Submissions are solicited for the Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers in all aspects of neural and statistical information processing and computation, and their applications. The conference is a highly selective, single track meeting that includes invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers. Submissions by authors who are new to NIPS are encouraged. In a switch from its previous Vancouver venue, the 2011 conference will be held on December 13-15 in Granada, Spain. One day of tutorials (December 12) will precede the main conference, and two days of workshops (December 16-17) will follow it at the Sierra Nevada ski resort.

Deadline for Paper Submissions: Thursday June 2, 2011, 23:59 Universal Time (4:59pm Pacific Daylight Time).

Technical Areas: Papers are solicited in all areas of neural information processing and statistical learning, including, but not limited to:
Algorithms and Architectures: statistical learning algorithms, kernel methods, graphical models, Gaussian processes, neural networks, dimensionality reduction and manifold learning, model selection, combinatorial optimization, relational and structured learning.
Applications: innovative applications that use machine learning, including systems for time series prediction, bioinformatics, systems biology, text/web analysis, multimedia processing, and robotics.
Brain Imaging: neuroimaging, cognitive neuroscience, EEG (electroencephalogram), ERP (event related potentials), MEG (magnetoencephalogram), fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), brain mapping, brain segmentation, brain computer interfaces.
Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence: theoretical, computational, or experimental studies of perception, psychophysics, human or animal learning, memory, reasoning, problem solving, natural language processing, and neuropsychology.
Control and Reinforcement Learning: decision and control, exploration, planning, navigation, Markov decision processes, game playing, multi-agent coordination, computational models of classical and operant conditioning.
Hardware Technologies: analog and digital VLSI, neuromorphic engineering, computational sensors and actuators, microrobotics, bioMEMS, neural prostheses, photonics, molecular and quantum computing.
Learning Theory: generalization, regularization and model selection, Bayesian learning, spaces of functions and kernels, statistical physics of learning, online learning and competitive analysis, hardness of learning and approximations, statistical theory, large deviations and asymptotic analysis, information theory.
Neuroscience: theoretical and experimental studies of processing and transmission of information in biological neurons and networks, including spike train generation, synaptic modulation, plasticity and adaptation.
Speech and Signal Processing: recognition, coding, synthesis, denoising, segmentation, source separation, auditory perception, psychoacoustics, dynamical systems, recurrent networks, language models, dynamic and temporal models.
Visual Processing: biological and machine vision, image processing and coding, segmentation, object detection and recognition, motion detection and tracking, visual psychophysics, visual scene analysis and interpretation.


Evaluation Criteria: Submissions will be refereed on the basis of technical quality, novelty, potential impact, and clarity.

Submission Instructions: All submissions will be made electronically, in PDF format. As in previous years, reviewing will be double-blind -- the reviewers will not know the identities of the authors. Papers are limited to eight pages, including figures and tables, in the NIPS style. An additional ninth page containing only cited references is allowed. Complete submission and formatting instructions, including style files, are available from the NIPS website, http://nips.cc.

Supplementary Material: Authors can submit up to 10 MB of material, containing proofs, audio, images, video, or even data or source code. Note that the reviewers and the program committee reserve the right to judge the paper solely on the basis of the 9 pages of the paper; looking at any extra material is up to the discretion of the reviewers and is not required.

Electronic submissions will be accepted until Thursday June 2, 2011, 23:59 Universal Time (4:59 pm Pacific Daylight Time). As was the case last year, final papers will be due in advance of the conference.

Dual Submissions Policy: Submissions that are identical (or substantially similar) to versions that have been previously published, or accepted for publication, or during the NIPS review period are in submission to another peer-reviewed and published venue are not appropriate for NIPS, with three exceptions listed below. These exceptions, which have been approved by the NIPS Foundation board in the interests of speeding up scientific communication and improving the efficiency of peer review, are as follows:
Concurrent submission to other venues is acceptable provided that: (a) The concurrent submission or intention to submit to other venues is declared to all venues, (b) NIPS and the concurrent venues are given permission by the author(s) to coordinate reviewing, and (c) acceptance to one venue imposes withdrawal from all other venues with the exception stated in 2 below.
NIPS submissions that summarize a longer journal paper, whether published, accepted, or in submission, are acceptable if the authors inform NIPS and the journal and give them permission to coordinate reviewing.
It is acceptable to submit to NIPS 2011 work that has been made available as a technical report (or similar, e.g. in arXiv) as long as the conditions above are satisfied.

None of the above should be construed as overriding the requirements of other publishing venues. In addition, keep in mind that author anonymity to NIPS reviewers might be compromised for authors availing themselves of exceptions 2 and 3.

Authors’ Responsibilities: If there are papers that may appear to violate any of these conditions, it is the authors' responsibility to (1) cite these papers (preserving anonymity), (2) argue in the body of your paper why your NIPS paper is non-trivially different from these concurrent submissions, and (3) include anonymized versions of those papers in the supplemental material.

Demonstrations and Workshops: There is a separate Demonstration track at NIPS. Authors wishing to submit to the Demonstration track should consult the Call for Demonstrations. The workshops will be held at the Sierra Nevada ski resort December 16-17. The upcoming call for workshop proposals will provide details.