The world's leading experts in the field of computational learning at an international conference that will be held for the first time in Israel this week

About 500 experts from all over the world, as well as Nobel laureate Prof. Israel Oman, are expected to participate next week in two major international conferences in the field of machine learning that will be held in Haifa

About 500 experts from all over the world, as well as Nobel laureate Prof. Israel Oman, are expected to participate next week in two major international conferences in the field of machine learning that will be held on June 22-25 in Haifa - International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and - Conference On Learning Theory (COLT).

The two conferences, which are held once a year in different parts of the world, are now being held for the first time in Israel, and despite the geographical distance and the geopolitical situation, there is a large response of participants and the flow of registrants continues. It is also worth noting that the combined conference is one of the largest academic conferences held in Israel in years.

Dr. Shay Payne, Director of the Analytical Computing Department at the IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa, and who led the effort in the research community in Israel to bring the conferences to Israel for the first time, explains that these events have a history of 30 years - but despite Israel's leading position in the field of computational learning, they have not been held To this day these conferences are with us. "It's like hosting the Olympics - and there is competition like hosting the Olympics," Payne says. Israel's victory in hosting the conference was contributed by a considerable effort in cooperation with prominent people in the Israeli academic community, such as Prof. Naftali Tishvi from the Hebrew University and Prof. Yishai Mansour from Tel Aviv University, as well as recommendations from academics from all over the world - who were recruited for the topic.

Under Payne's management, there are three groups dealing in the fields of machine learning, data mining, and constraint satisfaction computing. Computing for Constraint Satisfaction, CSP, is a field close to optimization: researchers are looking for a solution to design problems: from processing a time system, through personnel management and efficient team building, to the placement of employees according to skills. Such solutions are especially needed in large organizations such as IBM, which employ about 200,000 people in the services sector alone. They contribute to configuration management in manufacturing industries, building pricing models related to raw material prices, intra-organizational processes, competition and so on.

The activity of the IBM research laboratory in Haifa in this field began with work in the field of hardware design verification - where later the researchers are looking for ways to integrate these tools in other fields.

Dr. Shay Payne explains that the field of computational learning combines ideas and technologies that come from diverse fields of research, such as computer science, physics, statistics, optimization and artificial intelligence, where the accepted learning today is statistical learning from examples: the system has to build a law based on examples, and it is tested on its ability To exercise the ability to generalize: act in front of an example that you have not seen before and identify its essence. In supervised learning there is a teacher who identifies the essence of the objects. In unsupervised learning, the instructor does not define the essence, and the system is required to develop "insights" on its own based on the information presented to it. Learning systems may operate in a batch format, on a quantity of samples - or in a direct sequence

Today's popular fields of application in the world of computational learning are handling documents and text in the Web world, business intelligence (BI) and bioinformatics, DNA sequence analysis.

"Computational learning is more and more important", states Payne - "and it is the way to deal with the explosion of information. As larger amounts of data move to a digital medium - analytical methods for analyzing this information gain more and more weight."

One of the fields that is currently advancing on the path of computational learning is the world of health - which employs many IBM researchers, including researchers in the laboratory in Haifa. "BI systems in the business world are significantly ahead of the world of medicine - and you can look at the world of BI and guess what will happen in the world of health," believes Payne.

In the photo: Dr. Shay Payne, director of the analytical computing department at the IBM research laboratory in Haifa, and who led the effort in the research community in Israel to bring the conferences to Israel for the first time.