The LIF organises the second bootcamp of the European Network of Excellence PASCAL (Pattern Analysis, Statistical modelling and ComputAtional Learning) . This school will be held during summer 2010, from July the 5th (afternoon) to July the 13th (morning), on the campus of St. Charles in Marseille.

The bootcamp is an international event which consists of a one week courses (lectures, pratical and lab sessions) designed for Master students or students just about to start a PhD. It aims at training good-level students from various scientific fieds to major thematics of PASCAL network, particularly machine learning.
The first PASCAL bootcamp was held in Barcelona during summer 2007.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning is a multidisciplinary field which involves theoretical works linked with language theory, database theory, combinatorial optimisation, artificial intelligence, information theory but also with inferential statistics or, more recently, signal processing. This discipline aims at extracting statistical regularities from a finite sample of observations in preparation from an inference process, where algorithmic, theoretical and practical aspects are major concerns.

Application fields of machine learning can be potentially extended to all problems where an automatic processing of data (numeric or structured) is required. It mainly includes data classification problems, document indexations, information retrieval, automatic text summarization, bio-informatics (such as protein structures prediction), automatic processing of natural language, information extraction from multimedia data, audio/video signal modelisation (source separation, sequence classification).
Most of these domains are upstream from data mining and web mining, two booming sectors of computer science with major economic issues.

Attendance and Educational Objective

Up to now, Machine Learning researchers get an inadequate academical formation. Indeed, most of european computer sciences Masters integrate only few machine learning modules, and are far from encompassing the global nature of our discipline. It is essential that PhD students (or students just about to start a PhD) get the opportunity to top up their formation with events such as this bootcamp.

This bootcamp is therefore designed for machine learning PhD students but also to PhD students from connate fields (statistics, bioinformatics, natural language processing, optimisation, signal processing...). Participants will receive a set of lessons on several major machine learning themes given by european experts from the PASCAL2 network.

Program Committee

  • John Shawe-Taylor, University College London
  • Colin de la Higuera, Université de Nantes
  • François Denis, Université de Provence
  • José Luis Balcázar, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
  • Alexis Nasr, Université de la Méditerranée
  • Rémi Eyraud, Université de Provence

Organisation Committee

The summercamp organisation is provided by the Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Marseille (LIF). The committee is composed of the following members:

  • Stéphane Ayache, vice-president
  • Raphaël Bailly
  • Frédéric Bechet
  • François Denis
  • Cécile Capponi
  • Rémi Eyraud, president
  • Amaury Habrard
  • Pierre Machart
  • Alexis Nasr
  • Martine Quessada
  • Liva Ralaivola
  • Guillaume Stempfel