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Socials

Vishakha Agrawal · Sara Beery

Talk on AI for biodiversity and closing the gap between academic research and real-world impact. Nontraditional paths to research and interdisciplinary education. Register for the socials here.

Maria Luisa Santiago · Miguel Alonso Jr · William Berrios

Launched in January 2018, leaders from academia and industry in Artificial Intelligence, Education, Research, Finance, Community and Social Impact Nonprofits banded together to create a group that would be focused on “Creating Opportunity for LatinX in AI.”

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to displace workers of marginalized populations including those of Latinx origin. AI is already perpetuating social bias and prejudice because it lacks representation of LatinX professionals in the AI industry. Machine learning algorithms can encode a discriminative bias during training with real-world data in which underrepresented groups are not properly characterized or represented. A question quickly emerges: how can we make sure Machine Learning does not discriminate against people from minority groups because of the color of their skin, gender, ethnicity, or historically unbalanced power structures in society?

Even more, as the tech industry does not represent the entire population, underrepresented populations in computing such as Hispanics, women, African-Americans, and Native Americans have limited control over the direction of machine learning breakthroughs. As an ethnicity, the Latinx population is an interesting case study for this research as members are comprised of all skin tones with a wide regional distribution across the world.

In this session, we claim that …

Jennifer Hobbs · Sujoy Ganguly

Lapsed" (aka. Former) Physicists are plentiful in the machine learning community. Inspired by Wine and Cheese seminars at many institutions, this BYOWC (Bring Your Own Wine and Cheese) event is an informal opportunity to connect with members of the community. Hear how others made the transition between fields. Discuss how your physics training prepared you to switch fields or what synergies between physics and machine learning excite you the most. Share your favorite physics jokes your computer science colleagues don't get, and just meet other cool people. Open to everyone, not only physicists; you'll just have to tolerate our humor. Wine and Cheese encouraged, but not required.

Taylor Marrison

Come learn and share best practices collaborating with researchers around the world, and discuss how to bridge the remote work, cultural, and social divides.

Yunpeng Li · Olga Isupova · Nika Haghtalab · Adam White · Diego Granziol

Come and watch experts debate whether AI research and development should be controlled by a regulatory body or government oversight, with Charles Isbell (Georgia Tech), Michael Kearns (UPenn), Rich Sutton (Alberta), Steve Roberts (Oxford), Ti John (Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence / Aalto), Suchi Saria (John Hopkins), Shakir Mohamed (DeepMind), Martha White (Alberta).

AI has found its way into our everyday life, from healthcare to custom control, creditability check to autonomous driving. Its power is continuously growing, and gradually becomes easier to access for organisations and individuals. This leads to a natural question of the debate.

Enjoy an entertaining social event with 8 leading AI/ML academics and researchers debating the topic following the British Parliament Style. You are welcome to tell us your opinion of the topic before the debate poll. We will also host live votes right before and after the debate to see whether you are convinced by our debaters. Do join us for an unmatched fun and thought-provoking Social.

Charles Earl · Victor Silva

For over four years, Black in AI has been a place for sharing ideas, fostering collaborations, and discussing initiatives to increase the presence of Black people in the field of Artificial Intelligence. If you are in AI and either self-identify as Black, African, Diaspora or an ally, please join us at ICML21 to discuss interests, challenges, opportunities, collaborations, and other related issues. We plan to gather for a one-hour town hall and Q&A session. We'll then continue with informal socializing for the remaining hour.

Yi Wan

Please join us if you are interested in continuing reinforcement learning problems where the agent has a single non-episodic stream of experience. In many cases, and most importantly for natural intelligence, the agent is never reset to a state that it has visited before. What is the right objective for these problems? How is the problem different from the episodic ones? Plz join this social if you are also curious about these questions!

Katharina Beckh · Vanessa Faber

[ Virtual ]

From hunting mythical creatures, transcribing TV shows, compositionality and explainability in Deep Visual Learning to task descriptions for language models – Join us for our two-part meeting on Natural Language Processing! We will start with a panel and audience discussion including elevator pitches given by researchers and international partners of the German competence centers on AI. Afterwards we move to Gather Town, where we will have topical corners, room for further discussions, and a hang-out space for conversations in an informal atmosphere.

Michael Running Wolf

Papa Reo (papareo.nz) is a multilingual language initiative grounded in Indigenous knowledge and ways of thinking and powered by cutting edge data science. We will present our work on the importance of indigenous sovereignty over data, platforms, and technologies used in the preservation, promotion, and revitalisation of language and culture. We will also cover some of our latest tools such as a real time pronunciation model which aims to decolonise the sound of te reo Māori. Papa Reo is led by Te Reo Irirangi o Te Hiku o Te Ika (Te Hiku Media), a charitable media organisation, collectively belonging to the Far North iwi of Ngāti Kuri, Te Aupouri, Ngai Takoto, Te Rārawa and Ngāti Kahu. Te Hiku Media is an iwi communications hub for radio, online video and media services. Māori language revitalisation is a core focus, and Te Hiku Media’s vision and mission were confirmed by a meeting of kaumātua (elders) and other native speakers of Te Reo Māori.

A QA and informal social will follow this talk

Olivia Choudhury · Vaidheeswaran Archana

As a part of the WiML Un-Workshop at ICML 2021, on July 21, 2:30 - 3:30 pm EDT, we will host a Mentoring Social, virtually on GatherTown.

The social includes six mentoring roundtables hosted in parallel, where the mentors will target a diverse set of non-technical topics, such as advice on conducting research in both academia and industry, addressing the two-body problem, grant writing strategies, and career paths including non-linear trajectory to Machine Learning. We are excited to have mentors from industry and academia, including Been Kim, Shakir Mohamed, Lalana Kagal, Dina Obeid, Angelique Taylor, and Anna Goldenberg.

In addition, we created a general space/hall in GatherTown, where attendees can socialize with each other. Feel free to reach out to our volunteers in GatherTown for any questions or comments. We look forward to seeing you there!

Tahiya Chowdhury

This social will focus on a discussion on finding a balance between the good and the ugly side of AI research. On one side, AI promises automation and availability that can relieve humans from mundane tasks. On the other, the power of AI in society comes with the price of systematic bias, misinformation, and disruption in the labor market. In this fast approaching field of research, how to find meaning in our research that can serve as a moral compass so that we don’t lose focus on problems that can make a true positive impact on society? The social will be interactive where participants will share their thoughts and experiences on societal impact, public opinion of AI, and AI ethics in connection to finding purpose in research and works on AI.

Alice Zheng · Xian Wang

Join us for 40 minutes of Power Vinyasa yoga, followed by a guided meditation. The event will last 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes. It will be held twice during ICML, once in a morning session and once in an evening session. Pick the one that works best for your schedule, or come to both!

Brenda Ng · Alexander Gu · Jason Yosinski · Rosanne Liu · Luis Granados · Suzana Ilic

Making AI research more inviting, inclusive, and accessible is a difficult task, but the movement to do so is close to many researchers' hearts. Progress toward democratizing AI research has been centered around making knowledge (e.g. class materials), established ideas (e.g. papers), and technologies (e.g. code) more accessible. However, open, online resources are only part of the equation. Growth as a researcher requires not only learning by consuming information individually, but hands-on practicewhiteboarding, coding, plotting, debugging, and writing collaboratively, with either mentors or peers. Of course, making ""collaborators"" more universally accessible is fundamentally more difficult than, say, ensuring all can access arXiv papers, because scaling people and research groups is much harder than scaling websites. Can we nevertheless make access to collaboration itself more open? Can we flatten access to peers and mentors so the opportunities available to those at the best industrial and academic labs are more broadly available to all entrants to our burgeoning field? How can we kick-start remote, non-employment based research collaborations more effectively? This social is designed to discuss these topics and help you meet potential collaborators, find interesting ideas, and kick-start your next project.

Alan Chan · Dhawal Gupta

Show up to play some (online, possibly board) games with people! We’ll have some suggestions but feel free to bring your own game!

Dibya Ghosh · Hager Radi · Derek Li · Alex Ayoub · Erfan Miahi · Rishabh Agarwal · Charline Le Lan · Abhishek Naik · John Martin · Shruti Mishra · Adrien Ali Taiga

We invite anyone interested in reinforcement learning to join us in a GatherTown-format social. The goal is to connect both new and experienced RL researchers, to share ideas and discuss their recent work. Folks from anywhere in the world are welcome to participate, provided the timing is compatible with their schedule.

Using Process Mining and Machine Learning to Optimize Business Processes in HealthCare, in this case, data will be used to show the various process mining approaches to optimize the healthcare processes using various algorithms and machine learning use integration with Process mining.

Destani Engel

Join us for a virtual trivia night and an opportunity to learn more about the work we are doing at Amii! Teams will be assembled during the event and the winning team will walk away with a $25 gift card towards a celebratory meal from UberEATS.

Vishakha Agrawal · Shubha Chacko

Share stories with and listen to anecdotes from fellow queer + trans folks from around the world. Register for the socials here

Mementor Beta

The Mementor portal should help us scheduling spontaneous virtual mentor sessions during ICML and beyond. Our goal is to enable mentorship opportunities for researchers in machine learning, both as mentors and mentees, with a special focus on under-represented minorities.

Our initial goal is to provide a platform to support conversations between mentors and mentees. The mode of operation initially will be a “lighter” version, where a mentor, at a time of their convenience, has a video call, which everybody willing as a mentee can join. No person-to-person commitment.

The mentorship session serves as a platform to share experiences. These could be technical and research related (e.g., research topics and technical discussions), or could be about scientific communication (e.g., paper writing, presentation, networking), or could also be mental health, burnouts, work ethics, PhD life etc. The goal is to facilitate sharing of experiences between members of the community which would not happen otherwise.

Note: The mentorship sessions are not a platform for self-promotion or promotion of products.