The 20th International Conference
on
Algorithmic Learning Theory

University of Porto, Portugal
October 3 - 5, 2009

Topics of Interest: We invite submissions that make a wide variety of contributions to the theory of learning, including the following:

• Comparison of the strength of learning models and the design and evaluation of novel algorithms for learning problems in established learning-theoretic settings such as
  • inductive inference,
  • statistical learning theory,
  • on-line learning,
  • query models
  • unsupervised, semi-supervised and active learning.
• Analysis of the theoretical properties of existing algorithms:
  • families of algorithms could include
    • boosting,
    • kernel-based methods, SVM,
    • Bayesian networks,
    • methods for reinforcement learning or learning in repeated games,
    • graph- and/or manifold-based methods,
    • methods for latent-variable estimation and/or clustering,
    • MDL,
    • decision tree methods,
    • information-based methods,
  • analyses could include generalization, convergence or computational efficiency.
• Definition and analysis of new learning models. Models might
  • identify and formalize classes of learning problems inadequately addressed by existing theory or
  • capture salient properties of important concrete applications.

Invited Talks. There will be several invited talks by prominent researchers.

Submission. Authors can submit their papers electronically via our submission page. Files in Postscript (PS) and Portable Document Format (PDF) are allowed.

Important Dates.

• Submission deadline: May 10, 2009 (you may submit for as long as it is May 10, 2009 anywhere in the world)
• Notification of acceptance or rejection will be emailed to the submitting author by June 18, 2009
• The camera-ready copy of accepted papers will be due July 10, 2009.

Format. The submitted paper should be no longer than 15 pages in the standard format for Springer-Verlag's Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series. The 15 page limit includes title, abstract, acknowledgments, references, illustrations and any other parts of the paper; appendices bypassing the page limit are not allowed.

Policy. Each submitted paper will be reviewed by the members of the program committee and be judged on clarity, significance and originality. Joint submissions to other conferences with published proceedings are not allowed. Papers that have appeared in journals or other conferences are not appropriate for ALT 2009.

Proceedings. All accepted papers will be published as a volume in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Springer-Verlag, and will be available at the conference. Full versions of selected papers of ALT 2009 will be invited to a special issue of the journal Theoretical Computer Science.

E.M. Gold Award. One scholarship of 555 € will be awarded to a student author of an excellent paper (please mark student submissions on the title page).

Conference Chair:

Ricard Gavaldà

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona

gavalda@lsi.upc.edu

Program Committee:

• Gábor Lugosi, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain (Chair)
• Sandra Zilles, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada (Chair)
• Peter Auer, University of Leoben, Austria
• José L. Balcázar, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
• Shai Ben-David, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Avrim Blum, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
• Nader Bshouty, Technion, Haifa, Israel
• Claudio Gentile, Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Varese, Italy
• Peter Grünwald, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Roni Khardon, Tufts University, Medford, USA
• Phil Long, Google, Mountain View, USA
• Massimiliano Pontil, University College London, UK
• Alexander Rakhlin, UC Berkeley, USA
• Shai Shalev-Shwartz, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, USA
• Hans Ulrich Simon, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany
• Frank Stephan, National University of Singapore
• Csaba Szepesvári, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
• Eiji Takimoto, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

Local Arrangement Chair:

João Gama

University of Porto, Portugal

jgama@fep.up.pt