The annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference is the flagship meeting on neural computation and machine learning. This volume contains the papers presented at the December 2006 meeting, held in Vancouver.

Efficient Query Processing for Scalable Web Search will be a valuable reference for researchers and developers working on This tutorial provides an accessible, yet comprehensive, overview of the state-of-the-art of Neural Information Retrieval.

An up-to-date account of the interplay between optimization and machine learning, accessible to students and researchers in both communities. The interplay between optimization and machine learning is one of the most important developments in modern computational science. Optimization formulations and methods are proving to be vital in designing algorithms to extract essential knowledge from huge volumes of data. Machine learning, however, is not simply a consumer of optimization technology but a rapidly evolving field that is itself generating new optimization ideas. This book captures the state of the art of the interaction between optimization and machine learning in a way that is accessible to researchers in both fields. Optimization approaches have enjoyed prominence in machine learning because of their wide applicability and attractive theoretical properties. The increasing complexity, size, and variety of today's machine learning models call for the reassessment of existing assumptions. This book starts the process of reassessment. It describes the resurgence in novel contexts of established frameworks such as first-order methods, stochastic approximations, convex relaxations, interior-point methods, and proximal methods. It also devotes attention to newer themes such as regularized optimization, robust optimization, gradient and subgradient methods, splitting techniques, and second-order methods. Many of these techniques draw inspiration from other fields, including operations research, theoretical computer science, and subfields of optimization. The book will enrich the ongoing cross-fertilization between the machine learning community and these other fields, and within the broader optimization community.

How deep learning—from Google Translate to driverless cars to personal cognitive assistants—is changing our lives and transforming every sector of the economy. The deep learning revolution has brought us driverless cars, the greatly improved Google Translate, fluent conversations with Siri and Alexa, and enormous profits from automated trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Deep learning networks can play poker better than professional poker players and defeat a world champion at Go. In this book, Terry Sejnowski explains how deep learning went from being an arcane academic field to a disruptive technology in the information economy. Sejnowski played an important role in the founding of deep learning, as one of a small group of researchers in the 1980s who challenged the prevailing logic-and-symbol based version of AI. The new version of AI Sejnowski and others developed, which became deep learning, is fueled instead by data. Deep networks learn from data in the same way that babies experience the world, starting with fresh eyes and gradually acquiring the skills needed to navigate novel environments. Learning algorithms extract information from raw data; information can be used to create knowledge; knowledge underlies understanding; understanding leads to wisdom. Someday a driverless car will know the road better than you do and drive with more skill; a deep learning network will diagnose your illness; a personal cognitive assistant will augment your puny human brain. It took nature many millions of years to evolve human intelligence; AI is on a trajectory measured in decades. Sejnowski prepares us for a deep learning future.

Solutions for learning from large scale datasets, including kernel learning algorithms that scale linearly with the volume of the data and experiments carried out on realistically large datasets. Pervasive and networked computers have dramatically reduced the cost of collecting and distributing large datasets. In this context, machine learning algorithms that scale poorly could simply become irrelevant. We need learning algorithms that scale linearly with the volume of the data while maintaining enough statistical efficiency to outperform algorithms that simply process a random subset of the data. This volume offers researchers and engineers practical solutions for learning from large scale datasets, with detailed descriptions of algorithms and experiments carried out on realistically large datasets. At the same time it offers researchers information that can address the relative lack of theoretical grounding for many useful algorithms. After a detailed description of state-of-the-art support vector machine technology, an introduction of the essential concepts discussed in the volume, and a comparison of primal and dual optimization techniques, the book progresses from well-understood techniques to more novel and controversial approaches. Many contributors have made their code and data available online for further experimentation. Topics covered include fast implementations of known algorithms, approximations that are amenable to theoretical guarantees, and algorithms that perform well in practice but are difficult to analyze theoretically. Contributors Léon Bottou, Yoshua Bengio, Stéphane Canu, Eric Cosatto, Olivier Chapelle, Ronan Collobert, Dennis DeCoste, Ramani Duraiswami, Igor Durdanovic, Hans-Peter Graf, Arthur Gretton, Patrick Haffner, Stefanie Jegelka, Stephan Kanthak, S. Sathiya Keerthi, Yann LeCun, Chih-Jen Lin, Gaëlle Loosli, Joaquin Quiñonero-Candela, Carl Edward Rasmussen, Gunnar Rätsch, Vikas Chandrakant Raykar, Konrad Rieck, Vikas Sindhwani, Fabian Sinz, Sören Sonnenburg, Jason Weston, Christopher K. I. Williams, Elad Yom-Tov

This book provides a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to federated learning, ranging from the basic knowledge and theories to various key applications. Privacy and incentive issues are the focus of this book. It is timely as federated learning is becoming popular after the release of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Since federated learning aims to enable a machine model to be collaboratively trained without each party exposing private data to others. This setting adheres to regulatory requirements of data privacy protection such as GDPR. This book contains three main parts. Firstly, it introduces different privacy-preserving methods for protecting a federated learning model against different types of attacks such as data leakage and/or data poisoning. Secondly, the book presents incentive mechanisms which aim to encourage individuals to participate in the federated learning ecosystems. Last but not least, this book also describes how federated learning can be applied in industry and business to address data silo and privacy-preserving problems. The book is intended for readers from both the academia and the industry, who would like to learn about federated learning, practice its implementation, and apply it in their own business. Readers are expected to have some basic understanding of linear algebra, calculus, and neural network. Additionally, domain knowledge in FinTech and marketing would be helpful.”

Program synthesis is the task of automatically finding a program in the underlying programming language that satisfies the user intent expressed in the form of some specification. Since the inception of artificial intelligence in the 1950s, this problem has been considered the holy grail of Computer Science. Despite inherent challenges in the problem such as ambiguity of user intent and a typically enormous search space of programs, the field of program synthesis has developed many different techniques that enable program synthesis in different real-life application domains. It is now used successfully in software engineering, biological discovery, compute-raided education, end-user programming, and data cleaning. In the last decade, several applications of synthesis in the field of programming by examples have been deployed in mass-market industrial products. This monograph is a general overview of the state-of-the-art approaches to program synthesis, its applications, and subfields. It discusses the general principles common to all modern synthesis approaches such as syntactic bias, oracle-guided inductive search, and optimization techniques. We then present a literature review covering the four most common state-of-the-art techniques in program synthesis: enumerative search, constraint solving, stochastic search, and deduction-based programming by examples. It concludes with a brief list of future horizons for the field.