24 August 2022,
by Dorian Gouzou, Heriot-Watt University
Hi, I’m Dorian, a PhD student at Heriot-Watt University studying machine learning applied to medical imaging. I am (already) finishing my second year and realised that I spent my PhD learning about the different imaging modality I work with, and experimenting basic machine learning on it, which is obviously good because it is my PhD topic, but I haven’t done any deep learning at all, and haven’t kept up with the state of the art of what was my undergrad and master topic.
Thanks to SICSA which granted me funding to go to Prague, I was able to attend the Vision Summer School 3 (VS3) organised by the Czech Technical University, which was the best experience of my PhD so far.
After two flights and one hotel reservations being cancelled, and the first day of the event missed (which started to look like the worst experience of my PhD), I arrived in Prague and to the VS3 on Tuesday. I (re-)learned about deep learning and the best practices on that day, before heading to a climbing session. Because VS3 is a particular summer school where, after the 2 lessons of the day, the speakers are not finished and present us a sport they practice.
Thus, after a day dedicated to robustness, uncertainty and multi-modal learning, I practiced orienteering, then went to learn table tennis after being presented the state-of-the-art in 3D learning and concluded the sports session with badminton after learning about tracking.
The Saturday was dedicated to workshops presented by some of the speakers, who showed us their last research.
Thanks to this summer school, I was able to update my deep learning knowledge, learn about a lot of state-of-the-art applications and meet a lot of PhD students and academics.