Extended Seminar – Systems and Machine Learning

The seminar will be jointly held by Profs. Carsten Bin­nig and Kristian Kersting.

This year's seminar will be centered around machine learning for systems (e.g., using machine learning to improve data management or software engineering systems but excluding systems targeted for machine learning) including topics such as learned database components or relational machine learning.

The top­ics will be as­signed based on an on-line bid­ding pro­cess, which will be opened after the kick-off.​ The final as­sign­ment will be made a week later.

Quick Links

Course Material (Moodle) Registration (Tucan)

Organization

Course Infos

Below, you find some general information about the seminar. For all information regarding this year's seminar (including important dates) please check the moodle course linked above.

Prerequisites

It is not necessary to have prior knowledge in artificial intelligence, but prior knowledge in software/hardware systems and machine learning is helpful.​ Participation is limited to 20 students.​

For further questions feel free to send an email to dm@​cs.​tu-darmstadt.​de. No prior registration is needed, however, please still send us an email so that we are able to estimate beforehand the number of participants, and have your E-mail address for possible announcements.​ Also make sure that you are registered in TUCaN.

Ex­tend­ed Sem­i­nar

What is “Ex­tend­ed” about this sem­i­nar? Stu­dents are not only ex­pect­ed to give a short talk, but also to pre­pare a small write-up.​ The write-up will be pre­pared in groups, each group will cover one theme, con­sist­ing of four topics.​ The final write-up must be con­cise and short, and should give a short overview of the theme (not nec­es­sar­i­ly lim­it­ed to the stud­ied pa­pers).

In ad­di­tion, we will also do a peer re­view­ing pro­cess, as it is usu­al­ly done at sci­en­tif­ic conferences.​ This means that you also have to read (some) of the other write-ups and pro­vide feed­back by fill­ing out a re­view form.

Be­cause they are more work for stu­dents, stu­dents re­ceive 4 CPs for Ex­tend­ed Sem­i­nars (in­stead of 3 CPs for reg­u­lar sem­i­nars).

Write-up

The talks are or­ga­nized in top­i­cal groups.​ Each group must pre­pare one short write-up of their work.

Content: The pa­pers are re­lat­ed to each other.​ Your task is to use these pa­pers to cre­ate a mi­ni-sur­vey that com­bines the re­sults of all pa­pers, and pos­si­bly other papers.​ The con­tri­bu­tion of each in­di­vid­u­al paper can be lim­it­ed to the most im­por­tant points that are con­tribut­ed by this paper to the topic.​ There must be a clear “red thread” with­in each sur­vey, a con­cate­na­tion of in­di­vid­u­al paper sum­maries is not enough.​ A pos­si­ble out­line can con­sist of an in­tro­duc­tion to set the stage and out­line the cross-cut­ting themes of all pa­pers, mul­ti­ple sec­tions on in­di­vid­u­al con­tri­bu­tions w.​r.​t.​ cross-cut­ting themes and com­par­i­son of dif­fer­ent ap­proach­es, a joined re­lat­ed work sec­tion, and a sum­ma­ry and out­look.

For­mat: The for­mat for the write-up is pre­de­fined, and fol­lows con­ven­tions that are typ­i­cal­ly used for pub­li­ca­tions in com­put­er science.​ In par­tic­u­lar, we re­quire each paper to be for­mat­ted ac­cord­ing to the Tem­plate for Proceedings in ACM Conferences (2-column layout). Each paper should have no more than 6 pages in this for­mat (the bib­li­og­ra­phy is not count­ed, and can be as long as nec­es­sary). The for­mat must not be changed in order to gen­er­ate more space.​ Each paper also must, of course, have a title, au­thors, and an abstract.​ The tem­plates are avail­able in Word and LaTeX, but we strong­ly rec­om­mend that you try to use LaTeX.​ Environ­ments such as MiK­TeX and TeXs­tu­dio make local La­TeX-edit­ing quite easy, and web-sites like Over­leaf offer col­lab­o­ra­tive work­ing en­vi­ron­ments for LaTeX.

Re­view­ing

Re­view­s are required for all three other writeups.​ A review­ing form will be pro­vid­ed by then.

Grad­ing

The slides, the pre­sen­ta­tion, the an­swers given to ques­tions in your talk will in­flu­ence the over­all grade, as will the write-up and the reviews.​ Further­more, it is ex­pect­ed that stu­dents ac­tive­ly par­tic­i­pate in the dis­cus­sions, and this will also be part of the final grade.

To achieve a grade in the 1.​x range, the talk and write-up needs to ex­ceed the recita­tion of the given ma­te­ri­al and in­clude own ideas, own ex­pe­ri­ence or even examples/demos.​ An exact recita­tion of the pa­pers will lead to a grade in the 2.​x range.​ A weak pre­sen­ta­tion and lack of en­gage­ment in the dis­cus­sions may lead to a grade in the 3.​x range, or worse.​ For the write-ups it is im­por­tant that they pro­vide a co­her­ent view (like a sur­vey paper), and do not sim­ply con­sist of a con­cate­na­tion of four paper sum­maries.

Sched­ule

See schedule on Moodle (link above)

Topics

All pa­pers should be avail­able on the in­ter­net or in the ULB.​ Note that Springer link often only works on cam­pus net­works (some­times not even via VPN). If you can­not find a paper, con­tact us.

See moodle course for current topics.