Ghent University

At NIPS 2008, Lars Buesing received the NIPS student best paper award for our paper "On Computational Power and the Order-Chaos Phase Transition in Reservoir Computing". Woot!! Four out of the 1000 submissions got a student best paper award, which consist of a cash price and an invitation to send an extended version to the Journal of Machine Learning. Congrats Lars, you did a wonderful job on the paper.

NIPS was BTW quite stunning this year, an incredible improvement since last year! Finally NIPS again deserves the "Neural" in its name. For once not all paper were on Graphical Models, SVMs and Gibbs Sampling...

In 3 weeks, I will again go to the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Vancouver, Canada. I co-authored a paper with Lars Buesing and Robert Legenstein from the TUGraz: "On Computational Power and the Order-Chaos Phase Transition in Reservoir Computing". The paper was invited to be orally presented, which is quite an honor, since the oral-track acceptance rate is less than 3%! Thanks Lars and Robert for your wonderful work on it. Together with Michiel D'Haene we will also present a poster at the "Parallel Implementations of Learning Algorithms: What have you done for me lately?" workshop. These workshops are held in Whistler, Canada, home of the Whistler Blackcomb ski resort, presumably one of the best resorts of northern America. I am not at all a fervent skier, but I do look forward to this single day of American style skiing. Whistler Blackcomb will by the way be the location of the 2010 Winter Olympics. I heard whispers that the NIPS 2009 conference will for the first time since 2001 not be held in Vancouver as the hotels are fully booked for the Olympics. I hope next year's location is as idyllic.