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ANNOUNCEMENT:  The Second Annual NIPS Unlabeled Data Competition and Workshop
               It's time to put-up or shut-up!

Synopsis:  
We are please to announce the NIPS*2001 Unlabeled Data Competition and 
Workshop, to be held in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, Dec 7 or 8, 2001.  
This competition is a challenge to the machine learning community to develop
and demonstrate methods to use unlabeled data to improve supervised
learning.  We have created a web-site where participants can download
and submit problem sets and compete head to head with other contestants
in a series of challenging unlabeled-data, supervised-learning problems.

Recently, there has been much interest in applying techniques that
incorporate knowledge from unlabeled data into systems performing
supervised learning. The potential advantages of such techniques are 
obvious in domains where labeled data is expensive and unlabeled data 
is cheap. Many such techniques have been proposed, but only recently has 
any effort been made to compare the effectiveness of different approaches 
on real world problems. 

Our contest presents a challenge to the proponents of methods to
incorporate unlabeled data into supervised learning. Can you really
use unlabeled data to help train a supervised classification (or
regression) system? Do recent (and not so recent) theories stand up to
the data test? 

On the contest web-site you can find challenge problems where you can try
out your methods head-to-head against anyone brave enough to face
you. Then, at the end of the contest we will release the results and find
out who really knows something about using unlabeled data, and if
unlabeled data are really useful or we are all just wasting our time. So
ask yourself, are you (and your theory) up to the challenge?? Feeling
lucky???

For more details on the competition or the workshop and to sign up for
the Unlabeled Data Mailing List, please visit our
web-page at "http://q.cis.uoguelph.ca/~skremer/NIPS2001/".

        Stefan

-- 
--
Dr. Stefan C. Kremer, Assistant Prof.,
Dept. of Computing and Information Science
University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario   N1G 2W1

WWW: http://hebb.cis.uoguelph.ca/~skremer
Tel: (519)824-4120 Ext.8913  Fax: (519)837-0323
E-mail:  skremer@snowhite.cis.uoguelph.ca
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