From August 19-23, 2019, the two Big Data Competence Centers in Germany, ScaDS Dresden/Leipzig and BBDC, organized the 5th International Summer School on Big Data and Machine Learning. With this event, we continued our previous efforts to establish this summer school series. Furthermore, we broadened the topic spectrum covering state-of-the-art techniques in Big Data processing and analytics as well as novel methods in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. 

The Summer School 2019 took place at Technical University (TU) in Dresden.

Program & Highlights 

The Summer School 2019 bridged the gap between the research fields Big Data and Machine Learning, with many contributions from internationally renowned experts from various fields. The top-flight program included key notes from IBM, NVIDIA, Intel, and speakers from academia of both competence centers BBDC and ScaDS Dresden/Leipzig as well as invited speakers. 

The lectures span a wide range of topics around large scale and data intensive computing (Big Data) and exciting new trends in Machine Learning, such as uncertainty quantification, distributed Machine Learning and architectural optimization for Deep Learning. The event was attended by nearly sixty participants, who could not just connect with the experts, but also submit a poster on their own research activity. The poster sessions, which lasted throughout the week, stimulated discussions between the participants. As social activity, an archery tournament brought fun and a contrast into the program and sparked some friendly competition among the participants.

Prior to the Summer School, there was a hackathon for hands-on development of an application in the Machine Learning area. 

The topics of the summer school cover a broad range of up-to-date topics:

• Big Data and HPC
• Machine learning techniques
• Scalable graph analytics
• Data processing and streaming
• Machine learning and data analytics for applications
• Large scale visual analytics
• Web-scale information extraction

Below you find the full program with additional information on the speakers and their topics:

Monday 19.08.19

Time	Person	Topic
14:10 – 15:30	Prof. Dr. Wolfgang E. Nagel (ZIH/TU Dresden and ScaDS)	Data Analytics and High Performance Computing – a convergence?
15:30 – 16:00	COFFEE BREAK	COFFEE BREAK
16:00 – 17:30	Eric Peukert, Christopher Rost	Scalable Graph Analysis and Data Integration with Gradoop and FAMER
17:30 – 18:30		Poster Session and Reception

Tuesday 20.08.19

Time	Person	Topic
09:00 – 10:30	Prof. Tilmann Rabl (Hasso Plattner Institut, Universität Potsdam)	Big Data and Stream Data Engineering
10:30 – 11:00	COFFEE BREAK	COFFEE BREAK
11:00 – 12:30	Vishnu Madhu (Intel)	Intel AI – Scaling Machine Learning models over HPC clusters
12:30 – 14:00	LUNCH	LUNCH
14:00 – 15:30	Grégoire Montavon (TU Berlin)	Understanding the Decisions of Deep Neural Networks
15:30 – 16:00	COFFEE BREAK	COFFEE BREAK
16:00 – 17:30	Dr. Michael Bussmann (HZDR)	Welcome to the Jungle – The challenge of data-driven science at high rates and high complexity

Wednesday 21.08.19

Time	Person	Topic
09:00 – 10:30	Prof. Anne Lauber-Rönsberg (Civil Law, Intellectual Property, Media and Data Protection Law, TU Dresden)	A Legal Perspective on Big Data – Copyright and Data Protection Issues
10:30 – 11:00	COFFEE BREAK	COFFEE BREAK
11:00 – 12:30	Jim Dowling (CEO, Logical Clocks AB)	Hopsworks: End to End ML Pipelines
12:30 – 14:00	LUNCH	LUNCH
14:00		Social Event: Archery Tournament @Bärensteiner Str. 23-25
18:30		Conference Dinner at “Pulverturm an der Frauenkirche”

Thursday 22.08.19

Time	Person	Topic
09:00 – 10:30	Ricardo Usbeck (Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS)	Conversational AI – How does Iron Man’s JARVIS work?
10:30 – 11:00	COFFEE BREAK	COFFEE BREAK
11:00 – 12:30	Dr. Costas Bekas (AI Research Coordinator IBM Research – Zurich)	Cognitive Discovery: Pushing the Frontiers of Technical R&D with AI
12:30 – 14:00	LUNCH	LUNCH
14:00 – 15:30	Christoph Angerer (NVIDIA)	Data Science and Analytics Pipelines with RAPIDS
15:30 – 16:00	COFFEE BREAK	COFFEE BREAK
16:00 – 17:30	Christoph Angerer (NVIDIA)	RAPIDS Hands-On

Friday 23.08.19

Time	Person	Topic
09:00 – 10:30	Suryanarayana Maddu (Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD), TU Dresden)	Enabling Data-Driven Discovery in Biology: Statistical Learning of Interpretable Mathematical Models from Microscopy Videos
10:30 – 11:00	COFFEE BREAK	COFFEE BREAK
11:00 – 12:30	Prof. Morris Riedel (Julich Supercomputing Centre)	Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning
12:30 – 13:00		Certificate Handout and Closing

Organizers

The Summer School as well as the Hackathon were organized by the two Competence Centers for Big Data Research in Germany, ScaDS Dresden/Leipzig and BBDC, in cooperation with the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) e.V. at the Leipzig University.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang E. Nagel ScaDS Dresden/Leipzig, Technische Universität Dresden Dr. René Jäkel ScaDS Dresden/Leipzig, Technische Universität Dresden Prof. Dr. Erhard Rahm ScaDS Dresden/Leipzig, Leipzig University Prof. Dr. Tilmann Rabl  BBDC, Technische Universität Berlin Dr. Eric Peukert  ScaDS Dresden/Leipzig, Leipzig University

Have a look at other Summer Schools!