On Monday August 22, the first posters session on Machine Learning was held in the socle of Beauchef 851 Building at Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (FCFM). The activity was a new milestone in the consolidation of the Grupo de Aprendizaje de Máquinas, Inferencia y Señales (Games) at Universidad de Chile Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM).
“Students presented their projects for the course MA5203 Probabilistic Machine Learning. There were 31 students from a number of departments: Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Geology,” commented CMM researcher Felipe Tobar, who organized the event. Ongoing applications at CMM, the own Tobar’s research on Machine Learning and Signal Processing, and the personal interests of the students inspired the projects. These covered topics such as statistical signal processing, astronomy, finance, robotics, automatic music generation, bioengineering and meteorology, among others.
“This is a new course at FCFM both in content and format, I don’t think there are many other courses where the exam is in the form of a poster presentation. It was also the first time the course was given, designing and teaching it was a learning experience for me personally, where the support of my teaching assistants was also of great help. Overall, we are very pleased with the way the presentation went: during the three hours of the event we had a number of attendants including students, researchers, and lecturers from FCFM (mainly from CMM and the Mathematical Engineering Department) and even some participants external to the University”, explained the researcher.
The activity complemented another initiative carried on by Games: Machine Learning talks at CMM.
“We invite researchers working on either applied or fundamental aspects of Machine Learning to give an introductory overview of their research to then present their current work”, explained Tobar. The group has organized 13 talks since January and the YouTube video channel has more than 1,300 views.
Next months, Games will continue these talks and is going to start the Machine Learning reading group in September. “It will be open to all ML enthusiasts, researchers, practitioners, and students can take it as a formal course if they wish,” explained Tobar. “In this reading group, the members will present a paper in each weekly session which will be discussed by all attendants; these papers can be a tutorial treatment of a topic within ML, a presentation of the state-of-the-art methods in ML or anything between.”
