Mário Figueiredo, a professor at Instituto Superior Técnico involved in organising the Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS), talks to a student who works for a company that develops video referees and cameras to automatically detect phenomena such as offside. “Everything has been going well – [at LxMLS] there are classes, laboratories, coffee breaks and talks dedicated to more specific research areas”, said the professor.
The LxMLS 2024 edition took place from 11 to 17 July, and it offered students from all over the world the chance to engage with machine learning, attend theoretical presentations, and take part in practical programming activities. The programme featured discussions covering a wide range of topics, from the fundamentals of machine learning to natural language processing.
For Justus Westerhoff, a German student, LxMLS marked his first experience in Portugal. He appreciated the opportunity to “review the fundamentals of machine learning” and “enjoyed meeting people from Portugal and other parts of the world – the United States, Scandinavia, Estonia… I don’t know I’d have another chance to meet so many people on consecutive days”, shared the student.
Sonal Sannigrahi, a PhD student in natural language processing at Técnico since January, finds this event particularly important. “Several speakers work in the same field as I do, so I was very excited to be able to talk to them and participate in discussions”, shares the student from India. “This event is a good way to meet other people in the research community and to learn more about areas I didn’t know about – it was definitely very useful”, she said. As for the experience of studying at Técnico, Sonal says that “working in cutting-edge technology and being able to interact with so many different people has been great”.
LxMLS was organised by the Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores – Investigação e Desenvolvimento (INESC-ID), a research unit affiliated with Técnico, the Lisbon ELLIS Unit for Learning and Intelligent Systems, hosted at Técnico, Unbabel, a Técnico spin-off, Zendesk and IBM Research.
