This award provides partial support for a cluster of eight workshops centered around automated learning and decision making based on data. The meeting is held at Carnegie Mellon University on June 11-13, 1998. It covers scientific research at the intersection of statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, databases, social sciences and language technologies. The aim of this meeting is to initiate a dialogue between these disciplines. By doing do, it seeks to attain two types of impacts. First, it aims to generate synergy between previously separated fields, to lead to new, cross-disciplinary research collaborations and new, unified research approaches. Second, it attempts to provide guidance to the scientific community by characterizing the state-of-the-art, pointing out possible overlaps, making people aware of research results in other fields, and identifying some of the most promising cross-disciplinary research directions. One of the results of this meeting will be a written report, which will be made available to NSF and the scientific community at large, by posting it on the Web, and by submitting it to a widely accessible magazine or journal.
