Welcome to the workshop

Since their introduction in 1995, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) marked the beginning of a new era in the learning from examples paradigm. Rooted in the Statistical Learning Theory developed by Vladimir Vapnik at AT&T, SVMs gained quickly attention from the pattern recognition community due to a number of theoretical and computational merits. These include, for example, the simple geometrical interpretation of the margin, uniqueness of the solution, statistical robustness of the loss function, modularity of the kernel function, and overfit control through the choice of a single regularization parameter. Like all really good and far reaching ideas, SVMs raised a number of interesting problems for both theoreticians and practitioners. New approaches to Statistical Learning Theory are under development and new and more efficient methods for computing SVM with large number of examples are studied. Being interested in the development of trainable systems ourselves, we decided to organize an international workshop as a satellite event of the 16th International 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 countries. To ensure the high quality of workshop and proceedings, the program committee selected and accepted 30 of them after a thorough review process. Of these papers 16 will be presented in 4 oral sessions and 14 in a poster session. The papers span a variety of topics in pattern recognition with SVMs from computational theories to their implementations. In addition to these excellent presentations, there will be two invited papers by Sayan Mukherjee at MIT and Yoshua Bengio at University of Montreal. SVM2002 is being organized by the Center for Artificial Vision Research at Korea University and by the Department of Computer and Information Science at University of Genova. We wish to thank all the members of the Program Committee and the additional reviewers who each did their job in reviewing papers in a very short time. We are also grateful to Sang-Woong Lee for developing and maintaining the wonderful web-based paper submission/review system. Finally we thank our sponsors, the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT, the Brain Science Research Center at KAIST, the Statistical Research Center for Complex Systems at Seoul National University and the WatchVision, Inc. for their support. On behalf of the program committee, we would like to welcome you to SVM2002, whether you come as a presenter or an attendee. There will be ample time for discussion inside and outside the workshop hall and plenty of opportunity to make new acquaintances. Last but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to all the contributors, reviewers, program committee members, and sponsors, without whom the workshop would have not been possible. May 2002 Seong-Whan Lee and Alessandro Verri