The 24rd Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2011)

The 24rd Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2011) will take place in Budapest, Hungary, on July 9-11, 2011. It will be co-located with the Foundations of Computational Mathematics conference (FOCM 2011, Budapest, July 4th - 14th, 2011).

We invite submissions of papers addressing theoretical aspects of machine learning and empirical inference. We strongly support a broad definition of learning theory, including:
Analysis of learning algorithms and their generalization ability
Computational complexity of learning
Bayesian analysis
Statistical mechanics of learning systems
Optimization procedures for learning
Kernel methods
Boolean function learning
Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning and clustering
On-line learning and relative loss bounds
Planning and control, including reinforcement learning
Learning in social, economic, and game-theoretic settings
Analysis of learning in related fields: natural language processing, neuroscience, bioinformatics, privacy and security, machine vision, data mining, information retrieval

We are also interested in papers that include viewpoints that are new to the COLT community. We welcome experimental and algorithmic papers provided they are relevant to the focus of the conference by elucidating theoretical results. Also, while the primary focus of the conference is theoretical, papers can be strengthened by the inclusion of relevant experimental results.

Papers that have previously appeared in journals or at other conferences, or that are being submitted to other conferences, are not appropriate for COLT. Papers that include work that has already been submitted for journal publication may be submitted to COLT, as long as the papers have not been accepted for publication by the COLT submission deadline (conditionally or otherwise) and that the paper is not expected to be published before the COLT conference (June 2010). Papers will be published electronically without printed proceedings.

Paper awards:
COLT will award both the best paper and best student paper. Best student papers must be authored or coauthored by a student. Authors must indicate at submission time if they wish their paper to be eligible for a student award. This does not preclude the paper to be eligible for the best paper award.

Open Problems Session:
We also invite submission of open problems (see separate call). These should be constrained to two pages. There is a shorter reviewing period for the open problems. Accepted contributions will be allocated short presentation slots in a special open problems session and will be allowed two pages each in the proceedings.

Submission Instructions:
Formatting and submission instructions will be available at the conference website.

Important Dates:
Paper submission deadline: February 11, 2011
Author notification: May 2, 2011
Conference: Jul 9 - 11, 2011

Program Chairs: Sham Kakade and Ulrike von Luxburg