PGM 2016 is the eight edition of the International Conference on Probabilistic Graphical Models. It will take place in Lugano (Switzerland) between the 6th and the 9th of September 2016. The conference website is http://pgm.idsia.ch.

It welcomes contributions on all aspects of graphical models including probabilistic reasoning, decision making, learning and data mining. Both theoretical and applied contributions are welcome. The deadline for submissions is May 20, 2016.

::: PROCEEDINGS :::

The accepted papers will be published in the proceedings track (http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/proceedings/) of the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR).

Submission instructions and the author's kit are available at http://www2.idsia.ch/cms/pgm/submissions The page limit is 12 pages in the JMLR (single-column) style. Each submission will be double-blind reviewed by three referees.

::: IJAR Special Issue :::

Selected papers will be invited to be extended and then submitted to a special issue of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (IJAR).

::: INVITED SPEAKERS :::

We are pleased to have three distinguished invited speakers.

Guido Consonni is Professor of Statistics at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy. His current research topics are in the area of: model selection, graphical models and Bayesian networks, objective Bayesian analysis, models for high-dimensional data, hierarchical models. He is Chair of the Objective Bayes Section of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA).

Fabio G. Cozman is Professor at Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. He works with probabilistic reasoning and machine learning, with a special interest in formalisms that extend probability theory. He has served as Program and General Chair of the Conf. on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, Area Chair of the Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, and as Associate Editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and of the Journal of Approximate Reasoning, as well as of the Artificial Intelligence Journal.

Adnan Darwiche is Professor and former Chairman of the Computer Science Department at UCLA. His research focuses on the theory and practice of symbolic and probabilistic reasoning, with recent applications to machine learning. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and is an AAAI fellow. He is also author of "Modeling and Reasoning with Bayesian Networks", published by Cambridge University Press in 2009.

::: TUTORIALS :::

We will have two tutorials.

"Computational Complexity of Bayesian Networks and Markov Random Fields", by Cassio P. de Campos, Reader at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, and Johan Kwisthout, senior staff member in the Artificial Intelligence Program at Radboud University, The Netherlands.

"Learning Sum-Product Networks", by Nicola Di Mauro, Professor at the University of Bari, Italy, and by Antonio Vergari, PhD student at the University of Bari. This tutorial is an ECCAI invited talk, supported by the ECCAI conference sponsorship program.

::: DEADLINES :::

May 20, 2016: Paper submission deadline June 10, 2016: Author notification June 24, 2016: Camera-ready copy due September 6-9, 2016: Conference

Alessandro Antonucci IDSIA Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Via Cantonale (Galleria 2) CH-6928, Manno-Lugano, CH

mail: alessandro(a)idsia.ch skype: alessandro.antonucci tel: +41 916108515 web: www.idsia.ch/~alessandro