Welcome to the first issue of the Journal of Machine Learning Video Abstracts. The first issue is dedicated to presenting the spotlight presentations of the 2010 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference held in Vancouver, Canada, on December 7-9. The presentations were lengthened to four minutes for this year's conference with an allowance of 4 slides for each paper. The VideoLectures.NET team were on site to record the presentations and they post-processed the recordings to incorporate the slides into the video. The VideoLectures.NET portal provides the infrastructure for the journal pages. All of the abstracts have been reviewed for quality of recording and appropriateness of presentation, while the papers they describe were accepted to the highly prestigious and competitive NIPS event. At the conference itself there was also a poster session at which researchers could discuss the results with the authors and some of the presentations refer to these sessions at the end of their presentations. We are very conscious of the enormous effort that the authors have put into these presentations in order to communicate the results and main contributions of their papers to the community. We are therefore delighted to have been able to record them and make them available to a wider audience as a special issue of the Journal of Machine Learning Video Abstracts.

John Shawe-Taylor and Richard Zemel

Editors of the Special Issue and Programme Chairs of the 2010 NIPS Conference