1st Züri Machine Learning Meetup

UPDATE: Doodle poll about the future meetups, we appreciate your feedback: http://doodle.com/tqtmh9yn4kauck9q

Hope you will join us for our very first open meetup event, on Tuesday evening Feb 25th at ETH! Please RSVP here if you are able to attend! We have 3 interesting presentations on the menu on that first evening:

• Deep Learning
(45min)
Jürgen Schmidhuber (http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/), Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA (http://www.idsia.ch/)

We're very excited to have one of the world experts in this field at our first meetup. The recent resurrection of multi-layer neural networks is generating a lot of interest currently, with deep learning appearing on the New York Times front page, and big companies like Google and Facebook hunting for the experts in this field. Jürgen's talk will shed more light on how deep learning methods work, and why they work.

Some news and links about deep learning:

• Recent Acquisition of DeepMind (http://www.press.usi.ch/en/comunicati-stampa/comunicato-stampa.htm?id=1121)
• NYT Article from Nov 2012 (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-advances-in-deep-learning-a-part-of-artificial-intelligence.html)
• Deep Learning Website by Jürgen Schmidhuber (http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/deeplearning.html)
• Blog Article about Deep Learning in Competitions (http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-bio-inspired-deep-learning-keeps-winning-competitions)
• Jan 2014 Article by Wired Magazine (http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/geoffrey-hinton-deep-learning)

• Short Break (15min)

• Exploiting Similiarity to Adaptively Optimize Recommendations from User Feedback
(20min)
Hasta Vanchinathan (http://ch.linkedin.com/pub/hastagiri-vanchinathan/2/6a6/233), PhD student at the Learning & Adaptive Systems Group at ETH (http://las.ethz.ch/)

Access to useful information and visibility of products, articles or people on websites and social networks is critically influenced by the accuracy of the recommendation engine. In his talk, Hasta will present some challenges and possible solutions to modern large scale recommender problems. He will also present results from two large scale recommendation tasks: Yahoo! news article recommendation, and Google books.

• Analyzing the Web from Start to Finish - Knowledge Extraction from a Web Forum using KNIME
(20min)
Bernd Wiswedel (http://knime.org/team), Co-Founder and CTO at KNIME (http://www.knime.org/)

Bernd will give us an introduction to KNIME, an open source graphical workbench for the entire analysis process from data access and preprocessing to analytics, visualization and reporting. As a practical example, he will show an application in which KNIME was used to analyze a public discussion forum. It includes the steps of web crawling, web analytics, topic detection and description of user interaction.

Wikipedia article about KNIME (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KNIME)

• Apéro and Open Discussion about the Future Meetups
Let us know what topics you like, have ideas for potential speakers, locations, and some preferred dates and times for the next meetups.

Please join our meetup group to get updates, and hope to see you all on Tuesday!