3-30 July 2014, at NCSR “Demokritos”, Athens, Greece
Deadline for applications (for participation): March 7, 2014
The Summer School is organized by the Software & Knowledge Engineering Lab (SKEL) at the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications of NCSR “Demokritos” (http://www.iit.demokritos.gr/), and the Interactive Robots and Media Lab ((http://www.irmllab.com). This is the fifth summer school in a sequence initiated by the Interactive Robots and Media Lab. For the second time in a row, it will take place in Greece at NCSR “Demokritos” (located in Athens, Greece) between July 3 and July 30, 2014.
The Summer School has an innovative format: it is Research-Centered, with a strong focus on mini-projects of month-long duration, carried out by multiple teams of 3-4 students including a mix of academic levels (Postdoc, PhD, undergraduates). Selected seminars and lectures will also take place; but not exceeding two hours per day.
The outcome of the summer school includes both numerous scientific publications, as well as longer-term collaborations. For example, the scientific output from the last summer schools has already led to a number of papers in leading conferences and journals with several more underway.
This year’s topic and research project areas focus on the cognitive systems or the data analysis viewpoint, as pertaining to:
- Human Robot Interaction
- Dialogue Systems
- Computer Vision
- Information Visualisation
- Data and content analytics – data mining
- Social Media Analysis
- Semantic technologies and the Web of data
- User Modelling and Recommendation systems
- Intelligent Agents and Multi-agent Systems
- Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics
- Autonomous Creative Systems
- Event processing
More specifically, an initial plan includes projects on:
- Social Media analysis,
- Big Data analytics,
- Argument extraction and sentiment analysis,
- Robot Navigation and Vision,
- Analysis of biological/biomedical data
- Computational tools supporting creativity,
- Constrained optimization,
- Complex event recognition
These projects will be supported by a number of international and national research projects. They will be supervised by world leading researchers from several universities and research centers.
Furthermore, NCSR’D’ has significant expertise in all these subject areas, and can support the projects with computational tools, robotic equipment, as well as with the appropriate personnel who will co-supervise these projects. In terms of computational resources, there is access to high-performance computation, as well as multiple workstations. There is also close contact with numerous world-class institutions and companies in the field, and numerous distinguished invited lecturers and supervisors will be joining us for the summer school, as it was the case in IRSS-2013 (http://irss.iit.demokritos.gr/content/invited-speakers).
The relevant information will be announced at the IRSS site in the coming weeks.
Furthermore, the school will not be all work and no fun! A few exciting cultural events and excursions are planned to take place during the weekends so that the participants can relax and visit some of the best tourist attractions in Greece.
Applying for the Summer School
We are welcoming applications at multiple levels (final-year B.Sc, M.Sc., PhD, and postdoc levels). Necessary prerequisites include any one, and ideally a mixture of the skills below:
- Programming in C++, Java or Matlab
- Pattern Recognition, Data Mining, Machine Vision, or Natural Language Processing
- Psychological/Interaction experimental design and data analysis
- Information Visualization
- Social Media Analysis
- Sentiment analysis
- Optimization
But most importantly, the creative imagination and the strong motivation to produce innovative results in any of the main theme areas.
The registration fee for the school is 400€, which will be used to cover part of the school’s expenses, such as the expenses of the invited speakers, the lunch and coffee breaks for the participants, as well as cultural and social events.
We are in the process of securing sponsorships, so that we can give a number of scholarships that will cover the registrations fees, and/or the accommodation costs of selected participants.
To apply, kindly send your CV, including emails of two referees, to irss@iit.demokritos.gr, by 7 March 2014.
For more information visit the School’s webpage: http://irss.iit.demokritos.gr/