Science in Summer time

May 9, 2008

If everything goes as planned this year I am attending two Summer Schools.

The first one, the International Computer Vision Summer School 2008 , will be hosted in Sicily, Italy in 14-19 July. The program seems to be quite good and it will cover topics like object detection, tracking or 3D reconstruction, among others. There’s also a reading group on “how to conduct a literature review and discover the context of an idea”. The challenge is to see how far back in the past one can track the origins of a scientific idea. For example, the AdaBoost is a well known machine learning meta-algorithm, in which a sequence of classifiers is progressively trained focusing on the instances misclassified by previous classifiers. The set of classifiers is then combined by a weighted average. It was introduced by Freund and Schapire in 1996. This is easy to track, the question however is: can you find the same or similar core idea, or intution, somewhere else back in the past? Possibly from a different domain?
It’s gonna be fun!

The second one is the 10th Machine Learning Summer School , 1-15 September, Ile de Re, France. The program is also quite nice, but I still don’t have the confirmation I can attend it.
I would be specially interested in Rich Sutton ’s lecture on *“Reinforcement Learning and Knowledge Representation” *although hearing about Active Learning, Bayesian Learning, Clustering, Kernel Methods, etc. also sounds quite appealing.

Looking forward to science in summer time!