This is the fifth in a series of six-week-long research workshops on Machine Learning for Speech Language and Computer Vision Technology. These workshops bring together diverse “dream teams” of leading professionals, graduate students, and undergraduates, in a truly cooperative, intensive, and substantive effort to advance the state of the science.

These workshops constitute a continuation of the well known Johns Hopkins University summer workshops, and encompasses all areas of human language technology including automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, machine translation, topic detection and tracking, information retrieval and extraction, summarization and question answering, and certain related areas of computer vision, including image understanding and visual scene analysis. These fields share many important algorithmic and statistical approaches, allowing cross-fertilization. Machine learning challenges that arise from these areas are of fundamental scientific interest and are shared with many other fields of science and engineering, such as medical-/bio-informatics and social network analysis.

The primary goals of the workshop series are to advance basic science, attract students to the field and prepare them for research by putting them to work on exciting problems alongside senior researchers in a highly collaborative environment. Creation of research infrastructure and lasting collaborations are secondary goals.