The 2-class transduction problem, as formulated by Vapnik [1], involves finding a separating hyperplane for a labelled data set that is also maximally distant from a given set of unlabelled test points. In this form, the problem has exponential computational complexity in the size of the working set. So far it has been attacked by means of integer programming techniques [2] that do not scale to reasonable problem sizes, or by local search procedures [3]. In this paper we present a relaxation of this task based on semidefinite programming(SDP), resulting in a convex optimization problem that has polynomial complexity in the size of the data set. The results are very encouraging for mid sized data sets, however the cost is still too high for large scale problems, due to the high dimensional searchspace. To this end, we restrict the feasible region by introducing an approximation based on solving an eigenproblem. With this approximation, the computational cost of the algorithm is such that problems with more than 1000 points can be treated.

A special case of particular relevance is known as multiple instance learning [5]

A common way of image denoising is to project a noisy image to the subspace ofadmissible images made for instance by PCA. However, a major drawback of this method is that all pixels are updated by the projection, even when only a few pixels are corrupted by noise or occlusion.

The standard 2-n0rrn SVM is known for its good performance in two-Class Classi£cati0n. In this paper, we consider the 1-norm SVM.

One of the central problems of pattern recognition is the exploitation of known invariances in the pattern domain.

In typical classification tasks, we seek a function which assigns a label to a single object.Kernel-based approaches, such as support vector machines (SVMs), which maximize the margin of confidence of the classifier, are the method of choice for many such tasks. Their popularity stems both from the ability to use high-dimensional feature spaces, and from their strong theoretical guarantees. However,many real-world tasks involve sequential, spatial, or structured data, where multiple labels must be assigned. Existing kernel-based methods ignore structurein the problem, assigning labels independently to each object, losing much useful information. Conversely, probabilistic graphical models, such as Markov networks, can represent correlations between labels, by exploiting problem structure, but cannot handle high-dimensional feature spaces, and lack strong theoretical generalization guarantees.

We address the problem of learning topic hierarchies from data. The model selection problem in this domain is daunting--which of the large collection of possible trees to use? We take a Bayesian approach, generating anappropriate prior via a distribution on partitions that we refer to as the nested Chinese restaurant process. This nonparametric prior allows arbitrarilylarge branching factors and readily accommodates growing data collections. We build a hierarchical topic model by combining this prior with a likelihood that is based on a hierarchical variant of latent Dirichlet allocation. We illustrate our approach on simulated data and with an application to the modeling of NIPS abstracts.

Gaussian mixture densities are widely used to model complex, multimodal relationships.

Satellite domains are becoming a fashionable area of research within the AI community due to the complexity of the problems that satellite domains need to solve. With the current U.S. and European focus on launching satellites for communication, broadcasting, or localization tasks, among others, the automatic control of these machines becomes an important problem. Many new techniques in both the planning and scheduling fields have been applied successfully, but still much work is left to be done for reliable autonomous architectures. The purpose of this article is to present CONSAT, a real application that plans and schedules the performance of nominal operations in four satellites during the course of a year for a commercial Spanish satellite company, HISPASAT. For this task, we have used an AI domain-independent planner that solves the planning and scheduling problems in the HISPASAT domain thanks to its capability of representing and handling continuous variables, coding functions to obtain the operators' variable values, and the use of control rules to prune the search. We also abstract the approach in order to generalize it to other domains that need an integrated approach to planning and scheduling.

Cognition: The Mathematics of Mind. (CORES 2005). Stefanie Bruninghaus, University of Pittsburgh The ICCBR'05 Program Committee invites submissions of original theoretical research, Industry Day Chair: applied research and deployed application (MDAI 2005). Must have a Masters Degree in Data Mining.