“I’m amazed at the quality of the papers presented. The project teams’ line of thinking and breakthrough concepts are refreshing,” exclaimed a leading artificial intelligence (AI) scientist at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Sydney.
International Convention Centre Sydney was a massive hive of activities as 3,000 of the world’s top researchers, developers and students in AI gathered for ICML. The participants moved rapidly from one workshop to another and took great interest in the exhibition booths of top deep learning proponents such as NVIDIA, Google and Facebook.
With so many bright young talents. the event proved to be a good fishing ground for vendors as they held recruitment interviews at their booths, as well as posted openings on the board.
Besides the conference and exhibition, diamond sponsor NVIDIA organised a NVAIL meetup and networking session on August 7. NVIDIA gave 15 of its new Volta-based Tesla V100s to researchers, a reprise of its surprise at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Honolulu a couple of weeks ago.
Recipients include representatives from Carnegie Mellon University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), IDSIA – the Swiss AI Lab, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MPI Tübingen, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, National Taiwan University, Oxford University, Peking University, Stanford University, Tsinghua University, the University of California Berkeley, the University of Tokyo, the University of Toronto and the University of Washington.
NVIDIA also launched the NVIDIA Pioneering Research Awards, a programme to celebrate the acceptance of NVAIL partners’ research papers at conferences such as ICML.
Award recipients received a plaque featuring the first page of their papers. Inaugural winners include:
- Carnegie Mellon University: Improved Variational Autoencoders for Text Modeling using Dilated Convolutions
- IDSIA/Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull’Intelligenza Artificiale: Recurrent Highway Networks
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Coresets for Vector Summarization with Applications to Network Graphs
- Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms: A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks
- Tsinghua University: Identify the Nash Equilibrium in Static Games with Random Payoffs
- University of California, Berkeley: Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks
- University of Tokyo: Asymmetric Tri-training for unsupervised domain adoptation
- University of Toronto: Deep Spectral Clustering Learning
“I am very excited and honoured to receive this award,” said Professor Tatsuya Harada of the University of Tokyo.
“It’s really great to see that NVIDIA is really so involved in research, that they invite us out here and that they look at the kind of papers we are writing and recognise that,” said Sergey Levine, Assistant Professor of University of California, Berkeley.
The night ended with a lucky draw with the NVIDIA Titan XP as the top prize.
Cheng Zhang, Post Doctorate Associate of Disney Research in Pittsburgh was the winner.
“I’m moving from small data to big data,” she declared.
Entelechy Asia 