The 1st International SimTech Summer School on “Knowledge-driven machine learning and its applications” will take place from July 11 to 15, 2022 in Stuttgart.
Organized by SimTech’s Junior Research Group Leaders Paul-Christian Bürkner, Kristyna Pluhackova, and Benjamin Unger, the summer school aims to equip participants, primarily PhD researchers and early career PostDocs, with a basic understanding of how different aspects of knowledge, including but not limited to established simulation paradigms, can be induced in modern learning architectures.
“The balance between theoretical lectures and practical hands-on sessions will not only provide the participants with state-of-the-art tools for their current research but also initiate new research ideas and directions”, explains the organizing trio its motivation for such a summer school.
Despite the remarkable progress in machine learning (ML) techniques and, more generally, data-driven artificial intelligence frameworks in the last decades, most ML approaches are currently unable to extract interpretable information and knowledge from data. Moreover, predictions obtained from purely data-driven models may be physically inconsistent or even implausible. It is currently highly investigated how to include existing (expert) knowledge into the ML design to counteract these challenges. The careful integration of prior knowledge about a process, such as physical or chemical insights, into the learning procedure not only improves the quality of the learned representation but also tends to speed up the learning process with fewer data samples.
Taking place in the heart of Stuttgart, the scientific program covers diverse scientific areas, ranging from mathematics, over physics to chemistry, which is assured for by contributions from speakers such as Prof. George Em Karniadakis (Brown University), Prof. Tilman Plehn (University of Heidelberg), Prof. Pietro Faccioli (University of Trento), and Prof. Pascal Friedrich (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology).
“We are very delighted that we were able to win those renowned experts for our summer school which is the first of its kind for the Cluster of Excellence. The experts will provide insights into different aspect of knowledge-infused machine learning and at the same time provide useful and valuable aspects for SimTech and its community”, underlines Benjamin Unger.