BCAM and the University of the Basque Country organise the European Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining 2021

The main European conference in this field was held virtually from 13 to 17 September with attendees from all over the world

The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML/PKDD) has been organised by the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM) and the University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea UPV/EHU. It is the main academic conference in Europe in this highly topical field these days and, specifically, this is the twentieth edition of the conference. This year it has been held virtually on 13^th and 17^th September 2021. 

More than 1,000 people registered for the conference, consolidating the Basque Country as a place of reference in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at an international level. During its five days, the event featured a series of lectures and talks by eminent researchers and an extensive programme of workshops and presentations in which the latest advances and challenges in this field of research were shared.

Among the activities were exhibitions of scientific papers in the field of Machine Learning and its application to real-world problem solving. Around 300 papers were presented virtually via Zoom and SlidesLive. Awards were also presented for the best scientific contributions in the categories of best research papers in machine learning and best research papers in the application of machine learning techniques.

Another activities organised by the conference were the four plenary lectures given by leading researchers in the field of machine learning from both world-renowned institutions such as Stanford University and major technology companies such as Facebook. In addition, 20 other plenary lectures were given in the workshops over two days. In addition to this, there were other initiatives such as the Discovery Challenge competitions and presentations of works on the application of machine learning in the industrial field. The poster presentation session was held in gather.town, where attendees could virtually walk through the rooms and interact with each other. 

The organising committee of the conference was chaired by BCAM's scientific director, José A. Lozano, and formed by prestigious experts such as the co-founder and vice-president of ELLIS and Chief Data Scientist of Data-Pop Alliance Nuria Oliver, Fernando Perez-Cruz from the Swiss Data Science Center, Stefan Kramer from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz or Jesse Read from the French engineering school École Polytecnique, among others.

The conference was supported and sponsored by major companies such as Google, ASML and Amazon, as well as by Ikerlan, Knime and Two Sigma. In addition, it was internationally sponsored by the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAi) and the publishing partner and sponsor Springer.

In this way, the ECML/PKDD joins the list of important scientific events organised by BCAM, including the Conference on Mathematical Aspects of Material Sciences - SIAM MS20 and the 35th Edition of the International Statistical Modelling Congress - IWSM 2020. The centre thus contributes to the positioning of Bilbao as a university city, an epicentre of data science and an ideal place for knowledge exchange, making it the host of some of the most relevant scientific events at European level.

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