Special Theme: Patterns for Reuse Submission of statements due: April 25, 2005
Goal
As in previous years, the goal of the workshop is to encourage practitioners and tool developers to exchange expertise, techniques, and methodology in the application of Bayesian methods to a wide range of application areas and to share domain specific insights in a focused, informal forum. As an additional avenue of exchange, practitioners will also have the opportunity to submit statements, meeting notes, code and examples to be compiled into proceedings as part of the overall conference publication.
Special Topic Area
This year we are especially encouraging papers devote to our special theme of patterns for reuse. In particular, we are looking for "design patterns" and other ideas which can be reused from application to application. Based on the response at the workshop, papers describing reusable patterns will be selected for later publication in a special handbook or journal issue. Two example patterns are provided below:
Design Pattern: Noisy-Or. The Noisy-Or model has been used in a large number of applications. It is a robust model which is easy to describe to subject matter experts and it has the distinct advantage the number of parameters grows linearly rather than exponentially with the number of parent variables.
Pattern of Use: Value of Information and Weight of Evidence. When trying to "diagnose" a problem, a common task is to select the next "test" to run. One approach is to select a target node in a Bayes net or influence diagram corresponding to a hypothetical target diagnosis, and then find the test which maximizes the value of information for that node. As value of information requires the elicitation of formal utilities, several stand-ins have been suggested including the use of weight of evidence and mutual information. These calculations have been implemented in several Bayes net software packages.
General Topic Areas
In addition to the special theme, we are also encouraging other papers related to applications.
How solutions must be adapted to meet the demands of the application, clients and stakeholders.
How judgment elicitation techniques can be assisted by data-driven methods and vice versa.
How modeling techniques may vary depending on the domain, maturity of the application, or the organization.
What other applied fields should be drawn on to complement modeling? What kinds of problems arise in such interdisciplinary work, and how can they be overcome?
Interactions between academic research and problem solving: What are effective models of collaboration?
How applications are justified, formulated, validated, fielded, and maintained.
While the emphasis is in methodology we are encouraging submissions that cover a broad range of areas such as diagnosis, optimization, learning, temporal reasoning, speech and visual feature recognition, robotic navigation, language and document analysis. Novel applications in fields such as biology and economics are also encouraged.
Format
The workshop will take place on Tuesday, July 26th, the day of the UAI tutorials. The workshop will begin with highlights presentations where each participant will give a short introduction to themselves and their work. These brief introductions will be followed by sessions devoted to reusable patterns, consisting of the presentation of the patterns followed by open discussion the audience.
The general application papers will be presented as posters to encourage greater participation. In the afternoon, presenters will each give a short introduction to their topic, which will be followed by a poster session and then a number of panel discussions with panelist drawn from the poster sessions. The number and composition of the panels will be determined by the submissions we receive. We will conclude with a plenary panel discussion featuring the organizers which will sum up the days activities and talk about possible plans for next year.
Arrangements
The workshop will run on the premises of the general UAI conference. The registration fee of $40 for the workshop will be required in addition to the main conference registration.
To Participate
Persons desiring to participate should prepare a short (3--8 pages) statement of interest, explaining their background, the applications in which they have contributed and the characteristics of the domain in which they work. The statement should raise questions and offer results, which the participant can speak about. All participants will be expected to have material to present, either formal or informal, for the workshop. Participants are encouraged to apply jointly with members of other disciplines with whom they have collaborated. Make all submissions and enquires to uaiworkshop@macosx.com.
Participation will be limited to 30 individuals. Acceptance will be biased in favor of statements that touch upon reusable patterns and customer issues. We strongly encourage submissions to identify the customers and to discuss how their needs influenced the solution. All members of the workshop committee who would like to attend are expected to qualify as participants. Selection will be done by the committee's decision of the mix of individuals that are likely to generate the most constructive presentations and discussions.
Organizing Committee
Russell Almond, Educational Testing Service, Chair
Oscar Kipersztok, The Boeing Company, Co-Chair
John Mark Agosta, Intel Corporation, Chair Emeritus
Judy Goldsmith, University of Kentucky
Bert Kappen, University of Nijmegen
Kathryn Blackmond Laskey, George Mason University
K. Wojtek Przytula, HRL Laboratories
Irina Rish, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Linda van der Gaag, Utrecht University
Important Dates
Submission of Statements of Interest: April 25, 2005
Notification of selections by the organizing committee: May 23, 2005 (Same as Author notifications for main conference.)
Deadline for optional contributions to workshop proceedings: July 8, 2005
