66th Vienna Deep Learning Meetup: Learning to See & Multilingual Chatbot Winner

Dear Deep Learners,

Our next meetup takes place on May 22. Here is the updated agenda:

• Learning to See in the Age of AI - by Alexander Bronstein
• Insights from the winning team of a Multilingual Chatbot Competition - by Michael Pieler

Please find the details below:

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Agenda:

18:30

• Introduction & Welcome by the meetup organizers

18:45

• Talk 1: Learning to See in the Age of AI
  by Alexander Bronstein

19:30

• Announcements
• Networking Break & Discussions

20:00

• Talk 2: Winner of the WSDM Cup Multilingual Chatbot Arena Kaggle Competition: Summary & Details
  by Michael Pieler

20:40

• Networking & Discussions

22:00 Wrap up & End
***
Talk Details:
Talk 1: Learning to See in the Age of AI
Recent spectacular advances in machine learning techniques allow solving complex computer vision tasks -- all the way down to vision-based decision making. However, the input image itself is still produced by imaging systems that were built to produce human-intelligible pictures that are not necessarily optimal for the end task. In this talk, I will try to entertain ourselves with the idea of including the camera hardware (optics and electronics) among the learnable degrees of freedom. I will show examples from optical, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance imaging demonstrating that simultaneously learning the "software" and the "hardware" parts of an imaging system is beneficial for the end task.

About the speaker:
Alexander Bronstein received his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. in Department of Computer Science from the Technion in Israel. He has been a professor at the Department of Computer Science at the Technion holding the Schmidt Chair in Artificial Intelligence and the Dan Broida Academic Chair and heading the Center for Intelligent Systems.
Since 2024 he is a professor at the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology (ISTA). Alex’s current research interests can be broadly described as AI for science and engineering. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and ELLIS and the recipient of four grants from the European Research Council (ERC).
In addition to his academic activities, he is a technological entrepreneur, inventor and investor. He co-founded and served in leading technical roles in various startup companies spanning diverse technologies and application ranging from depth cameras to video search, from medical devices to food tech and finance.

Talk 2: Winner of the WSDM Cup Multilingual Chatbot Arena Kaggle Competition: Summary & Details
In the WSDM Cup Multilingual Chatbot Arena Kaggle competition the challenge was to predict which responses users will prefer in a head-to-head battle between LLM-powered chatbots. Our winning solution consisted of the model training which involved a pre-training, a teacher-training, and a distillation stage and an optimized inference setup to get the highest performance in a specific time-frame with the provided hardware.

Michael Pieler, an independent researcher, will give a short presentation of the winning solution of his team. In this talk he will summarize and share some details about the winning entry in this competition.

We are thankfully hosted by University of Vienna Biology center this time. Please note that we cannot provide food or drinks at this meetup.

Looking forward to seeing you at our next meetup,
Your VDLM Organizers