Neural Information Processing Systems 2002 (NIPS*2002) Main Page

www.nips.cc
Vancouver, Canada, December 9-14

Neural Information Processing Systems: Natural and Synthetic

You are invited to participate in the Sixteenth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, which is the premier scientific meeting on neural computation. The Conference is extraordinarily interdisciplinary, with contributions from many intellectual communities united by an interest in the study of artificial and natural neural information processing. Interdisciplinary interactions are encouraged by having a single track of presentations and high-quality poster sessions. Presentation topics include learning algorithms and architectures, learning theory, neuroscience, cognitive science, vision, speech and signal processing, reinforcement learning and control, implementations,and diverse applications. All papers have been rigorously reviewed (with a 30% acceptance rate). The Conference is preceeded by one day of tutorials and is followed by two days of workshop sessions in nearby Whistler, British Columbia, Canada. (Click here for enlarged Vancouver image.)

Note that NIPS provides its PAPERS ONLINE.

Very special thanks to the sponsors of NIPS*2002: Microsoft and Ben Wegbreit.

NEW

Online Preproceedings

NEW

Awards

Registration and Financial/Travel Support

Invitation Letters

Volunteering

Hotels and Local Transportation

For Authors and Presenters

Where is Information on...

	Conference proceedings? here.
	Proceedings on CD-ROM? here.
	NIPS*2001 conference? here.
	NIPS conferences of previous years? here.
	Poster formats? here.
	Skiing discounts? here.
	Driving directions? here.
	Organizers of NIPS? here.
	Call for papers/proposals (now past)? here.

Important Dates

	Tutorials: Dec 9, 2002
	Conference: Dec 10, 11, 12 (until noon), 2002
	Workshops: Dec 12 (evening reception), 13, 14, 2002
	Poster presentations: Dec 10, 11, 2002
	Demonstrations: Dec 10, 11, 2002
	Camera-ready papers due: January 10, 2003
	Proceedings available online: March 2003
	Proceedings volumes mailed: June 2003

Conference Format
The new Demonstrations component of the Conference program will enable researchers to highlight scientific advances, systems, and technologies in ways that go beyond conventional poster presentations. It will provide a unique forum for demonstrating advanced technologies both hardware and software and fostering the direct exchange of knowledge. The Tutorial Program provides a choice of six two-hour tutorials by leading scientists. The topics span a wide range of subjects including neuroscience, learning algorithms and theory, bioinformatics, image processing and data mining. The Workshop Program will include 15 workshops covering a wide range of topics from neuroscience to machine learning. The workshop schedule allows time for informal discussions, skiing and other winter sports. Click for the NIPS brochure [pdf] or printed NIPS program [pdf].

Organization

Organizing Committee
General Chair:
	Sue Becker, McMaster University
Program Chair:
	Sebastian Thrun, Carnegie Mellon University
Tutorials Chair:
	Lawrence Saul, University of Pennsylvania
Workshops Co-Chairs:
	Barak Pearlmutter, University of New Mexico
	Robert Jacobs, Rochester University
Publications Chair:
	Klaus Obermayer, TU Berlin
Demonstrations Co-Chairs:
	Shihab Shamma, University of Maryland
	Shih-Chii Liu, University of Zurich and EZH, Zurich
Publicity Chair:
	Zoubin Ghahramani, University College London
Volunteers Director:
	Rajesh Rao, University of Washington
Contracts:
	Steve Hanson, Rutgers University
Program Committee
	Sebastian Thrun (chair), Carnegie Mellon University
	Peter Bartlett, BIOwulf Technologies
	Gert Cauwenberghs, Johns Hopkins University
	Geoffrey Gordon, Carnegie Mellon University
	Daniel Lee, University of Pennsylvania
	Marina Meila, University of Washington
	Klaus-Robert Mueller, Fraunhofer FIRST
	Andrew Y. Ng, University of California, Berkeley
	John Platt, Microsoft Research
	Sam Roweis, University of Toronto
	Eero Simoncelli, New York University
	Joshua Tenenbaum, MIT
	Chris Williams, University of Edinburgh
	Richard Zemel, University of Toronto
Webmasters
Design:
	Alexander Gray, Carnegie Mellon University
Technical:
	Guy Lebanon, Carnegie Mellon University
NIPS Foundation
Board, Officers, and Office

NIPS*2003 - click here for details Conference dates: Dec. 8-13, 2003 (Dec. 8: tutorials, Dec. 9-11 conference, Dec. 12-13 workshops) Location: Vancouver (tutorials and conference) and Whistler (workshops) Submission Deadline: June 6, 2003
General Chair	Sebastian Thrun, Carnegie Mellon University
Program Chair	Lawrence Saul, University of Pennsylvania
Tutorials Chair	Sam Roweis, University of Toronto
Workshop Chairs	Robbie Jacobs, Rochester University Satinder Singh Baveja, University of Michigan
Publications Chair	Bernhard Schoelkopf, Max Planck Gesellschaft Tuebingen
Online Proceedings Chair	Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Demonstrations Chairs	Shih-Chii Liu, ETH/University of Zurich Tobi Delbruck, ETH/University of Zurich
Publicity Chair	Klaus Robert Mueller, Fraunhofer FIRST
Volunteers Chair	Dale Schuurmans, University of Waterloo
Web Master	Bryan Nielsen, Salk
Workflow Masters	John Blitzer, University of Pennsylvania Guy Lebanon, Carnegie Mellon University
Program Committee	Lawrence Saul (Chair), University of Pennsylvania Peter Bartlett, University of California at Berkeley Samy Bengio, IDIAP Chris Burges, Microsoft Rich Caruana, Cornell University Ralph Etienne-Cummings Johns Hopkins University Geoff Hinton, University of Toronto John Lafferty, Carnegie Mellon University Michael Lewicki, Carnegie Mellon University Michael Littman Rutgers University Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst Rajesh Rao, University of Washington Jianbo Shi, University of Pennsylvania Richard Shiffrin, Indiana University Yoram Singer, Hebrew University Alexander Smola, Australian National University Martin Wainwright, University of California at Berkeley

Tutorials and Conference

Conference Invited Speakers

Click for abstracts and bios.

Hugh Durrant-Whyte, University of Sydney: Information in Sensor Networks

Paul Glimcher, New York University: Decisions, Uncertainty and the Brain: Neuroeconomics

Deborah Gordon, Stanford University: Ants at Work

David Heeger, New York University: Neural Basis of Visual Pattern Discrimination

Andrew W. Moore, Carnegie Mellon University: Statistical Data Mining

Pietro Perona, Caltech: The Emergence of Visual Categories - A Computational Perspective

Tutorial Topics

Click for abstracts and bios.

Michael Kearns, University of Pennsylvania: Computational Game Theory

Sebastian Seung, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and MIT: Neural Integrators

Yair Weiss, Hebrew University, Jianbo Shi, Carnegie Mellon University, and Serge Belongie, UC San Diego: Eigenvector Methods for Clustering and Image Segmentation

Richard M. Karp, UC Berkeley and International Computer Science Institute: Mathematical, Statistical and Algorithmic Challenges from Genomics and Molecular Biology

Martin Cooke, University of Sheffield: Computational Auditory Scene Analysis in Listeners and Machines

Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst, William Cohen, Carnegie Mellon University: Information Extraction from the World Wide Web

Tutorials and Conference Schedule

Click for the full presentations program or the full printed version.

Monday, Dec. 9

8:00am - 6:00pm		Registration
9:30am - 5:30pm		Tutorials
7:00pm - 10:00pm		Conference Banquet

Tuesday, Dec. 10 and Wednesday, Dec. 11

8:00am - 6:00pm		Registration
8:30am - 12:00pm		Sessions
2:00pm - 5:30pm		Sessions
1:00pm - 6:00pm		Poster Setup and Preview
7:30pm - 10:30pm		Poster Session and Demonstration Sessions

Thursday, Dec. 12

8:30am - 12:00pm		Sessions
2:00pm - 3:30pm		Buses Depart for Workshops

Workshops

Friday & Saturday,
Dec. 13 & 14

Two-day workshops:

Propagation Algorithms on Graphs with Cycles: Theory and Applications (2 day) Shiro Ikeda, Toshiyuki Tanaka, Max Welling

Computational Neuroimaging: Foundations, Concepts & Methods (2 day) S. Hanson, B. Pearlmutter, S. Strother, L. Hansen, B. Martin-Bly

Multi-Agent Learning: Theory and Practice (2 day) Gerald Tesauro, Michael L. Littman

Friday, Dec. 13

One-day workshops:

Machine Learning Techniques for Bioinformatics Colin Campbell, Phil Long

Unreal Data: Principles of Modeling Nonvectorial Data Alex Smola, Gunnar Raetsch, Zoubin Ghahramani

Statistical Methods for Computational Experiments in Visual Processing and Computer Vision Ross Beveridge, Bruce Draper, Geof Givens, Ross J. Micheals, Jonathon Phillips

Neuromorphic Engineering in the Commercial World Timothy Horiuchi, Giacomo Indiveri, Ralph Etienne-Cummings

The Role of Adaptation/Plasticity in Neuronal Coding Garrett B. Stanley

Independent Component Analysis and Beyond Stefan Harmeling, Luis B. Almeida, Erkki Oja, Dinh-Tuan Pham

Spectral Methods in Dimensionality Reduction, Clustering, and Classification Josh Tenenbaum, Sam T. Roweis

Saturday, Dec. 14

One-day workshops:

Universal Learning Algorithms and Optimal Search Juergen Schmidhuber, Marcus Hutter

Quantum Neural Computing Elizabeth C. Behrman, James E. Steck

Learning of Invariant Representations Konrad Paul Kording, Bruno A. Olshausen

On Learning Kernels Nello Cristianini, Tommi Jaakkola, Michael Jordan, Gert Lanckriet

Negative Results and Open Problems Isabelle Guyon

Beyond Classification and Regression: Learning Rankings, Preferences, Equality Predicates, and Other Structures Rich Caruana, Thorsten Joachims

Thalamocortical Processing in Audition and Vision Shihab A. Shamma, Anthony M. Zador

Workshops Schedule

The workshops will be held at the Westin Resort & Spa in Whistler. If you are attending the workshops, please help our planning by completing a brief workshop preferences survey.

Thursday, Dec. 12

6:30pm - 8:30pm

Welcoming Reception and Registration

Friday, Dec. 13

7:00am - 11:00am		Registration
7:30am - 10:30am		Workshop Sessions
4:00pm - 7:00pm		Workshop Sessions

Saturday, Dec. 14

7:30am - 10:30am		Workshop Sessions
4:00pm - 7:00pm		Workshop Sessions
7:30pm - 10:30pm		Banquet and Wrap-up

About this Webpage

For issues regarding page design and content, contact Alexander Gray For issues regarding forms, scripts and server operation, contact Guy Lebanon.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Doug Baker of Eizel Technologies, long-time former NIPS webmaster, for help in writing the NIPS travel grant script, to Dana Dahlstrom of UCSD for creating updated versions of the NIPS formatting files, and to Leemon Baird of the Air Command and Staff College, for creating the original .rtf file. Lucifer yellow stain of the LGMD neuron (top left) courtesy of Drs. Krapp, Gabbiani, Koch, and Laurent.