NeurIPS 2021 Ghent meetup (Canceled)

December 8-10, 2021 in Ghent, Belgium

Unfortunately, the meetup can not proceed due to new COVID19 restrictions.

With global travel restrictions and lockdown measures in the past year, academic conferences were forced to move to a virtual format. Unfortunately, the NeurIPS 2021 conference is no exception. To provide an opportunity for in person interaction and networking, we are organizing a NeurIPS meetup in Ghent, Belgium. As an official part of NeurIPS 2021, the NeurIPS Ghent meetup will bring the best of the NeurIPS 2021 conference right to Ghent! We will provide a combination of selected NeurIPS content, live talks from domain experts and poster sessions. In addition to the technical content, there will be ample opportunities for social interaction and networking with your peers.

Programme

The NeurIPS Ghent meetup will take place on December 8,9 and 10, 2021. The programme will be a mix of selected NeurIPS talks (conference recordings or live streams), live presentations and poster sessions.

Wednesday, Dec 8th

  • 08:30 - 9:30 - Registration

  • 9:30 - 10:30 - Welcome and Keynote Max Welling

  • 10:30 - 11:00 - Break

  • 11:00 - 12:30 - Live presentations

    • Storchastic: A Framework for General Stochastic Automatic Differentiation (Emile van Krieken)
    • Contrastive Active Inference (Pietro Mazzaglia)
    • E(n) Equivariant Normalizing Flows (Victor Garcia Satorras)
    • Shape As Points: A Differentiable Poisson Solver (Songyou Peng)

  • 12:30 - 14:00 - Lunch (not provided)

  • 14:00 - 15:30 - Live presentations

    • Truncated Marginal Neural Ratio Estimation (Benjamin Kurt Miller)
    • Sparse Training via Boosting Pruning Plasticity with Neuroregeneration (Shiwei Liu)
    • PASS: An ImageNet replacement for self-supervised pretraining without humans. (Yuki Asano)
    • Bandits with many optimal arms (Rianne de Heide)

  • 15:30 - 17:00 - Poster session

Thursday, Dec 9th

  • 08:30 - 9:30 - Registration

  • 9:30 - 10:30 - The Collective Intelligence of Army Ants, and the Robots They Inspire (NeurIPS Keynote stream)

  • 10:30 - 11:00 - Break

  • 11:00 - 12:30 - Live presentations

    • Nested Variational Inference (Heiko Zimmermann)
    • On the Frequency Bias of Generative Models (Katja Schwarz)
    • Realistic evaluation of transductive few-shot learning (Pablo Piantanida)
    • Keeping Your Eye on the Ball: Trajectory Attention in Video Transformers (Yuki Asano)

  • 12:30 - 14:00 - Lunch (not provided)

  • 14:00 - 15:30 - Live presentations

    • Argmax Flows and Multinomial Diffusion: Learning Categorical Distributions (Emiel Hoogeboom)
    • Bias Out-of-the-Box: An Empirical Analysis of Intersectional Occupational Biases in Popular Generative Language Models (Yuki Asano)
    • An Information-theoretic Approach to Distribution Shifts (Marco Federici)
    • Invertible DenseNets with Concatenated LipSwish (Yura Perugachi-Diaz)

  • 15:30 - 17:00 - Poster session

  • 16:30 - 19:00 - Outside reception (tentative)

Friday, Dec 10th

  • 08:30 - 9:30 - Registration

  • 9:30 - 10:30 - Benign Overfitting (NeurIPS Keynote stream)

  • 10:30 - 11:00 - Break

  • 11:00 - 12:30 - Live presentations

    • Topographic VAEs learn Equivariant Capsules (T. Anderson Keller)
    • Projected GANs Converge Faster (Axel Sauer)
    • BooVAE: Boosting Approach for Continual Learning of VAE (Evgenii Egorov)
    • Graph Neural Networks with Local Graph Parameters (Floris Geerts)

  • 12:30 - 14:00 - Lunch (not provided)

  • 14:00 - 15:00 - Live presentations

    • DOCTOR: A Simple Method for Detecting Misclassification Errors (Federica Granese)
    • Roto-translated Local Coordinate Frames For Interacting Dynamical Systems (Miltiadis Kofinas)
    • Nonparametric estimation of continuous DPPs with kernel methods (Michaël Fanuel)
    • Framing RNN as a kernel method: A neural ODE approach (Pierre Marion)

  • 15:00 - 16:00 - Closing remarks

Keynote speaker
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Max Welling
University of Amsterdam

Venue

abbey

The NeurIPS Ghent meetup will take place in the historical St Peter's Abbey, right in the city center. This Benedictine abbey was founded in the 7th century by St Amand, who christened the very city of Ghent itself. In the 14th and 15th centuries, it grew into nothing short of an abbey village, with farms, gardens, homes and estates. The abbey owed its prosperity to the privileges it had gained and the taxes it was allowed to impose on its estates. The abbey is now used as a museum and exhibition centre. With its enchanting corridors and romantic courtyard, it is an inspiring location for the NeurIPS 2021 meetup.

The venue is located right in the city center with hotels, restaurants and public transport all within walking distance. There is an underground parking available next to the venue. Please note that the city center is a low emission zone. Check this page first to make sure your car can enter.

Registration

To make sure that we can accommodate everyone in a safe and comfortable way, the NeurIPS Ghent meetup is an invitation-only event. Would you like to attend but have you not received an invitation yet, please contact Sam Leroux and we will do our best to accommodate your request.

Health and safety

Due to new COVID19 regulations, we were forced to cancel the meetup. We apologize for this last minute cancelation.

Sponsors

Main sponsor:
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With the support of:
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Organisers

Sam Leroux, Ghent University - imec, Belgium
Tim Verbelen, Ghent University - imec, Belgium
Cedric De Boom, Ghent University - imec, Belgium
Tijl De Bie, Ghent University - imec, Belgium