Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17

The annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference is the flagshipmeeting on neural computation. It draws a diverse group of attendees -- physicists, neuroscientists,mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists. The presentations are interdisciplinary,with contributions in algorithms, learning theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, brain imaging,vision, speech and signal processing, reinforcement learning and control, emerging technologies, andapplications. Only twenty-five percent of the papers submitted are accepted for presentation atNIPS, so the quality is exceptionally high. This volume contains the papers presented at theDecember, 2004 conference, held in Vancouver.