December 8, 2021

NeurIPS 2021 Meetup @MPI-IS

Tübingen, Germany

Image credit: MPI for Intelligent Systems / Patrick Junker

The registration deadline (28 November 2021) has passed.

Update:

We regret to announce that due to the current COVID-19 situation, we decided to cancel all in-person activities and hold the event fully virtually. See below for the updated schedule. After this long period of virtual events we were very much looking forward to re-initiating physical interactions between fellow researchers, however, due to recent developments we are unable to host a responsible in-person event anymore. We are exploring the possibility of organizing a post-meetup get-together once the COVID-19 situation has relaxed, so stay tuned for updates in spring!

The purpose of this NeurIPS 2021 meetup organized by the Empirical Inference Department at the Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems is a safe and diverse 1-day event that enables exciting scientific exchange and networking within the machine learning community in and around Tübingen and Southern Germany. While the event is primarily addressed to researchers from the local research community, we also welcome participants from other regions of Germany and Europe.

As outlined below, the tentative schedule involves teaser talks and poster sessions in which accepted papers will be presented and discussed virtually. This will be complemented by an in-person conference dinner.

Link to the virtual event: https://gather.town/events/3tDPjz8kt6yqGm3kNWM0

Preliminary Timeline

The meetup will take place on Wednesday, December 8th, 2021, the second day of the main conference. The schedule can be found below. The poster sessions will be held virtually on GatherTown.

Hygiene Concept

Update: Due to the evolving COVID-19 situation in Germany, the event will be held fully virtually.

To maximize the safety of all participants, the in-person conference dinner will be held under German "2G+" rules, thus adhering to stricter hygiene rules than laid out by the German government for restaurant visits. This implies that the dinner will be restricted to persons that are either fully vaccinated (with an EU approved vaccine) or have recovered from COVID-19 within the last six months. In addition, we will require dinner participants to show negative COVID-19 rapid test results that are less than 24h old.

Commitment to Diversity and Accessibility

In addition to our main motivation of returning to in-person scientific exchange of the local scientific community, one of our goals is to enable junior PhD students and master's students who have not had the opportuniy to attend a conference in the last two years to gain valuable experience in discussions, presentations and getting to know fellow researchers. In particular, we will solicit participation of PhD students within the new ELLIS pan-European PhD program, whose first student cohort started this year.

In order to allow everyone to participate independent of their financial background, the event will be fully subsidized and free of charge.

Location

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

Max-Planck-Ring 4,
Tübingen, Germany

Image credit: MPI for Intelligent Systems / Wolfram Scheible

Organizing Committee

Annika Buchholz is a Scientific Coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where she works at the intersection of research and management. She holds a M.Sc. in Physics with distinction and did her PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Bonn. She was a Co-Organizer of the Real-Robot Challenge I and II (official NeurIPS challenge) and various workshops, tutorials and schools, like e.g. the MLSS 2020.

Maximilian Dax is a PhD candidate in the Empirical Inference department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and gravitational-wave physics. He holds M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Physics from the University of Bonn.

Heiner Kremer is a PhD candidate in the Empirical Inference department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. His research interests range from causal inference in econometrics over epidemiological modeling to computational imaging and computer-generated holography. He holds a MASt in Applied Mathematics from the University of Cambridge and a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Frankfurt.

Lars Lorch is a PhD candidate in the Empirical Inference and Learning and Adaptive Systems groups at ETH Zürich. His interests lie in learning causal models and representations as well as artificial intelligence more generally. He holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science from ETH Zürich and a A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University.

Yucen Luo is a postdoctoral researcher in the Empirical Inference department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. She received a PhD from Tsinghua University in China. Her research interests lie in latent variable models and causal representation learning. She previously helped organizing the Duke-Tsinghua Machine Learning Summer School in 2017.

Image credit: Herlinde Koelbl

Bernhard Schölkopf studied Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy in Tübingen and London. In 1994 he joined Bell Labs to work on a Ph.D. with Vladimir Vapnik. Following researcher positions at GMD, Microsoft Research, and a biotech startup, Schölkopf started his lab at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Tübingen) in 2002. In 2011, he became a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Bernhard Schölkopf has been program chair of NeurIPS and COLT and is currently co-editor in-chief of the flagship journal in machine learning (JMLR). He has been elected to the boards of the NeurIPS foundation and of the International Machine Learning Society. With Alex Smola, he initiated the Machine Learning Summer Schools series in 2002, which has meanwhile been organized, by various teams, 35 times.

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