The 1st TC2 Summer School on Deep Learning on Graphs concluded on PolyU campus on the last day of August. Organised by Technical Committee 2 (TC2) of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), the event saw a team of five international speakers delivering six seminars to nine local and seven non-local students, selected out of a total of 25 applicants, evenly split between MSc and PhD levels.
Prof. Andrea Torsello from Ca' Foscari University of Venice kickstarted the event with a seminar covering the history of graph (deep) learning, highlighting the challenging issues faced by researchers in this area. Prof. Xiao Bai from Beihang University showed how graph neural networks can be applied to the processing of 3D computer vision data. Dr. Luca Rossi from PolyU drew the students’ attention to the importance of creating AI models whose predictions are interpretable and explainable. Finally, Prof. Edwin Hancock from University of York talked about the exciting opportunities lying at the intersection of quantum machine learning and graph analysis. The event also included two PyTorch coding sessions delivered by Dr Luca Cosmo from Ca' Foscari University of Venice where the students had an opportunity to put the concepts they had just learned into practice.
The event was free for the attendees and financially sponsored by the PolyU Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. The Summer School was the first of a series of similar events that TC2 plans to organise in alternate years with the Joint IAPR International Workshops on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition and Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition (S+SSPR), a bi-annual event now in its 20th iteration jointly organised by TC1 and the TC2, respectively the first and second oldest technical committees of the IAPR.
