Second edition of the symposium that will highlight Barcelona as a key player of Artificial Intelligence in Europe

Barcelona will host on 19 and 20 December the second edition of the Deep Learning Barcelona Symposium (DLBCN). Deep Learning has greatly revolutionised Artificial Intelligence, boosting this technology across the globe. According to Forbes magazine, the business value created by AI will reach $3.9T in 2022 in the USA. What’s more, it estimates an increase of 20% of Europe’s economy within 10 years due to the implementation of AI.

The Deep Learning Barcelona Symposium has the aim to highlight the research developed in Barcelona, bringing together top-level researchers who are either currently developing their research in the city, or have pursued part of their academic career here. This unique meeting gathers multidisciplinary researchers in the field of Deep Learning and highlights the potential of Barcelona to become the hub of AI in the South of Europe.

Alphastar project leader Oriol Vinyals will be one of the main speakers. He is currently a researcher at Google DeepMind (London), from where he developed the Alphastar algorithm. DeepMind’s algorithm won 10-1 against two top professional players of the Starcraft II video game. This technology tested new types of AI.  In order to beat the Starcraft players, it had to combine long term planning with real-time decision making, along with the ability to acquire and make use of abstract information in a setting with no fixed rules.  The symposium will also have the presence of Facebook AI’s research leader, Cristian Canton.

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) will be represented at the event by Xavier Baró, Hassan Hayat, Àgata Lapedriza, David Masip and Carles Ventura, members of the Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications' Scene Understanding and Artificial Intelligence (SUnAI) research group, and Javier Borge-Hothoefer, Cristina Bustos, Daniel Rhoads and Albert Solé-Ribalta, members of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute's (IN3) Complex Systems (CoSIN3) research group.

The symposium is organised by leading universities and local research centres in the field of Machine Learning: the UOC, the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, the Computer Vision Centre, the Universitat de Barcelona, the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.

For further details visit the website.