CALL FOR PAPERS

Conference On Learning Theory (COLT 03) and Workshop on Kernel Machines

Washington, D.C.

August 24 - 27, 2003

http://learningtheory.org/colt2003 and http://www.kernel-machines.org

The Sixteenth Annual COLT (Conference on Learning Theory, formerly Conference on Computational Learning Theory) and the Seventh Kernel Workshop will be held jointly with ICML and KDD in Washington, D.C. In addition there will be tutorials and invited papers in two target areas (Game Theory and Natural Language processing) and a later submission deadline for clearly stated one-page open problems.

The Kernel Workshop has traditionally been held at NIPS; in 2003, it will constitute one day at COLT.Its papers will go through the regular COLT reviewing process (with a dedicated kernel area chair), and will be published in the COLT proceedings.

We invite submissions of rigorous theoretical and experimental papers on all aspects of learning theory and empirical inference. Papers must be clear and mathematically sound. We particularly look for creative papers that introduce crisp and well-motivated new models and, if applicable, relate them to existing theoretical work.We welcome experimental and algorithmic papers provided they are relevant to the focus of the conference, e.g. by providing theoretically motivated comparisons, or algorithmic implementations of approaches that previously have been analyzed only theoretically.All papers and open problems will appear in the proceedings, to be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series (see http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html). The proceedings will appear both as a printed book and in a full-text electronic version, thus we require electronic submissions. 

To help us direct your paper, the authors are asked provide a keyword list at the beginning of their paper. Some of the following areas might be suitable keywords:

kernel methods, learning in games, mechanism design, natural language processing, boosting, ensemble learning, optimization, on-line learning, competitive analysis, reinforcement learning, planning, control, statistical learning theory, PAC learning, regularization theory, transduction, unsupervised and semi-supervised learning, learning with queries, MDL, graphical models and Bayesian methods, inductive and grammatical inference, learning in the limit.

All papers will receive the same amount of space in the proceedings. However for some of the more technical contributions there might only be time for a short presentation or poster. Papers that have previously appeared in journals or at other conferences, or that are being submitted to other conferences are not appropriate for COLT.

Paper format: Submissions should include the title, authors' names, postal and email addresses, and a 200-word summary of the paper suitable for the conference program. They should be no longer than 13 pages using the Springer LNCS style file (see http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). Your paper should include a clear definition of the theoretical model used and a clear description of the results, as well as a discussion of their significance, including comparison to other work.Submit papers electronically in pdf or ps format (for details see conference website).

Program chairs: Bernhard Schöelkopf (Max Planck Institute Tübingen) and Manfred Warmuth (U.C. Santa Cruz), Conference and local arrangements chair: Carl Smith (U. of Maryland)

Program committee: Kristin Bennett (Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst.), Avrim Blum (Carnegie Mellon U.), Nicolo Cesa-Bianchi (U. of Milan), Nello Cristianini (UC Davis), Yoav Freund (Banter Inc.), Michael Kearns (U. of Pennsylvania), Efim Kinber (Sacred Heart U.), Vladimir Koltchinskii (UNM Albuquerque), Yishay Mansour (Tel Aviv U.), Rob Schapire (Princeton U.)

Student travel: We anticipate that some funds will be available to partially support travel by student authors. Eligible authors who wish to apply for travel support should indicate this on their submission's title page.

Mark Fulk Award: This award is for the best paper authored or coauthored by a student. Eligible authors who wish to be considered for this prize should indicate this on their submission's title page.

Dates:
 
Electronic submission of extended abstracts 
March 23, 2003
Electronic submission of one-page open problems
April 27, 2003
Notification of acceptance or rejection 
May 25, 2003
Final submission of all papers (incl. LaTex source files) 
June 10, 2003
Conference registration
See website
Conference dates
August 24-27, 2003