Cross-Cutting Research Workshops in Intelligent Information Systems

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

A six-week-long research workshop on Intelligent Information Systems (IIS) is being held at Johns Hopkins University on Machine Learning for Language Engineering. It strives for cross-fertilization with other areas of machine intelligence. The workshop has diverse teams of professionals and students engaged in an intensive effort to advance the state of science. Language Engineering encompasses speech recognition, machine translation, information retrieval and extraction, etc., and shares fundamental Machine Learning techniques with other fields within IIS, most notably computer vision, medical- and bio-informatics and social network analysis. The goal of the workshop is to advance machine learning for IIS and to attract students to the field and initiate them in research by working alongside senior scientists. For projects to address relevant problems, an open call for proposals was issued to the IIS community. The (35) received proposals were evaluated at a planning meeting (attended by project proponents, government representatives, and experts from related fields) which chose the specific projects, their research leaders and many senior participants. The graduate students were selected according to their known performance, the undergraduates through a national search. The workshop will disseminate its results and help incorporate them into research at geographically diverse institutions. The five past workshops resulted in 80 publications in premier journals and conferences. Some of the work was initiated in the workshops and completed after their conclusion. Individuals from several institutions are conducting collaborative research in this workshop, discovering new techniques, creating and disseminating valuable tools and establishing long-lasting collaborations. Graduate as well as undergraduate students are being initiated into the IIS field.