A workshop in conjunction with NIPS-2006
The workshop will try to offer support for covering workshop registration
fees and parts of the travel expenses to graduate students and junior researchers who
will be presenting at the workshop.
Whistler, British Columbia, December 8, 2006
Although evaluation and testing has been an important consideration for some time, our
community has devoted little effort towards developing principled approaches for
assessing the efficacy of deployed systems. We need to be able to estimate:
Aside from providing several key capabilities to adaptive and autonomous systems (such
as adaptability to changing environments), we believe that learning and statistical can be
successfully applied to the meta-problem of evaluating the above list of properties of a
learning or decision system, before it is deployed.
The first goal of this workshop is to explore the requirements and risks of developing
learning algorithms and tools with the purpose of deploying them for tasks such as
autonomous navigation, health management, flight control, decision support (interacting
with human experts), etc.
Next, we would like to understand how (possibly novel) learning methods can contribute
to the process of testing and evaluating learning and decision systems and what
techniques are needed to evaluate the decisions computed by complex (even human-
computer) systems.
Finally, this workshop will bring together researchers and users of learning and adaptive
systems and create a forum for discussing recent advances in validation and testing of
learning systems, to better understand the practical requirements for developing and
deploying learning systems, and to inspire research on new methods and techniques for
the testing and evaluation of learning.
Workshop Organizers