This year the
International Conference on Machine Learning took place in
Lille, France. It was a fantastic event to bring research from a diverse areas of
Machine Learning in a collaborative setting. The conference went down really well. There was an immense amount of research shared within the community. Also, a noticeable increase in number of people that attended the conference this year. The schedule was broken down into conferences, workshops, and tutorials. Even an open question and discussion session was available after each session. The banquet was a joyful experience. However, both the banquet and the local Lille food experience was much to be desired. Cheese was on display, in all forms, and showing itself in every french menu. For vegetarians, Lille offers cheese, french fries, and salad. Some of the most popular areas of research covered included:
Deep Learning,
Topic Modelling,
Structured Prediction, Networks and Graphs,
Natural Language Processing,
Reinforcement Learning, and
Transfer Learning. Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, and
Word2Vec were the most popular researched topics in attendance. Many of the presented
papers can be found also on
Arxiv. The conference also showed how far Machine Learning has come as well as the level of popularity it has garnered over the years. Machine Learning is proving to be an invaluable area in a multitude of domains which is having profound effects for business and society as a whole. But, one thing was reverberated throughout the conference that even now there is still a lot to be discovered before Artificial Intelligence can truly match the abilities of a human being.