==Call for Papers

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 site of the conference is http://pgm.idsia.ch.

It welcomes contributions on all aspects of graphical models including probabilistic reasoning, decision making, learning and data mining. It welcomes both theoretical and applied contributions.

Due to several requests the paper submission deadline has been extended to June 3, 2016.

==Important Dates

Friday, June 3, 2016: Paper submssion (extended) deadline. Friday, July 1, 2016: Author notification. Friday, July 15, 2016: Camera-ready copy due.

==Submissions

The instructions for submission and the author kit are available here: http://www2.idsia.ch/cms/pgm/submissions/ The page limit is 12 pages in the JMLR style. Each submission will be double-blind reviewed by three referees. It will be up to the authors to ensure the proper anonymization of their paper.

==JMLR Proceedings

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

==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 and Tutorials

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).

Prof. Consonni will give a talk titled "Bayesian Selection of Essential Graphical Models".

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, among other activities, as Program and General Chair of the Conf. on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, Area Chair (Machine Learning track) of the Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, and as member of the Editorial Board of the Artificial Intelligence Journal, as well as Associate Editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and of the Journal of Approximate Reasoning.

Prof. Cozman will give a talk titled "The Finite Model Theory of Bayesian Networks: An Invitation".

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.

Prof. Darwiche will give a talk titled "Learning Arithmetic Circuits with Background Knowledge".

==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, and postdoc in the Donders Center for Cognition.

"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.

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