New Perspectives for Relational Learning (15w5080)

The Banff International Research Station will host the "New Perspectives for Relational Learning" workshop from April 19th to April 24th, 2015.

Vast amounts of data are gathered daily for different purposes. Many, if not most, new datasets contain information about networks of linked entities. Sources of link data include social media, such as Twitter, social networks, computer networks such as the Internet, biological networks, and the relational databases that most organizations use to maintain their data. A crucial competitive edge comes with the ability to efficiently find informative patterns in network data, and to learn from them to improve decision-making under uncertainty. Relational learning has many applications in text processing, medicine, robotics, social network analysis, and others. This workshop supports research that extends and enhances computational tools from Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Complex Network Analysis for modelling relational data. The workshop brings together researchers from different subfields that study relational data to define new directions for the field, including: (1) new application tasks and domains, (2) efficient programs for learning with very large databases and networks, (3) developing high-level probabilistic programming languages to make the development of relational analytics applications faster and more robust.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).