History

The idea to co-locate a machine learning conference with a knowledge discovery one is not new. It has been formulated on many occasions, in particular on business meetings of past ML and KDD conferences. However, so far, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) have not been co-located for a variety of reasons. Two important reasons are difference in size and also in focus (acadamic versus industrial).

The European situation is much more favorable in many respects. Both PKDD and ECML have about the same size and a similar focus. Therefore Luc De Raedt thought it would be good to purpose the co-location for 2001. In Spring 2000, he contacted the chairs of PKDD 2000 (Djamel Zighed, Jan Zytkow and Jan Komorowski) and ECML 2000 (Ramon Lopez de Mantaraz, Enric Plaza) and the coordinator of MLnet (Maarten van Someren) via email and phone and formulated a concrete proposal. The proposal to co-locate in Freiburg was conditionally accepted by the PKDD steering committee before ECML 2000 took place in Barcelona. The proposal was then formulated an accepted at the ECML 2000 business meeting. Finally, the acceptance of the proposal was confirmed at the PKDD 2000 business meeting.