The papers which interested me most at ICML and COLT 2010 were:

The program chairs for ICML did a wide-ranging survey over participants. The results seem to suggest that participants generally agree with the current ICML process. I expect there is some amount of anchoring effect going on where participants have an apparent preference for the known status quo, although it’s difficult to judge the degree of that. Some survey results which aren’t of that sort are:

7.7% of reviewers say author feedback changed their mind. It would be interesting to know for which fraction of accepted papers reviewers had their mind changed, but that isn’t there. 85.4% of authors don’t know if the reviewers read their response, believe they read and ignored it, or believe they didn’t read it. Authors clearly don’t feel like they are communicating with reviewers. 58.6% support growing the conference with the largest fraction suggesting poster-only papers. Other conferences attended by the ICML community in order are NIPS, ECML/PKDD, AAAI, IJCAI, AIStats, UAI, KDD, ICDM, COLT, SIGIR, ECAI, EMNLP, CoNLL. This is pretty different from the standard colocation list for ICML. Many possibilities are precluded by scheduling, but AAAI, IJCAI, UAI, KDD, COLT, SIGIR are all serious possibilities some of which haven’t been used much in the past.

My experience with Mark‘s new paper discussion site is generally positive—having comments emailed to interested parties really helps the discussion. There are a few comments that authors haven’t responded to, so if you are an author you might want to sign up to receive comments.

In addition, I was the workshop chair for ICML&COLT this year. My overall impression was that things went reasonably well, with the exception of internet connectivity at Dan Panorama which was a minidisaster courtesy of a broken per-machine authentication system. One of the things I’m particularly happy about was the Learning to Rank Challenge workshop. I think it would be great if ICML can continue to attract new challenge workshops in the future. If anyone else has comments about the workshops, I’d love to hear them.