UPF is jointly organizing the Deep Learning Symposium in Barcelona, which will gather world leaders in research in the field, linked to the city
UPF is jointly organizing the Deep Learning Symposium in Barcelona, which will gather world leaders in research in the field, linked to the city
Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) is jointly organizing the Deep Learning Barcelona Symposium (DLBCN), which will gather world-class researchers in the field who are conducting their research in Barcelona, or were trained at universities in the Catalan capital and are working abroad. The sixth edition of the symposium will take place on Thursday, 19 December, at La Salle-Ramon Llull University.
Deep learning is the dominant field in artificial intelligence (AI), and is responsible for major technological advances in recent years. Indeed, deep learning is behind globally successful products such as ChatGPT, and this has brought about exponential growth in the social interest in this aspect of data science.
In this edition, the symposium aims to go beyond the applications of deep learning in the field of computer science and, among other issues, will address the impact it can have on the discovery of new drugs. Like this one, many of the topics that the congress will address are linked to the 2024 Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry, which will mark this sixth edition of the DLBCN. This year, the focus will also be on the field of outreach, addressing both the need to better explain to society how artificial intelligence (AI) works and its applications for scientific dissemination.
The organizers of the Deep Learning Barcelona Symposium
The DLBCN is organized by scientists from the country’s university and industrial research centres. Concerning university research centres, in addition to UPF, La Salle-URL, the UAB’s Computer Vision Center, the University of Barcelona, the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, the Open University of Catalonia, and the Mila-Quebec AI Institute are involved. Meanwhile, the industrial research centres include Amazon, Apple, Meta, Sony AI, AstraZeneca, and Telefonica. The event is also sponsored by Meta, Apple, Google, Crisalix, the ELLIS Barcelona network, AstraZeneca, ZeroError, and the UOC’s eHealth Center.
Participation by researchers from the departments of Engineering and Translation and Language Sciences as organizers of or speakers at the symposium
In addition to being one of the organizers, Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) co-founded the symposium and hosted its first edition. It should be borne in mind that the headquarters of the DLBCN rotates, and each year it is held in different universities and companies linked to its organization.
Sitting on the Advisory Committee of the symposium is Coloma Ballester, of the UPF Department of Engineering, where she coordinates the Intelligent Multimodal Vision Analysis (IMVA) research group. She is also the director of the University’s Doctoral School. As an expert in this field, she is one of the DLBCN’s scientific co-organizers and co-founders. Also on the coordinating team of the scientific posters of the symposium is Laia Tarrés, a doctoral student at UPF in the field of computer vision.
Speakers from UPF will also be participating in this edition of the symposium, including Marco Baroni, one of the principal researchers of the Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (COLT) research group of the Department of Translation and Language Sciences, together with Mateo Mahaut and Emily Cheng, PhD students and researchers of the COLT.
The application of deep learning in pharmaceuticals and the dissemination of AI and with AI, highlights of the symposium
In all, the meeting will feature 25 talks and around sixty scientific posters will be on display, by local research groups, foreign universities such as EPFL or Stanford, and world-leading companies such as Deepmind, Amazon, and Apple.
The opening conference will be given by the chemist Noelia Ferruz, of the Centre for Genomic Regulation, who won a prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant in 2024. For the first time, the keynote talk will not focus on traditional applications of computing, such as computer vision or natural language processing, but will instead focus on the impact of deep learning on the discovery of new drugs. This expansion is aligned with the awarding of the 2024 Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry to scientists who pioneered deep learning. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for laying the foundations for AI. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry, meanwhile, went to David Baker, for computational protein design, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, for the prediction of protein structure using AI, which may have important applications in the design of drugs or vaccines.
With regard to outreach activities, the DLBCN 2024 will enjoy the collaboration of the team of communicators of Neurones Fregides, who will produce informative videos and interviews that will be distributed on the symposium’s new Instagram channel @dlbcn.ai, joining the English language scientific channels @dlbcnai on X and BlueSky. Finally, the organizers have also launched a podcast in English generated automatically on the basis of the scientific publications presented.
Messages about the event can be followed on the following social networks with the hashtag #DLBCN.