ELLIS holds its first-ever PhD and Postdoc Summit
05 August 2021 News
Have you ever wondered what role causality may play in addressing some of the core problems in machine learning, how industries use machine learning to optimize and scale business processes or what inspired the pioneers of the European machine learning community to do what they do today? These are some of the questions that the first cohort of ELLIS PhDs and Postdocs discussed with leading scientists at the first ELLIS PhD and Postdoc Summit in July
On July 12th and 13th, the first cohort of the ELLIS PhD and Postdoc Program kicked off its journey at the ELLIS PhD and Postdoc Summit. More than 80 students from across Europe attended the two-day virtual event, participating in reading groups, keynotes, and roundtable discussions on subjects ranging from geometric deep learning to language models and natural intelligence. The Summit had over 100 attendees on both days, and was closed by ELLIS President Bernhard Schölkopf, who presented on Symbolic, Statistical and Causal Representations as a part of the AIDA AI Excellence Lecture Series.
Since 2020, ELLIS has admitted 120 excellent young researchers as a part of its newly established PhD and Postdoc Program, which aims to accelerate innovation and development in the field of machine learning by building a strong and competitive European AI ecosystem dedicated to excellent and free basic research. During their time in the program, these PhD students and postdocs will be connected to leading researchers and conduct cutting-edge, curiosity-driven research in various subfields within machine learning and AI. More than 100 leading scientists, representing 67 different leading European institutions and companies across 13 countries are currently serving as advisors to these students.
Among those invited as keynote speakers for the program’s inaugural event were some of Europe’s leading academics and key industry players: Danica Kragic (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Mackenzie Mathis (EPFL), Michael Bronstein (Imperial College London), Oriol Vinyals (Google DeepMind), Bernhard Schölkopf (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems), Babak Ehteshami Bejnordi (Qualcomm AI), and Melih Kandemir (Bosch) hosted keynote lectures over the two days.
Testimonials from summit attendees:
“Amazing experience overall, world class speakers and a fantastic variety of topics. I loved the opportunity to interact with famous researchers in so many areas!”
“The summit was a unique opportunity to dive into a broad set of ML topics and gather ideas also from fields that are not strictly related to my PhD topic.”
“The "line up" of presenters and panelists was very good! Some of the presentations have already led to new ideas and experiments for projects I am currently working on.”
