The 28 of February saw students from
Southampton, Nottingham and Oxford gathering in the heights (8th
floor) of Oxford’s Engineering Department to attend the first in a
sequence of student-led events to come.

The idea of these
events is to have a sequence of seminar-type days that bring together
all students involved in Orchid. With contents being decided upon by
the students themselves, they provide opportunities for students to
meet in an informal setting, learn about the fundamentals of the
diverse research that is going on in the different groups, ask
‘stupid questions’ and to continuously get to know each other. In
addition, future events will also provide career development training
supporting students to succeed in today’s competitive job market.

During the first event, we wanted to have introductory talks
on some of the basics of some of the main competence areas of the
three universities involved in the ORCHID. To this end, we managed to
persuade some of our researchers to give presentations on topics in
mechanism design, learning and HCI.

In the morning of the 28th, we had to
make a choice. Either we could attend an introductory session on
human-computer interaction, led by Ben Bedwell (Nottingham), or the
introduction on mechanism design, given by Victor Naroditskiy
(Southampton). Having thought about doing some collaborative work
with colleagues in Southampton, I felt keen on brushing up on my
sketchy knowledge in mechanism design. So, mechanism design it was!
Ben took us on a fast-paced but astonishingly comprehensible ride
through the wonderland of game theoretic essentials.

Endowed with the satisfying feeling of
having something accomplished during the earlier part of the day on
the one hand, and a gaping hole in my stomach on the other, I joined
the others for a lunch break that felt well-deserved. Lunch was not
only taken advantage of as an opportunity for plugging aforementioned
hole, but also provided ample opportunity for discussion of the
contents just presented and for meeting familiar faces.

Covering
one of the hot topics of our time, Ioannis Psorakis (Oxford) opened
the afternoon events with an introduction to big data analysis, both
from a principled and practical perspective. Building on the
fundamentals of the first talk, Michael Osborne (Oxford) then
presented material on big data analysis with Gaussian processes
exemplifying cutting-edge research in the field. (Risking accusations
of partisanship: this talk was of particular interest to me since I
found the application of non-parametric Bayes to large-scale problems
quite surprising. Perhaps much less surprisingly, considering the
talk was given by one of my co-supervisors, remarks that were made
during the talk sparked ideas related to my own research. In my
defense, the following Q&A and feedback received at the end of
the day suggested particular interest in this area from the side of
other students as well.)
Following a day of talks, Gopal Ramchurn
(Southampton) challenged us to adopt an active role. Being divided
into different, frequently fluctuating groups, the audience was
tasked to design different components of a crowd-sourcing-based text
categorization system that ideally would be suitable to attract a
web-community of volunteers. While one cannot be sure the ad-hoc
designs crowd-sourced to us will necessarily see implementation in an
actual system, the exercise proved instructive and fun.

For those of the participants who
wanted, Exeter College’s dining hall, and later a nearby pub,
provided the setting for a gregarious conclusion of the day.

I hope everyone enjoyed the day as much
as I did. In anticipation of future events, Daniela, Sam and I would
like to invite everyone to provide feedback. So, if you would like to
suggest any improvements, or would like to see any specific talks or
activities happening over the course of future student-led events,
please do let us know!