Agnostic Learning v.s. Prior Knowledge Challenge

We are very grateful to our sponsors who made this project possible. Any new financial contribution will be used towards providing prizes and travel money for successful challenge participants who need support. Help us, become a sponsor!

The workshops are hosted by the NIPS 2006 and IJCNN 2007 conferences. We thank the organizers who gave us this opportunity.

The EC funded Network of Excellence Pascal is gratefully acknowledged for its support.

The preparation of this challenge was facilitated by previous work performed for the Performance Prediction Challenge, a project supported by the National Science Fundation under Grant N0. ECS-0424142, who also provided travel support for students under Grant ECCS-0736687. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
The workshop and challenge are coordinated by:
Isabelle Guyon
Clopinet Enterprises
955, Creston Road,
Berkeley, CA 94708, U.S.A.
Tel/Fax: (510) 524 6211
in collaboration with: Amir Reza Saffari Azar (Graz University of Technology, Austria).
The web site design of Steve Gunn (University of Southampton, UK), formerly used for the NIPS2003 feature selection challenge, was adapted and improved by Olivier Guyon (MisterP.net, France). We are thankful to Thomas Fuchs (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) for administering the computer resources.
The advisors and beta-testers are gratefully acknowledged:
Joachim Buhmann (ETH Zurich, Switzerland),
Gideon Dror (Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo, Israel),
Amir Reza Saffari Azar (Graz University of Technology),
Lambert Schomaker (University of Groningen, The Netherlands),
Kari Torkkola (Motorola, USA),
Steve Gunn (University of Southampton, UK),
Horst Bischof (Graz University, Austria),
Françoise Fogelman (KXEN, Paris, France),
Michèle Sebag (LRI, Orsay, France),
André Elisseeff (IBM, Zurich, Switzerland),
Kristin Bennett (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA),
Gökhan BakIr (MPI for Biological Cybernetics, Germany),
Joaquin Quiñonero Candela (MPI for Biological Cybernetics, Germany),
Yi Lu Murphey (University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA),
Gavin Cawley (University of East Anglia, UK),
Masoud Nikravesh (UC Berkeley, USA),
Stefan Lessmann (University of Hamburg, Germany),
Erinija Pranckeviciene Institute for Biodiagnostics, NRC, Canada),
Leszek Rutkowski (Technical University of Czestochowa, Poland).
The Challenge Learning Object Package (CLOP) is based on code to which many people have contributed:
- The developers of CLOP: Isabelle Guyon and Amir Reza Saffari Azar.
- The creators of the spider: Jason Weston, André Elisseeff, Gökhan BakIr, Fabian Sinz.
- The developers of the packages attached to CLOP: Chih-Chung Chang and Chih-JenLin Jun-Cheng (LIBSVM), Chen, Kuan-Jen Peng, Chih-Yuan Yan, Chih-Huai Cheng, and Rong-En Fan (LIBSVM Matlab interface), Junshui Ma and Yi Zhao (second LIBSVM Matlab interface), Leo Breiman and Adele Cutler (Random Forests), Ting Wang (RF Matlab interface), Ian Nabney and Christopher Bishop (NETLAB).
- The contributors to other Spider functions or packages: Thorsten Joachims (SVMLight), Chih-Chung Chang and Chih-JenLin (LIBSVM), Ronan Collobert (SVM Torch II), Jez Hill, Jan Eichhorn, Rodrigo Fernandez, Holger Froehlich, Gorden Jemwa, Kiyoung Yang, Chirag Patel, Sergio Rojas.
- The authors of the Weka package and the R project who made code available, which was interfaced to Matlab and made accessible to CLOP.