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 organizes an annual three-day winter school. For additional background, please see the archival pages from the 2018 NLPL Winter School.

For early 2019, NLPL will hold its winter school from Monday, February 4, to Wednesday, February 6, 2019, at a mountain-side hotel (with skiing opportunities) about two hours north of Oslo. The project will organize group bus transfer from and to the Oslo airport Gardermoen, leaving the airport at 9:30 on Monday morning and returning there around 17:30 on Wednesday afternoon.

The main instructors in 2019 will be Chris Dyer and Graham Neubig, core developers of the DyNet framework, for a combination of lectures and hands-on exercises in applications of ‘dynamic’ deep neural networks to NLP. The winter school programme will be complemented with a ‘walk-through’ of available software, data, and service resources from NLPL, as well as with a ‘research bazar’ involving all participants.

The winter school is subsidized by the project (with financial support from NeIC). There will be a limited number of fully funded ‘slots’ available to members of the core NLPL consortium, which each partner is free to allocate among their staff and student as they see fit. Additionally, the winter school will welcome partly self-funded participants from project partners and other Nordic NLP research centers, who will have to cover their own travel expenses to and from Oslo airport, as well as their cost of accommodation at the winter school hotel (the latter is expected to come to at most NOK 2,500). In total, we anticipate 30–35 participants in the 2019 Winter School.

Logistics and Registration

We ask all interested parties (from NLPL project sites, associates, or other NLP research groups in Northern Europe) to register their interest in participation through the on-line registration form The deadline for requesting involvement was Friday, December 7, 2019; registration is now closed. Registration through this form does not automatically qualify for participation in the winter school, however.

Each NLPL partner site will have available three ‘fully subsidized’ (within Norway) slots, which will be confirmed by the local site manager: Anders Sørgaard at Copenhagen University, Leon Derczynski at IT University Copenhagen, Jörg Tiedemann at Helsinki University, Stephan Oepen at the University of Oslo, Filip Ginter at the University of Turku, and Joakim Nivre at Uppsala University).

In addition to these slots, five to ten additional participants will be welcome to participate partly at their own expense, i.e. covering the cost of accomodation at Skeikampen (and, of course, travel to and from Oslo airport) themselves. The NLPL outreach task force will review registrations in mid-December 2019 and then finally confirm participation by non–project members, based on a combination of the first come–first served principle and a goal of institutional and regional diversity.

Subsized Participants

In early December 2018, there has been great interest in participation already (and registration technically remains open), and we will regrettably have to decline numerous prospective participants. In a first round of allocations, we are currently confirming participation from members of the core consortium (including associate partners), who will have their cost of staying at the conference site covered directly by NeIC. Everyone else, please expect to hear more from us by mid-December.

1. Mostafa Abdou (University of Copenhagen)
2. Željko Agić (IT University Copenhagen)
3. Rahul Aralikatte (University Copenhagen)
4. Victor Petrén Bach Hansen (University of Copenhagen)
5. Jeremy Barnes (University of Oslo)
6. Eivind Alexander Bergem (University of Oslo)
7. Leon Derczynski (Steering Group)
8. Chris Dyer (Lecturer)
9. Filip Ginter (Steering Group)
10. Suwisa Kaewphan (University of Turku)
11. Jenna Kanerva (University of Turku)
12. Sigrid Klerke (IT University Copenhagen)
13. Artur Kulmizev (Uppsala University)
14. Akseli Leino (University of Turku)
15. Bjørn Lindi (Project Manager)
16. Miryam de Lhoneux (Uppsala University)
17. Graham Neubig (Lecturer)
18. Joakim Nivre (Steering Group)
19. Stephan Oepen (Steering Group)
20. Vinit Ravishankar (University of Oslo)
21. Yves Scherrer (University of Helsinki)
22. Natalie Schluter (IT University Copenhagen)
23. Umut Sulubacaky (University of Helsinki)
24. Gongbo Tang (Uppsala University)
25. Andre Tättar (University of Tartu)
26. Jörg Tiedemann (Steering Group)
27. Raul Vazquezy (University of Helsinki)

Self-Funded Participants

Our public call for participation was met with great interest by NLP researchres from all over Northern Europe (and beyond). A total of 54 registrations were received by the deadline, of which six have been declined for various reasons. Everyone else (who as of December 10 has yet to hear from us) will be invited to participate on a self-funding basis, meaning that these participants will have to pay their own accomodation and meals while at Skeikampen (but are of course not expected to contribute to the cost of transfer between the Oslo airport and the hotel or otherwise pay a participation fee). Bjørn Lindi, the NLPL project manager, will email pre-registered participants by December 15, 2018, with more information on the cost for self-funded participation and the process for confirming your involvement.