Call for Papers

UAI 2015 Bayesian Applications Workshop

Note: submissions due at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=baw2015 by 18 May 2015.

Continuing a successful tradition as part of the UAI conference, the Twelfth Annual Bayesian Modeling Applications Workshop will provide a forum for exchange about real-world problems among applications practitioners, tool developers, and researchers. The aim of the workshop is to foster discussion on the challenges of building applications whilst considering stakeholders, user interaction, tools, knowledge elicitation, learning, validation, system integration, and deployment.

The theme of the Workshop has adapted from year to year, as real-world problems change and technologies evolve to meet them. The frenzy to apply conventional machine learning methods for commercial applications has the danger of overwhelming Bayesian methods where they might be best applied. Bayesian methods face a similar challenge to the one they faced a decade ago by this community: To demonstrate their timeliness in the current environment of intelligent systems and a long tail of related decision and prediction tasks.

Submissions are solicited of real-world applications of Bayesian models and computational methods, to be presented in oral or poster sessions. There will also be opportunity to take part in discussions with invited speakers and with a concluding panel about the state of the current application environment. We encourage submissions from a broad spectrum of topics, with a bias toward novel domains, including those that cross domains or disciplines, on topics suggested by this list:

Problem representation, formulation, and model design;
Novel approaches for learning and inference with probabilistic graphical models, inspired by a real-world problem;
Combining machine learning, active learning, and elicitation of expert knowledge;
Tractable, scalable computational methods for complex and distributed models;
Bayesian approaches to classification, clustering, recommendations, personalization, search, advertising, and on-line so-called "A/B" testing;
Generative models for data cleaning, feature engineering, or fusion of different types of data;
Techniques for domains with missing, incomplete, large, heterogeneous, and unstructured data;
Extensions to relational data, causality, infinite domains, spatial or temporal reasoning.

Submissions will be peer reviewed and papers will be published online. Final workshop papers will be selected with the goal of fostering discussion of critical issues within the community of practice. BMAW 2015 will be a half-day workshop. All papers accepted to the BMAW will be presented during the workshop and published in the workshop proceedings. Authors of accepted technical papers will have 20 minutes to present their work, while authors of accepted position papers will have a 10-minute slot to share their ideas. After each presentation, 5 minutes will be allocated to questions from the audience. Both technical and position papers will be published in the BMAW Workshop proceedings, to be available after the UAI 2015 Conference.

Authors who submit a full paper, but wish to withhold it from publication in this workshop, either because it contains references to proprietary data, or because they wish to publish it later at a different venue, can request that only the abstract be published.

We are running two review cycles, the main cycle, and an early, expedited review cycle for authors who are ready to submit and need early notification to be able to make travel arrangements. We request that authors submit to the Main Review Cycle if at all possible.

Submissions to BAW2015 should adhere to UAI format and page limits, and be submitted to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=baw2015. LaTeX and MS Word templates can be found on the UAI submission instructions site.

Final submissions for the proceedings must be accompanied by a signed copyright release form.

Please see the Workshop website at https://c4i.gmu.edu/BMAW/2015/ for updates on the Workshop. Questions about the Workshop should be sent to baw2015@easychair.org.

Early Review Cycle Dates

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| Friday, 24 April, 2015 | Early Submissions Due
| Tuesday, 12 May, 2015 | Early Author Notification

Main Review Cycle Dates

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| Friday, 15 May, 2015 | Abstracts Due
| Monday, 18 May, 2015 | Submissions Due
| Friday, 12 June, 2015 | Author Notification

Workshop Dates

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| Monday, 6 July, 2015 | Camera-ready copy due
| Thursday, 16 July, 2015 | Workshop Date (tentative)

Co-chairs:

John Mark Agosta
Microsoft Azure ML
johnmark.agosta@gmail.com

Rommel Novaes Carvalho University of Brasília / Brazil's Office of the Comptroller General rommel.carvalho@gmail.com

Organizing Committee Members:

Russell Almond (Associate Professor, Florida State, USA) ralmond@fsu.edu,
Feng Chen (Assistant Professor, U. at Albany) fchen5@albany.edu,
Fabio Cozman (Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil) fgcozman@usp.br,
Marek J. Druzdzel (University of Pittsburgh, USA; Bialystok University of Technology, Poland) marek@sis.pitt.edu,
Pablo Hector Ibarguengoytia González pibar@iie.org.mx,
Jim Jones (Associate Professor, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA) jjonesu@gmu.edu,
Oscar Kipersztok (The Boeing Company, USA) oscar.kipersztok@boeing.com,
Branislav Kveton (Adobe Research) bkveton@yahoo.com,
Kathryn Laskey (Professor, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA) klaskey@gmu.edu,
Manuel Luque (UNED, Madrid) mluquega@gmail.com,
Ole Mengshoel (CMU) ole.mengshoel@sv.cmu.edu,
Ann Nicholson (Monash University/Bayesian Intelligence) ann.nicholson@monash.edu,
Tomas Singliar (Amazon) singliar@gmail.com,
Luis Enrique Sucar (INAOE, Puebla, Mexico) esucar@inaoep.mx,
Charles R. Twardy (George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA) ctwardy@gmu.edu,
Tom Walsh (Data Scientist, Kronos Incorporated, USA) thomasjwalsh@gmail.com