As in its previous edition, this year’s summer school organised by the University of Udine, IP4FVG and DITEDI will again feature an international audience, with Area Science Park and DIH Udine among the main partners. In the 2023 edition, the 70 participants who will attend morning classes and afternoon hands-on workshops this week (3-7 July) come indeed from 8 different countries, including Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Ukraine, and South Korea. They include PhD students, researchers, and professionals and technicians from digital and manufacturing companies.

A large turnout in this year’s edition is also expected from business users, with 19 professionals coming from the manufacturing industry attending lectures and specific afternoon workshops dedicated to business applications.

As every year, classes will be held by internationally renowned professors. These include Martin Danelljan, a professor at ETH Zurich who specialises in visual tracking, Björn Ommer, a professor in Munich, where he heads the Computer Vision and Learning group, and Nello Cristianini, a Gorizia-born Italian professor teaching at the University of Bath (UK), considered one of the most influential scientists of the last decade in the field of Artificial Intelligence and author of the book “La scorciatoia. Come le macchine sono diventate intelligenti senza pensare in modo umano” [The Shortcut. How machines have become smart without thinking humanly].

Lecturers also include Giuseppe Serra, a professor at the University of Udine, recently ranked among the world’s 2,000 most influential scholars in various fields of Artificial Intelligence. The school’s scientific committee is composed of professors Gian Luca Foresti and Christian Micheloni from the University of Udine and Professor Rita Cucchiara from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

The topics to be covered will be the hottest ones addressed in recent months in the field of Artificial Intelligence: Generative AI, computer vision, neural networks, large language models.

“This edition of the summer school”, say school directors Professor Gian Luca Foresti and Professor Christian Micheloni, “showcases trailblazing topics in the field of research in artificial intelligence ranging from new generative and adversarial techniques to well-known discriminative techniques, making important theoretical contributions and proposing advanced solutions in important application contexts. The techniques presented during the experts’ speeches find application in a variety of fields such as medicine, cyber security, manufacturing, service industry, and the cultural sphere. The distinguishing feature of the school is its extensive laboratory training capabilities.”

The event will also feature exchanges between the academic and the industrial and professional worlds: networking opportunities between students and professionals throughout the lectures but especially during the panel debate scheduled for the late afternoon of Wednesday 5 July starting at 05:30 p.m. It will be hosted in the Tower of Confindustria Udine, where participants will have the opportunity to engage with three mentors from academia and industry, on technical and ethical issues related to Artificial Intelligence and its application in the labour landscape and in new frontiers of research.

“The goal of the school” – pointed out Francesco Contin, project manager of DITEDI – “is to create a point of contact between businesses and the world of research to drive innovation in products and services and production processes.”

Go to AI-DLDA Summer School website