The Summer School has an innovative format: it is Research-Centered, with a strong focus on mini-projects of month-long duration, carried out by multiple teams of 3-4 students including a mix of academic levels (Postdoc, PhD, undergraduates). Selected seminars and lectures will also take place; but not exceeding two hours per day. Exciting cultural events and excursions will take place during the weekends. The outcome of the summer school includes both numerous scientific publications, as well as longer-term collaborations.
This year’s topic and research project areas, focus on the cognitive systems viewpoint, as pertaining to:
- Human Robot Interaction and Whole-body HCI
- Dialogue Systems and Computer Vision
- Information Visualisation
- Social Media Analysis and Utilization
- Digital preservation and the Social Web
- User Modelling and Recommendation systems
- Affective science and computing
- ICT for sustainable development
The lab is equipped with multiple robots (The Ibn Sina human-size Android with full facial expressions, the Indigo museum guide robot, Pioneer and other mobile robots, manipulator arms, UAVs), as well as advanced vision and other sensing systems.
In terms of computational resources, there is access to high-performance computation, as well as multiple workstations. There is also close contact with numerous world-class institutions and companies in the field, across three continents, and numerous distinguished invited lecturers and supervisors will be joining us for the summer school.
The Social Media and Digital Preservation theme is co-organised by the EU-funded Integrated Project ARCOMEM. This year, a distinguished group of lecturers, as well as experts from the Media sector and Parliamentary Libraries will be present for the duration of the school that will present the latest scientific findings in the area. A hands-on training session will be available for the students on the applications and technologies of Digital Preservation and the Social Web.
The SocialSensor project also supports the organization of this Summer School and will provide the dimension of real-time multimedia indexing and search in the Social Web. Engineers and researchers from the consortium of the project will explain how to move beyond conventional text-based indexing and retrieval models by mining and aggregating user inputs and content over multiple social networking sites. New tools for Social Indexing will be presented which incorporate information about the structure and activity of the users’ social network directly into the multimedia analysis and search process.
Finally, the summer school will cooperate with FONDAZIONE ROSSELLI AMERICAS (FRA) through its ICT4DEVIS (Information & Communication Technology for Development International School), to provide a better understanding on the use of ICT in project planning for sustainable development, specifically focusing on developing countries. FRA’s ICT4DEVIS is conceived as a for-credit, hands-on, practice oriented, cross-cultural summer school, intended for students, professionals and practitioners who want to pursue a professional career in deploying ICT as a means for international development. In this Summer School ICT4DEVIS will present “best practices” explaining the “life-cycle” of development projects aiming at improving the living conditions of developing countries, through the deployment of ICT.
Applying for the Summer School
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We are welcoming applications at multiple levels (final-year B.Sc, M.Sc., PhD, and postdoc levels). Necessary prerequisites include any one, and ideally a mixture of the skills below:
- Programming in C++, Java or Matlab
- Pattern Recognition, Data Mining, Machine Vision, or Natural Language Processing
- Psychological/Interaction experimental design and data analysis
- Information Visualization
- Social Media Analysis
- Sentiment analysis
- Digital Archiving
But most importantly, the creative imagination and the strong motivation to produce innovative results in any of the main theme areas.
Scholarships will be provided to selected participants.
To apply, kindly send your CV, including emails of two referees, to nmav@alum.mit.edu and cc vangelis@iit.demokritos.gr, by 10 May 2013. Applications will be considered in a first come first served basis.