This workshop is the first network meeting of the SMASH project. SMASH is a multidisciplinary program centered on developing cutting-edge Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications for science and humanities. These include climate science, precision medicine, fundamental physics and linguistics. It is co-funded by the European Union via the Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND action and connects scholars from five top-level institutions in Slovenia with 25 associated partners, Slovenian businesses and academic institutions globally.
The First SMASHing workshop will gather scientists working in the SMASH research areas with the aim to create a multi-disciplinary environment that will foster knowledge exchange between different fields and between academia and industry, thereby building the SMASH community. The workshop will be structured around discussions of different classes of ML/AI techniques, followed up with examples on the successful application in SMASH research areas. More specifically the workshop will focus on:
- Large language models/Graphs/transforemrs and time series
- Computer vision/generative models
- Statistical approaches (simulation based inference, etc)
- Reinforcement/unsupervised learning
In addition to invited talks the workshop will have discussion sessions and there will be plenty of time to exchange ideas and build the community.
Speakers include:
- Todor Ganchev (Head of the Artificial Intelligence Lab, Technical University of Varna, SMASH supervisor) - ML and animal communication
- Lukas Heinrich (Technical University, Munich), TBC - Foundation models & scientific discovery
- Mario Jurić (Un. of Washington, SMASH supervisor), TBC - ML and survey science in astro
- Tilman Plehn (Heidelberg University) - ML/AI in particle physics
- Matthew Purver (Queen Mary Un. of London, SMASH supervisor) - Large language models and application to science
- Baseerat Romshoo (Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research, TROPOS) - Multi-layer perceptron in atmospheric physics
- Lucia Sacchi (Un. of Pavia), ML in biomedical research
- Tanja Samardžić (Un. of Zurich, Language and Space Lab, SMASH GB member) - ML in Linguistics
- Uroš Seljak (UC Berkeley, SMASH supervisor) - Scientific discovery and ML in cosmology
- Berend Snijder (ETH Zurich, Institute of Molecular Systems Biology) - ML in personalized medicine
- James Alves (Un. of Amsterdam, GRAPPA Institute, SMASH supervisor), TBC - SBI, application to astrophysics
- Mark Winands (Maastricht University, Netherlands) - Reinforcement learning and application to science
Soft skill lecturers:
- Jana Javornik (Un. of Leeds, SMASH Ethics advisor), TBC - Ethics in AI
- Paul McGuiness - How to write grant applications
