General course objectives
This course revolves around the latest developments in machine
learning research presented at the virtual NeurIPS conference. The
course takes place on the same days as the NeurIPS conference, and
is structured as a collection of multiple concentrated reading
groups running in parallel. Students will be split into smaller
groups (approx. 3-6 students per group) according to topics of
interest. Each group will then read and discuss a collection of
papers within the topic of interest.
A side-goal goal of this course is to increase the scientific
interaction for PhD students due to not being able to physically
attend the NeurIPS conference. The course will be announced as part
of the ELLIS Copenhagen Unit to engage with students from both KU
and ITU, adding to the interactive and networking potential of the
course.
Learning objectives
A student who has met the objectives of the course will be able to:
- Read and discuss with peers a NeurIPS 2020 machine learning
paper
- Explain the scientific content of a machine learning content to
other machine learning researchers and PhD students
- Write an easily accessible explanation of a NeurIPS 2020 paper,
e.g. in the form of a blog.
- Contrast paper and discussions with publically available peer
reviews.
- Discuss strengths, weaknesses to NeurIPS papers.
- Explain key points of NeurIPS 2020 tutorials to peers.
- Reflect upon possible impacts of NeurIPS 2020 papers
- Give a short oral presentation of a paper to peers.
Content
Each group will collectively read and discuss at least 5 papers
from the main conference and associated workshops. This should also
include the paper reviews, which are publicly available for the
main conference papers. An expected outcome of the discussions is
that the groups can engage in qualified discussions with the
authors during the conference. The groups will prepare a 5-minute
pitch of their favorite paper to be presented to the remaining
groups on Friday December 11.
Each student will individually prepare a “blog post style” report
of one particularly interesting paper from the conference or a
workshop. The report should both explain the scientific content of
the paper and discuss its strengths, weaknesses and potential
community response.
Course schedule:
Monday Dec. 7, 2020
Full day of tutorials.
NeurIPS provides a selection of virtual tutorials (lectures), which
will be followed and discussed within each group.
Tuesday Dec. 8, 2020
Read and discuss papers within each group.
Wednesday Dec. 9, 2020
Read and discuss papers within each group.
Thursday Dec. 10, 2020
Read and discuss papers within each group.
Friday Dec. 11, 2020
From 10:00 to 12:00 all groups gather (virtually). Each group will
present the key ideas, tricks, and insights of their favorite paper
so far to the other groups, followed by discussions in plenum.
The remainder of the day is devoted to reading and discussing
workshop papers within the group.
CourseLiterature
https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2020
Last updated
10. december, 2020
