The Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS) took place this Thursday 18th July. Researchers, PhD students, Scientists and professionals of industry from all continents shared their knowledge in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The event included lectures, practical activities and networking.
For the 9th consecutive year, the LxMLS was a success and brought together more than 180 participants, who were selected among over 680 candidates. “About 27 volunteers participated in this year’s edition. Most of them had already participated in previous LxMLS editions”, says Mário Figueiredo, Técnico professor and researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações(IT). “Most of the participants are MSc and PhD students, but more than 30 participants come from companies”, he highlights. The event brings together participants from all continents, however there is a wider range of German participants. “We also had participants from distant countries, such as Ethiopia, South Africa and Australia”, shares the researcher at IT.
André Martins( Head of Research at Unbabel), Bhiksha Raj (professor at Carnegie Mellon University), Slav Petrov (research director at Google) and Xavier Carreras (research scientist at dMetrics) participated in the 9th edition of LxMLS.
One of the highlights of the event is the Demoday, which took place last Monday, July 15th, and through which participants had the opportunity to interact with companies and research units. Besides expanding the contact networks, Demo Day is a great opportunity to learn more about the various types of solutions and products in the area of AI and Machine Learning. Farfetch, Jungle.ai, Feedzai and Outsystems are some companies that exhibited their products.
Stefan Riezler, professor at the University of Heidelberg, captured the audience’s attention in the last day of the event, June 18th. “The commercial Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems try to avoid risk, by showing only the most probable translation”, said professor Stefan Riezler.
According to professor Mário Figueiredo “the growing interest about artificial intelligence and machine learning” is the reason why this event has so many participants, and also “because this is an event of great international prestige”, he points out.
The 9th edition of LxMLS was jointly organised by Técnico, Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento (INESC-ID), Unbabel, Priberam Labs and Feedzai. “About 20 students received funded scholarships. Google provided 10 scholarships”, says professor Mário Figueiredo, stressing that “this is a way of bringing LxMLS many people who would be deprived from participating without this support”.
