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 around NOK 2,500). In total, we anticipate 30–35 participants in the 2019 Winter School.