Reward for learning with a twist of real-life research

2021 EPFL / Alain Herzog - CC BY-SA 4. Martin Jaggi, Assistant Professor in the School of Computer and Communications Sciences (IC) has won the 2021 Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching, for introducing two novel, hands-on science challenges into his Machine Learning Course - the largest masters level class on campus. The explosion of machine learning in the past two decades has already transformed large sectors of society, including healthcare, education, transport, and food and industrial production, as well as having an enormous impact on science and research. Indeed, the growth of deep learning, a type of machine learning, has been compared to the Cambrian Explosion of half a billion years ago when life on Earth experienced a short period of very rapid diversification. Martin Jaggi, head of the Machine Learning and Optimization Laboratory , with his colleague Nicolas Flammarion teach the masters level Machine Learning Course , open to students from across campus. Recently, they have introduced two novel, practical elements to the course that have been welcomed by students and labs alike. The first allows students to participate in the international " ML Reproducibility Challenge " a competition in which members of the machine learning community select a paper from a top ML conference and try to reproduce - and therefore validate - the experimental results described.