The 7th annual Bayes Applications Workshop is looking for real world applications of graphical models and Bayes networks. We are especially interested in contributions that emphasize the challenges encountered in exploring novel domains — that are characteristic of the domain and the software tools used. With contributions at the border of the academic and non-academic community, our desire is to foster discussion and interchange. Accordingly, we not only seek submissions from members of the immediate conference community, but also strongly encourage submissions from practitioners from a larger community.

Real world applications typically integrate theories and techniques from multiple sources, taking a systems approach. One topic of particular interest is how researchers and developers have reconciled apparently conflicting demands of theory and practice in larger systems. Further, the availability of mature academic and commercial software tools has spawned numerous applications. We'd like to reach out this year to users of such tools, especially those who have applied software in places and domains where they have not been applied before: Many of the connections among researchers and applications occur by virtue of software that researchers make available that is applied by someone working on a real world problem.

In past years this workshop has addressed the UAI community. Now with the joint workshop program the AI/ML communities have grown closer, and we invite participation of interested parties from all communities with an interest in building graphical models.

Please pass this call on to practitioners that you work with, or who apply your software, and encourage their submissions.

• Broad areas of interest:

• Ecological & biological systems models
• computer systems & dependability
• dialog systems
• fault isolation & root cause analysis
• conflict analysis
• disaster response
• forensics
• financial & economic modeling
• …others

• Submissions:

• Submissions should be in UAI format, limited to 8 pages. Demonstrations to accompany talks are encouraged.
• E-mail submissions to baw-uai09@intel-research.net, in pdf format.

• Workshop format:

• The format of the workshop will be a series of selected talks, and posters, grouped to encourage discussion. We will leave time during breaks for poster presentations. Speakers may also want to present posters of their work in the poster session.

Workshop discussions tend to be informal, and the smaller group tends to encourage more candid comments from presenters. We ask presenters to consider why some projects succeed or fail in a larger organizational context, and generally encourage them to take a multi-disciplinary approach. Hopefully this will reveal lessons learned from projects that have shown value (or in some cases, surprisingly failed to show value) in situations and organizations motivated by specific needs.




As in past years, proceedings will be posted online. These Bayes Application Workshop calls and proceedings from previous years are available:

1. 4th BAW: 2006, Cambridge, MA, USA
2. 5th BAW: 2007, Vancouver, BC, Canada
3. 6th BAW: 2008, Helsinki, Finland.

Organizers:

• John Mark Agosta, Intel Corp., Santa Clara, CA
  
• Russell Almond, ETS, Princeton, NJ
  
• Dennis Buede, Innovative Decisions, Vienna, VA
  
• Marek J. Druzdzel, ISL, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
  
• Judy Goldsmith, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
  
• Silja Renooij, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands