Section: Dissemination

Promoting Scientific Activities

Scientific Events Organisation

EWRL 2018

We organized the 14th European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL) in October 2018 in Lille. 183 people registered. Despite its name, the audience goes really beyond Europe with 42 from North Amercia, 38 from France, 19 from Germany, 16 from the UK, 12 from Italy, 12 from Israel, 9 from Belgium, ... 40% of participants were students, mostly PhD students, but also some Master students. Among non students, 40% came from industry, the other 60% being academics. We had a quite unique panel of invited speakers highlighted by historical figures of reinforcement learning with Prof. Richard Sutton (U. Alberta and Deepmind), bandit theory with Tze Leung Lai (Stanford U.). EWRL is really the main scientific event on reinforcement learning in the world today.

After 2008 and 2015, this is the third time EWRL is organized in Lille.

General Chair, Scientific Chair

M.  Valko was a program co-chair for CNRS Summer school on Networks, Graphs, and Machine Learning (RESCOM 2018)

Member of the Organizing Committees

• F. Strub, co-organizer of the workshop “Visually Grounded Interaction and Language (ViGIL)” at NIPS 2018

• M.  Valko was an organizing co-chair of the ITS Workshop: Optimizing Human Learning (ITS 2018)

• R. Fruit, M. Seurin, M. Pirotta, F. Strub organized the 14th European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning

Scientific Events Selection

Member of the Conference Program Committees

• Philippe Preux: SPC IJCAI 2018; PC of ICML, ECML, LOD, EWRL, and French speaking conferences: EGC, SFC JFPDA

• Michal Valko: Area Chair of NIPS 2018, Top 10 reviewer recognition for reviewing at ICML

• Emilie Kaufmann: PC Chair for WiML 2018, Top 10 reviewer recognition for reviewing at ICML

• Odalric-ambrym Maillard: PC chair for ALT

Reviewer

Members of SequeL have been involved in the following reviewing activities for conferences in 2018:

• AI&Stats, NIPS, ALT, ICML, COLT, IJCAI

Journal

Reviewer - Reviewing Activities

• The Annals of Statistics

• Journal of Machine Learning Research

• Machine Learning Research

• Bernoulli

• Annual Reviews in Control

• European Journal of Operation Research

• Information and Inference: a Journal of the IMA (Institute of Mathematics and its Application)

• Operations Research

• IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing

Invited Talks

• Odalric-Ambrym Maillard: invited Opponent for the PhD defence of Stefan Magureanu (Stockholm, Sweden), February 2018

• Odalric-Ambrym Maillard: invited speaker at LTCI, Telecom ParisTech, February 2018

• Odalric-Ambrym Maillard: invited speaker at Journées Probabilités et statistiques de Lille, June 22, 2018

• Odalric-Ambrym Maillard: invited speaker at RL Lab, McGill University, August 23, 2018

• Odalric-Ambrym Maillard: invited speaker at the 21st IBIS conference (Sapporo, Japan), November 06, 2018

• Odalric-Ambrym Maillard: invited speaker at the RIKEN Institute (Tokyo, Japan), November 07, 2018

• Michal Valko: The power of graphs in speeding up online learning and decision making Presented on October 23rd, DeepMind, London, UK (DeepMind 2018)

• Michal Valko: Active block-matrix completion with adaptive confidence sets, Presented on September 10–13th, 2018, International Workshop on Optimization and Machine Learning, CIMI, Toulouse (CIMI 2018)

• Michal Valko: Online influence maximization, Presented on May 14th, 2018, Workshop on Graph Learning, LINCS, Paris (LINCS 2018)

• Michal Valko: Recommender systems, Presented on March 22nd, 2018, Journée Big data, Polytech'Lille (Polytech'Lille 2018)

• Michal Valko: Pliable rejection sampling, Presented on February 8th, 2018 at GDR Isis, Télécom ParisTech in Paris (ISIS 2018)

• Michal Valko: Graph Bandits, Presented on January 7th, 2018 at MIST conference in Rajecká Lesná (MIST 2018)

• Pierre Perrault: Stochastic multi-arm bandit problem and some extensions, Presented on November, 23rd, 2018 at Lambda seminar at Université de Bordeaux (Lambda 2018)

• Emilie Kaufmann: (Optimal) Best Arm Identification and applications to Monte-Carlo Tree Search, presented on January, 18th, 2018 at the Probability and Statistics seminar of IECL, Nancy

• Emilie Kaufmann: Bandits (for) Games, presented on March 26th, 2018 at Amazon Research, Berlin

• Emilie Kaufmann, Bandits (for) Games, presented on April 25th, 2018 as an invited talk to the Workshop on Modern Challenges on Learning Theory at Univerisé de Montréal

• Emilie Kaufmann, Bandits (for) Games, presented on June 13th, 2018 as an invited talk to the Paris Symposium on Game Theory, Paris

• Emilie Kaufmann New tools for Adaptive Testing and Applications to Bandit Problems, presented on December 3rd, 2018 at the Probability and Statistics seminar of IRMA, Strasbourg

Scientific Expertise

• Philippe Preux was a member of the hiring committee for CR at Inria Nancy

• Philippe Preux was a member of the hiring committee for an associate professor at Université de Lille

• Philippe Preux evaluated submissions to ANRT (he also declined many such invitations due to lack of time)

• Philippe Preux was a member of an auditing committee of an international company which can not be named (NDA)

• Philippe Preux participates to a “AI mission” with an (other) international company which can not be named (NDA)

• Odalric-Ambrym Maillard evaluated a submission to OTKA (Hungarian ANR), and to ANR.

• M. Valko is an elected member of the evaluation committee and participates in the hiring, promotion, and evaluation juries of Inria, notably

  • Selection committee for Inria award for scientific excellence of confirmed researchers

  • Inria working group for the creation of team RandOpt

  • National committee for the secondments at Inria

• Michal Valko participates in a collaboration with an international company which can not be named (NDA)

• Emilie Kaufmann was a member of the hiring committee for an associate professor position at Université de Lille

• Emilie Kaufmann was a member of the hiring committee for an associate professor at ENS Paris (Computer Science departement)

Research Administration

• Philippe Preux is:

  • “délégué scientifique adjoint” of the Inria center in Lille

  • member of the Inria evaluation committee (CE)

  • member of the Inria internal scientific committee (COSI)

  • member of the scientific committee of CRIStAL

  • the head of the “Data Intelligence” thematic group at CRIStAL

• Michal Valko is a member of the Inria evaluation committee (CE)