Transylvanian

Machine Learning
Summer School
(TMLSS)
Summary of the first edition

July 2018, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Transylvanian Machine Learning Summer School 2018,
Summary of the first edition.
Issued October 2018.

All images are copyright of the TMLSS 2018 organisers.

Authors of the report:

Razvan Pascanu (razp@google.com)
Viorica Patraucean (viorica@google.com)
Doina Precup (doinap@google.com)

TMLSS 2018 organisers:

Doina Precup, McGill University and DeepMind

Luigi Malago, Romanian Institute of Science and Technology
Razvan Florian, Romanian Institute of Science and Technology
Razvan Pascanu, DeepMind
Viorica Patraucean, DeepMind
Prologue
The TMLSS project was born from our concerns regarding the state of the higher education
system in Eastern Europe (EE), where our roots are and where we started our own
education. Due to various political and economical factors, young people in this region -
although very talented and passionate - are deprived of the right environment to learn and
to reach their potential. We hope this school organised in EE can make a positive impact in
their careers, by giving them the opportunity to learn, network, and get advice from
renowned experts from all over the world. We focused on Machine Learning and Artificial
Intelligence as this is our field of expertise and is becoming an important topic in both
industry and academia, with large potential to impact our everyday life. However, similar
initiatives would be very useful in other fields as well and we dare to hope that other
experts will join our efforts.

The first edition of TMLSS was held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and brought together talented
participants and amazing speakers from EE and the rest of the world, for six intense days of
lectures, practical sessions, discussions, and networking activities. Given the success of the
first edition, measured through the positive feedback provided by all the people involved
(participants, speakers, sponsors), we are committed to continuing the project and we hope
we will enjoy the same support from the local and international communities in the future.
Although this school is a small scale event, aimed at raising awareness for EE, the school is
not restricted to the region. We hope to enhance communication between communities,
within EE but globally as well, and to ease access to knowledge for all interested in Artificial
Intelligence. So we hope everyone felt welcome and we welcome everyone to apply and
participate to future editions of the summer school.

We are extremely grateful for all the support and help we received in making this school
happen. We thank Luigi Malago and Razvan Florian from Romanian Institute of Science and
Technology, Cluj-Napoca, for their active involvement in the organisation of the school.

We thank the speakers (Dumitru Erhan, Guido Montufar, Jan Chorowski, Kyunghyun Cho,
Lucian Busoniu, Luigi Malago, Maria-Florina Balcan, Marius Leordeanu, Nicolas Heess, Oriol
Vinyals, Raia Hadsell, Ulrich Paquet, David Szepesvari, Diana Borsa, Mihaela Rosca, Wojtek
Czarnecki) for donating their precious time and for sharing with generosity their knowledge
and research ideas.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 3

We thank the local partner institutions: Romanian Institute of Science and Technology,
mainly Cristina Bompa, Laura Rus, Larisa Calo, and Camelia Cinc for help with the local
organisation, and Babes-Bolyai University, through Simona Motogna, Anca Andreica and
Laura Diosan, for providing lecture rooms and accommodation for participants and for their
overall support. A big thank you to teaching assistants and volunteers, whose efforts were
crucial in providing a friendly environment for all the participants.

We are extremely grateful to our sponsors and individual donors whose generosity was
essential in making this event a high quality learning experience but affordable and
accessible to everybody: DeepMind and Siemens at Diamond level; Amazon, Artificial
Intelligence Journal, Everseen, Intel, and The Curious AI Company at Platinum level;
Bitdefender, Bosch, certSIGN, Continental, facebook, General Intelligence, Rakuten, Google,
and Tora at Gold level; Accesa and Catalysts at Silver level.

Last, but not least, we would like to thank to several individuals whose contributions were
paramount in making the event a success: Shakir Mohamed and Ulrich Paquet for sharing
advice from their Indaba experience; Elena Pascanu for advice and support throughout the
organisation of the school, prof. Ion Bica for endorsing and promoting the event, Gabi
Marchidan for all the help in organisation and for an unlimited source of humour that got us
through the tough moments, Cosmin Huruiala and Vlad Piersec for useful advice about Cluj.

Razvan Pascanu

Viorica Patraucean

Doina Precup

TMLSS 2018 report — page 4

OUTLINE

MOTIVATION ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… page

6

(Lack of) diversity in affiliation in AI/ML

(Lack of) diversity in gender in AI/ML
Access to education in AI / ML
Eastern Europe - raw potential for AI / ML
Eastern Europe - where do things break and possible causes
Eastern Europe - positive outlook

OUR INITIATIVE: TMLSS ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. page 21

Organisers, partners, and sponsors
Speakers
Schedule
Selection process
Selection statistics
Overall assessment of the applications
Budget
Feedback & feedback quotes
Notes on feedback

WHAT’S NEXT ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. page 39

Estimated budget for next edition

WHY EE IS THE PLACE FOR SUCH EVENTS ………………………………………………….. page 41

TMLSS 2018 report — page 5

Motivation
The field of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence has seen incredible growth in the
last few years, in both academia and industry. Main AI and ML conferences’ size seems to
almost double every year, with a new phenomenon emerging - conferences being sold out
(e.g. NIPS 2017 and 2018, ECCV 2018 etc).

Source: Source:
http://www.aiindex.org/2017-report.pdf https://twitter.com/nipsconference/stat
us/909064018559590402?lang=en

The industry is becoming also deeply involved in the field. Giants like Google, Facebook,
Amazon, Baidu, Intel and many more are regularly present at these conferences. For
example, for ICML 2017, about 20%-25% of accepted papers had industry involvement
(source). See below-right a breakdown of top institutions according to number of accepted
papers at the conference. Large corporations, beside carrying and publishing a lot of
research, are also investing in the field, offering scholarships or residency programs, e.g.
here, here, here or here.

More importantly, governments started paying

attention to the field, considering it as a strategic
investment (see here). A list of governments openly
talking about the importance of AI include:
Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, the EU
Commision, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy,
Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, UAE,
UK and US.
Some governments are investing in AI. Examples of
Source:
such involvement are: https://medium.com/@karpathy/icml-ac
cepted-papers-institution-stats-bad8d2
● Australia is investing AU$29.9 millions over 4 943f5d

years in AI

TMLSS 2018 report — page 6

 ● Canada is providing CAD$125 millions in funds for AI
● China plans a massive investment of $150 billion until 2030
● Denmark provided DKK 75 million in 2018 and DKK 125 million each year until 2025
● EU will increase its investment from €500 million to €1.5 billion by the end of 2020
● France will invest until 2022 €1.5 billion in AI as outlined in the AI for humanity plan.
● Singapore launched AI Singapore, a five year 150 million program
● South Korea has announced a five year ₩2.2 trillion investment in AI
● UK outlined their strategy to grow the AI sector with a £0.95 billion package
● The US government recognises the strategic role of AI technology. According to a
report by Govini, in its unclassified 2017 budget, the Pentagon spent approximately
$7.4 billion on AI.

(Lack of) Diversity in Affiliation in AI / ML

While there might be some uncertainty on how far along we really are with regard to AI
technology, one thing is clear. Machine learning, in one form or another, from simply
smarter devices to self-driving cars, from robotics to search engines, will impact and is
impacting everyone's life: how we interact with each other socially, how we entertain
ourselves, the job market, how we treat illnesses or how we do science.

Statistics on the research output in the field* (see figure below) show a disproportionate
distribution of where this research is carried out, the field being largely dominated by
research centres from US, Canada, some Western Europe countries (e.g. UK, Germany,
France) and China and Japan to some extent.

Source: http://www.jfgagne.ai/talent/

TMLSS 2018 report — page 7

However, if machine learning is to impact our future, even in a minor way, we should all
have the opportunity and the ability to be part of this process, to make sure that the change
reflects everyone’s needs and aspirations. In this context, making ML/AI education
accessible to everyone becomes crucial.

See here or here or here for in depth discussions on the importance of diversity. One
argument is that the tools we build reflect the culture and needs of those who build them.
Without a diverse set of researchers, we cannot build new technology that benefits
everyone. Our background influences what problems we tackle and the way we approach
them, but it also determines our potential inability to notice certain types of biases, for
example in the data we use to train our models. While following good practices and
guidelines might help in preventing intentional discrimination, a lot of negative
consequences can come from unintentional or unconscious biases -- and diversity in the
field might be crucial in fighting effectively against these.

An additional argument refers to disproportionate economic and social impact on different

regions of the world or sections of the population, which can increase social inequality
considerably (e.g. see this presentation). Particularly the natural barriers between countries
(e.g. need of visas to access education or work in a foreign country, language barrier,
cultural barrier, etc) makes transfer of knowledge difficult.

How to fix the diversity problem in AI research (or elsewhere) is an open social problem with
no straightforward answer or quick fixes.

There are a number of ongoing projects that are trying to improve diversity and access to
knowledge in AI for underrepresented groups, e.g.: Deep learning indaba, LatinX in AI, Black
in AI, Deep AfricaAI, while some other important initiatives try to improve access to
education in general, e.g. Coursera, TwentyTu.

In this context, we argue that Eastern Europe is an underrepresented group as well,

being isolated from the AI community and having a reduced impact in the AI research
overall. In this report, we will analyse the situation in EE and some of the underlying
factors, and present our initiatives and recommendations for supporting the ML
community in EE.

Current ML related events in the region include RAAI, TFML, PL in ML, DeepBayes, LeMAS.
Our goal is to join the efforts of strengthening the local research community by creating
high-quality international events that welcome participants from all over the world in EE.

* Statistics are collected based on publications in main ML conferences such as ICLR, NIPS and ICML in the last few years and
provide an english-centric view .See the source of the plot for how the data was collected and what it represents.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 8

(Lack of) Diversity in Gender IN AI / ML

ML / AI research suffers from a significant gender imbalance; see male to female ratio for
authors of NIPS, ICML and ICLR submission in 2017 in figure below. The problem is larger
than ML, the lack of gender diversity being rampant in STEM sciences all over the world.
There are a multitude of causes, from momentum of the status quo to explicit
discrimination, some of it even disguised as cultural norm. And this imbalance has real
consequences, from the type of problems we address and type of solutions we find
acceptable, to biases in our datasets. For a detailed discussion of the topic we suggest
looking here or here or here; particularly see the talk given by Daphne Koller at ICLR 2017 or
this article.

Several efforts try to address this issue and encourage or provide support for women in
STEM, e.g. Women In ML, Women in CV, Black girls code, Stanford AI4ALL, etc. However,
correcting for the skewed distribution will be a long process that will need continuous effort
from the entire community. We want to openly acknowledge this issue and join the efforts
of encouraging and supporting women researchers in ML and AI.

Source:
https://medium.com/element-ai-research-lab/estimating-the-gender-ratio-of-ai-researchers-around-the-world-81d2b8d
be9c3

TMLSS 2018 report — page 9

Access to Education in AI / ML

Access to knowledge is strongly correlated with the concentration of expertise in a few

hubs, and is one of the reasons EE fairs worse compared with other regions of the world.
Indeed, organising for example a high-quality master program in ML requires experts in the
field to teach, so naturally these education programs have the same distribution as the
expertise in ML. However, access to knowledge refers to more than just how the expertise is
spread over the globe. It also refers to e.g., the cost of accessing education programs in ML
(master programs, conferences, summer schools) compared to income, the ability to travel
(e.g. see this discussion regarding US visa ban or this), etc.

To get an idea on the affordability of ML education programs, let us focus on the cost of
attending conferences and summer schools in the field. The registration fees for attending
top ML related conferences, as a student, in 2018, not including accomodation, travel or
food, are on the order of: 300€ for ECCV or AISTATS, ~360-380€ for ICML, NIPS or ICLR,
~400€ for AAAI, ~490€ for CVPR. Table 1 shows estimated prices for several ML related
summer schools in 2017-2018. Note that, among these, the last two have considerably lower
participation fees: Indaba has free registration for students as it was designed with access to
education in mind, whereas DeepBayes is organised in Russia, where the costs of living are
lower compared to other countries.

While the high registration fees of most conferences and summer schools might be well
justified to ensure the self-sustainability of the events, they can become quickly prohibitive
for many, especially when taking into account the costs of travel, accommodation, and food.
Indeed, most of these events are organised in Western Europe, US, or Canada - countries
with high costs of living - so the subsistence costs might be even higher than the
registration fees. Well-funded research groups and doctoral schools might cover the costs
of attending such events for students, but it is not a standardised practice for all institutions,
and it surely is a very limited practice in EE. Hence, the students and researchers would
have to pay from their own pocket the fees. But when we look at the minimum wage per
country in Europe in Table 2, we can quickly see how such events are simply not affordable
for many. Some summer schools and conferences do offer scholarships to address such
issues. However, these are usually very limited in number and they might cover only a small
part of the overall cost. This makes it very difficult for researchers from certain regions (e.g.
EE) or less visible institutions to attend such events, which in turn makes it very difficult for
them to be part of the community, find collaborators, etc. This drives the lack of diversity by
affecting disproportionally different segments of the world. Here or here are some
discussions on these issues.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 10

Summer school name Cost for students Location Scholarships
/ faculty

Lisbon Machine Learning 250€/300€ Lisbon, Portugal yes

School

DLRL summer school ~450€/~700€ Toronto, yes

Canada

Madrid DL summer school 250€/500€ Madrid, Spain yes

International Computer Vision 525€/750€ Sicily, Italy Yes (only one

Summer school of 525€)

Vision and sports 370€/450€ Prague, Czech N/A

Republic

Genova Deep Learning > 310€ Genova, Italy N/A

Summer school

Prairie Artificial Intelligence 400€/600€ Grenoble, N/A

Summer School(PAISS) France

DeepBayes 13€/130€ Moscow, Russia Yes

Deep Learning Indaba free Stellenbosch, Yes

South Africa

Table 1: Examples of costs of attending ML related summer schools.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 11

Table 2: Minimum wage in European Union countries in 2017. It can be observed that EE
countries have the lowest wages.
Source: www.eurofound.europa.eu

TMLSS 2018 report — page 12

Eastern Europe - Raw Potential for AI / ML
Eastern European countries have a vast potential in terms of talent for research in AI/ML,
due to the strong educational foundations in STEM, reflected in various proxies. One such
proxy is the attractiveness of IT outsourcing in the region. A report published by A. T.
Kearney in 2016 put Eastern European countries (Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia) at the
top of most attractive countries for software outsourcing in Europe, when measuring for
programming skills of the population, financial attractiveness and openness of the business
environment. A study done by hackerrank reflects programming skills per country (see
figure on next page). EE ranks high at skilled programmers.

Another relevant indicator for raw

potential in the fields of STEM is the
significant presence of Eastern
European countries at Mathematics
and Informatics olympiads. These are
highly-demanding competitions for
pre-college students, where
countries like Hungary, Romania,
Russia, Bulgaria are traditionally
present close to the top; see statistics
for math olympiad and informatics
olympiad.

Both these aspects show healthy and

strong educational foundations in
STEM, and one would expect this
potential to thrive and lead to
high-quality university programs and
strong research groups with expertise
in the fields of ML/AI - an advanced
STEM area.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mathematical_Olympiad

TMLSS 2018 report — page 13

Eastern Europe - where do things break

However, despite this tremendous potential, the higher education system in EE

(college/university level) ranks very poorly compared to education systems from the rest of
the world. The figure below represents countries by the score of the best ranked university
per country, according to Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018. The
ranking takes into account teaching, research, industry income, and international outlook.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 14

Of course, the score of the best ranked university in a country is not representative for the
overall state of the higher education system in that country. However, it does speak
volumes about the opportunities that bright young people have to access high quality
university education in their own country.
Source: http://www.jfgagne.ai/talent/
To no surprise, the same poor numbers are
found in statistics about research outcome in
ML and AI. The figures below represent the
number of authors publishing in top ML
conferences by country of affiliation, relative to
US and corrected by population size. It can be
observed that countries like Romania or
Poland rank far behind US, UK, or Germany.
Some EE countries are also completely
absent, which is extremely worrying.

Leaving aside pure research, in terms of expertise in the field, the picture does not look
drastically different. The figure below shows statistics of LinkedIn profiles per country that
have ML or AI in their expertise. For details please see (http://www.jfgagne.ai/talent/). The
picture below shows correlation with the amount of published work.

Source:
http://www.jfgagne.ai/talent/

TMLSS 2018 report — page 15

The two bar plots on the bottom left (previous page) look at number of LinkedIn profiles
matching the criteria relative to the US ones. In the bottom one the numbers are corrected
by population size. Particularly when taking into account the population size of Romania and
Poland, the results seem somewhat more positive. However overall EE is way behind
countries like US, UK or Canada. And many EE countries are still absent.

Possible causes

The factors underlying the current situation in Eastern Europe have complex historical,
political, and economical roots and their in depth analysis is beyond the scope of this report.
See this article for a discussion.

One possible cause is the large brain drain phenomenon that the region is experiencing,
which plays a significant negative role. The 2015 UN report on immigration placed Romania
and Poland on 2nd and 3rd positions after Syria in the increase rate of diaspora population [1].
Adding that in EE countries it is mostly the highly skilled people that immigrate (see source
here, here, and figure below), this could explain the poor quality of education at university
level.
[1] International Migration Report 2015, Highlights, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations
New York, 2016, ST/ESA/SER.A/375.

Source: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2016/sdn1607.pdf

TMLSS 2018 report — page 16

An additional decisive factor is the poor funding of universities in EE. The figure below
shows the R&D investment intensity being low in many EE countries compared to the rest of
the EU. Additionally, the focus on teaching rather than research, the inflexibility of the
system and its isolation from the international community (see here) means these countries
underperform even when correcting for the amount of investment that is being made.

Source: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2016/sdn1607.pdf

Here are some extracts from opinions expressed by ML researchers and faculties affiliated
in Romania and Poland in a survey that we carried related to these aspects:

Q: According to Times Higher Education 2018, Romania's best ranked university is in the range
601-700, Poland's best university is in 501-600. What do you think is the main issue explaining such
low rankings?

A: “One generic explanation would be that a CS department such as one in Warsaw can afford to finance
just 2-3 bigger projects (preferably cheap projects, such as projects in theoretical computer science). At
the moment we basically have big groups in algorithms and logic in computer science and a smaller
crypto group.” Henryk Michalewski, Warsaw University, Poland

A: “Lack of collaboration between universities, lack of collaboration between industry and universities,
outdated curricula, lack of internal university governance that promotes meritocracy.” Gabi Marchidan,
Iasi, Romania

A: “Lack of public financing for the education which leads to low paid teachers and no interest in
pursuing an academic carrier. Also, in Romania, there is an acute lack of communication between
scholars due to a misperceived need for individualism in research.” Adriana Stan, Technical University of
Cluj-Napoca, Romania

TMLSS 2018 report — page 17

A: “Consistent lack of meritocratic processes in the Romanian educational system: 1. many advancement
procedures rely on the goodwill of direct managers. 2. underpayment and general under-investment in
education: good educators are severely underpaid for their skills, despite a fundamental shortage in the
workforce. The net result of these two factors is the migration of highly skilled educators and researchers
to private endeavors or other countries. The long term effect of the lack of skilled educators is the overall
reduced output of the educational system - less well-trained individuals enter the workforce/ re-enter the
educational system.” - Anonymous, Romania

A: “1. insufficient funding, 2. insufficient support for obtaining grants, 3. researchers are not encouraged
(comp.sci) to publish and the teaching load is too large (60% - 65% personnel only), 4. no successful
cooperation with local companies.” - Anonymous, Romania

Q: Both Romania and Poland have low outcome in terms of research publications in top conferences
compared to Western countries. In your opinion, what is the main cause of this in your country?

A: “[...] In Machine Learning there is no serious research tradition - we are trying to establish it, but it
will be a long process.” Henryk Michalewski, Warsaw University, Poland

A: “[...] the universities are not that open to international students and prefer not to deal with the hassle
of paperwork. This is also true for undergraduate programmes. The openness to international students, I
think, would determine an increase in the level of involvement in research of both the students and the
professors, TAs, so on. At a larger scale, I think that access to the European research funding is quite
unbalanced. Meaning that the large grants are won mostly by the universities which already have lots of
expertise in the respective field. Hence, the access to such grants is restricted for new research labs, for
example.” Adriana Stan, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania

A: “Not having a meritocratic system and low investments in the educational system determines the
migration of skilled researchers to other areas where they can be well rewarded for their abilities. This
also means that, in time, the universities have had to suffer from a lack of well trained and capable
individuals willing to join them. We are now seeing the long term effect of the 2 above causes.”
Anonymous, Romania

A: “No long-term reward for publication, no consistency in the funding / rewarding / planning
mechanisms.” Anonymous, Romania

A: Research performance criteria in Romania are not aligned with Western countries, e.g. a NIPS paper
values less than a paper in some obscure ISI-indexed conference. There is high-quality teaching in
Romanian universities for Computer Science fundamentals, but the mentors to encourage students to
follow the research path are missing. The costs for attending top conferences in ML are very high
compared with income/budget in Romania. Elena Burceanu, ML researcher at Bitdefender, Romania

Q: If you could change something in the educational system in your country, what would that be?

A: “[...] students are starting to work in various companies at a very young age and we do not have any
systematic way to retain them. One method which seems to work is to send the best students to do
research internships (in contrast to engineering internships).” Henryk Michalewski, Warsaw University,
Poland

TMLSS 2018 report — page 18

A: “1. Set up an EU-funds based program, developed by an NGO (has to NOT be governmental to avoid
corruption mechanisms), to fund well-performing low-paid educators. Such a program would be required
to run for at least 10-15 years to allow for the reversal of the current trend. The performance evaluation
of an individual should be done against a pre-set evaluation criteria where an independent committee
establishes which performance criteria have been met and which not (see below for definition of
independent committee). The funds pool is used to always fund the top-K evaluated individuals according
to their performance score. Evaluation data should be available for independent scrutiny. 2. Re-model
university and school promotion processes to no longer depend on the good-will of direct managers.
Evaluations of promotion-readiness should be done by committees independent of the effects of their
decision: each university/school individual should be able to initiate their own evaluation process; the
committee should be randomly drawn from a set of independent evaluators - remove all potential
evaluators up to k-order relationship with the evaluated person. 0. Contract consultants from countries
which had successful educational reform processes completed to develop and implement one such process
in Romania/Poland.” Anonymous, Romania

A: “organize student internships/mobility programs - for PhD/master students working in an Eastern

Europe University. [...] such an experience would greatly improve their knowledge & perspective and
incentivise them.” Camelia Lemnaru, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Q: If you could change something in your current position, what would that be (number of teaching
hours, salary, less/more/better students to supervise etc.)?

A: “A peculiarity of Polish system is that grants pay money to everyone engaged into a given project. With
this extra "grant" money a professor income is reasonable.” Henryk Michalewski, Warsaw University,
Poland

A: “[...] the students [...] are great and intelligent, however most of the professors prefer not to have them
think too much for themselves, so they end up quite disappointed by their university experience [...] and
start working full-time in IT companies as early as the second year. As a result, it is quite hard to find
creative, involved students to do a good Masters or PhD thesis.” Adriana Stan, Technical University of
Cluj-Napoca, Romania

A: “reduce the number of teaching hours and the administrative overload” Camelia Lemnaru, Technical
University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania

TMLSS 2018 report — page 19

Eastern Europe - Positive outlook

Due to the growing interest in the fields of ML/AI, there are a number of initiatives that aim,
directly or indirectly, to improve the state of research in Eastern Europe in fields related to
ML. Taking Romania as an example, these initiatives include:
● Research groups within universities focusing on ML related topics, created by
researchers publishing in top conferences. E.g.: Politehnica Bucuresti - Robotics and
Computer Vision group, Technical University Cluj - Reinforcement Learning, Image
Processing, Computer Vision.
● Large international companies opened offices in Romania (e.g. Intel-Movidius,
Amazon, Siemens, etc.), having R&D as an important sector of activity. These co-exist
with important Romanian companies such as Bitdefender, and start-ups. Their
contribution within the local community is very important due to their efforts to
support the local universities through collaborations, sponsorships, internships.
● SSIMA - summer school focused on medical image processing, including ML applied
to medical data
● RAAI - conference on AI related topics (NLP, Vision, Information Retrieval, ML)
● AI Meet-ups and other self organised meetings: these are generally informal free
events where people with interest in AI gather to discuss and network

This list is not exhaustive. Similar initiatives are happening in other EE countries also. Whilst
these initiatives are highly beneficial for the local communities, there is still a lack of
communication between different research groups in EE and between EE and the rest of
the world.
Here are some possible recommendations that we believe would make a high positive
impact for the EE community (as well as other underrepresented regions):
- Currently, top conferences have different registration fees for students vs
non-students, which are very beneficial. They could also have different registration
fees based on the country of affiliation. Such a measure could be negligible to the
overall budget, given the strong involvement of international companies in top
conferences through generous sponsorships.
- Top conferences that tend to be sold out could change the first-come-first-served
registration policy, to control the distribution of attendants in terms of affiliation.
- Small and medium conferences should consider more EE countries as potential
locations; see at the end of this report a more detailed argument on this.
- Experts in the field from well-developed countries could seek more to establish
collaborations with EE groups.
- Renowned hubs could attempt to provide internships/fellowships aimed at students
and faculty from regions that are underrepresented.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 20

Our Initiative: TMLSS
In order to improve the participation of EE countries in the global Machine Learning
community, our first effort materialised into the Transylvanian Machine Learning Summer
School (TMLSS).

The goals of the summer school are:

1. Improve visibility of EE: The project has the explicit aim of putting EE on the map of
high quality research events in AI/ML. Additionally it aims to facilitate the
communication and collaborations between different research groups within EE but
also between groups from EE and other regions of the world.
2. Raise awareness on the potential of AI: On a longer term, the school aims at
supporting local universities to develop educational programs in AI/ML and raise
awareness on the potential of AI within the local community. We hope to support the
local community in developing an AI strategy.
3. Improve accessibility to knowledge and diversity: The school aims to ensure
accessibility through low costs, cheap accomodation, and scholarships. We
encourage diversity by creating an inclusive and collaborative environment where
everyone feels welcomed. We acknowledge the different forms of discrimination
and we attempt to correct for the biases they induce in society.

Organisation rules:
● The school is a non-profit event.
● The school must be organised in an Eastern European country, preferably on an
yearly basis.
● The school gathers participants, speakers, and sponsors from all over the world, all
having in common the passion and interest for ML / AI.
● The selection of participants will favor students and practitioners from Eastern
Europe. However, this does not exclude participants from the rest of the world. On
the contrary, they are welcome and needed in order to build collaborations between
the EE and rest of the world. We aim to have a significant percentage of participants
not being from EE.
● The selection of participants strives to be gender-balanced.
● A significant percentage of speakers must be affiliated in Eastern Europe, to highlight
the local research and help setting up collaborations.
● Gender balance among speakers is highly desired.
● The school fees must be as low as possible, for the school to be accessible.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 21

● The school will offer a number of need-based travel grants, so that no one is
prevented from attending due to financial reasons.
● The organisation will aim to ensure catering and cheap accommodation, so that the
costs of attending the school for participants are minimised.
● The school maximises quality and not quantity. The school should become a
high-quality event that students and practitioners from all over the world aspire to
attend. This is ensured through carefully selected lecturers from research hubs
across the world and EE but also through a careful selection of participants.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 22

TMLSS 2018
Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, Romania, 16-22 July 2018

Home to largest university in Romania: Babes-Bolyai University

( ~40k students, ~1.2k PhD students)

The first edition of TMLSS was organised in Cluj-Napoca, at Babes-Bolyai University (UBB),
Faculty of Economics and Business Administration (FSEGA).
Accommodation for participants was provided at the UBB Economica II dorms, in walking
distance to FSEGA for roughly 70€ for the entire school (6 nights), two persons per room.
School fees:
● 100€ for students
● 150€ post-doc or faculty
● 300€ other (e.g. industry)
The school provided scholarships
(registration fee waiver, free
accomodation in the dorms and
travel grants) need-based.
The school ensured catering for the
whole week (breakfast, lunch, dinner,
coffee breaks for 6 days), excluding
2 dinners.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 23

ORGANISERS, Partners, and Sponsors

The organisers of TMLSS2018 were: Doina Precup (McGill University and DeepMind), Luigi
Malago (RIST), Razvan Florian (RIST), Razvan Pascanu (DeepMind), Viorica Patraucean
(DeepMind).

The local partner institutions in organising the school were the Romanian Institute of
Science and Technology (RIST) and Babes-Bolyai University (UBB).

RIST provided logistic support for several aspects including visa letters, sponsorship
contracts, management of the budget, online payment system for collecting registration
fees, etc. UBB provided lecture and lab rooms for free and dorm accommodation at its
standard price for external students. Besides helping with logistics aspects, 12 students and
researchers from RIST and UBB respectively, joined the organisation efforts as volunteers
and teaching assistants.

Various international and local companies sponsored the event at different levels; see
below the list per sponsorship tier. Additionally, a number of individuals made donations to
the school: Anna Bortsova, Anthony Phalen, Cosmin Paduraru, David Khosid, David
Warde-Farley, Razvan Pascanu, Mihaela Rosca, Tudor Leu + anonymous donors.
Importantly, these donations were made through the Benevity platform and Google
matched the donations.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 24

Speakers

The first edition of the school focused on Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning, and
gathered 19 experts in the field listed below. In terms of ratios, 4 out of 19 (~21%) speakers
were affiliated to institutions from EE. 6 out of 19 (~31%) speakers were female. Overall, the
speakers were affiliated to 11 different institutions.

15 speakers held lectures attended by all participants (i.e. single track) and 5 speakers held
practical sessions in parallel rooms (~ 30 participants per room), same topic being taught in
all rooms.

The slides of almost all the lectures were made available to participants. The code for lab
session was released on github in the hope that it can provide a starting point for teaching
materials in other educations programs.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 25

Schedule

The schedule spread across 6 days, starting on Monday morning and ending on Saturday
evening. Each day consisted of 3 lectures of 100 minutes each, an industry keynote, and one
lab session. The school had 3 social events: the welcome reception on Monday evening, a
half-day trip on Thursday afternoon at Turda salt mine, and the Gala Dinner on Friday
evening. Additionally, on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings there were poster and industry
stands sessions. A panel discussion was held on Thursday, having Dumitru Erhan as
moderator and Doina Precup, Razvan Pascanu, Nicolas Heess, Luigi Malago, Maria-Florina
Balcan, and Ulrich Paquet as panelists. Participants were able to send their questions in
advance or ask questions live.

The lectures covered a wide range of topics: Deep Learning for Computer Vision, RNNs for
NLP, Learning Theory, Maths of Neural Networks, Unsupervised Learning and Generative
Models, Basics of RL and Deep RL, Continuous Control, Robotics, and GraphNets.

The school provided catering for the whole week (breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee breaks),
except dinners on Thursday and Saturday. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, the lunch
was at a nearby restaurant.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 26

Selection Process

School timeline

The school was announced in early December 2017, during NIPS conference, when the
school website tmlss.ro went public. Announcement emails were sent on various academic
mailing lists (in the fields of ML, AI, Computer Vision, Neuroscience etc.). The application
period started on January 24th, with application deadline on March 30th. Selection
notifications were released in two rounds, on April 13th and April 27th. The timeline was
decided such that candidates have enough time to prepare their submissions (about 9
weeks), and that there is enough time after the selection notifications to make travel
arrangements (about 10 weeks).

Application procedure

Interested individuals were required to fill in an application form to provide contact details,
affiliation details, diversity-related details and a statement of research interests. Additionally,
they were required to upload a CV and, optionally, an abstract of an ML-related project.
Submitting an abstract increased significantly the chances of being accepted. The abstract
submission was not made compulsory to not prevent beginners from applying to the
school. Reference letters were not required, as they can be cumbersome to obtain
sometimes. We preferred to use the Research statement section instead to extract basically
the same information that a reference letter would provide.

Selection criteria

The selection procedure took into account various aspects, all meant to provide answers to
two questions: “How can the school help the career of this applicant?” and “How can this
applicant help the school?”. All in all, we strived to have a balance between experienced
participants and less experienced but with potential, as we believe that the teaching is not
only from speakers to participants, but also between participants. Once all the applications
were evaluated from this perspective, they were ranked taking into account also diversity
aspects.

Every application received at least 3 and at most 5 reviews. In the first round of notifications,
applicants who received at least 3 Accept scores were notified to be Accepted, applicants
who received no Accept score were notified as Not Accepted, and applicants who received
at least one Accept score were put on a waiting list and their applications were discussed
individually by the selection committee. Exception from this schedule was made for
applications from countries like India, Iran, were visa procedure was lengthier. In these
cases, the Accept/Not Accept decision was made in the first round, after discussions within
the selection committee.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 27

Selection statistics

We received 827 valid applications. The preliminary budget and planning was done to
accommodate around 80 participants. Due to the large number of applications, the number
was increased as far as the budget and overall concept of the school allowed. Eventually,
the school had 146 full participants: 98 accepted through selection, 31 from sponsoring
companies, and 18 from local partners; the latter included teaching assistants and
volunteers. In addition, there were 20 speakers and organizers, and 3 members of staff, for
an overall total of 169 persons. Besides the full participants, about 20 faculties and PhD
students affiliated to the local universities in Cluj-Napoca attended the lectures as well. The
next figures give details about statistics in terms of gender, affiliation, and career level,
before and after selection for the participants accepted through selection only.

Definition of Eastern Europe

There is no globally accepted definition of the Eastern Europe region (see here). In the spirit
of inclusion, we defined Eastern Europe as widely as possible. The list of countries we
considered as EE includes: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia,
Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, Ukraine; see the map
bellow.

Eastern Europe (EE)

West
Other

Affiliation Statistics

Before selection After selection

(827 applications) (98 accepted applications)

As can be observed from these figures and the detailed maps on the next page, the ratios
before and after selection are similar, and a significant percentage of participants (35.4%) are
not from EE, showing that the school welcomes participants from all over the world.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 28

Affiliation Statistics - finer details

Before selection After selection

(827 applications) (98 accepted applications)

Gender Statistics

from EE from rest of the world

Before selection
(827 applications)

After selection
(98 accepted applications)

These figures show the number of applicants and of accepted participants based on gender
and country of affiliation. In both EE and the rest of the world, it can be observed that the
number of female applicants is much smaller compared to male, with a slightly better ratio
for EE.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 29

However, because the number of applicants was very high compared to the number of
available places, we managed to correct significantly this bias without affecting the quality
of the participants. We were forced not to accept some strong candidates (both male and
female), which might have given the false impression that the school favoured forcefully
certain underrepresented groups. This was not the case. Less experienced participants
were accepted solely based on their potential as assessed by the selection committee, and
not based on diversity aspects.

Statistics for Career level

Before selection After selection

(827 applications) (98 accepted applications)

The breakdown of applicants and participants based on career level shows that the ratios
before and after selection were roughly preserved, except for the “Other (industry)”
category. This shows our commitment to support students and academic researchers, who
are most affected by the lack of funding in research.
Additionally, the ratio of faculty and post-doc increased after selection.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 30

Overall assessment of the applications

Due to the large number of applications, we were not able to provide individual feedback
for any application, be it accepted or not accepted. We did encourage and provided
individual advice to interested people who contacted us before the application deadline
asking about the suitability of a particular project.

In general, the selection committee wanted to see that the candidate was passionate about
Machine Learning, that the candidate had put effort into preparing the application, hence
was truly interested in attending the school, and that the candidate had the necessary basic
knowledge to understand or at least grasp the concepts taught at the school.

Negative points and false negative points in assessing the applications:

- As stated on the Application page, the abstract was optional. However participants
who had exposure to machine learning projects were highly encouraged to send
one. Describing projects in the “Research statement” section and not sending an
abstract was a major negative point. Not sending an abstract was understandable for
people with limited or no exposure to machine learning, but who wish to bring a
machine learning component into their work; e.g. a post-doc with a PhD in Physics
wanting to apply Deep Learning techniques to their projects.
- Very short research statement section was a negative point.
- Having or not having published a paper in a conference/journal was not important.
What mattered was the quality of the abstract submitted and the research
statement.
- The novelty of the project was not important. Projects trying to replicate published
results were highly appreciated. Efforts in writing the report (e.g. analysis of the
method, personal view on the approach, respecting conventions of writing a report)
were also greatly appreciated.
- As stated above, diversity (e.g. gender or country of affiliation) was important to us,
and we took it into consideration in our final decisions. However, it did not affect the
quality of the selected participants. All selected participants deserved to be there
regardless of gender or affiliation. The quality and motivation in the research
statement and abstract were the most important elements in our decisions.

Last, but not least, we are aware that the selection process can be improved and we strive
to do so for the next edition taking into account the valuable feedback that we received
from the applicants this year. Namely, we aim to improve the guidelines and the application
evaluation process. We hope that the applicants who were not accepted this year will apply
to next year’s edition. Our policy is to favour applicants who haven’t attended the school in a
previous edition.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 31

Budget

Income

The overall income this year totaled 67000 EUR.

The main part (~75%) represented sponsorships from international and local companies. The
other sources of income were donations from individuals (8.6%) and registration fees from
participants (16.4%).

Expenses

According to the no-profit rule, all the income of this year was spent in its entirety on
scholarships, catering, and other expenses (e.g. welcome bags, t-shirts, toiletries for dorms,
reusable water bottles, banners, pocket guides, etc.), as shown below. Importantly, this year,
most of the speakers’ travel expenses were covered by themselves, on their research
grants or as company expenses. Also speakers donated their time, and were not paid by the
school to lecture.

32 scholarships were awarded. These included registration fee, accommodation and travel
grant that covered fully or partially the travel costs. Due to the large number of scholarship
requests, we limited the travel grant awarded to any one participant, to be able to support
as many participants as possible. The travel grants limits were 70 EUR for participants
travelling from Romania, 250 EUR for participants travelling from Europe, and 750 EUR for
participants travelling from outside Europe. These limits were set as to cover fully or at least
75% of the overall travel cost. All the participants that were accepted and required a
scholarship received one, to cover fully or partially the costs of attending the school.

Note that the amount received from registration was smaller than the amount put in
scholarships. Hence the organisation costs of the school were supported exclusively
through sponsorships and donations.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 32

Feedback

Shortly after the end of the school, we sent out feedback forms to all participants (including
sponsors) to collect their opinions regarding: the overall organisation of the school, most
appealing and useful aspects of the school, overall schedule, quality and difficulty of
lectures and practical sessions, quality of industry keynotes, quality of poster sessions,
opportunities to network and social events, catering and accommodation.

This feedback is essential for shaping future editions, to keep the positive aspects and
improve the less positive ones flagged by participants. 64% of participants (including
sponsors) filled in the survey.

Summary of the survey

Overall organisation: 77.3% excellent and 22.7% very good

Motivation to apply for the school (multiple answers allowed): 89.8% choice of topics,
86.4% lecturers, 44.3% location, 27.3% low fees.

Most useful parts of the school (multiple answers allowed): 83% listening to the lectures,
72.7% networking with participants (getting to know new people), 64.8% lab sessions, 47.7%
getting to know personally the speakers, 33% presenting my work during poster sessions.

Quality of lectures: 51.1% excellent, 40.9% very good, 6.8% good, 1.1% should be improved.

Quality of lab materials: 47.7% excellent, 37.5% very good, 12.5% good, 2.3% should be
improved.

Quality of posters: 40% excellent, 51.8% very good, 7.1% good, 1.2% should be improved

Were there enough networking opportunities: 61.4% plenty, 28.4% enough, 10.2% not
enough

Rating of the social events: 84.1% excellent, 14.8% very good, 1.1% should be improved

Rating of the catering: 46% excellent, 41.4% very good, 9.2% good, 3.4% should be improved

Rating of dorms: 50% excellent, 35.7% very good, 11.9% good, 2.4% very poor

Would you recommend the school to a friend/colleague: 100% yes

How did you find out about the school? 18.8% mailing lists, 12.9% facebook, 9.4% twitter,
8.2% meetup, 50.7% other sources (friends, colleagues, google search etc)

TMLSS 2018 report — page 33

 Feedback Quotes* Registration

“This summer school made me want to study

even more and learn more about AI and this
represents a first step in this direction. It was one
great week” -- Cristina Todoran

Lecture
“This was one of the best academic events I have
attended so far,[...] HUGE THANKS [...] TMLSS 2018
was one amazing event with a great value for
almost negligible price […] I think that TMLSS
2018 was a huge contribution to the Eastern
European ML community. Especially to people
that can't afford to apply to similar events in
North America (due to travel cost) such as
myself.” -- Lukas Martak

Poster session
“Thank you so so much for the amazing
experience. As a postdoc at Max Planck Institute
(Tuebingen), I still learned quite a bit this time;
really grateful for the organizing effort. I'd happy
to help if you guys need any in the future :) It was
a blast in Romania!!!” -- JJ Zhu

Poster session
“I was immensely impressed by how humble and
approachable all the lecturers were. In a full
week of interacting with all these accomplished
scientists I never heard one of them bragging
about their accomplishments or the field in
general. It shows that people at the forefront of
DL & RL research do not necessarily embrace the
hype around it.” (blogpost) -- Maria Rigaki

*Quotes are taken from feedback with no alteration. Emphasis is ours, and we used […] to shorten the quote.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 34

 Lab session

“Thank you for giving us the unique opportunity

to meet world-renowned machine learning
experts! Hope you do it again next year!” --
anonymous

Poster session
“Thank you very much again for organizing such
a wonderful event! I really enjoyed being in such
a live, friendly environment for a week and I would
definitely miss everything there. The organizers
cared a lot about the event and we had their
support all the time. From scientific point of view,
it was a really great summer school and we
learned a lot.” -- Masha Asadi

“I enjoyed the summer school very-very much. Poster session

Everyone was so intelligent and kind and
open-minded, it was amazing. I also learned a lot
every day, This whole week was very useful for
me. Thank you!” -- Rita Aleksziev

Best poster awards at gala dinner

“There will not be enough feedback forms to fit
all my gratitude in them! Once again, thank you
for the memorable experience, important
knowledge and hospitality! I really hope to see
you again some day.” -- Sofia Krasovskaya

TMLSS 2018 report — page 35

 Panel discussion
“Very well organised. Was my first time in Romania and
glad to have volunteers meeting us at the airport. The
speakers gave very inspirational lectures and kept the
motivation and excitement high throughout the summer
school. I also like the idea of a day trip (Salt mine) so
that everyone can relax their neurons a little and hang
out in a more relaxing environment!” -- Raymond
Chua

Half-day trip @ Turda Salt Mine

“Everyone, organizers, speakers, volunteers did a
great job! I am extremely happy that I had the
opportunity to participate to this summer school. I
have met wonderful people, made new friends and
also learned so much, not only about machine
learning/deep learning, but also about new
cultures, new countries. So, thank you all for your
hard work!! You really did a great job!!” -- Otilia
Zvoristeanu

Coffee break

“I really liked the fact that the lecturers and the

organizers were also attending some of the
lectures and the social events and it was very
easy and nice to interact with them. ” -- Cristina
Cristescu

Coffee break
“There were no hype or buzzwords, but the
lecturers were people who know today’s
limitations, needs and questions and get things
done step by step, with an engineering mindset. A
fundamental feeling with which I left is that it is not
only about learning, but sharing the experience
and knowledge gained to empower others to
create and to strengthen the community and
motivation.” -- (blogpost) Dana Axinte

TMLSS 2018 report — page 36

Notes on Feedback

The feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive, as can be seen in the summary
and the quotes above. We are grateful for the kind words and the encouragements. They
are an important motivator for us to continue with the project. At least two blog posts have
appeared about the summer school (here and here), both presenting the school in a very
positive light. Some of the lab materials have already been used in two other workshops:
here and here.

We will focus next on the less positive feedback we received, as this is important for
improving future editions. The main negative comments can be split in a few categories,
and we will try to reply to each category.

(1) Quality of venue and catering

There were several complaints regarding the sound in the first days and the air conditioning
of the lecture and lab rooms throughout week. While we did manage to improve the sound
after a couple of days, we couldn’t do anything about the air conditioning system of the
venue. We will definitely pay more attention in the future to the quality of the classroom.
Regarding catering, most parts of it were excellent as the participants acknowledged, but
the breakfast and coffee were indeed sub-par. We will do our best to improve this, as much
as the budget allows.

(2) Intensity of the schedule and high diversity of lecture topics

The schedule was indeed very dense and diverse in topics, as our aim was to maximise the
quantity of high-quality knowledge the participants are exposed to during the school. Given
the cost and investment from both participants and organizers, it seemed like a wasted
opportunity to not fully utilise the available time. We will, however, try to improve the
schedule for next edition. Among the suggestions we are considering are longer breaks,
possibly three poster sessions instead of two, more networking opportunities (possibly in
the form of small group discussions).

(3) Sonnet and lab materials

Most of the provided lab materials used tensorflow and Sonnet, a public library developed
by DeepMind. Most of the participants were not familiar with Sonnet, hence some frustration
appeared due to this additional challenge that they had to face in solving the lab exercises.
The justification for choosing Sonnet comes from the fact that preparing the lab materials
required considerably more effort and synchronisation from the lab instructors compared to
preparing lectures. Since the instructors were all familiar with Sonnet and the materials
were all prepared in their free time, Sonnet was a natural choice to reduce the amount of
work. We are grateful for the significant amount of time that they donated before and
during the school. The main issues regarding Sonnet were the lack of documentation and
sufficient getting-started tutorials.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 37

We aim to make available more tutorials on Sonnet early before the school and encourage
participants to go through those materials. We also hope that the documentation of Sonnet
will improve. Switching to a different tool, e.g. pytorch, would require more effort on the
instructors’ side, which might not be feasible, but we will consider all possible options.

(4) Selection process

One other important criticism concerned the selection process, its lack of transparency and
a perceived forced diversity. We refer the readers to section Selection process, for details
about the selection criteria. The selection process was far from trivial, as our aim was and
will be to encourage potential while also acknowledging expertise. We will do our best to
improve the selection procedure as much as possible, possibly by allowing a longer period
for reviewing applications.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 38

What’s next
Given the positive feedback and the overall success of this first edition, we are committed
to organising the school again. To highlight the mission of the school in supporting the
Eastern European community, we decided to change the name of the school to EEML
(Eastern European Machine Learning summer school), with its new home at: eeml.eu.

For the next edition of the school we plan to:

- Improve the organisation by defining clear roles and guidelines for all the parties
involved (organisers, partners, volunteers, staff), using the experience of the first
edition;
- Keep the same structure for the school, i.e. lectures given by high-profile speakers
from EE and the rest of the world, organise lab sessions, invite major sponsoring
companies to give keynotes, poster sessions;
- Increase the number of participants as much as possible, to give more people the
chance to attend the school, but making sure that the quality and the overall
concept are preserved - predicted total number of participants: 200; see below an
estimated budget for this number.
- Strive to make the school more appealing to potential sponsoring companies; e.g.
one suggestion is that for the next edition we could plan to set up a competition,
where companies can propose tasks and datasets, and candidates can submit
solutions for those problems. The authors of top 3 solutions will be accepted by
default to attend the school, and possibly receive a travel grant.

Additionally, we strive to maximise the impact we can make in the local education system.
To this end, we are considering the following directions:
- Set up an advisory board formed of local and international experts, having a
consultative role. Its members will provide high-level guidance on the school
organisation using their experience and knowledge of the local and international
ecosystem, with the goal of maximising the impact of the school on the local
community. The members will be elected on an yearly basis.
- Communication in the EE community - we plan to set up a moderated mailing list of
active labs in Eastern Europe working on ML and AI. We hope this will facilitate
communication among the labs by making them aware of each other and help build
collaborations. Additionally, this mailing list could be used to post announcements
about ML related events, jobs posts etc. While similar systems exists within different
EE countries, our hope is to improve awareness and communication between EE
countries.
- Support local faculties to enhance their teaching materials. How: set up a network
(e.g. mailing list) where they can share teaching materials; invite international experts
to join the network and ask for support in improving these materials; the materials
from the summer school will be shared for these purposes; discuss the possibility to
set up series of invited lectures given by well known experts in the world that could
come and teach in local universities; discuss possibilities for local faculties to be
invited to visit established research groups in the world.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 39

Estimated budget for next edition

For a total number of 200 persons involved, we count roughly 20 speakers (similar to
TMLSS2018), 15 volunteers and teaching assistants, 25 participants from sponsors, and 140
participants from selection (compared to 98 participants for TMLSS2018)..

We consider roughly that all the expenses with the school organisation scale linearly with
the number of participants. This leads to a required budget of 78.800 EUR.

However, for this year’s edition, most of the speakers were self-funded. For the next edition,
we need to make budget provisions for speakers’ travel costs, a minimum of 10.000 EUR.
Speakers will not be paid to speak, these funds cover only flight and accommodation costs.

Minimum required budget: ~ 90.000 EUR.

We aim to not increase the registration fees. Keeping similar percentages of students
(72.9%) vs. faculty & post-doc (19.8%) vs. industry (7.3%), among the participants accepted
from selection, the expected income from registrations would be 17.400 EUR. After taking
into account the number of scholarships awarded whose recipients do not pay registration
fees (this year ~33%), this leaves 14.100 EUR from registration.

The rest of 75.900 EUR until 90.000 EUR would need to be covered from sponsorships
and donations.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 40

Why EE is The Place
for Such Events
Besides providing a much needed opportunity for the local community to get involved in
the ML research community, organising such initiatives in Eastern Europe brings many other
advantages, making this region a very desirable location for any small or medium events.
These advantages include:
- Low organisation costs, while providing high quality experience to participants. This
is due to low costs of living compared to Western Europe, US, or Canada; see figure
on next page. The low cost of living means also low costs for participants to attend
the event; whilst travelling costs towards EE are comparable with other destinations,
the accommodation and subsistence costs are much cheaper compared to other
countries.
- Several EE countries belong to the European Union, hence many are exempted from
visa or obtaining one to travel in the region is fairly straightforward.
- High quality venues able to accommodate up to 500 participants are available in
many EE cities.
- EE countries are very English-friendly.

This is a clear win-win situation, and we hope conference or workshop organisers will start
considering the countries in the EE region as candidates for locating their events. Equally,
potential international sponsoring companies should see the high value for money of such
events: with much smaller sponsorships compared to events in Western Europe or US, they
can make a much larger impact on the participants’ experience, which in turn generates
positive publicity.
On a longer term, besides a positive impact on education, such initiatives could impact also
the local economy, by encouraging tourism and promoting destinations that are not
otherwise popular in a time when well known tourist locations (e.g. Venice, Barcelona etc)
struggle more and more with the large number of tourists..

TMLSS 2018 report — page 41

Why EE is The Place
for Such Events
Cost of living per country according to price index*

Examples of price index

Romania 79
Czech Republic 100
Germany 148
Canada 159
France 174
United States 177
United Kingdom 179

Source: https://www.expatistan.com

*To calculate each country's price index, first a value of 100 is assigned to a central reference
country, here Czech Republic. Then the Price Index of every other country is calculated by
comparing their cost of living to the cost of living in the Czech Republic; e.g. if a country has a Price
Index of 134, it means that living there is 34% more expensive than living in the Czech Republic.

TMLSS 2018 report — page 42