At the welcome reception during the first night of the conference, our paper was announced the Best Student Paper Award Winner at the European Conference on Machine Learning 2018!

My talk was originally scheduled two days later for 20 minutes. With this announcement though, this meant that my talk was to be presented to the entire conference, moved 1 day earlier to the very next morning, and also doubled in time to 40 minutes. So, you can imagine the adrenaline rushing like there IS a tomorrow that night (get it?)

In the end, I’m so glad that the talk was well received and it got people interested in our line of research.

The rest of the conference had been nothing short of amazing. It was my first time travelling overseas for an international conference and I got to talk to so many people who are doing interesting and awesome work across the globe. I also got to fan-boy and meet some of my machine learning idols in the field.

The conference also organised a trip to Malahide Castle on the north coast of Dublin. It was pretty cool learning about some Irish history from the Medieval times.

Overall, it was probably one of the most surreal experiences I ever had. It took a long while, but this was my first ever paper published in my PhD. And, as all research goes, it had its ups and downs. As weird as it sounds, it does hold some sentimental value to me. After all the sweat and tears, this is more than what I can ever imagine and hope for.

Here is the story behind the paper

Michele announcing the Best Student Machine Learning Paper Award Winner at the Mansion House Dublin

After starting off the presentation with an exercise to interact with the audience, we dived into some kernel machine mathematics!

If nothing else, at least people seem to have remembered the superman analogy even after a few more days of intense conference talks!

A simple extension to treat neural network parameters as kernel hyperparameters to learn

Scheduled talk

Malahide castle trip with the conference cohort!