Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: European Conference, ECML PKDD 2009, Bled, Slovenia, September 7-11, 2009, Proceedings, Part II

The year 2008 was the first year that the previously separate European Conferences on Machine Learning (ECML) and the Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD) were merged into a unified event. This is a natural evolution after eight consecutive years of their being collocated after the first joint conference in Freiburg in 2001. The European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) traces its origins to 1986, when the first European Working Session on Learning was held in Orsay, France followed by the second European Working Session on Learning held in Bled, the location of this year’s ECML PKDD 2009 conference. The European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD) was first held in 1997 in Trondheim, Norway. Over the years, the ECML/PKDD series has evolved into one of the largest and most selective international conferences in machine learning and data mining, the only one that provides a common forum for the two closely related fields. In 2009, ECML PKDD conference was held during September 7–11 in Bled, Slovenia. The conference used a hierarchical reviewing process. We nominated 26 Area Chairs, each of them responsible for one sub-field or several closely related research topics. Suitable areas were selected on the basis of the submission statistics for ECML PKDD 2008 and from last year’s International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2008) and International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2008) to ensure a proper load balance among the Area Chairs. A joint Program Committee (PC …