[ecoop-info] FOPSS Logic and Learning School advertisement

[Andrzej Murawski]

FOPSS Logic and Learning School advertisement

The Logic & Learning School is an opportunity to learn from, and
interact with, the world's experts leading recent progress in
understanding the relationships between logic and learning. These
experts come from both academia and some of the leading industrial
research labs (Amazon Research and DeepMind).

In the last few decades, logic has emerged as a fundamental paradigm
for understanding complex systems. It has turned out to be
instrumental in formal methods such as program verification, reasoning
about hardware, reasoning about real-time systems and, more recently,
probabilistic systems. Machine learning has recently had spectacular
successes in fields such as image recognition, game playing, and many
areas that involve the extraction of information from large datasets.
The use of statistical approaches yields practical solutions to
problems that seemed out of reach just a few years ago. The
understanding of why these approaches are so successful has lagged
behind the empirical successes. Using logic as the foundation to
understand machine learning to obtain the best of both worlds is a
major challenge.

The programme of the Logic & Learning School consists of ten lectures
of three hours each, starting with four introductory courses on
computational and statistical learning theory, reinforcement learning
and Bayesian inference, and six advanced courses on exciting and
recent developments relating logic and learning. The lectures target
an audience of logicians and computer scientists broadly construed and
do not assume any knowledge on machine learning. Accordingly, the
School represents a perfect opportunity to learn for both students and
working researchers. The School will take place in St Anne's College
in the centre of Oxford, an ideal learning environment with
accommodation and lunches provided on site. The lectures will be from
Monday 2 July in the morning to Friday 6 July in the afternoon, which
is the week before the main activities of FLoC.

Complete list of speakers

Borja Balle (Amazon Research Cambridge) Spectral algorithms for
automata learning
Richard Evans (DeepMind) Inductive logic programming and deep learning
Nina Gierasimczuk (Technical University of Danemark) Learning and
epistemic modal logic
Varun Kanade (University of Oxford) Statistical learning theory
Guy Katz (Stanford University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Verification of machine learning programs
Jan Křetínský (Technical University of Munich) Learning for verification
Stephen H. Muggleton (Imperial College London) Inductive logic programming
Doina Precup (McGill University and DeepMind) Reinforcement learning
Dan Roy (University of Toronto) Bayesian learning
James Worrell (University of Oxford) Computational learning theory

Registration

The summer school is a residential course held at St Anne's College,
Oxford. The registration fee includes bed & breakfast accommodation
for 6 days (1-6th July 2018), buffet lunches and evening meals. There
will be a banquet on 4th July at St John's College.

Arrivals are on 30th June 2018 and departures on 6th July. As the
number of rooms available at St Anne's is very limited, early
registration is strongly advised to avoid disappointment.

Registration fees are:

Early bird     £750      15 April, 2018

Late           £850      15 May, 2018

The summer school is perfectly aligned for students who want to attend
the four-yearly Federated Logic Conference (FLOC) taking place in
Oxford after the summer school. FLOC will feature a number of
AI-related events, including a public lecture by Stuart Russell at the
Sheldonian Theatre (http://www.floc2018.org/speaker/stuart-russell/),
a Debate in the Oxford Union Chamber on Ethics for Robots
(http://www.floc2018.org/speaker/debate/), and the Summit on Machine
Learning Meets Formal Methods
(http://www.floc2018.org/summit-on-machine-learning/).

Students and postdocs may also be interested in the FLOC Volunteer Programme:

http://www.floc2018.org/volunteer/

For registration and further information about the Logic & Learning
School (opens early February) see:

http://www.floc2018.org/fopss/

Information about FLOC 2018 can be found at:

http://www.floc2018.org/