News

Online Access to Proceedings and Journal Issues

It is our pleasure to announce that all ECML PKDD 2008 participants will be able to browse the conference proceedings one week ahead of the conference start, i.e. from September 8 to 22! Additionally, Springer provides free access to the content of the two special ECML PKDD journal issues published in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery and in Machine Learning.

As soon as we have received your registration fee, you will get the instructions on how to access the content.

For more information about previous ECML PKDD volumes and related products, go to the new Springer ECML PKDD page

Awards

We are very pleased to announce the best paper and best student paper award winners of ECML PKDD 2008. The selection was done by the program chairs based on the recommendations of the area chairs and program committee members. We are grateful to the Machine Learning journal and the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal who sponsor the Best Machine Learning Student Paper Award and the Best Knowledge Discovery Student Paper Award respectively. The awards will be handed to the winners at the conference opening ceremony on monday evening, september 15th.

And the winners are ...

Best Machine Learning Paper

"Improving Maximum Margin Matrix Factorization",
by Markus Weimer, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Alex Smola
View abstract View article

Best Knowledge Discovery Paper

"SkyGraph: An Algorithm for Important Subgraph Discovery in Relational Graphs",
by Apostolos N. Papadopoulos, Apostolos Lyritsis, and Yannis Manolopoulos.
View abstract View article

Best Machine Learning Student Paper

Sponsored by the Machine Learning journal
"New Closed-form Upper Bounds on the Partition Function",
by Dvijotham Krishnamurthy, Soumen Chakrabarti, and Subhasis Chaudhuri.
View abstract View article

Best Knowledge Discovery Student Paper

Sponsored by the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal
"The Boolean Column and Column-Row Matrix Decompositions",
by Pauli Miettinen.
View abstract View article

The winners of the Discovery Challenge are ...

This year's Discovery Challenge presents a dataset from the social bookmarking system BibSonomy to deal with two important tasks: the detection of spam and the recommendation of tags.

And the winners are: ...

For the spam detection task with an AUC value of 0.98, these are A. Gkanogiannis and T. Kalamboukis from Athens University of Economics and Business, which use a text classification approach with a classifier which refines the
solution similar to approaches known from the area of relevance feedback.

For the tag recommender challenge with an F-Measure of 0.19, these are M. Tatu and colleagues from Lymba Corporation. They use a natural language approach to generate tag recommendations.

Together with other participants they will present their results at the corresponding workshop on Monday, September 15th.

ECML PKDD 2010 Call For Proposals

The purpose of this call is to invite groups interested in hosting ECML PKDD 2010. ECML PKDD 2009 will take place in Bled, Slovenia. All proposals will be presented and discussed at the community meeting of ECML PKDD 2008 in Antwerp, which takes place on Thursday, September 18, 2008. The community will then decide upon the location and the chairs of the meeting in 2008. Prior to the presentation at the community meeting in Antwerp, the ECML PKDD Steering Committee and the conference chairs of ECML PKDD 2008 and 2009 will review the proposals and may provide informal feedback to the organizers.

FORMAT OF PROPOSALS

Expressions of interest are informal and should briefly describe the
planned event, the location, and the organizing committee.

Full proposals should address the following issues:

1. Proposed Dates. The conference should be scheduled for five days
(two days reserved mostly for workshops and tutorials; three days for
paper sessions and invited talks), preferably in fall 2010.

2. Local Parameters.

- Accessibility. Is it easy and inexpensive for people (especially
graduate students) to travel to the conference site? (Compute
mean airfares from Europe, but also North America, and Asia.
Include ground transportation from relevant airports to the site.)

- Meeting Rooms, AV Equipment, etc. What are the physical facilities
like? Consider rooms for plenary sessions, parallel sessions,
workshops, tutorials, and poster sessions. What are the charges,
if any, for using them?

- 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?

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

3. Local ML/KDD Community. Is there a local ML or KDD group/community
that will be involved in the organization and funding?

4. Opportunities to co-locate with other conferences.

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

Proposals should be addressed to the program chairs of ECML PKDD
2008 (E-mail: pcchairs@ecmlpkdd2008.org)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: September 8, 2008

ECML PKDD 2008 Journal Issues Available on Springerlink

We are very happy to announce that the special issues of a selected set of ECML PKDD papers in the Machine Learning journal and in the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal are already available on SpringerLink!

Early registration extended until August 15th!

The early registration deadline has been extended until August 15th. After that, the registration fee will increase from 320 euros to 420 euros. Several hotels, such as Elzenveld and Express by Holiday Inn still blocked several rooms for participants of ECML PKDD 2008!

Full Schedule Online

The full schedule has been published online. By clicking one of the sessions or a date, the detailed schedule for that session or day is shown. On monday and friday, we have several very nice workshops and tutorials. The conference is officially opened on monday evening with an invited talk from Anil K. Jain. The main conference consists of three parallel tracks, with additional demo sessions on wednesday. Each day starts with a distinguished keynote speaker, such as Ray Mooney, Francoise Fogelman, Raghu Ramakrishnan, and Yoav Freund. All days end with plenty of food at a nice reception or the banquet on wednesday, which is preceded by a diamond cocktail!

Book Hotel rooms early (before August 1st)!

Due to several conferences taking place in Antwerp, hotel rooms fill up quickly! We cannot emphasize enough the importance of making hotel reservations early if you want to confirm a room at a reasonable rate. The negotiated rates as listed on the accommodation page and should be available until August 1st as long as there are rooms available.

Conference poster available

The official conference poster can now be downloaded from the downloads section. Also available there, is an ECML PKDD 2008 wallpaper in large resolution.

List of accepted papers online

The list of accepted papers is now available online. Out of 521 submissions, 105 submissions were accepted for presentation at the conference, of which 7 will be published directly in the Machine Learning journal, 7 will be published directly in the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal, and 85 research papers and 6 demo papers will be published in the LNAI proceedings of the conference.