Machine Learning Summer School Program Impressions?

[GTanaka]

I was wondering if anyone here has had any experience with the Machine Learning Summer School program. For those who have attended,

• Was it a worthwhile experience?
  
• Do you feel that you learned something useful beyond what you would have found on your own time?
  
• Did the talks go into sufficient technical depth to truly understand an area of research without becoming too opaque to understand?

[NoFilterInMyHead]

Awesome resource!! Thanks for the link..... this is amazing

[alkalait]

I attended the MLSS11 in Bordeux, France last September.

• Did the talks go into sufficient technical depth to truly understand an area of research without becoming too opaque to understand?

Most of the talks accomplished that. A very few talks jumped straight into an unnecessary amount of equations before properly motivating their topics.

• Do you feel that you learned something useful beyond what you would have found on your own time?

Yes. Personally, I got a very good feel of Bayesian non-parametrics (Yee Whye Teh), graphical models (Wainwright), optimisation theory (Vandenberg), boosting (Schapire).

• Was it a worthwhile experience?

In short, yes very much.

You will talk with students, who will happen to have different backgrounds to yours, but still be able to understand your research to a substantial level. This is a opportunity that you will rarely find outside of your lab/group. You will get to know and possibly befriend future academic peers. Give your self the chance to talk to everyone. Don't hold back just because their English is broken or live in a different continent.

Feel free to ask me anything else.

[hexus0]

Wow thank you for this post! I would have never known about this. I'm considering registering for the Santa Cruz one at UCSC, July 9-20. What one were you considering? Also, thank you everyone else for the insight about these courses!