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This summer, the world’s experts in artificial intelligence will meet in Kosice, a city in the east of Slovakia. From 9th to 16th  July, they will be lecturing at the Technical University of Kosice as part of the Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School (EEML 2023). The school is co-organized by ESET with a mission to make machine learning education accessible to students from Eastern European countries and  help them network with top researchers in the field, as well as other students from around the world.

The idea to organize a machine learning summer school originated among three scientists from the labs of  DeepMind, a company owned by Google since 2014, which specializes in artificial intelligence research. . The three initiators: Doina Precup, Razvan Pascanu and Viorica Patraucean are originally from Romania,  so their goal was to create opportunities for young people from Eastern Europe. The first edition of the Machine Learning Summer School took place in 2018. This year’s EEML is already the sixth edition of this successful event and the first time it will be held in Slovakia. Previous editions took place in Romania, Poland, Hungary, and Lithuania.

 During the week, students will have an opportunity to learn from top ML experts. Information on various aspects of machine learning such as deep learning, machine vision, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, ethics in machine learning, applications of machine learning and many more await them. Registration for EEML is now open, and students can find information about application requirements here.

Finalized event agenda and speaker list, will be announced soon. Speakers already confirmed include: 

Doina Precup holds the very prestigious Canada CIFAR AI Chair in the Faculty of Computer Science at McGill University in Montreal, and works closely with the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (Mila). At DeepMind, she serves as director of research. She works in several areas of artificial intelligence, including reinforcement learning and applications of machine learning in medicine.  
 
Razvan Pascanu completed his PhD at the University of Montreal under the supervision of Professor Yoshua Bengio. He was at the birth of the Theano software library and has also written several tutorials on its use. Currently, he works as a researcher for DeepMind in London and is actively involved in various educational projects about AI for youth in Romania, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. His research interests include deep learning in particular.  
 
Ankur Handa completed his PhD at Imperial College London and moved on to post-doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge and later at Imperial College. He has worked as a researcher at OpenAI and is currently working at NVIDIA. His research is at the interface of machine learning and robotics.
 
Michal Valko completed his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh under the supervision of Professor Milos Hauskrecht. He continued his post-doctoral studies with Professor Rémi Munos. He currently works as a researcher for Inria and DeepMind and lectures in the mathematics department at ENS Paris-Saclay. Mr Valko is doing research on several areas of machine learning, including reinforcement learning and self-supervised learning. He is particularly interested in algorithms that enable machine learning with minimal human intervention.  
 
Peter Richtarik completed his PhD at Cornell University and continued his post-doctoral studies with Professor Yuri Nesterov at the Catholic University of Louvain. He has worked as a professor at the University of Edinburgh and at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a professor at the King Abdullah University and a research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. His research focuses on randomized and distributed optimization algorithms, and he is also one of the initiators of research in federated learning.

In addition to ESET, the current edition of the summer school is partnered by the national platform for the development of AI in Slovakia, and the Technical University of Košice, whose Department of Cybernetics & Artificial Intelligence is an academic partner of the event. Technical University of Košice has a long tradition and it was the first university in Slovakia to enable the study of artificial intelligence.  Innovatrics and DeepMind are also sponsors of the current edition of EEML.