PUBLIC MARKS from ogrisel with tags optimization & "deep learning"

Theoretical results strongly suggest that in order to learn the kind of complicated functions that can represent high-level abstractions (e.g. in vision, language, and other AI-level tasks), one may need "deep architectures", which are composed of multiple levels of non-linear operations (such as in neural nets with many hidden layers). Searching the parameter space of deep architectures is a difficult optimization task, but learning algorithms (e.g. Deep Belief Networks) have recently been proposed to tackle this problem with notable success, beating the state-of-the-art in certain areas. This workshop is intended to bring together researchers interested in the question of deep learning in order to review the current algorithms' principles and successes, but also to identify the challenges, and to formulate promising directions of investigation. Besides the algorithms themselves, there are many fundamental questions that need to be addressed: What would be a good formalization of deep learning? What new ideas could be exploited to make further inroads to that difficult optimization problem? What makes a good high-level representation or abstraction? What type of problem is deep learning appropriate for? The workshop presentation page show selected links to relevant papers (PDF) on the topic.