First established in 2016, the StatML Oxford Imperial ML Workshop is occurring this year at Amazon’s office in Berlin after a two-year pause due to COVID-19 restrictions. The three-day private workshop will take place April 4-6, and will include keynote presentations from three well-known academics within the machine learning field.
The workshop brings together PhD students from the Oxford University and Imperial College of London StatML Center for Doctoral Training with Amazon researchers, with the goal of bridging the gap between machine learning and computational statistics. Participants have the opportunity to discuss methodological advances in these fields, and how they can be utilized to address real-life challenges. A poster session is planned on the event’s first day. In previous years, the workshop included students from Oxford, Warwick, and Edinburgh universities.
“The goal is to give students the opportunity to showcase their work and to establish links between academics and Amazon researchers,” explains Cédric Archambeau, a principal applied scientist in Amazon’s Berlin office, who is hosting the event. “Academics give talks about their recent research, and Amazon researchers provide insights into the broad set of practical challenges we’re addressing. It provides a great opportunity to identify mutual interests, and to establish collaborations.”
The upcoming event includes keynote presentations from Ole Winther, professor of data science and complexity at Technical University of Denmark, and professor of genomic bioinformatics within the biology department at Copenhagen University Hospital; Aaron Roth, the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science within the University of Pennsylvania’s computer science department, and an Amazon Scholar; and Mihaela van der Schaar, the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Medicine at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London.
Other academic talks will be given by Tom Rainforth, a senior research fellow in statistical machine learning at Oxford University; Mark van der Wilk, an assistant professor in the computing department at Imperial College of London; Francesco Sanna Passino, an assistant professor of statistics within the mathematics department at Imperial College of London; and Judith Rousseau, professor of statistics at Oxford University.
In addition to Archambeau, other Amazon participants will include Beyza Ermis and Aaron Klein, applied scientists on Amazon’s AWS AI Platforms team in Berlin; Alexander Buchholz, an applied scientist on the Amazon Music Technology team in Berlin; Stefanos Eleftheriadis and Francois-Xavier Aubet, applied scientists within Amazon’s Supply Chain Optimization Technologies (SCOT) organization in Cambridge, UK; Sergul Aydore, a senior applied scientist, and Lenon Minorics, an applied scientist, on the AWS AI Vertical Services team in New York City, and Tübingen, Germany, respectively; Shubham Kapoor and Cheng Wang, applied scientists within the company’s Worldwide Operations team in Berlin; Constantinos Papayiannis, an applied scientist within the Alexa text to speech team in Berlin; and Viacheslav Klimkov, an applied scientist within the Prime Video team in Berlin.
