[summary] sister conference highlights (monday morning)

The sister conference session is a convenient path to access relevant and interesting researches in the conferences you have missed in the past. I'm a little bit surprised that this session is not well attended.

KDD 04: Tutorials reflects current interests in Data Mining: date steam, time series, data quality and data cleaning, junk mail filtering, and graph analysis. This conference has an algorithmic and practical flavor, e.g. clustering is a more concrete form of "levels of abstraction". There are also many industrial participations and KDD cup went well.

ICAPS 05: This is a fairly young conference which merges several previous conferences on planning and scheduling. Scheduling papers increase(25%), and search continues play prominent role. Best paper presents a "complete and optimal" and "memory-bounded" beam search. Another interesting paper learns action model from plan traces without the need of manually annotating intermediate nodes in the trace. The competition on knowledge engineering another way to attract participants from various relevant domains. Interesting agreements from participants "application get no respect", "too many people spend too much time working on meaningless theories".

UAI 04: Probability and graphical representation dominate these years. Tutorials were clustered on graphical models (esp. BBN). Best paper presents case-factored diagram, a new representation of structure statistical models, so as to offer compact representation, as demonstrated in the problem of "finding the most likely parse of a given sentence".