Almende, our sponsor for the 3rd NSVKI student conference, is organizing a company day on Friday, the 6th of April 2012. On this day, the Almende Group opens its doors to advanced (Master) students and recently graduated job hunters, looking for an exciting internship or first job.

You will have the chance to get to know some of our subsidiary companies, meet the people, and hear about possibilities for working or learning at either of them. In the left panel on this page you can take al ook at the companies that are participating.

Almende can accomodate only 30 visitors, so sign up soon!

On the AWAI 2012, on Friday, we will be visiting the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. There is now more information on our programme there:

10 uur: Opening (Danny De Schreye)
10.05 uur: Machine Learning Group (Prof. Luc De Raedt)

An overview will be given of a number of core activities around Machine Learning in the DTAI group, where the emphasis is on processing structured data (relational representations), usage of probabilistic logics and the integration of constraint programming and data mining. This will be illustrated using applications in game playing, robotics, vision and life sciences.

11.00 uur: Language Intelligence & Information Retrieval group (Prof. Sien Moens)

Machine Understanding of Text: A Complex Puzzle to Unravel
Marie-Francine Moens (Information Retrieval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)

 

Machine understanding of text is a long-term goal of artificial intelligence research. Current technologies are already quite successful at extracting factual information from text. Their scope is, however, limited to, for instance, the recognition of individual events and their participants, and their temporal and locational settings. Connecting the different, often uncertain extractions into more complex discourse structures (e.g., the timeline of the events in a story, the premises and conclusions in argumentation, concepts that are composed of events and their causal relations) is much more difficult. In addition, the validity of an extraction is usually reinforced by the availability of other information present in a text or in other sources.

In this lecture we discuss current technologies and their performance for story understanding, argumentation recognition and concept extraction. We point to the problems that need further research and to promising techniques that rely on language models, alignment, evidence combination and uncertainty reasoning.

We illustrate the talk with our own research results in European and national projects.

12 uur: Lunch
13.30 uur: Computational Neuroscience group (dr. Marijn van Vliet)
14.30 Afsluiting

The day program of the 3rd NSVKI Student conference is now online, with abstracts of the talks we’ll hear. A short recap:

12:30 – Reception, lunch
13:15 – Opening talk by invited speaker Niels Taatgen (researcher RUG)
14:15 – Break
14:30 – Willem van Willigen (VU): “Adaptive Sensor Systems: Design & Applications”
15:00 – BioMAV (RU)
15:30 – Break
15:45 – Coert van Gemeren (UU): “Concept generation for part-based visual object detection”
16:15 – Mike Farjam (RU): “Greed, Envy, Jealousy. A tool for more efficient resouce management”
16:45 – End

The student conference will be held in Utrecht, in the Ruppert building (Uithof), in room D. There is no registration cost, nor a lunch fee.

Due to some slight organizational mishaps, we have decided to postpone the 3rd NSVKI Student Conference to the 20th of January 2012. Our apologies for any inconvenience, more information will follow soon.

Once again the Dutch Study Association for Artificial Intelligence (Nederlandse Studievereniging Kunstmatige Intelligentie) is organizing a conference for everyone studying AI and related fields in the Netherlands at undergraduate level. During this conference AI students from the entire country are given the unique opportunity to present their work (theses, projects, papers) to their fellow students.

More information can be found here.