This volume contains the papers presented at the eighteenth annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), held in British Columbia, Canada from December 13 through 16, 2004. NIPS is a unique, interdisciplinary, conference that brings together researchers from a wide variety of fields including computer science, neuroscience, physics, cognitive science, psychology, engineering and mathematics. It is sometimes difficult to define what all these disparate researchers have in common, yet having attended many NIPS meetings ourselves, we have no doubt that NIPS researchers are indeed a well defined scientific community — sharing a passion for a common set of questions and an appreciation for methods to address these questions. Rather than try to define these questions and methods explicitly, we invite the reader to “learn from examples” and browse the exciting papers collected in this volume.

@proceedings{nips-2005,
  editor = {Saul, Lawrence and Weiss, Yair and Bottou, L\'{e}on},
  title = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17},
  publisher = {MIT Press},
  year = {2005},
  url = {http://leon.bottou.org/papers/nips-2005},
}