The education and training of early stage researchers is a key objective of the DoSSIER EU project. In that context, from 25 to 30 of September 2022, DoSSIER, in collaboration with the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of the International Hellenic University, organized in Olympiada (Chalkidiki, Greece) the 1st DoSSIER Training School as an internal training event.
The 1st DoSSIER Training School was a week-long event consisting of a series of lectures and seminars. The school was intended for PhD students researchers that are funded by the project, conducting research in the area of Domain Specific Systems for Information Extraction and Retrieval. The aim of the school was to give grounding in core research topics (e.g. IR Experimentation), but also to provide training in other subjects relevant to their research activities (e.g. Licensing practices, Search in Industry settings). The agenda of the entire training school is available here<link>. The school contained a few lecturers from advisors inside the DoSSIER network but mostly from invited speakers who are recognized experts in the field. In numbers, the school consisted of 12 talks presented by professors and researchers from several countries:
- Katriina Byström: OlsoMet, Faculty of Social Sciences
- Roberto Cornacchia: Spinque
- Nicola Ferro: University of Padua, Department of Information Engineering
- Norbert Fuhr: Universität Duisburg-Essen, Informatik und Angewandte Kognitionswissenschaft
- Marianna Katrakazi: Legal associate ATHENA RC
- Petr Knoth: Open University, Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics Group & RSA Data Science Studio
- Udo Kruschwitz: Universität Regensburg, Information Science
- Antonis Makropoulos: Contextflow
- Andreas Rauber: Technische Universität Wien, Institute of Information and Software Engineering
- Elaine Toms: University of Sheffield, Management School
- Theodora Tsikrika: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Information Technologies Institute
- Jakub Zavrel: Zeta Alpha
In total 13 PhD students attended the school, but also discussed and coordinated their efforts to develop a search engine prototype for domain-specific tasks in a scheduled session. A very special moment during the school was the panel discussion that was organized in Ancient Stagira which is an important archeological site only 0.5 km from the current settlement of Olympiada. Ancient Stagira is the birthplace of Aristotle, probably the greatest and most influential thinker of all times and the first genuine scientist in history. The subject of the panel discussion was “Do we need academia in AI?” and several opinions were presented in a very interesting and vibrant way.
As the summer school reached its end, after five days of intense attendance and tutoring, the general feeling was very positive and pleasant, making the 1st DoSSIER Training School a very successful school.