Preface

This volume includes 25 technical contributions that were selected from 50 submissions by the program committee. It also contains descriptions of the five invited talks of ALT and DS; longer versions of the DS papers are available in the proceedings of DS 2007. These invited talks were presented to the audience of both conferences in joint sessions.

• Avrim Blum (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA): “A Theory of Similarity Functions for Learning and Clustering” (invited speaker for ALT 2007)
• Thomas G. Dietterich (Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA): “Machine Learning in Ecosystem Informatics” (invited speaker for DS 2007)
• Masaru Kitsuregawa (The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan): “Challenge for Info-plosion” (invited speaker for DS 2007)
• Alex Smola (National ICT Australia / ANU, Canberra, Australia): “A Hilbert Space Embedding for Distributions” (invited speaker for ALT 2007)
• Jürgen Schmidhuber (IDSIA, Lugano, Switzerland): “Simple Algorithmic Principles of Discovery, Subjective Beauty, Selective Attention, Curiosity & Creativity” (joint invited speaker for ALT 2007 and DS 2007)

Since 1999, ALT has been awarding the E. Mark Gold award for the most outstanding paper by a student author. This year the award was given to Markus Maier for his paper “Cluster Identification in Nearest-Neighbor Graphs,” co-authored by Matthias Hein and Ulrike von Luxburg. We thank Google for sponsoring the E.M. Gold Award.

ALT 2007 was the 18th in a series of annual conferences established in Japan in 1990. Another ancestor of ALT 2007 is the conference series Analogical and Inductive Inference, held in 1986, 1989, and 1992, which merged with the ALT conference series after a collocation in 1994. ALT subsequently became an international conference series which has kept its strong links to Japan but has also regularly been held at overseas destinations including Australia, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Spain and the USA.

Continuation of the ALT series is supervised by its steering committee, consisting of: Thomas Zeugmann (Hokkaido University, Japan) Chair, Steffen Lange (FH Darmstadt, Germany) Publicity Chair, Naoki Abe (IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown, USA), Shai Ben-David (University of Waterloo, Canada), Marcus Hutter (Australian National University, Canberra, Australia), Roni Khardon (Tufts University, Medford, USA), Phil Long (Google, Mountain View, USA), Akira Maruoka (Ishinomaki Senshu University, Japan), Rocco Servedio (Columbia University, New York, USA), Takeshi Shinohara (Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka, Japan), Frank Stephan (National University of Singapore, Republic of Singapore), Einoshin Suzuki (Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan), and Osamu Watanabe (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan).

We would like to thank all of the individuals and institutions who contributed to the success of the conference: the authors for submitting papers, and the invited speakers for accepting our invitation and lending us their insight into recent developments in their research areas. We wish to thank the following sponsors for their generous financial support: Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR); Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development (AOARD)^*; Google for sponsoring the E.M. Gold Award; Graduate School of Information Sciences (GSIS), Tohoku University for providing secretarial assistance and equipment as well; Research Institute of Electrical Communication (RIEC), Tohoku University; New Horizons in Computing, MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas; and Semi-Structured Data Mining Project, MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research.

We are also grateful for the Technical Group on Computation (COMP) of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) for its technical sponsorship; Division of Computer Science, Hokkaido University for providing the web-page and online submission system; and Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, University of Lübeck where Frank Balbach developed a part of the online submission system.

We thank the Local Arrangements Chair Akira Ishino (Tohoku University, Japan) for his great assistance in making the conference a success in many ways. We thank Vincent Corruble for making the beautiful poster. We thank Springer for its continuous support in the preparation of this volume.

We would also like to thank all program committee members for their hard work in reviewing the submitted papers and participating in on-line discussions. We thank the external referees whose reviews made a substantial contribution to the process of selecting papers for ALT 2007.

We are grateful to the Discovery Science conference for its ongoing collaboration with ALT. In particular we would like to thank the Conference Chair Ayumi Shinohara (Tohoku University, Japan) and the Program Committee Chairs Vincent Corruble (UPMC, Paris, France) and Masayuki Takeda (Kyushu University, Japan) for their cooperation and support.

Finally, we would like to express special thanks to Thomas Zeugmann for his continuous support of the ALT conference series and in particular for his great service in maintaining the ALT web pages and the ALT submission system, which he programmed together with Frank Balbach and Jan Poland. Thomas Zeugmann assisted us in many ways by answering countless questions related to running the conference and preparing the proceedings.

Conference Chair

Program Committee

Local Arrangements

Subreferees

Sponsoring Institutions

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