Yesterday we finished our third Sheffield school. As with the previous events we’ve ended with a one day workshop focussed on Gaussian processes, this time on using them for feature extraction. With such a busy summer it was pretty intimidating to take on the school so shortly after we have sent out decisions on NIPS. As ever the group came through with the organisation though. This time out Zhenwen Dai was the main organiser, but once again he could never have done it without the rest of the group chipping in. It’s another reminder that when you are working with great people, great things can happen.

The school always gives me a special kind of energy, that which you can only get from seeing people enthuse about the things you care about. We were very lucky to have such a great group of speakers: Carl Rasmussen, Dan Cornford, Mike Osbourne, Rich Turner, Joaquin Quinonero Candela, and then at the workshop Carl Henrik Ek, Andreas Damianou, Victor Prisacariu and Chaochao Lu. It always part feels like a family reunion (we had brief overlaps between Carl, Joaquin (Sheffield Tap!), Lehel Csato and Magnus Rattray, all four of whom were in Sheffield for the 2005 GPRT) and part like a welcoming event for new researchers. We covered important new developments in probabilistic numerics (Mike Osborne) and time series processing (Rich Turner) and Control (Carl Rasmussen). Joaquin also gave us insights into the evidence and then presented to a University-wide audience on machine learning at Facebook.

In the workshop we also saw how GPs can be used for multiview learning (Carl Henrik Ek) audio processing (Rich Turner) deep learning (Andreas Damianou) shape representation (Victor Prisacariu) and face identification (Chaochao Lu).

We’ve now taught around about 140 students through the schools in Sheffield and a further 60 through roadshows to Uganda and Colombia. Perhaps the best bit was watching everyone head for the Devonshire Cat after the last lecture to continue the debate. I think we all probably remember summer schools from our early times in research that were influential (for me the NATO ASI on Machine Learning and Generalisation, for many it will be the regular MLSS events). It’s nice to hope that this series of events may have also done something to influence others. The next scheduled events will be in roadshows in Australia in February with Trevor Cohn and Kenya in June with Ciira wa Maina and John Quinn (although we plan to make the Kenyan event it will be more data science focussed than GPs).

Thanks to all in the group for organising!