The University of Cambridge Machine Learning Group and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Empirical Inference Department in Tübingen are two of the world’s leading centres for machine learning research. In 2014, we launched a new and exciting initiative whereby a small group of select PhD candidates are jointly supervised at both institutions. The principal supervisors are Carl Rasmussen, Neil Lawrence, Ferenc Huszar, Jose Miguel Hernandez-Lobato, David Krueger, Adrian Weller and Rika Antonova at Cambridge University, and Bernhard Schölkopf and other research group leaders at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen. This program is specific for candidates whose research interests are well-matched to both the principal supervisors in Cambridge and the MPI for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen. The overall duration of the PhD will be four years, with roughly three years spent at one location, and one year spent at the other location, including initial coursework at the University of Cambridge. Successful PhDs will be officially granted by the University of Cambridge.

Passionate PhD and Postdoc candidates are sought for research on machine learning for graph and temporal data. The research topics can be found at the provided project link.

This Ph.D. position is focused on machine learning in realistic settings referring to statistical and system characteristics such as robustness to limited data and distribution shifts. For the application side, the candidate will collaborate with the Institute of Marine Research on valuable image data of the marine environment.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can facilitate new paradigms and solutions in almost every research field. Collaboration is essential to achieve tangible and concrete progress in impactful and meaningful AI and ML research, due to its transdisciplinary nature. Come and meet University of Pretoria (UP) academics that are embracing and exploring the opportunities that AI and ML offer to transcend the conventional boundaries of their disciplines. Join the discussion to debate this new frontier of opportunities and challenges that may enable you to look beyond the obvious, and discover new directions and opportunities that we may offer for tomorrow — together!

This is my C-14 Impaler gauss rifle! There are many like it, but this one is mine!" - A terran marine If you have never heard of a terran marine before, then you have probably missed out on playing the very engaging and entertaining strategy computer game, StarCraft. However, don’t despair, because what we have in store might be even more exciting! In this interactive session, we will take you through, step-by-step, on how to train a team of terran marines to defeat a team of marines controlled by the built-in game AI in StarCraft II. How will we achieve this? Using multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). MARL is a useful framework for building distributed intelligent systems. In MARL, multiple agents are trained to act as individual decision-makers of some larger system, while learning to work as a team. We will show you how to use Mava (https://github.com/instadeepai/Mava), a newly released research framework for MARL to build a multi-agent learning system for StarCraft II. We will provide the necessary guidance, tools and background to understand the key concepts behind MARL, how to use Mava building blocks to build systems and how to train a system from scratch. We will conclude the session by briefly sharing various exciting real-world application areas for MARL at InstaDeep, such as large-scale autonomous train navigation and circuit board routing. These are problems that become exponentially more difficult to solve as they scale. Finally, we will argue that many of humanity’s most important practical problems are reminiscent of the ones just described. These include, for example, the need for sustainable management of distributed resources under the pressures of climate change, or efficient inventory control and supply routing in critical distribution networks, or robotic teams for rescue missions and exploration. We believe MARL has enormous potential to be applied in these areas and we hope to inspire you to get excited and interested in MARL and perhaps one day contribute to the field!