Dear colleagues,

(Let me start by explaining that I am writing in English as some of you might not be fluent in Portuguese.)

This is a kick-off message for a new series of seminars to be held at IST around the topic of "Machine Learning." The goal of these seminars is to create a new platform for discussion involving different research groups (inside and outside IST) with a common interest in this field. We are aiming a broad list of participants interested in areas such as (but not limited to): statistical learning theory, signal processing, pattern recognition, computer vision, natural language processing, computational biology, neural networks, control systems, reinforcement learning, and anything related (even if vaguely) with machine learning.

The meetings are planned to be *quite informal*. Each session will have a volunteered presenter who will freely choose the topic of his/her presentation. For example, he/she can speak about his/her own research, describe some challenging problem, survey a particular line of research, practice a conference talk, etc etc. The whole meeting will last one hour, with a significant time allocated for questions and discussion. To keep the whole thing as dynamic as possible, we aim for periodic meetings every other week; sometimes (but not as a rule) the presenter may be an invited speaker.

The seminars will be free and open to everyone who wants to attend (no inscription required). To further encourage participation, the meetings will be at lunch time and delicious (free!) food will be provided to all attendants.

Please let me know ASAP if you would like to attend, volunteer to present, or know more about these seminars. Future messages will be sent to a mailing list specifically created for this effect. You can either reply me at afm@cs.cmu.edu or directly subscribe to the mailing list, by sending email to seminarios-mlpb-request@freelists.org with 'subscribe'
in the Subject field OR by visiting the list page at http://www.freelists.org/list/seminarios-mlpb. Further discussion concerning the organization of the seminars will be carried out on the mailing list. Any suggestion will be more than welcome!

Please feel free to forward this message to anyone or any research group, inside and outside IST, that could be interested in attending these seminars. Your help in publicizing the seminars will be greatly appreciated!

Remark: these seminars are sponsored by Priberam (http://www.priberam.pt), an IST spin-off company that applies machine learning techniques to natural language processing.

Looking forward for the seminars!