A series of annual research workshops on Intelligent Information Systems, centered on machine learning for speech, language and vision technologies, are being organized at Johns Hopkins University to bring together diverse ?dream teams? of leading professionals, graduate students, and undergraduates, in a truly cooperative, intensive, and substantive effort to advance the state of the science. The primary goals of the proposed workshop series are to develop machine learning principles applicable to a broad spectrum of intelligent systems, to attract students to the field and to prepare them for research by putting them to work on exciting problems alongside senior researchers in a highly collaborative environment. Creation of research infrastructure and lasting collaborations are secondary goals. An open call for workshop project proposals is being issued each year to researchers in the worldwide IIS community. Received proposals are competitively evaluated and cooperatively refined at interactive peer review meetings, where project proponents, government representatives, and experts from related fields meet to assess their scientific merit, viability and potential impact. The graduate students attending the workshop are familiar with the field and are selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance. The undergraduates are entering seniors who are new to the field and who have shown outstanding academic promise; they are selected through a national search. The participation of undergraduates in these research programs encourages talented young scholars to pursue graduate studies in IIS. By the end of this 3-year workshop series (beginning 2010), more than a hundred individuals will have conducted intensive collaborative research: about 30 academic and industry researchers, 20 researchers from government and national laboratories, 30 graduate students, and 20 undergraduates. Additional benefits of the workshops will be the collection or creation, and dissemination of valuable tools and data for IIS research, the establishment of fruitful and long-lasting collaborations, and the cross-fertilization of ideas among the participants.
