Nordic Probabilistic AI Summer School: Recap, recordings and future plans

The materials and recordings from the 2022 Nordic Probabilistic AI Summer School held in Helsinki are now available, while next year’s school is in preparation.

Photo: Melanie Balaz

This summer, after a long break, the Nordic Probabilistic AI Summer School (ProbAI) returned for its 2022 edition, for the first time in Helsinki. The school was co-organized locally by chairs, assistant professor Luigi Acerbi and associate professor Arto Klami, together with the international ProbAI team and a large number of volunteers from Helsinki and Trondheim, Norway. This edition was a collaboration of the University of Helsinki, Norwegian Open AI Lab, Norwegian University of Science and Technology and FCAI. 

From the start, the summer school was in high demand, with more than 750 applications from all over the world for the 150 available places. The school aimed at a diverse audience, as reflected in its composition: three quarters of the participants were students while the other quarter consisted of researchers and practitioners from academia and industry.

ProbAI 2022 group shot. Photo: Melanie Balaz

According to the participants’ feedback, it was a very intense but highly rewarding week, with lectures and tutorials from 14 internationally recognized speakers, on subjects ranging from Neural ODEs to Likelihood Free Inference, representing multiple FCAI research programs as well as the most recent research topics in AI. The school gave participants the chance to showcase their research in two well-attended poster sessions. “It was the occasion for meeting researchers from very different backgrounds, all led by the interest in state-of-the-art machine learning research,” says Alex Hämäläinen, an FCAI doctoral researcher at Aalto University who attended ProbAI.

“The success of this summer school shows the growing interest for probabilistic machine learning, both in academia and industry,” adds Acerbi.

In order to make this school even more inclusive and accessible, all materials have been released and are freely available on Github, with video recordings of the sessions available on the ProbaAI YouTube channel.

As for the future: preparations are ongoing for the next edition of ProbAI, to be held in Trondheim on June 12–16, 2023, continuing the fruitful collaboration between Finnish and other Nordic researchers. The application will open at the beginning of 2023 and will be advertised on the website, mailing list and social media channels of ProbAI.

Learn more:

https://probabilistic.ai/
https://twitter.com/probabilisticai/