[ICML 2015] CALL FOR SITE PROPOSALS

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INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MACHINE LEARNING (ICML) 2015
                         CALL FOR SITE PROPOSALS
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In the summer of 2015, the 32th International Conference on Machine
Learning (ICML-2015) will be held.  We invite groups interested in
hosting the conference to submit a letter of intent by March 31, 2013,
and a complete proposal by May 31, 2013.

Proposals from Europe or western North America are particularly
encouraged; however, proposals from elsewhere will also be given
serious consideration.  (ICML-2013 will be in Atlanta, Georgia, and
ICML-2014 will be in Beijing, China).

Proposals should address the following issues:

1. Proposed Dates.  The conference should be scheduled for four days
(one day reserved for workshops and tutorials; three days for paper
sessions, poster sessions, and invited talks).  The conference prefers
dates in the range from June 15 to July 15, but other dates will be
considered, particularly if they permit co-location with other related
conferences.

2. Locale Parameters.

    - Accessibility.  Is it easy and inexpensive for people
    (especially graduate students) to travel to the conference site?
    (Compute mean airfares from Europe, North America, and Asia;
    include ground transportation from relevant airports to the site;
    discuss visa issues if relevant.)

    - Meeting Rooms, AV Equiment, etc.  What are the physical
    facilities like?  Consider rooms for plenary sessions, parallel
    sessions, workshops, tutorials, and poster sessions.  Is there
    highly visible space for sponsors and publishers who want to set
    up displays?  What are the charges, if any, for using the various
    rooms/locations?

    - Meals and Lodging.  Is there low-cost, quality housing available
    for attendees (especially graduate students)?  How far from the
    meeting rooms?  Where will attendees eat?  Please estimate costs
    for meals and lodging.

    - Demo facilities.  Will there be computing equipment and space
    available to support demos?

    - Internet access.  Is wired or wireless internet access
    available?  At what cost?

    - Other features.  You may mention any other aspects of the site
    or the region that are relevant.

3. Local Machine Learning Community.  Is there a local ML
group/community that can help with organization and funding?

4. Opportunities to co-locate with other conferences.  In the past, we
have co-located with COLT, UAI, and KDD.  There is strong interest in
co-locating with these conferences and also with other related
conferences including ISMB (Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology),
EMNLP (Empirical Methoers in Natural Language Processing), CoNLL
(Conference on Natural Language Learning), IUI (Intelligent User
Interfaces), and CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition).

5. Organizational and Institutional Support.  Is there a conference
office that can help with local arrangements?

6. Budgetary Issues.  Is any financial support available from the
hosting institution and/or local industry?  What is a rough estimate
of the expected conference registration fees (including a student
rate)?  Historically ICML has made efforts to maintain low
registration fees to encourage wide participation, and prospective
hosts for ICML should contact William Cohen if they have questions
about budgetary decisions.

Letters of intent need contain nothing other than a non-binding
statement of intent and a list of likely principals, but should be
emailed by March 31, 2013 to:

William W. Cohen
President, International Machine Learning Society (IMLS)
wcohen@cs.cmu.edu

Proposals (in PDF) should be emailed to the same address by May 31, 2013.

The IMLS governing board will rank proposals according to cost and
accessibility, proposed dates, opportunities for co-location,
attractiveness of the location, and experience of the host group.

Note that IMLS chooses the Program Chair and General Chair as a
decision separate from the choice of the site.  The site proposal
should propose a Local Arrangements Chair and other relevant
supporting positions (e.g., Volunteers Coordinator, Registration
Chair).