The result of the 1993 Connectionist Models Summer School, the papers in this volume exemplify the tremendous breadth and depth of research underway in the field of neural networks. Although the slant of the summer school has always leaned toward cognitive science and artificial intelligence, the diverse scientific backgrounds and research interests of accepted students and invited faculty reflect the broad spectrum of areas contributing to neural networks, including artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, engineering, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. Providing an accurate picture of the state of the art in this fast-moving field, the proceedings of this intense two-week program of lectures, workshops, and informal discussions contains timely and high-quality work by the best and the brightest in the neural networks field.

Acquire the tools for understanding new architectures and algorithms of dynamical recurrent networks (DRNs) from this valuable field guide, which documents recent forays into artificial intelligence, control theory, and connectionism. This unbiased introduction to DRNs and their application to time-series problems (such as classification and prediction) provides a comprehensive overview of the recent explosion of leading research in this prolific field. A Field Guide to Dynamical Recurrent Networks emphasizes the issues driving the development of this class of network structures. It provides a solid foundation in DRN systems theory and practice using consistent notation and terminology. Theoretical presentations are supplemented with applications ranging from cognitive modeling to financial forecasting. A Field Guide to Dynamical Recurrent Networks will enable engineers, research scientists, academics, and graduate students to apply DRNs to various real-world problems and learn about different areas of active research. It provides both state-of-the-art information and a road map to the future of cutting-edge dynamical recurrent networks.

Markov decision processes have become the de facto standard in modeling and solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. This book studies lifting Markov decision processes, reinforcement learning and dynamic programming to the first-order (or, relational) setting.

Online Harassment is one of the most serious problems in social media. To address it requires understanding the forms harassment takes, how it impacts the targets, who harasses, and how technology that stands between users and social media can stop harassers and protect users. The field of Human-Computer Interaction provides a unique set of tools to address this challenge. This book brings together experts in theory, socio-technical systems, network analysis, text analysis, and machine learning to present a broad set of analyses and applications that improve our understanding of the harassment problem and how to address it. This book tackles the problem of harassment by addressing it in three major domains. First, chapters explore how harassment manifests, including extensive analysis of the Gamer Gate incident, stylistic features of different types of harassment, how gender differences affect misogynistic harassment. Then, we look at the results of harassment, including how it drives people offline and the impacts it has on targets. Finally, we address techniques for mitigating harassment, both through automated detection and filtering and interface options that users control. Together, many branches of HCI come together to provide a comprehensive look at the phenomenon of online harassment and to advance the field toward effective human-oriented solutions.

The twenty last years have been marked by an increase in available data and computing power. In parallel to this trend, the focus of neural network research and the practice of training neural networks has undergone a number of important changes, for example, use of deep learning machines. The second edition of the book augments the first edition with more tricks, which have resulted from 14 years of theory and experimentation by some of the world's most prominent neural network researchers. These tricks can make a substantial difference (in terms of speed, ease of implementation, and accuracy) when it comes to putting algorithms to work on real problems.

Recent Advances in Reinforcement Learning addresses current research in an exciting area that is gaining a great deal of popularity in the Artificial Intelligence and Neural Network communities. Reinforcement learning has become a primary paradigm of machine learning. It applies to problems in which an agent (such as a robot, a process controller, or an information-retrieval engine) has to learn how to behave given only information about the success of its current actions. This book is a collection of important papers that address topics including the theoretical foundations of dynamic programming approaches, the role of prior knowledge, and methods for improving performance of reinforcement-learning techniques. These papers build on previous work and will form an important resource for students and researchers in the area. Recent Advances in Reinforcement Learning is an edited volume of peer-reviewed original research comprising twelve invited contributions by leading researchers. This research work has also been published as a special issue of Machine Learning (Volume 22, Numbers 1, 2 and 3).

It is our belief that researchers and practitioners acquire, through experience and word-of-mouth, techniques and heuristics that help them successfully apply neural networks to di cult real world problems. Often these \tricks" are theo- tically well motivated. Sometimes they are the result of trial and error. However, their most common link is that they are usually hidden in people’s heads or in the back pages of space-constrained conference papers. As a result newcomers to the eld waste much time wondering why their networks train so slowly and perform so poorly. This book is an outgrowth of a 1996 NIPS workshop called Tricks of the Trade whose goal was to begin the process of gathering and documenting these tricks. The interest that the workshop generated motivated us to expand our collection and compile it into this book. Although we have no doubt that there are many tricks we have missed, we hope that what we have included will prove to be useful, particularly to those who are relatively new to the eld. Each chapter contains one or more tricks presented by a given author (or authors). We have attempted to group related chapters into sections, though we recognize that the di erent sections are far from disjoint. Some of the chapters (e.g., 1, 13, 17) contain entire systems of tricks that are far more general than the category they have been placed in.