On my way to NIPS 2008

Next week is the annual NIPS conference in Vancouver. In case you don't know, it's one of the most important annual conferences in the area of machine learning. It's actually its 22nd installment, and while the full title (Neural Information Processing Systems) hits at the beginnings of the fields with artificial neural networks, such methods cover only a small percentage of the presented papers nowadays.

Together with Soeren Sonnenburg and Cheng Soon Ong we have organized a workshop on machine learning open source software. I'm pretty excited about our program, I only fear that our decision to drop the coffee breaks in favor of a few additional talks will backfire severly. But we'll see.

I plan to use my twitter account this year to cover the workshop, so if you're interested, make sure to have a look. Most importantly, I will cover our workshop so that you can see how far we are behind schedule. ;)

By the way, the picture above shows the swimming gas station. It mostly services seaplanes, and you have a very nice view of it from the top floor of the hotel where the NIPS conference takes place.