Community/training/2018

Background

The 2018 NLPL Winter School was co-located and partially overlapping with the NeIC All-Hands Meeting (AHM), which some NLPL team members attended. The NeIC meeting was held from January 29 to February 1, 2018, in the Norwegian mountain resort at Skeikampen.

Starting already after lunch on Monday, January 29, NLPL kicked off its winter school in E-Infrastructure and Scientific Computing for Nordic Natural Language Processing Research. The winter school had a duration of two days, i.e. ended with lunch on Wednesday, January 31. There were around 20–25 participants, where the majority came 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 were invited to attend; NLPL partners(i.e. members of the project team) had 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			Tuesday, January 30, 2018			Wednesday, January 31, 2018
09:00	12:00	Travel to Skeikampen. Lunch at 12:30	09:00	10:30	Session 4: Deep Learning for NLP (LxMLS) Room: Olav 2	09:00	10:00	Session 8: Deep Learning for NLP Wrap-Up (LxMLS) Room: Olav 2
			10:30	15:00	Break and lunch, which is served 13:00 - 14:30	10:30	12:00	Session 9: Tutorial on Containers (Abdulrahman Azab, UiO/NeIC) Room: Olav 2
13:30	15:00	Session 1: Deep Learning for NLP (LxMLS)	15:00	16:30	Session 5: Deep Learning for NLP (LxMLS) Room: Vinterhagen	12:30	13:30	Lunch
15:00	15:30	Coffee Break	16:30	17:00	Coffee Break	13:45	14:00	Get on the bus. The Bus leaves for OSL Airport at 14:00
15:30	17:00	Session 2: Deep Learning for NLP (LxMLS)	17:00	18:30	Session 6: Deep Learning for NLP(LxMLS) Room: Vinterhagen
17:00	17:30	Coffee Break	18:30	18:45	Coffee Break
17:30	19:00	Session 3: Walk-Through of NLPL Infrastructure	18:45	19:30	Session 7: Experience Exchange on DL and GPUs, Room: Vinterhagen

Dinner 19:30 Monday and Tuesday