[agents] Last CFP: International Research-centered Summer School 2014

[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): February 28, 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

More specifically, an initial plan includes projects on:
•	Social Media analysis,
•	Big Data analytics,
•	Argument extraction and sentiment analysis,
•	Robot Navigation and Vision,
•	Analysis of biological/biomedical data
•	Computational tools supporting creativity,
•	Constrained optimization,
•	Complex event recognition

These projects 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‘D’ has significant expertise in all these subject areas,
and can support the projects with computational tools, robotic equipment,
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, as it was the case in IRSS-2013
(http://irss.iit.demokritos.gr/content/invited-speakers).
The relevant information will be announced at the IRSS site in the coming
weeks.

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.

The registration fee for the school is 400€, which will be used to cover
part of the school’s expenses, such as the expenses of the invited
speakers, the lunch and coffee breaks for the participants, as well as
cultural and social events.

We are in the process of securing sponsorships, so that we can give a
number of scholarships that will cover the registrations fees, and/or the
accommodation costs of selected participants.

To apply, kindly send your CV, including emails of two referees, to
irss at iit.demokritos.gr, by 28 February 2014.

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

Looking forward to welcoming you in Athens!