Community/training/2019

Background

A desirable side-effect of the NLPL cooperation is community formation, i.e. strengthening interaction and collaboration among Nordic research teams in NLP and advancing a shared level of knowledge and experience in using national e-Infrastructures for large-scale NLP research. Towards these goals, the project will organize some training and outreach events.

For early 2018, NLPL will hold a winter school in conjunction with the NeIC All-Hands Meeting (AHM), which some NLPL team members will attend. The NeIC meeting will be held from January 29 to February 1, 2018, in the Norwegian mountain resort at Skeikampen.

Starting already after lunch on Monday, January 29, NLPL will kick off its winter school in E-Infrastructure and Scientific Computing for Nordic Natural Language Processing Research. The winter school will have a duration of two days, i.e. end with lunch on Wednesday, January 31. We anticipate participation of around 20–25 people, where the majority will come from the NLPL partner sites.

NLPL team members, associates at partner sites (e.g. doctoral and post-doctoral fellows, possibly also some MSc students), and other prospective users of the infrastructure will be invited to attend; NLPL partners can have their cost of participation covered by the project.

Programme

The winter school will comprise different types of activities, including (a) overview talks, for example on GPU programming (with emphasis on Taito and Abel), ‘deep’ learning paradigms and toolkits, or other scientific programming and HPC techniques; (b) in-depth tutorials on parts of the NLPL infrastructure (e.g. translation, parsing, and extrinsic evaluation software, as well as corpora and embeddings) and other topics of relevance to the project (e.g. ‘containerization’); and (c) hands-on hackathons, i.e. collective programming and experimentation in specific toolkits (e.g. environments like DyNet, MPI, or CUDA). Participation in the hackathons will require preparation prior to the winter school, which NLPL partner sites will organize locally.

Two of the co-organizers of the Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxML), André Martins and Ramon Fernandez Astudillo will work through selections of the LxML programme, with a special focus on deep learning approaches to NLP. Additionally, NLPL team members will provide a walk-through of the emerging infrastructure, there will be a high-level tutorial on the use of Singularity containers, and representatives of the Finnish and Norwegian national providers will provide a survey of available and upcoming computing infrastructures, with emphasis on GPU resources.

Monday, January 29, 2018
13:30	15:00	Session 1: Deep Learning for NLP (LxMLS)
15:00	15:30	Coffee Break
15:30	17:00	Session 2: Deep Learning for NLP (LxMLS)
17:00	17:30	Coffee Break
17:30	19:00	Session 3: Walk-Through of NLPL Infrastructure

Logistics and Registration

NLPL will provide bus transfer from and to Oslo Aiport Gardermoen (OSL), leaving at 9:30 on Monday morning and returning to OSL around 16:30 on Wedensday. The transfer and accomidation at Skeikampen will be directly covered by NeIC. Travel expenses to and from Oslo Airport will need to be submitted to NeIC for reimbursement after completion of the winter school.

Please record your intent to participate in the winter school through the on-line registration form. A limited number of hotel rooms and travel stipends are available. For considerations of fairness, we will want to make sure that all NLPL parner sites can send some participants (three per site, on average). We will post confirmed registrations on this page by Monday, December 18; please make your own travel arrangements once your participation has been confirmed.

Confirmed Participants

Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Unbabel and Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores

Bjørn Lindi, Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration

Andre Martins, Unbabel and Instituto Superior Técnico

Stephan Oepen, University of Oslo