Edintelligence | AI & Data Science Society

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Past events

02. Oct 19: Become a Committee Member

We are looking for an enthusiastic new committee to run this year's EdIntelligence! Are you interested in AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning and want to make it more accessible to everyone? Our events are such as: - Cutting Edge Research Talks by Researchers in Academia and the Industry - Hackathons in Machine Learning - Workshops on specific topics in ML - Recruiting events such as our annual AI Career Fair and recruitment talks throughout the year - Socials :) - and much more Sounds like something you want to be involved in? Then come to this meeting and figure out the specifics! Ask questions that you might have and nominate yourself for one of our committee roles from president to business coordinator! Before you come, we ask you to fill out the form in the ticket box (https://bit.ly/2mjwHNX) so that we can get a bit of an overview of who you are!

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25. Feb 19: From PhD to Startup

We are pleased to announce a joint event with Entrepreneurs First and Edintelligence! The guest speaker will be Robert Stojnic, who is the co-founder and CEO of Atlas ML. Atlas ML is a platform that is systematising the world’s deep learning knowledge. Git and GitHub were designed for code, but new software has new ingredients like data and models that require new solutions. Atlas ML is building that community and toolkit to solve the workflow problem for machine learning, and ultimately shape the future of software. Robert started his career as one of the early core developers of Wikipedia, where he was part of a small team that scaled the website to billions of users. After that he completed a PhD in Computational Biology at Cambridge, where his research focused on the applications of machine learning in biology. After his PhD, he co-founded GeneAdviser and has been the CTO of Factmata, a company that built the first commercial hate speech and fake news detection engine together with researchers from UCL. He met his co-founder at Entrepreneur First and developed the idea for Atlas ML there. Robert will share his story and the key points in his career that brought him here. He'll cover questions like how do you settle on an idea, how do you use your academic backgrounds as an advantage, and most importantly, how do you find a co-founder that propels you? Finally, he'll share advice on transitioning from academia to running a startup. Please arrive from 5.15pm to get settled in, and no later than 5.30pm. There will of course be beer and pizza after the event!

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20. Feb 19: EdIntelligence Mid-Sem Social

Welcome to our Mid-Semester Social at EdIntelligence! We will again be at the famous St. Andrews Brewing Company opposite the Bayes Centre. They've got great prices on drinks 🍺🍾 and Mixers 💃🕺. It's recommended to be **on time** as some free finger food will be served alongside. Whether you are in an MSc or PhD in Informatics, international/visiting student or you are a student interested in AI, we invite everyone to our free Mid-Semester social! Get to know others with the same interest, socialise, learn about our society and, most important, have fun! If you have ideas about future projects, come and talk to our committee members!

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27. Jan 19: We Need To Talk About AI series - #1 'AI, Big Data and Me'

NB: Currently sold out - watch this space for more info, and do keep an eye for future events!
First in a series of public discussion, the event will cover issues around data and privacy, focusing on the impact of the Big Data industry on our privacy and society as a whole.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other websites, financial services companies and even home utility suppliers (through smart devices) are capable of collating vast amounts of personal data. But do we, the society, know what data they collect and what it is used for? Personal data is a commodity that can be sold and bought and used for marketing purposes, but also to manipulate election outcomes and restrict access to services like healthcare or housing. It has been shown that content customised using this data can be used effectively to influence people’s personal beliefs and choices.
Do you know how your personal data is used? Do you know what control over your personal information you have? Come and find out!
Panel:

• Lilian Edwards is the Professor of Law, Innovation and Society at Newcastle Law School at Newcastle University. Additionally, she is a member of the Advisory Board of the Open Rights Group and the Foundation for Internet Privacy Research. She is much in demand as an academic speaker on issues of Internet law, intellectual property, and artificial intelligence. She has appeared at the BBC Blue Room roundtable on the future of AI, the New Scientist Live on AI, and several programmes on BBC Radio 4, among others. She is a self-proclaimed “GDPR nerd and total geek.”
• Kami Vaniea is a Lecturer in Cyber Security and Privacy at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, where she specialises on the human factors involved in security and privacy, and the head of the Technology Usability Lab In Privacy and Security (TULIPS). The goal of her work is to make security and privacy technologies more accessible for a wide range of users and to empower them to easily make good security decisions. She has spoken extensively on ethical and privacy issues in data science.
• Laura Cram is a professor of European Politics at the University of Edinburgh and the head of the NRLabs Neuropolitics Research lab. In her research, she examines how insights from psychology, information science and cognitive neuroscience can help to explain political behaviour and policy processes, using experimental approaches like fMRI brain scanning, behavioural games, face-emotion coding, eye-tracking, physiological hormone testing and big data analysis. She is a regular media commentator and her group's work has appeared on the BBC Daily Politics Show and as part of the BBC MindGames documentary, among others.
➡ More info about the series: https://www.ed.ac.uk/informatics/news-events/public/we-need-to-talk-about-ai
➡ More info about this event: https://www.ed.ac.uk/informatics/news-events/public/we-need-to-talk-about-ai/artificial-intelligence-data-me
🥂 Followed by a drinks reception.
📸 NB: This event might be streamed live, recorded and/or photographed.

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28. Nov 18: Mini NeurIPS

The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) is one of the most prestigious machine learning and computational neuroscience conference. In light of this, we present two speakers from the University of Edinburgh's own cohort whose papers have been accepted to NeurIPS.
The presented papers are:
'Moonshine: Distilling with Cheap Convolutions'; Elliot J. Crowley, Gavin Gray, Amos Storkey. https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.02613
'HOUDINI: Lifelong Learning as Program Synthesis'; Lazar Valkov, Dipak Chaudhari, Akash Srivastava, Charles Sutton, Swarat Chaudhuri https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.00218

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27. Nov 18: A.I. in genetics and genomics

Geneticist Lee Stopak, will talk about “The Applications of A.I. for genomics in healthcare”. Lee is a scientist at Ada Health, a company which integrates symptom assessment, bioinformatics and machine learning, to empower its users to make informed decisions about their health. Come along to his talk at the David Hume Tower Lecture Theatre B today, after class and hear about how A.I. is changing the face of healthcare!

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30. Oct 18: Become an AI Entrepreneur

If you’re interested in starting your own tech company and want to learn more about how you can commercialise your research, then join EdIntelligence and Ali from Entrepreneur First! Entrepreneur First is Europe’s leading pre-seed investment programme for founders of deep technology startups. Founded in 2011, EF backs the world’s top technical talent pre-company and pre-idea. EF’s startups have raised over $100m in funding and are breaking ground in artificial intelligence, robotics and infrastructure, among other fields. EF has built over +150 companies that are worth over $1.4bn in total. It’s the best place to find a co-founder, build a deep tech company and get funding from world leading investors.

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27. Oct 18: EdIntelligence Mid-Sem Social

Welcome to our Mid-Semester Social at EdIntelligence! For the first time, we will be at the famous St. Andrews Brewing Company at Potterow. They've got great prices on drinks 🍺🍾 and Mixers 💃🕺. It's recommended to be **on time** as some free finger food will be served alongside. Whether you are in an MSc or PhD in Informatics, international/visiting student or you are a student interested in AI, we invite everyone to our free Mid-Semester social! Get to know others with the same interest, socialise, learn about our society and, most important, have fun! If you have ideas about future projects, come and talk to our committee members!

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24. Oct 18: Mini- EMNLP

The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) is one of the most prestigious Natural Language Processing conference. In light of this, we present six speakers from the University of Edinburgh's own cohort whose papers have been accepted to EMNLP. Come by and enjoy state of the art research for free! Presented Papers:
Privacy-preserving Neural Representations of Text - Maximin Coavoux, Shashi Narayan, Shay B. Cohen https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09408
Don’t Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization - Shashi Narayan, Shay B. Cohen, Mirella Lapata https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.08745
What do character-level models learn about morphology? The case of dependency parsing - Clara Vania, Andreas Grivas, Adam Lopez https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09180
Accelerating Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent for Neural Machine Translation - Nikolay Bogoychev, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Kenneth Heafield, Alham Fikri Aji https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.08859
Learning Unsupervised Word Translations Without Adversaries - Tanmoy Mukherjee, Makoto Yamada, Timothy Hospedales
Data Augmentation via Dependency Tree Morphing for Low-Resource Languages - Gözde Gül Sahin, Mark Steedman

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17. Oct 18: Machine Learning with Codeplay

Codeplay and EdIntelligence have partnered up to bring you an evening full of Machine Learning and Codeplay! You will gain an inside look on the kind of real-world projects that Machine Learning is used for at Codeplay. Afterwards, you can get to know EdIntelligence and Codeplay over food and drinks. The event is free of charge and food and drinks are provided. ------------- This event is for EdIntelligence members only. If you have not done so yet, please sign up at https://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/activities/societies/society/17462/. Completely FREE of charge.

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17. Sep 18: Artificial Intelligence Welcome

Welcome to a new year at the University of Edinburgh! Whether you are a new MSc or PhD in Informatics or you are a recurring student interested in AI we invite everyone to our free AI welcome social! Get to know others with the same interest, socialise, learn about the society and, most important, have fun! We also have a number of committee positions currently open! If you are interested talk to me at the social, have a read through the roles or simply fill out this form: https://goo.gl/forms/lW0c3GLlvKOxN7jD2

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19. Jun 18: Artificial Intelligence Career Fair

Submit your CV, get on-the-spot interviews, participate in talks and workshops, meet leading AI companies such as Facebook and Microsoft, welcome to EdIntelligence's AI Career Fair! https://edintelligence.github.io/fair Do you use Artificial Intelligence techniques in your studies and think about working in the sector? No matter if you are doing a PhD in Physics, studying AI in your Masters or are a curious Bachelor student, we welcome everyone with knowledge in Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, High-Performance Computing, Vision/ Imaging or anything related from all programmes! At our career fair you can: - meet companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Lloyds Banking Group, Five AI and Skyscanner ( for a full list see our website: https://edintelligence.github.io/fair/companies.html) - submit your CV beforehand to have companies contact you and increase your chance to... - score an interview at the day through our on-the-spot interviews. - listen to talks and workshops that are held throughout the day. (You can find a provisional schedule at https://edintelligence.github.io/fair/schedule.html) - simply explore the AI company space from startups to large companies! If you are a student or recent graduate from ANY university and interested in AI get your free tickets as long as we still have some!

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08. Jun 18: Start of Summer Social

Edinburgh summer is here! Join us this Friday to chat about AI, Dissertations and everything in between.

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16. Apr 18: mini-ICLR

We are excited to announce our next event: mini-ICLR. Similarly to mini-NIPS last semester, we have invited faculty members* to present their papers accepted to ICLR 2018.

Papers presented:

- Title: A framework for the quantitative evaluation of disentangled representations Authors: Cian Eastwood*, Chris Williams

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/ckiw/postscript/iclr_final.pdf

- Title: SMASH: One-Shot Model Architecture Search through HyperNetworks Authors: Andrew Brock*, Theo Lim, James Ritchie, Nick Weston

https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.05344

- Title: Synthesizing realistic neural population activity patterns using Generative Adversarial Networks Authors: Manuel Molano, Eugenio Piasini, Arno Onken*, Stefano Panzeri

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.00338

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19. Feb 18: AI Challenge

Clarification: you do not need to be free all week to participate! We specifically designed this to take the whole week so that you DON'T have to spend a few days crammed up somewhere but can measure your own time and work on it whenever you and your teammates are free! Challenge yourself this Creative Learning Week with EdIntelligence! We invite people of all levels to join us for a Kaggle inspired Machine Learning Hackathon. 1st Prize: 1 Amazon Echo Dot per team member 2nd Prize: 1 Amazon £30 gift card per team member 3rd Prize: 1 Amazon £20 gift card per team member Day 1: Pizza, Introductions, Team Building and Dataset Info Days 2-4: Team Hacking Day 5: Judging, Prizes, Food and Fun Make sure to sign up for FREE to secure your spot!

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19. Jan 18: Welcome Back Social

Welcome back to a new term with EdIntelligence!
Come chat about AI, Machine Learning and all things in between this Friday.

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29. Nov 17: Mini NIPS

The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is one of the most prestigous machine learning and computational neuroscience conference. In light of this we present three speakers from the University of Edinburgh's own cohort whose papers have been accepted to NIPS. Catered lunch will be provided afterwards. The presented papers are:

Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimation; Papamakarios, George, Theo Pavlakou, and Iain Murray https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.07057

VEEGAN: Reducing Mode Collapse in GANs using Implicit Variational Learning.; Srivastava, Akash, Lazar Valkov, Chris Russell, Michael Gutmann, and Charles Sutton.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.07761

Emergence of Language with Multi-agent Games: Learning to Communicate with Sequences of Symbols.; Serhii Havrylov and Ivan Titov.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.11192

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16. Nov 17: AlphaGo Screening

EdIntelligence is pleased to present, in association with Google DeepMind, an exclusive, pre-release film screening of Alphago, the documentary movie of DeepMind’s rise to fame and the gripping tale of AI vs. Man. Directed by Greg Kohs with an original score by Academy Award nominee, Hauschka, AlphaGo chronicles a journey from the halls of Oxford, through the backstreets of Bordeaux, past the coding terminals of Google DeepMind in London, and ultimately, to the seven-day tournament in Seoul. As the drama unfolds, more questions emerge: What can artificial intelligence reveal about a 3000-year-old game? What can it teach us about humanity?

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28. Jun 17: Sharon Goldwater: Language learning in humans and machines

Computer processing of speech and language has advanced enormously in the last decade, with many people now using applications such as automatic translation, voice-activated search, and even language-enabled personal assistants. Yet these systems still lag far behind human capabilities, and the success they do have relies on machine learning methods that learn from very large quantities of human-annotated data (for example speech data with transcriptions or text labelled with syntactic parse trees). These resource-intensive methods mean that effective technology is available for only a tiny fraction of the world's 5000 or more languages, mainly those spoken in large rich countries. This talk will argue that in order to solve this problem, we need a better understanding of how humans learn and represent language in our minds, and we need to consider how human-like learning biases can be built into computational systems. Sharon Goldwater will illustrate these ideas using examples from her own research. She will discuss why language is such a difficult problem, say a bit about what we know about human language learning, and then show how her own work has taken inspiration from that to develop better methods for computational language learning.

21. Jun 17: Chris Williams: Linear Dynamical Systems in Intensive Care Units

In this talk Chris Williams will describe the application of a switching linear dynamical model to monitoring the condition of a patient receiving intensive care. The state of health of a patient cannot be observed directly, but different underlying factors are associated with particular patterns of measurements, e.g. in the heart rate, blood pressure and temperature.

14. Jun 17: Charles Sutton: Machine Learning for Data Exploration

One of the first and most fundamental tasks in data mining is what we might call data understanding. Given a dump of data, what’s in it? If modern machine learning methods are effective at finding patterns in data, then they should be effective at summarizing data sets so as to help data analysts develop a high-level understanding of them.

21. Apr 17: Amazon Machine Learning Interview Workshop

At this event, we’ll discuss machine learning roles at Amazon Development Centre Scotland (and Amazon more broadly) and what they entail. We’ll also do practice interview questions for a machine learning scientist interview and discuss what we’re typically looking for and how to do well.

31. Mar 17: Law and Artificial Intelligence Hackathon

03. Feb 17: Edintelligence Talks: Simple techniques (and challenges) to do semi-supervised learning with neural network models with Miguel Jaques

In recent years, the developments in unsupervised learning methods like Variational Autoencoders, Generative Adversarial Networks and Ladder Networks have lead to good results in semi-supervised tasks using neural networks. In this talk will be presented a much simpler class of methods recently proposed for semi-supervised learning (which achieve SOTA in visual tasks). These do not stem directly from any of the unsupervised methods mentioned. Instead they rely on using random inputs perturbations, temporal ensembles and consistency costs to obtain better results much more efficiently.

20. Feb 17: Innovative Machine Learning Week Competition

09. Nov 16: Edintelligence Talks: From flow charts to neurons - Structure and flexibility in dialogue systems

During this talk, Alan Nichol will discuss several approaches for building conversational software, on a spectrum from hand-coded to completely data driven. Interesting work is happening in the middle ground, where systems don’t rely on a rigid flow chart, but can still guide users and perform useful tasks. By making fewer assumptions, these systems show greater flexibility, but an increased need for training data. Additionally, Alan will talk about trade-offs in using end-to-end training of these models and draw connections with memory-augmented neural networks.

05. Oct 16: Edintelligence Talks: PhD topic of Abel Gonzalez-Garcia

Abel is currently a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. He will be discussing about his latest work ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.03738 ) as well as share some insights about his MSc in AI he took here in Edinburgh.

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03. Mar 16: Edintelligence presents: Deep Learning and its applications in research

Edintelligence's kickoff event will be a talk about Deep Learning and how it currently is used within research. To see various aspects of this talk Steve Renals and Iain Murray are going to share their experiences and uses of Deep Learning within their research. Steve is going to speak about his use of Deep Learning for speech processing whereas Iain will talk about Deep Learning and density estimation. Recordings of the talks can be found on Youtube

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12. Apr 16: Edintelligence presents: PhD research in Machine Learning

Edintelligence's second event will be a session of talks of PhD student giving insight into their research as well as giving the opportunity to learn more about doing a PhD within machine learning.

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13. Apr 16: Edintelligence presents: Machine Learning Interview Workshop with Amazon

To prepare our members for stepping into real life we are teaming up with the Amazon Development Centre in Edinburgh and holding an interview workshop targeted on machine learning roles at Amazon.

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21. Mar 16: Coding, project work and mingling session

This is our weekly informal working session. Everyone is welcome to join and either contribute to the project or just hang around and have a chat.

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