Last September I had the opportunity to attend Gaussian Process Summer School, in Sheffield, UK. It is a twice a year event that holds for 3-4 days. First of all, I have to say that it was an awesome experience even if i had no much time to explore the city. Besides, it was heavy raining most of my time there. Well, we had an excursion to a local brewery.
Anyway, the event was structured like full day lectures, everyday, given by experts in the field. And by saying experts I mean guys like Rasmussen, who has written the famous book on Gaussian Processes (GPs) cited on any paper that includes these two words nowadays, and of course Neil Lawrence who has a whole lab in Sheffield working on Gaussian Processes and organizes this School.
What I enjoyed the most though were the lab sessions scheduled between lectures. It was the perfect time to get our hands dirty. It was a chance to use GPy, a python library that includes almost everything about GPs, developed in Sheffield. I have to admit that GPy seems a lot more powerful tool to have than GPML which I currently (it is a GP library for Matlab). Anyway, the exercises given were perfectly suited to play around with the features of GPy as well as discover the potential of GPy and Gaussian Processes in general. In fact, the exercises were given in ipython notebooks. Ipython notebook is an interactive computational environment, in which you can combine code execution, rich text and mathematics. Specifically, we were given snippets of code that had some crucial parts missing, which we were supposed to fill in.
Another memory from the GP school was that of Joaquin Quiñonero Candela who gave lectures at the summer school as well as the university of Sheffield. Joaquin was previously a researcher at Microsoft and he is now director of research in Applied Machine Learning at Facebook, where apparently make use of advanced machine learning techniques and push the field to its limits. Importantly Joaquin co-authored papers with Rasmussen on Gaussian Processes and he seemed to me a brilliant guy.
That is pretty much my experience from this school. In another post, I will introduce GPs and explain as intuitively as i can their usefulness and applicability.
intelligentsensing 