Silver 2012 - International Workshop on The Silver Lining ? learning from unexpected results

This workshop is dedicated to the proposition that insight often begins with unexpected results. Unexpected results chart the boundaries of our knowledge: they identify errors, reveal false assumptions, and force us to dig deeper. Unfortunately, this process is rarely mentioned in the machine learning and data mining discourse. Indeed, there exists a publication bias that favors (incremental) successes over novel discoveries of why some ideas, while intuitive and plausible, do not work. With this workshop, we want to give a voice to unexpected results that deserve wider dissemination: thoroughly conducted studies that follow a plausible idea that did not achieve the aspired results, but instead taught us novel lessons; studies showing that well-known (successful) methods will not work under certain conditions, highlighting remaining weaknesses and new avenues of research; and stories that focus on how a successful method was discovered after one or several failed attempts.