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AGENCY USE ONLY (Leave blank)2. REPORT DATE
July 1998
REPORT TYPE AND DATES COVEREDFinal, 7/10/98-9/30/98
TITLE AND SUBTITLEMachine Learning: Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference
AUTHOR(S)Jude Shavlik (editor)
FUNDING NUMBERSN00014-98-1-0810
PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAMES(S) AND ADDRESS(ES)Computer Sciences Department University of Wisconsin 1210 W. Dayton Street Madison, WI 53706
PERFORMING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER144-HD17
SPONSORING /MONITORING AGENCY NAMES(S) AND ADDRESS(ES)Office All rights reserved.
Printed in the United StatesNo part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means^lectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.
PrefaceThis volume contains the 66 technical papers presented at the Fifteenth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML '98), held July 24r-27,1998, in Madison, Wisconsin U.S.A. These articles were selected based on the rigorous review and discussion of 215 submissions. All papers were presented orally as well as at an evening poster session.ICML '98 was one of ten AI-related conferences held in Madison during mid-summer 1998, in an ambitious, first-time experiment to see what kind of synergies would result from all this collocation. In particular, ICML '98 was held in the same building as, and concurrently with, the Computational Learning Theory (COLT) and Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) conferences. It also overlapped one day with the Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) conference.Registrants were allowed to attend, without additional costs, the technical sessions of the other conferences. COLT, ICML, and UAI each invited one of the plenary speakers and jointly invited the banquet speaker, plus there was a joint poster session and wrapup panel. The poster session contained about 150 papers, allowing conference attendees a chance to see or further discuss research presented during the four to five parallel tracks and fostering interaction among the various communities.I especially wish to thank:• the authors of all the papers for their technical contributions toward the advancement of machine learning.• Richard Sutton, who was the IMCL representative among the three joint invited speakers and spoke on "Reinforcement Learning: Ho...