ESC Jump Start Meeting

Students met with the mentors at the first eClub Summer Camp Jump Start Meeting yesterday. This was the unofficial ESC opening. The real start is on July 14. Here is a short report for those of you who have missed the first meeting.

Let me first say thank you to all students and mentors who spent almost the whole morning discussing various projects and introducing their ideas.

What was the program? At the beginning I have briefly explained the organization and here is a list of the main milestones:

• Chose the project and its name.
• Sign a CVUT MediaLab Foundation (our sponsor) contract.
• Sign up on the contact board.
• Set the project web page - include eClub and CVUT MediaLab logos.
• Write an essay.
• To access the computational resources sign up to Metacentrum (Vondra).
• If you need an access to data in Metacentrum sign a NDA.
• Prepare the state of the art technology overview.
• Select the best approach, solution.
• Program, run or copy the selected approach.
• Finish and improve the solution.
• Write a final report.

My presentation was followed by an introduction of mentors. They gave short presentations describing the topics of their interest:

• Twitter Translation
• Cloud projects
• Large Scale Hierarchical Classification
• Rest Search Project
• DHC user scenarions
• New Car UI
• Support Vector Machine
• Machine learning at scale
• General Game Playing for Atari 2600
• Scalable predictive models
• Predictor factory
• Angry birds

At the end we had a long discussion and the most frequent topic was what application to chose and who is the mentor. This is the main job for you now: select the project and choose its name. To help you see the list of the ESC Projects Proposals. You can also review the mentors’ presentations. Select carefully, all mentors are ready to help. We are sure we will do a good job together.  We also hope, that we can convert some of the projects to a BSc or MSc theses.

The other important thing is the scholarship. It will be granted by our sponsor CVUT MediaLab Foundation. It is collecting money from the industry sponsors and it uses the funds to support activities such as ESC. Therefore to get the scholarship all the participants of the ESC need to sign a contract with the Foundation. Currently, I am working on the wording. I need to iron out the last details and as soon as it is finished we will share it with you.

I have also updated the eClub web pages, check it out. I will be step by step adding there all the program, materials, such as the Contract, Non-disclosure Agreement, logos, templates of documents, program of presentations and other stuff, stay tuned.

Yes, it is a lot of work in front of us, this is just the  first meeting, but it was very encouraging. I am looking forward to see great results, mobile and Internet apps etc. Follow us on eClub web pages, Facebook or search for the #CTUECLUB or #CTUESC hashtags.

eClub Summer Camp introductory meeting

The eClub Summer Camp (ESC) preparations continue. We are inviting you for an introductory, jump start meeting June 24th to meet mentors and learn about the projects.

We have busily worked the last weeks on the organizational details of the ESC. We have made a big progress. Because of the organizational reasons, we have to postpone the beginning of the ESC for two weeks. To not disappoint you and to give you a jump start let's meet on 24. June.

The main goal of the jump start meeting is the project discussion and selection. We are very much looking forward to hear about your own ideas, prepare a short 10 min presentation, please. We are also very anxious to introduce our projects in the data section. In plain language we will explain what are the suggested projects about and why we should try to solve them. We want you to be as excited about our project as we are. During the jump start meeting we want to justify the projects importance and explain out what problem they solve.

The jump start meeting will start at 9:00. You will meet with your pears and mentors who will be helping you. We will open with a short personal introduction, then we will give a high level description of the ESC focus and will continue with general discussion. I hope, all mentors will be available throughout the day for appointments, for a discussion. We recommend you you finishing the jump start meeting with some idea about your future project and scheduling a meeting with the appropriate mentors to discuss details. If you have your own project also select a mentor and show the short presentation.

The official kick off is the July 14th. You have the opportunity to use the two weeks for a project selection if you do not chose any project during the first presentation. If you pick up one you can start with the link below the project description and begin working on the first milestone, the current state of the art review.

The ESC will take place in two locations. One will be on the top floor of the Faculty of Civil Engineering building CVUT Dejvice. The other place is the study room of the VIC center in Klokner Institute also Dejvice. In both places we will have the Eduroam and wired Ethernet access. The rooms are air-conditioned.

Let me know if you have questions or suggestions, we are all looking forward to work on interesting high-tech problems and waiting for you great ideas.

eClub Summer Camp Projects

Some of you are already passionate to see the list of eClub Summer Camp (ESC) Data projects. We have many more than we planned. Some of you have not sign up. Fix it, here is the form.

The preliminary listing the projects is quite large. Before you try to select your favorite project you may read this blog to get familiar with the categories. Of course we are open to discuss your own ideas too, just talk to us.

The first category is the Information Retrieval (IR), which contains lot of small problems. All of them are focusing on full text search. For example, learning to rank, interleaving and modeling are contributing to improving the SERP. The rest of the tasks in this category are trying to solve problems related to query expansion.

The Semantic Search section is formulating several problems related to future search engines, which will be able to answer complicated questions such as “How old is Tom Cruise?”. To prepare the right answer we need to be able to find the entities in text or in a query.

We also offer topics in the Ad Selection category. The problem is simple to formulate, but not easy to implement. We need to place to SERP or on a customer web page an ad, which would be most attractive for users. We want to maximize the number of users clicks on an ad, to maximize the income.

The classical problem in machine learning is Spam Detection. The fight still continues in new more twisty incarnations. The problems in this category are focusing on these new forms o f spam.

We have also a large range of problems in the Recommendation System category. The best example? Everybody from the field knows the Netflix Competition with the astonishing first price of 1 million USD. Large number of teams tried to recommend the best movies to viewers. Recommendation is very important for all Internet shop and can help dramatically increase the revenue.

Many applications on today Internet are Mashups and this is the next category. They are put together from simple web services with REST API. Imagine for example an accounting system comparing your performance with similar companies. Another segment in this category is the vertical search. These services can be implemented for example with open source packages such as Lucene and Solr.

If you feel the task description is difficult to understand, difficult to imagine what is the particular problem about and why it is listed, do not be frightened, we will help you to get through it. We will soon announce a meeting to answer your questions and help you with selection. This will be also the ideal place to discuss your own ideas. Follow us on twitter #CTUESC or Facebook. If you want to sign up here is the entry form.