The 25th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2012) will take place in Edinburgh, Scotland, on June 25th-27th, 2012. It will be co-located with ICML, with a joint day of on June 27th.

We invite submissions of papers addressing theoretical aspects of machine learning, empirical inference and related topics. We strongly support a broad definition of learning theory, including:

Analysis of learning algorithms and their generalization ability
Computational complexity of learning
Statistical mechanics of learning systems
Optimization procedures for learning and their analysis
Online and stochastic optimization, and analysis of oracle models of optimization
High dimensional and non-parametric empirical inference, including sparse and low-rank methods
Kernel methods
Boolean function learning
Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning and clustering
On-line learning and relative loss bounds
Planning and control, including reinforcement learning
Learning in social, economic, and game-theoretic settings
Privacy in learning

We are also interested in papers that include viewpoints that are new to the COLT community. We welcome experimental and algorithmic papers provided they are relevant to the focus of the conference by elucidating theoretical results, or by pointing out interesting and not well understood behaviour that could stimulate theoretical analysis.

Papers that have previously appeared in journals or at other conferences with published proceedings, or that are being submitted to other conferences with published proceedings, are not appropriate for COLT. Papers that include work that has already been submitted for journal publication may be submitted to COLT, as long as the papers have not been accepted for publication by the COLT submission deadline (conditionally or otherwise) and that the paper is not expected to be published before the COLT conference (June 2010).

Papers will be published electronically, likely in the JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings series.
Open Problems Session:

We also invite submission of open problems. These should be constrained to two pages. There is a short reviewing period for the open problems. Accepted contributions will be allocated short presentation slots in a special open problems session and will be allowed two pages each in the proceedings. The deadline for submitting open problems will be announced in a separate call at a later date.
Submission Instructions:

Submissions are limited to 12 JMLR-formatted pages, plus additional pages for references and appendices. All details, proofs and derivations required to substantiate the results must be included in the submission, possibly in the appendices. However, the contribution, novelty and significance of submissions will be judged primarily based on the main text (without appendices), and so enough details, including proof details, must be provided in the main text to convince the reviewers of the submissions' merits.

Exact formatting and submission instructions will be available at the conference website.
Important Dates:

Paper submission deadline: Tuesday February 14th, 2012, 18:00 UTC (1PM EST).

Author notification: April 30th, 2012

Conference: June 25th-27th, 2012
People:

General Chair: Jykri Kivinen

Open Problem Chair: Alexander Rakhlin

Publicity Chair: Bob Williamson

Sysadmin: Adam Bohlander

Local coordination: Charles Sutton

Program Chairs: Shie Mannor and Nathan Srebro

Program Committee:

Peter Auer
Francis Bach
Maria-Florina Balcan
Shai Ben-David
Kamalika Chaudhuri
Gentile Claudio
Koby Crammer
Vitaly Feldman
Peter Grunwald
Elad Hazan
Adam Kalai
Satyen Kale
Robert Kleinberg
Vladimir Koltchinskii
John Lafferty
Phil Long
Gabor Lugosi
Yishay Mansour
Remi Munos
Pardeep Ravikumar
Philippe Rigollet
Shai Shalev-Shwartz
Ohad Shamir
Alexander Shapiro
Ingo Steinwart
Gilles Stoltz
Csaba Szepesvari
Manfred Warmuth
Hans Simon