/going to a funeral/a wedding”
  3. “What was that? I wish there was a rewind on reality.”

There are some fears here too. For example, maybe a shift towards recording and placing things on the web will result in lower attendance at a conference. Such a fear is confused in a few ways:

  1. People go to conferences for many more reasons than just announcing new work. Other goals include doing research, meeting old friends, worrying about job openings, skiing, and visiting new places. There also a subtle benefit of going to a conference: it represents a commitment of time to research. It is this commitment which makes two people from the same place start working together at a conference. Given all these benefits of going to a conference, there is plenty of reason for them to continue to exist.
  2. It is important to remember that a conference is a process in aid of research. Recording and making available for download the presentations at a conference makes research easier by solving all the problems listed above.
  3. This is just another new information technology. When the web came out, computer scientists and physicists quickly adopted a “place any paper on your webpage” style even when journals forced them to sign away the rights of the paper to publish. Doing this was simply healthy for the researcher because his papers were more easily readable. The same logic applies to making presentations at a conference available on the web.

Deadline Season

Many different paper deadlines are coming up soon so I made a little reference table. Out of curiosity, I also computed the interval between submission deadline and conference.

Conference Location Date Deadline interval
COLT Pittsburgh June 22-25 January 21 152
ICML Pittsburgh June 26-28 January 30/February 6 140
UAI MIT July 13-16 March 9/March 16 119
AAAI Boston July 16-20 February 16/21 145
KDD Philadelphia August 23-26 March 3/March 10 166

It looks like the northeastern US is the big winner as far as location this year.

MLSS 2006

There will be two machine learning summer schools in 2006.

One is in Canberra, Australia from February 6 to February 17 (Aussie summer). The webpage is fully ‘live’ so you should actively consider it now.

The other is in Taipei, Taiwan from July 24 to August 4. This one is still in the planning phase, but that should be settled soon.

Attending an MLSS is probably the quickest and easiest way to bootstrap yourself into a reasonable initial understanding of the field of machine learning.

NIPS

NIPS is the big winter conference of learning.

  1. Paper due date: June 3rd. (Tweaked thanks to Fei Sha.)
  2. Location: Vancouver (main program) Dec. 5-8 and Whistler (workshops) Dec 9-10, BC, Canada

NIPS is larger than all of the other learning conferences, partly because it’s the only one at that time of year. I recommend the workshops which are often quite interesting and energetic.

Conference attendance is mandatory

For anyone planning to do research, conference attendance is virtually mandatory for success. Aside from exposing yourself to a large collection of different ideas, many interesting conversations leading to new research happen at conferences. If you are a student, you should plan to go to at least one summer conference. Your advisor should cover the costs.

Conference Location Early Registration deadline normal/student cost in US dollars
AAAI Pittsburgh, PA, USA May 13 590/170
IJCAI Edinburgh, Scotland May 21 663/351
COLT Bertinoro, Italy May 30 256/178
KDD Chicago, IL, USA July 15 590/260
ICML Bonn, Germany July 1 448
UAI Edinburgh, Scotland not ready yet ???