The annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is the flagship conference on neural computation. It draws preeminent academic researchers from around the world and is widely considered to be a showcase conference for new developments in network algorithms and architectures. The broad range of interdisciplinary research areas represented includes computer science, neuroscience, statistics, physics, cognitive science, and many branches of engineering, including signal processing and control theory. Only about 30 percent of the papers submitted are accepted for presentation at NIPS, so the quality is exceptionally high. These proceedings contain all of the papers that were presented.

The annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is the flagship conference on neural computation. It draws preeminent academic researchers from around the world and is widely considered to be a showcase conference for new developments in network algorithms and architectures. The broad range of interdisciplinary research areas represented includes computer science, neuroscience, statistics, physics, cognitive science, and many branches of engineering, including signal processing and control theory. Only about 30 percent of the papers submitted are accepted for presentation at NIPS, so the quality is exceptionally high. These proceedings contain all of the papers that were presented.

The annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is the flagship conference on neural computation. These proceedings contain all of the papers that were presented.

The annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is the flagship conference on neural computation. It draws preeminent academic researchers from around the world and is widely considered to be a showcase conference for new developments in network algorithms and architectures. The broad range of interdisciplinary research areas represented includes computer science, neuroscience, statistics, physics, cognitive science, and many branches of engineering, including signal processing and control theory. Only about 30 percent of the papers submitted are accepted for presentation at NIPS, so the quality is exceptionally high. These proceedings contain all of the papers that were presented.

Theory of Neural Information Processing Systems provides an explicit, coherent, and up-to-date account of the modern theory of neural information processing systems. It has been carefully developed for graduate students from any quantitative discipline, including mathematics, computer science, physics, engineering or biology, and has been thoroughly class-tested by the authors over a period of some 8 years. Exercises are presented throughout the text and notes on historical background and further reading guide the student into the literature. All mathematical details are included and appendices provide further background material, including probability theory, linear algebra and stochastic processes, making this textbook accessible to a wide audience.

Papers presented at the 2003 Neural Information Processing Conference by leading physicists, neuroscientists, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists. The annual Neural Information Processing (NIPS) conference is the flagship meeting on neural computation. It draws a diverse group of attendees -- physicists, neuroscientists, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists. The presentations are interdisciplinary, with contributions in algorithms, learning theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, brain imaging, vision, speech and signal processing, reinforcement learning and control, emerging technologies, and applications. Only thirty percent of the papers submitted are accepted for presentation at NIPS, so the quality is exceptionally high. This volume contains all the papers presented at the 2003 conference.

Reinforcement learning encompasses both a science of adaptive behavior of rational beings in uncertain environments and a computational methodology for finding optimal behaviors for challenging problems in control, optimization and adaptive behavior of intelligent agents. As a field, reinforcement learning has progressed tremendously in the past decade. The main goal of this book is to present an up-to-date series of survey articles on the main contemporary sub-fields of reinforcement learning. This includes surveys on partially observable environments, hierarchical task decompositions, relational knowledge representation and predictive state representations. Furthermore, topics such as transfer, evolutionary methods and continuous spaces in reinforcement learning are surveyed. In addition, several chapters review reinforcement learning methods in robotics, in games, and in computational neuroscience. In total seventeen different subfields are presented by mostly young experts in those areas, and together they truly represent a state-of-the-art of current reinforcement learning research. Marco Wiering works at the artificial intelligence department of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He has published extensively on various reinforcement learning topics. Martijn van Otterlo works in the cognitive artificial intelligence group at the Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands. He has mainly focused on expressive knowledge representation in reinforcement learning settings.