[hpc-announce] Call for Papers: Workshop on IoT, Edge, and Mobile for Embedded Machine Learning (ITEM)/ECML-PKDD 2021

[Holger Fröning]

(apologies if you receive multiple publicity emails)


================================================================================
                           CALL FOR PAPERS

                     2nd International Workshop on 
         IoT, Edge, and Mobile for Embedded Machine Learning
                             (ITEM 2021)

                    https://www.item-workshop.org <https://www.item-workshop.org/>                                   

                    September 13-17, 2021, online

                         In conjunction with
               European Conference on Machine Learning
                                 and
     Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases
                           (ECML-PKDD 2021)
                       https://2021.ecmlpkdd.org <https://2021.ecmlpkdd.org/>
================================================================================


ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

Local and embedded machine learning (ML) is a key component for real-time data 
analytics in upcoming computing environments like the Internet of Things (IoT), 
edge computing and mobile ubiquitous systems. The goal of the ITEM workshop is 
to bring together experts, researchers and practitioners from all relevant 
communities, including ML, hardware design and embedded systems, IoT, edge, and 
ubiquitous / mobile computing. Topics of interest include compression 
techniques for existing ML models, new ML models that are especially suitable 
for embedded hardware, federated learning approaches, as well as automatic code 
generation, frameworks and tool support. The workshop is planned as a 
combination of invited talks, paper submissions, as well as open-table 
discussions. 

There is an increasing need for real-time intelligent data analytics, driven by 
a world of Big Data, and the society’s need for pervasive intelligent devices, 
such as wearables for health and recreational purposes, smart city 
infrastructure, e-commerce, Industry 4.0, and autonomous robots. Most 
applications share facts like large data volumes, real-time requirements, 
limited resources including processor, memory, network and possibly battery 
life. Data might be large but possibly incomplete and uncertain. Notably, often 
powerful cloud services can be unavailable, or not an option due to latency or 
privacy constraints. For these tasks, Machine Learning (ML) is among the most 
promising approaches to address learning and reasoning under uncertainty. 
Examples include image and speech processing, such as image recognition, 
segmentation, object localization, multi-channel speech enhancement, speech 
recognition, signal processing such as radar signal denoising, with 
applications as broad as robotics, medicine, autonomous navigation, recommender 
systems, etc.

To address uncertainty, limited data, and to improve in general the robustness 
of ML, new methods are required, with examples including Bayesian approaches, 
sum-product networks, capsule networks, graph-based neural networks, and many 
more. One can observe that, compared with deep convolutional neural networks, 
computations can be fundamentally different, compute requirements can 
substantially increase, and underlying properties like structure in computation 
are often lost. As a result, we observe a strong need for new ML methods to 
address the requirements of emerging workloads deployed in the real-world, such 
as uncertainty, robustness, and limited data. In order to not hinder the 
deployment of such methods on various computing devices, and to address the gap 
in between application and compute hardware, we furthermore need a variety of 
tools. As such, this workshop proposal gears to gather new ideas and concepts 
on 

- ML methods for real-world deployment, 
- methods for compression and related complexity reduction tools, 
- dedicated hardware for emerging ML tasks, 
- and associated tooling like compilers and mappers. 


TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:
- Compression of neural networks for inference deployment, including methods for
  quantization (including binarization), pruning, knowledge distillation, structural 
  efficiency and neural architecture search
- Learning on edge devices, including federated and continuous learning
- Trading among prediction quality (accuracy), efficiency of representation (model
  parameters, data types for arithmetic operations and memory footprint in general), 
  and computational efficiency (complexity of computations)
- Automatic code generation from high-level descriptions, including linear algebra 
  and stencil codes, targeting existing and future instruction set extensions
- Tool driven, optimizations up from ML model level down to instruction level, 
  automatically adapted to the current hardware requirements
- Understanding the difficulties and opportunities using common ML frameworks with
  marginally supported devices
- Exploring new ML models designed to use on designated device hardware
- Future emerging processors and technologies for use in resource-constrained
  environments, e.g. RISC V, embedded FPGAs, or analogue technologies
- Applications and experiences from deployed use cases requiring embedded ML
- New and emerging applications that require ML on resource-constrained hardware
- Energy efficiency of ML models created with distinct optimization techniques
- Security/privacy of embedded ML
- New benchmarks suited to edge and embedded devices


IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: June 23, 2021
Acceptance notification: August 4, 2021
Camera-ready paper: August 18, 2021
Workshop program and proceedings online: September 1, 2021
Workshop date: Sept 13-17, 2021 (depending on conference organization)


PAPER SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Papers must be written in English and formatted according to the Springer LNCS 
guidelines. Author instructions, style files and the copyright form can be 
downloaded here: 
http://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines <http://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines>

Submissions may not exceed 12 pages in PDF format for full papers, respectively 
6 pages for short papers, including figures and references. Submitted papers 
must be original work that has not appeared in and is not under consideration 
for another conference or journal. Work in progress is welcome, but first 
results should be made available as a proof of concept. Submissions only 
consisting of a proposal will be rejected. 


We are negotiating with ECML-PKDD co-organizers on joint proceedings or will 
organize individual proceedings. More details to follow hopefully. In case of
questions, please contact the workshop organizers. In any case, accepted papers 
will be posted on the workshop's website. If the authors of an accepted paper 
do not want to join the workshop's proceedings, these accepted papers do not 
preclude publishing at future conferences and/or journals.


ORGANIZATION

CO-CHAIRS
- Gregor Schiele, University of Duisburg-Essen (gregor.schiele at uni-due.de <mailto:gregor.schiele at uni-due.de>)
- Franz Pernkopf, Graz University of Technology, Austria (pernkopf at tugraz.at <mailto:pernkopf at tugraz.at>)
- Michaela Blott, XILINX Research, Dublin, Ireland (michaela.blott at xilinx.com <mailto:michaela.blott at xilinx.com>)
- Holger Fröning, Heidelberg University, Germany (holger.froening at ziti.uni-heidelberg.de <mailto:holger.froening at ziti.uni-heidelberg.de>) 

TECHNICAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE
TBA


ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
https://www.item-workshop.org <https://www.item-workshop.org/>