6 September 2022,
by Katarina Alexander, Edinburgh Napier University
This year’s IRDTA Deep Learn Summer School took place in Gran Canaria from July 25th – 29th. The summer school was both in-person and online, with the majority of the nearly 500 participants coming to the island. The three keynote speakers – Wahid Bhimji, Joachim M. Buhmann and Kate Saenko, were brilliant and really brought to light their areas of expertise. Subjects covered by the summer school included Explainable AI, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, AI in the Natural Sciences, Deep Learning Design and more.
Speakers gave short four-and-a-half-hour-long course on their subject split into three lectures across two days, with three speakers in parallel so we could attend courses that were connected to our own research. The lectures were also recorded, in case of overlap and lecture materials available to download, something I have taken advantage of. For many of the participants I met this was the first conference we were able to attend in person, and it was great to meet with researchers from across the globe. The speakers were excellent and managed to fit a lot of information into such a relatively short time. One of the benefits of the hybrid delivery as a person with a disability was being able to attend from my hotel room on a day I felt unable to attend in person, I think this approach works well from an accessibility stand-point.
Overall, the IRDTA schools are fantastic, and I would definitely encourage anyone to attend if you have an interest in any form of deep learning! Details of their Autumn 2022 and Winter 2023 schools are available at https://irdta.eu/#active-events.