April 15, 2014
Call for participation
NCSR “Demokritos”, Athens, Greece
July 3-30, 2014, Athens, Greece
Homepage: http://irss.iit.demokritos.gr/
New deadline for applications (for participation): February 28, 2014
International Research-Centered Summer School in “Cognitive Systems and Interactive Robotics, Data and Content Analysis”
3-30 July 2014, at NCSR “Demokritos”, Athens, Greece
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 (see about IRSS-2013 here), 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 has significant expertise in all these subject areas, and can support the projects with computational tools, robots, 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 IRSS13. The relevant information will be announce 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 invited speakers, the lunch and coffee breaks for the participants, as well as cultural and social events.
We are in process of securing sponsorships, so that we can give a number of scholarships that will cover the registration fess, and/or accommodation costs of selected participants.
To apply, kindly send your CV, including contact details of two referees, to irss@iit.demokritos.gr, by 28 February 2014.
For more information visit the School’s webpage: http://irss.iit.demokritos.gr/
Looking forward to welcoming you in Athens!
Visit the IRSS 2014 summer school websitehttp://irss.iit.demokritos.gr/