We have recently actively participated in the Meta-learning Challenge and AAAI 2021 workshop Meta-Learning and Co-Hosted Competition that were extremely interesting and we share our insights here.

Few-shot learning is increasingly popular because it can handle machine learning tasks with just a few learning examples. It is also more biologically plausible and closer to what we observe in nature. While learning a new task, one normally does not start from a randomly initialised neural network presenting hundreds of thousands of examples in several thousands epochs.

When you are told to remember a person from a picture, you are able to…

This weekend we managed to organize UNIHACK 2021, international ideathon designed to disrupt existing educational systems.

Working with data and recommender systems for years, I just cannot believe, how these modern technologies are largely ignored by educational institutions in their internal processes. This is directly responsible for wasted time and opportunities of talented students, but also inability to attract and reward motivated teachers and mentors from academia and business.

I was hoping to bring solutions to challenges described in my Linkedin article:

Here are the projects that participants managed to submit:

There are many interesting ideas, from all around the…

Just to test if there is an interest from the audience to get news from Recombee about new features, research and case studies.

If you like the idea, please add some claps here.

In Recombee, we work hard on improving technologies for shopping cart prediction. Thanks to our customers like Bofrost, we are able to train our machine learning models on hundreds of millions of past purchases.

We have also recently partnered with NVidia to accelerate our deep learning research.

Searching for the right information has always been difficult. Not so long ago, relevant documents were stored in physical libraries and discovering them was a lengthy and complicated process.

When documents became available through online repositories, the number of indexed documents started to grow beyond physical storage limits. The same applies to the number of products offered by e-commerce sites or to content available through online streaming services.

Users tend to prefer finding everything in one place and most of them enjoy choosing from more relevant alternatives so service providers need to adapt. Global services (such as Google, Amazon, Netflix…

Lze předpokládat, že pandemie koronaviru a tvrdá opatření k jejímu zmírnění budou mít poměrně významný dopad na naši ekonomiku. Vše naznačuje, že přijatá opatření jsou v tuzemsku účinná. Odvrátila tak exponenciální šíření viru, zahlcení zdravotnického systému a předešla velkým ztrátám na životech. Zatím. Je jasné, že dokud nebude vakcína a společnost si nevytvoří rozumnou kolektivní imunitu, což může trvat roky, je třeba změnit způsob života tak, aby se i do budoucna zabránilo explozivnímu šíření viru. Pěkně to ve svém článku “Tanec kolem R” vysvětlil Tomas Pueyo. …

Academia is losing in its role of innovation leader as companies started investing heavily into fundamental research. It was not the case a decade ago (except pharma and few other domains) as fundamental research is costly for companies. Now, especially in AI, companies invest billions to win the race. It is hard to predict if funding large scale fundamental research in Deepmind, Google Brain or OpenAI with almost no direct business impact is sustainable in the long term, but let’s discuss its consequences for academia.

Draining brains from academia

Brain drain from academia to industry is normal when it comes to students. …

Three years ago, our faculty started to support students with research ambitions. Since then, our summer research program has grown to over 50 participants from bachelor and master programs. This summer, each funded student has to write a blogpost about the research project she/he elaborates with her/his mentor. The research project is later finalized by submitting a research paper intended for a scientific journal or conference.

This publication will bring you interesting blogposts submitted by our students. We will release them one by one.

Here is the summary of 2019 projects

Matej Choma with his mentors Karel Klouda (FIT CTU) and Kuba Bartel (FIT CTU alumni, Meteopress…