Call for papers: ICML 2011 Workshop on Machine Learning for Global Challenges

ICML 2011 Workshop on Machine Learning for Global Challenges

Workshop URL : https://sites.google.com/site/mlforglobalchallenges
Submission deadline: May 6, 2011

Description and Goals
The world currently faces a number of pressing global challenges. Energy, 
Healthcare, Sustainability, Environment, and Education are exemplary areas 
where cross-disciplinary research is assembling large teams of people from 
around the world to address urgent global concerns. We believe that 
machine learning has much to offer as a key component of these 
cross-disciplinary efforts.   The goals of this workshop are to:

1) Bring together researchers from different areas of machine learning 
working on topics that are technically unrelated but can work together to 
also solve one or more of the global challenges. 

2) Attract experts working in the areas of these global challenges from 
both academia and industry who have the domain expertise and access to 
useful sources of data and problems but not necessarily the expertise in 
ML to solve them effectively. 


We are focusing this workshop on several global challenges: Environment, 
Healthcare, and challenges for the developing world such as education & 
infrastructure. We plan on having multiple sessions. Each session will 
include invited talks from domain experts in each field, panel of machine 
learning and domain experts, and a poster session. Topics of interest 
broadly include, but are not limited to the following: 

        - Environment: Many of the most pressing global challenges that 
will face society in the next century involve the Environment, and Climate 
Change, and approaches to these problems often entail work 
towards Sustainability.  Half of the workshop will be devoted to 
addressing pressing Environmental issues, to which Machine Learning is 
poised to make impactful contributions.  We will accept submissions in 
related areas, including but not limited to:  Sustainability, Climate 
Science, Climate Change Impacts, Energy

        - Healthcare: Healthcare systems around the world are struggling 
to keep up with patient needs, and improve quality of care while reducing 
costs at the same time. At the same time, more and more data is being 
captured around healthcare processes in the form of Electronic Medical 
Records (EMR), health insurance claims, medical imaging databases, disease 
registries, spontaneous reporting sites, and clinical trials. As this data 
gets collected, government regulations are requiring healthcare providers 
to not only store it in an electronic format but also use it in meaningful 
ways. Using this data in an effective way to improve quality of care and 
reduce costs requires the use of novel machine learning algorithms. We 
will accept submissions in related areas, including but not limited to: 
Meaningful use of healthcare data for improved patient care, Pattern 
detection and hypothesis generation from observational data, Evolutionary 
and longitudinal patient and disease models, Mining knowledge from medical 
imaging data, Medical fraud detection, Bio-surveillance, Post-market 
surveillance of medical interventions, Text mining - mining free text in 
electronic medical records, Improving Clinical trial management and 
design. 

        - Education, Infrastructure & other challenges for the developing 
world: Can machine learning and data mining help improve educational 
systems and the process of human learning? Can we build low-cost, 
efficient platforms for improving infrastructure in the developing world 
using insights drawn from data? 

Submissions
We invite upto 4 page submissions for poster presentations at the 
workshop. Papers should be prepared in ICML format and submitted as email 
attachments to mlforgc@gmail.com on or before May 6, 2011. Acceptance 
notification will be sent to the authors by May 20, 2011. Papers can be 
position articles or ongoing work on a global challenge (for example, 
environment, healthcare, education, sustainability, energy and other areas 
of global concern) and offer to bring machine learning methodologies to 
bear on such problems. Please add your names and affiliation to the 
submitted paper (our review process is not blind).

Dates
Paper Submission Deadline: May 6, 2011
Paper Acceptance Notification: May 20, 2011
Workshop Date: July 02, 2011

Registration
Please see the ICML 2011 website (http://www.icml-2011.org/) for 
information on how to register for the workshop. For questions or 
comments, please send an e-mail to mlforgc@gmail.com

Organizers: 
Arindam Banerjee University of Minnesota (banerjee@cs.umn.edu) 
Claire Monteleoni, Columbia University (cmontel@ccls.columbia.edu)
Rayid Ghani, Accenture, Accenture (rayid.ghani@accenture.com)
Vikas Sindhwani IBM Research (vsindhw@us.ibm.com)