Natural language research announcements

[Prajit Ramachandran <prmchnd2 AT illinois.edu>]

(Apologies if you already received this email - this is being sent out to general mailing lists. The only change is that the first meeting is on Thursday 4-5pm at Siebel Center 3401, not Monday)

Do you have an interest in deep learning and want to learn about the cutting edge of deep learning in different fields? We are creating a deep learning research paper reading group. The goal is to bring together people from all different disciplines (e.g. vision, speech, NLP, computational biology, etc.) so ideas can be exchanged between different groups. The nice thing about deep models is that they can applied to a variety of problems, and learning about their uses in other disciplines is a great way to generate ideas to apply to your own field. The signup form is here: bit.ly/deepuiuc

The only prerequisite is some familiarity with deep models. At the very least, you should have a high level understanding of things like ConvNets, recurrent neural networks, SGD, etc. You do not need to know about more specialized ideas, like Long Short-Term Memory or Batch Normalization. This is a group designed to help others learn about these specialized ideas. If you don't know if you have the necessary prerequisites, try attending the first few meetings.

If you are interested, the signup form is bit.ly/deepuiuc . The first meeting will be next week (the week of September 20th), on Thursday (no longer Monday) from 4-5pm at Siebel Center 3401. Timings may (or may not) change for future meetings, so even if you can't make the first meeting, make sure to sign up to stay updated. If you know others who might be interested, feel free to forward this email to them.

Thanks, and excited to see everyone next week!