Preface

ALT 2013 took place at the Guild House, National University of Singapore, Singapore from October 6th to October 9th, 2013. ALT is dedicated to the theoretical foundations of machine learning and provides a forum for high-quality talks and scientific interaction in areas such as online learning, inductive inference and grammatical inference, teaching and learning from queries, active learning, probably approximate correct learning, bandit theory, statistical learning theory, Bayesian and stochastic learning, unsupervised or semi-supervised learning, clustering, universal prediction, stochastic optimization, high dimensional and non-parametric inference, information-based methods, decision tree methods, kernel-based methods, graph methods and/or manifold-based methods, sample complexity, complexity of learning, new learning models and applications of algorithmic learning theory.

The present volume of LNAI contains the text of the 23 papers presented at ALT 2013, as well as the texts/abstracts of the invited talks:

• Nir Ailon (Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel), “Learning and Optimizing with Preferences” (joint invited speaker for ALT 2013 and DS 2013)
• Eiji Takimoto (Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan), “Efficient Algorithms for Combinatorial Online Prediction” (invited speaker for ALT 2013),
• Hannu Toivonen (University of Helsinki, Finland), “Creative Computers and Data Mining” (invited speaker for DS 2013),
• Nader H. Bshouty (Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel), “Exact Learning from Membership Queries, Some Techniques, Results and New Directions” (tutorial speaker for ALT 2013).

ALT 2013 was the 24th in the ALT conference series, established in Japan in 1990. The ALT series is supervised by its Steering Committee: Shai Ben-David (University of Waterloo, Canada), Nader Bshouty (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology , Israel), Marcus Hutter (Australian National University, Canberra, Australia), Sanjay Jain, (National University of Singapore, Republic of Singapore), Jyrki Kivinen (University of Helsinki, Finland), Phil Long (NEC Labs America, USA), Rémi Munos, (INRIA, Lille), Frank Stephan (National University of Singapore, Republic of Singapore), Gilles Stoltz (Ecole normale supérieure, Paris, France), Csaba Szepesvári (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada), Eiji Takimoto (Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan), György Turán (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, and University of Szeged, Hungary), Akihiro Yamamoto (Kyoto University, Japan), Thomas Zeugmann (Chair, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan), and Sandra Zilles (Publicity Chair, University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada).

We thank various people and institutions who contributed to the success of the conference. Most importantly, we would like to thank the authors for contributing and presenting their work at the conference. Without their contribution this conference would not have been possible. We would like to thank the Office of Naval Research Global for the generous financial support for the conference ALT 2013 provided under ONRG GRANT N62909-13-1-C208. ALT 2013 and DS 2013 were organized by the School of Computing, National University (NUS) of Singapore. We are very grateful to the School of Computing at NUS for sponsoring the conferences and providing administrative support.

We thank the local arrangement chair, Lee Wee Sun, and his team Mark Bartholomeusz, Kee Yong Ngee, Rachel Goh, Noraiszah Bte Hamzah and other administrative staff at the School of Computing, NUS, for their efforts in organizing the two conferences. We are grateful for the collaboration with the conference series Discovery Science. In particular we would like to thank the DS 2013 Conference Chair Tomoyuki Higuchi and DS 2013 Program Committee Chairs Eyke Hüllermeier and Johannes Fürnkranz.

We are also grateful to EasyChair, the excellent conference management system, which was used for putting together the program for ALT 2013. EasyChair was developed mainly by Andrei Voronkov and is hosted at the University of Manchester. The system is cost-free.

We are grateful to the members of the Program Committee for ALT 2013 and the subreferees for their hard work in selecting a good program for ALT 2013. Last but not the least, we thank Springer for their support in preparing and publishing this volume in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

Conference Chair

Program Committee

ALT 2013 Local Arrangements

Subreferees

Sponsoring Institutions

• Office of Naval Research Global, ONRG GRANT N62909-13-1-C208
• School of Computing, National University of Singapore

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