NIPS*2008 CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline for Paper Submissions: June 6, 2008, 23:59 Universal Standard Time (4:59pm Pacific Daylight Time).

Submissions are solicited for the Twenty Second Annual meeting of an interdisciplinary Conference (December 8- 11) that brings together researchers interested in all aspects of neural and statistical processing and computation. The Conference will include invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers. It is single track and highly selective. Preceding the main Conference will be one day of Tutorial (December 8), and following will be two days of Workshops at Whistler/Blackcomb ski resort (December 12-13).

Submissions: Papers are solicited in all areas of neural information processing and statistical learning, including (but not limited to):

• Algorithms and Architectures: statistical learning algorithms, neural networks, kernel methods, graphical models, Gaussian processes, dimensionality reduction and manifold learning, model selection, combinatorial optimization, relational learning.
• Applications: innovative applications or fielded systems that use machine learning, including systems for time series prediction, bioinformatics, text/web analysis, multimedia processing, and robotics.
• Brain Imaging: neuroimaging, cognitive neuroscience, EEG (electroencephalogram), ERP (event related potentials), MEG (magnetoencephalogram), fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), brain mapping, brain segmentation, brain computer interfaces.
• Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence: theoretical, computational, or experimental studies of perception, psychophysics, human or animal learning, memory, reasoning, problem solving, natural language processing, and neuropsychology.
• Control and Reinforcement Learning: decision and control, exploration, planning, navigation, Markov decision processes, game-playing, multi-agent coordination, computational models of classical and operant conditioning.
• Hardware Technologies: analog and digital VLSI, neuromorphic engineering, computational sensors and actuators, microrobotics, bioMEMS, neural prostheses, photonics, molecular and quantum computing.
• Learning Theory: generalization, regularization and model selection, Bayesian learning, spaces of functions and kernels, statistical physics of learning, online learning and competitive analysis, hardness of learning and approximations, large deviations and asymptotic analysis, information theory.
• Neuroscience: theoretical and experimental studies of processing and transmission of information in biological neurons and networks, including spike train generation, synaptic modulation, plasticity and adaptation.
• Speech and Signal Processing: recognition, coding, synthesis, denoising, segmentation, source separation, auditory perception, psychoacoustics, dynamical systems, recurrent networks, Language Models, Dynamic and Temporal models.
• Visual Processing: biological and machine vision, image processing and coding, segmentation, object detection and recognition, motion detection and tracking, visual psychophysics, visual scene analysis and interpretation.
• Evaluation Criteria: Submissions will be refereed on the basis of technical quality, novelty, potential impact, and clarity. Papers that balance new algorithmic contributions with a more applied focus are particularly encouraged. These include papers that contain a substantial evaluation on real-world problems, or papers that combine results on novel applications with analysis of their relevance from a machine learning perspective. We would also like to encourage submissions by authors who are new to NIPS.

Submission Instructions: all submissions will be made electronically at http://nips2008.confmaster.net. Submissions must be in PDF format. As in previous years, reviewing will be double-blind: the reviewers will not know the identities of the authors. Papers will be limited to 8 pages, including figures and references, in the NIPS style. Complete submission and formatting instructions, including style files, can be found at the NIPS website: http://nips.cc. Electronic submissions will be accepted until midnight June 6, 2008, Universal Standard Time (5pm Pacific Daylight Time). There will be an opportunity after the meeting to revise accepted manuscripts.

Demonstrations: There is a separate Demonstration track at NIPS. Authors wishing to submit to the Demonstration track should consult the Call for Demonstrations (coming soon).

Policy on Dual Submissions: Submissions that are identical (or nearly identical) to versions that have been previously published or that have been submitted in parallel to other conferences are not appropriate for NIPS. Exceptions to this rule are the following:
(1) Shorter write-ups of longer papers that have been recently (i.e. in the current calendar year) submitted to journals, and have not, at the time of the NIPS submission, been accepted for publication.
(2) Papers presented or to be presented at conferences or workshops without proceedings (or with only abstracts published).

Workshops: The workshops will be held at Whistler/Blackcomb ski resort from December 12-13. The upcoming workshop proposal will provide details.

Program Committee:
Jean-Yves Audibert (Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées)
Francis Bach (INRIA - Ecole Normale Supérieure)
Yoshua Bengio (Université de Montréal) [Co-Chair]
Kristin Bennett (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Michael Bowling (University of Alberta)
Aaron Courville (Université de Montréal)
Koby Crammer (University of Pennsylvania)
Sanjoy Dasgupta (University of California, San Diego)
Nathaniel Daw (New York University)
Eleazar Eskin (University of California, Los Angeles)
David Fleet (University of Toronto)
Paolo Frasconi (Università di Firenze)
Arthur Gretton (Max Planck Institute)
Tony Jebara (Columbia University)
Chris Manning (Stanford University)
Ron Meir (Technion)
Noboru Murata (Waseda University)
Erkki Oja (Helsinki University of Technology)
Doina Precup (McGill University)
Stefan Schaal (University of Southern California)
Dale Schuurmans (University of Alberta) [Co-Chair]
Fei Sha (Yahoo! Research)
Alan Stocker (New York University)
Ingo Steinwart (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Erik Sudderth (University of California, Berkeley)
Yee-Whye Teh (University College London)
Antonio Torralba (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Larry Wasserman (Carnegie Mellon University)
Max Welling (University of California, Irvine)