Pattern Recognition with Support Vector Machines: First International Workshop, SVM 2002, Niagara Falls, Canada, August 10, 2002. Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2388, Band 2388)

With their introduction in 1995, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) marked the beginningofanewerainthelearningfromexamplesparadigm.Rootedinthe Statistical Learning Theory developed by Vladimir Vapnik at AT&T, SVMs quickly gained attention from the pattern recognition community due to a n- beroftheoreticalandcomputationalmerits.Theseinclude,forexample,the simple geometrical interpretation of the margin, uniqueness of the solution, s- tistical robustness of the loss function, modularity of the kernel function, and over?t control through the choice of a single regularization parameter. Like all really good and far reaching ideas, SVMs raised a number of - terestingproblemsforboththeoreticiansandpractitioners.Newapproachesto Statistical Learning Theory are under development and new and more e?cient methods for computing SVM with a large number of examples are being studied. Being interested in the development of trainable systems ourselves, we decided to organize an international workshop as a satellite event of the 16th Inter- tional Conference on Pattern Recognition emphasizing the practical impact and relevance of SVMs for pattern recognition. By March 2002, a total of 57 full papers had been submitted from 21 co- tries.Toensurethehighqualityofworkshopandproceedings,theprogramc- mitteeselectedandaccepted30ofthemafterathoroughreviewprocess.Ofthese papers16werepresentedin4oralsessionsand14inapostersession.Thepapers span a variety of topics in pattern recognition with SVMs from computational theoriestotheirimplementations.Inadditiontotheseexcellentpresentations, there were two invited papers by Sayan Mukherjee, MIT and Yoshua Bengio, University of Montreal.