[agents] IRSS 2014: First Call for Participation

[Ioannis Vetsikas]

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                CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

              The 2014 IRSS Summer School

     NCSR "Demokritos", Athens, Greece
     July 3-30, 2014, Athens, Greece
     Homepage: http://irss.iit.demokritos.gr/
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Deadline for applications (for participation): January 31, 2014
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International Research-Centered Summer School in “Cognitive Systems and
Interactive Robotics, Data and Content Analysis”

3-30 July 2014, at NCSR "Demokritos", Athens, Greece

The Summer School is organized by the Software & Knowledge Engineering Lab
(SKEL) at the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications of NCSR
"Demokritos" (http://www.iit.demokritos.gr/), and the Interactive Robots
and Media Lab (http://www.irmllab.com). This is the fifth summer school in
a sequence initiated by the Interactive Robots and Media Lab. For the
second time in a row, it will take place in Greece at NCSR "Demokritos"
(located in Athens, Greece) between July 3 and July 30, 2014.

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.
The outcome of the summer school includes both numerous scientific
publications, as well as longer-term collaborations. For example, the
scientific output from the last summer schools has already led to a number
of papers in leading conferences and journals with several more underway.

This year’s topic and research project areas focus on the cognitive
systems or the data analysis viewpoint, as pertaining to:
- Human Robot Interaction
- Dialogue Systems
- Computer Vision
- Information Visualisation
- Data and content analytics - data mining
- Social Media Analysis
- Semantic technologies and the Web of data
- User Modelling and Recommendation systems
- Intelligent Agents and Multi-agent Systems
- Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics
- Autonomous Creative Systems
- Event processing

The projects on these research topics will be supported by a number of
international and national research projects. They will be supervised by
world leading researchers from several universities and research centers.
Furthermore, NCSR has significant expertise in all these subject areas,
and can support the projects with computational tools, robots, as well as
with the appropriate personnel who will co-supervise these projects. 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, and
numerous distinguished invited lecturers and supervisors will be joining
us for the summer school.

Furthermore, the school will not be all work and no fun! A few exciting
cultural events and excursions are planned to take place during the
weekends so that the participants can relax and visit some of the best
tourist attractions in Greece.

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
- Optimization
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
irss at iit.demokritos.gr, by 31 January 2014.

For more information visit the School’s webpage:
http://irss.iit.demokritos.gr/

Looking forward to welcoming you in Athens!