Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Machine learning

Abstract

This volume, which is also available from http://www.machinelearning.org, the home page of the International Machine Learning Society, contains the technical papers accepted for presentation at ICML-2006, the 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning. ICML is an international forum for presentation and discussion of the latest results in the field of machine learning. This year, ICML was held at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was co-located with COLT-2006, the 19th Annual Conference on Computational Learning Theory.Coincidentally, Carnegie Mellon University was also the venue for the first ICML---the First Machine Learning Workshop, which was held in 1980. Instead of proceedings, a book was published (Machine Learning: an Artificial Intelligence Approach, ed. Michalski, Carbonell, and Mitchell, Morgan Kaufman, 1983) containing sixteen research papers, and also a comprehensive of the field of machine learning, as it stood in 1983. This bibliography contained 572 entries.In 2006, no less than 548 papers were submitted to ICML---nearly as many as were in the comprehensive published with the papers from the first ICML. These papers were subjected to a thorough review process. In the first round of reviewing, every paper received three reviews by program committee members. Authors were then given an opportunity to view the first-round reviews and respond to them. Led by a Senior Program Committee member, the reviewers then engaged in a discussion of the paper, leading finally to a decision by the Senior Program Committee member in charge of the paper. Papers could be accepted, rejected, or conditionally accepted; the 36 conditionally accepted papers were subject to an additional final round of review by the Senior Program Committee. Of the 548 submissions, 140 were accepted for publication, an acceptance rate of 25.5%.In addition to the technical talks, ICML-2006 also included seven tutorials and eleven workshops, which were held before and after the conference, respectively. Authors presented their papers both orally and in a poster session, allowing time for detailed discussions with any interested attendees of the conference. Each day of the main conference included an invited talk by a prominent researcher. We were very fortunate to be able to host David Haussler, of the University of California at Santa Cruz; Robert Schapire, of Princeton University; and Mandyam V. Srinivasan, of the Australian National University.