Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases

The year 2008 was the ?rst year that the previously separate European C- ferences on Machine Learning (ECML) and the Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD) were merged into a u- ?ed event. This is a natural evolution after eight consecutive years of their being collocated after the ?rst joint conference in Freiburg in 2001. The European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) traces its origins to 1986, when the ?rst European Working Session on Learning was held in Orsay, France followed by the second European Working Session on Learning held in Bled, the loca- on of this year's ECML PKDD 2009 conference. The European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD) was ?rst held in 1997 in Trondheim, Norway. Over the years, the ECML/PKDD series hasevolvedintooneofthelargestandmostselectiveinternationalconferencesin machine learning and data mining, the only one that provides a common forum for the two closely related ?elds. In 2009, ECML PKDD conference was held during September 7-11 in Bled, Slovenia. The conference used a hierarchicalreviewing process. We nominated 26 Area Chairs, each of them responsible for one sub-?eld or several closely related re- arch topics. Suitable areas were selected on the basis of the submission statistics for ECML PKDD 2008 and from last year's International Conference on Mac- neLearning(ICML2008)andInternationalConferenceonKnowledgeDiscovery and Data Mining (KDD 2008) to ensure a proper load balance among the Area Chairs. A joint ProgramCommittee (PC) wasnominated consisting of some300 renownedresearchers,mostlyproposedbytheAreaChairs.