Preface

ALT 2009 was the 20th in the ALT conference series, established in Japan in 1990. The series Analogical and Inductive Inference is a predecessor of this series: it was held in 1986, 1989 and 1992, co-located with ALT in 1994, and subsequently merged with ALT. ALT maintains its strong connections to Japan, but has also been held in other countries, such as Australia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Singapore, Spain, and the USA. The ALT series is supervised by its Steering Committee: Naoki Abe (IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown, USA), Shai Ben-David (University of Waterloo, Canada), Phil Long (Google, Mountain View, USA), Gábor Lugosi (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain), Akira Maruoka (Ishinomaki Senshu University, Japan), Takeshi Shinohara (Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka, Japan), Frank Stephan (National University of Singapore, Republic of Singapore), Einoshin Suzuki (Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan), Eiji Takimoto (Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan), György Turán (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, and University of Szeged, Hungary), Osamu Watanabe (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan), Thomas Zeugmann (Chair, Hokkaido University, Japan), and Sandra Zilles (Publicity Chair, University of Regina, Canada). The ALT web pages have been set up (together with Frank Balbach and Jan Poland) and are maintained by Thomas Zeugmann.

The present volume contains the texts of the 26 papers presented at ALT 2009, divided into groups of papers on online learning, learning graphs, active learning and query learning, statistical learning, inductive inference, and semi-supervised and unsupervised learning. The volume also contains abstracts of the invited talks:

• Sanjoy Dasgupta (University of California, San Diego, USA)
  The Two Faces of Active Learning
• Hector Geffner (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain)
  Inference and Learning in Planning
• Jiawei Han (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
  Mining Heterogeneous Information Networks by Exploring the Power of Links
• Yishay Mansour (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
  Learning and Domain Adaptation
• Fernando C.N. Pereira (Google, Mountain View, USA)
  Learning on the Web

Papers presented at DS 2009 are contained in the DS 2009 proceedings.

The E. Mark Gold Award has been presented annually at the ALT conferences since 1999, for the most outstanding student contribution. This year, the award was given to Hanna Mazzawi for the paper Reconstructing Weighted Graphs with Minimal Query Complexity, co-authored by Nader Bshouty.

We would like to thank the many people and institutions who contributed to the success of the conference. Thanks to the authors of the papers for their submissions, and to the invited speakers for presenting exciting overviews of important recent research developments. We are very grateful to the sponsors of the conference for their generous financial support: University of Porto, Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Laboratory, Center for Research in Advanced Computing Systems, Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation, Portuguese Artificial Intelligence Association, SAS, Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Machine Learning, and Division of Computer Science, Hokkaido University.

We are grateful to the members of the Program Committee for ALT 2009. Their hard work in reviewing and discussing the papers made sure that we had an interesting and strong program. We also thank the subreferees assisting the Program Committee. Special thanks go to the local arrangement chair João Gama (University of Porto). We would like to thank the Discovery Science conference for its ongoing collaboration with ALT, which makes it possible to provide a well-rounded picture of the current theoretical and practical advances in machine learning and the related areas. In particular, we are grateful to the conference chair João Gama (University of Porto) and Program Committee chairs Vãtor Santos Costa (University of Porto) and Alãpio Jorge (University of Porto) for their cooperation. Last but not least, we thank Springer for their support in preparing and publishing this volume of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

Conference Chair

Program Committee

Local Arrangements

Subreferees

Sponsoring Institutions

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