Last Call for Papers: Silver 2012 – International workshop on Learning from Unexpected Results, collocated with ECML-PKDD 2012, August 24-28, Bristol, United Kingdom

Workshop website and call for papers

The Silver Lining: learning from unexpected results
With this workshop, we want to give a voice to unexpected results that deserve wider dissemination: thoroughly conducted studies that follow a plausible idea that did not achieve the aspired results, but instead taught us novel lessons; studies showing that well-known (successful) methods will not work under certain conditions, highlighting remaining weaknesses and new avenues of research; and stories that focus on how a successful method was discovered after one or several failed attempts.

Unexpected results chart the boundaries of our knowledge: they identify errors, reveal false assumptions, and force us to dig deeper. Unfortunately, this process is rarely mentioned in the machine learning and data mining discourse. Indeed, there exists a publication bias that favors (incremental) successes over novel discoveries of why some ideas, while intuitive and plausible, do not work.

With Silver, we invite original studies that fall in one of the following categories:
 unexpected results: thoroughly conducted studies that follow an intuitive and plausible idea that made perfect sense but did not achieve the aspired results. They should explore the underlying reasons for the observed results and highlight what we can learn from them;
 counterexamples: studies showing that well-known (successful) methods will not work under certain conditions, highlighting remaining weaknesses and new avenues of research;
 the road to success: stories that focus on how a successful method was discovered after one or several failed attempts, highlighting how a negative was turned into a positive;
 other papers, e.g. position statements, as long as they are relevant to the overall aim of the workshop.
In addition, extended abstracts may present position statements or interesting cases of (unexplained) surprising results for which the authors would like input from the community.
Important dates
 submission: June 29
 notification: July 20
 camera-ready version: August 3
 Silver 2012: September 24 (tentative date)