oliver.obst.eu

We are organising a special session on Interactive Data Analysis and Visualization at the 2012 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks! The special session web site contains all the details.

By offering automated information extraction tools from data, machine learning has revolutionized the way in which humans can cope with electronic data volumes. The ever increasing complexity of the settings continues to pose challenges to the field: often, it is no longer possible to specify a priori a formal learning task; complex parameter choices can severely influence the outcome; and an appropriate encoding of data is not clear at all. More and more often, the human constitutes an important step in the loop to interactively decide about an appropriate learning model, model parameters, and data representation. Because of this fact, intuitive models and model parameters, and human understandable interfaces to the model and data are needed. In this frame, interesting new technologies have been developed such as high quality data visualization tools, sparse interpretable data representation and models, informed priors, active learning, and similar.

This special session aims to foster research in neural learning paradigms which offer an intuitive interface to data or models and thus have the potential as parts of an interactive pipeline. Go to the special session web site more information.

We are organising a special session “Information Processing, Inference and Learning” at the Fifth Australian Conference on Artificial Life (ACAL11).

Organisers: Oliver Obst, Mikhail Prokopenko (CSIRO ICT Centre)

Keynote speaker (tentative): Prof. Martin Riedmiller, Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg, Germany

Learning is one of the most important capabilities of living systems, and processes involved in inference and learning are ingrained in many levels of organisation scale, e.g., from single neurons to organisations or societies. Much of the information processing involved in these processes is consequently distributed, and relies on local interactions among individual entities. On the other hand, many successful approaches from machine learning require some centralised processing, while in living systems no such requirement exists.

In this special session, we are looking for contributions that will address issues that involve information processing, inference, and learning, with a perspective on their application to Alife scenarios. These include for example methods to help characterising relevant information, self-organised encoding of information, decentralised approaches to learning, and inference mechanisms. Possible topics include, but are not limited to,

• information theoretic methods for analysing/describing Alife scenarios
• interactions between genetic evolution, and individual learning
• self-organised information processing
• intrinsically motivated learning
• guided self-organisation

To submit papers to this special session, please use the ACAL 2011 submission system and use Information Processing, Inference and / or Learning as a keyword.

(more…)

DMMD 2011 Symposium: Distributed machine learning and sparse representation with massive data sets
Web page: http://research.ict.csiro.au/conferences/machine-learning/

The symposium will take place at the CSIRO Campus in Sydney (Marsfield), Australia.

The exponentially increasing demand for computing power as well as physical and economic limitations has contributed to a proliferation of distributed and parallel computer architectures. To make better use of current and future high-performance computing, and to fully benefit from these massive amounts of data, we must discover, understand and exploit the available parallelism in machine learning. Simultaneously, we have to model data in an adequate manner while keeping the models as simple as possible, by making use of a sparse representation of the data or sparse modelling of the respective underlying problem.

The invited speakers are:

Samy Bengio (Google Research, CA, USA)
Barbara Hammer (University of Bielefeld, Germany)
Yann LeCun (New York University, NY, USA)
Michael Mahoney (Stanford University, CA, USA)

Call for Papers / Extended Abstracts

(more…)

Our new paper, Improving Recurrent Neural Network Performance using Transfer Entropy, has been accepted at the 17th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP) in Sydney.

In this paper, we present an approach to improve the hidden layer of recurrent neural networks, guided by the learning goal of the system, and apply this new method to reservoir computing approaches. Reservoir computing uses, in general, a fixed, randomly initialised hidden layer. A consequence of this is that performance is usually quite good, but not necessarily optimal for the task at hand. There exist self-organised approaches – like intrinsic plasticity – that are able to improve performance of reservoir computing approaches, but usually, they just consider the input to the system, and don’t take the actual task of the system into account.

Our reservoir adaptation optimises the information transfer at each individual unit, dependent on properties of the information transfer between input and (desired) output of the system. Using synthetic data, we show that this reservoir adaptation improves the performance of offline echo state learning and Recursive Least Squares Online Learning.

ICONIP 2010 takes place from the 22nd–25th November 2010 in Sydney, Australia.

ICDL is a multidisciplinary conference pertaining to all subjects related to
the development and learning processes of natural and artificial systems,
including perceptual, cognitive, behavioral, emotional and all other mental
capabilities that are exhibited by humans, higher animals, and robots. Its
visionary goal is to understand autonomous development in humans and higher
animals in biological, functional, and computational terms, and to enable such
development in artificial systems. ICDL strives to bring together researchers
in neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, robotics and other
related areas to encourage understanding and cross-fertilization of latest
ideas. ICDL2009 is held in Shanghai, June 5-7, 2009.
For a list of topics of see the CfP at http://www.icdl09.org/.

icdl, conference, cfp, learning, development, robotics

The 2008 Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA’08) will be held at the Australian National University (ANU) Canberra, during 3-5 December 2008.

We invite participation in the conference by researchers in all areas of robotics, automation and mechatronics. At this year’s conference we will be celebrating the 10th Anniversary of ACRA. For more information, please visit the
conference website. Submission of papers deadline is 5 September 2008.

Technorati Tags: cfp, robotics, conference, australia, robots, canberra

UC 2008, the Seventh International Conference on Unconventional Computation will take place in Vienna, August 25-28, 2008.

Original papers are solicited in all areas of unconventional computation; typical, but not exclusive, topics are: natural computing including quantum, cellular, molecular, neural, and membrane computing as well as evolutionary paradigms; chaos and dynamical systems based computing; proposals for computations going beyond the Turing model.

Submissions are due on April 14th, 2008. The call for papers and the conference poster are available from the conference homepage.

Technorati Tags: unconventional, evolutionary computing, conference, quantum computing, chaos, cfp, neural computing, dynamical systems

The Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems deals with new methodologies, algorithms, hardwares, system architectures to realize advanced distributed robotic systems. Topics include but are not limited to:

Architectures for teams of robots, Ambient Intelligence, Biologically inspired systems, Control issues in multi-robot systems, Distributed decision making/problem solving, Distributed/cooperative perception, Distributed planning, Distributed task execution, Human and robot interaction, Learning and adaptation in teams of robots, Multi-robot applications in exploration, search and rescue, Mobiligence (Emergence of Intelligence through Mobility), Modular robotics, Network robotics, Performance metrics for robot teams, Reconfigurable robots, Robot societies, Self-organizing robotic systems, Sensor networks, Swarm robotics, Task allocation.

The conference takes place in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan, Nov. 17-19, 2008. Full paper submission is June 30, 2008. For details, check out the web page.

Technorati Tags: CFP, conference, robotics, distributed systems, autonomous robots

The scope of development and learning covered by this conference includes perceptual, cognitive, behavioral, emotional and all other mental capabilities that are exhibited by humans, higher animals, artificial systems and robots. Investigations of the biological and computational mechanisms of mental development are expected to improve our understanding of the working of the whole range of mental capabilities in humans and to enable autonomous development of these highly complex capabilities by robots and other artificial systems. The International Conference on Development and Learning strives to bring together researchers in neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence and robotics and other related areas to encourage understanding and cross-fertilization of the latest ideas and results from the different disciplines. Full papers are due March 14. ICDL 2008 takes place Aug 9th-12 in Monterey, California. For details see http://www.icdl08.org/.

Artificial life investigates the fundamental properties of living systems through simulating and synthesizing biological entities and processes in artificial media. Papers are welcome in all areas of the field, including Synthesis and origin of life, self-organization, self-replication, artificial chemistries, Evolution and adaptation, evolutionary dynamics, evolutionary games, coevolution, major evolutionary transitions, levels of selection, ecosystems, Unconventional and biologically inspired computing, Bio-inspired robots and embodied cognition, autonomous agents, evolutionary robotics, information in Complex Systems and Artificial Life, … .
All authors are encouraged to explain how their work sheds light on the
fundamental properties of living systems and makes progress on the important
open questions identified at previous meetings.

Several artificial life themes have been proposed as live research topics around which conference sessions may organise. See here for details.

The conference will be held in Winchester, paper submission is 29 February, conference date is 5-8 August, 2008.