In 2015 the Machine Learning in High Energy Physics was help in St. Petersburg (details).
We asked participants to describe their experience:
"I surely learned a lot, I now have enough background to dig deeper into various ML techniques and hopefully use them in my regular tasks."
-- Alina Eksaeva
"I liked almost everything: the location was fantastic, selection of participants was good, hosts were great and incredibly kind, school material was good, challenge offered a great hands-on experience... Though, there was not enough time for attending the lectures, doing the challenge and exploring the city, so it would be good if the school lasted 7 instead of 4 days. Also, a small tour around the city center on the first day of the school would have been nice."
-- Ana Trisovic
"So I really liked the kaggle competition, it was a lot of fun and I really learned to apply things there. However, I do admit that it greatly distracted me from the seminar sessions and the lectures. I learn more from 'doing' rather than just listening however so it was okay for me but it would have been nice to have been more focused as well. I'm not sure how to balance things in such a short and intensive school."
-- Jared Vasquez
"Seminars were very demanding for me. I felt not like advanced, but more like intermediate level, so it took a significant effort of me to do the seminars. But as I wrote before, it was very useful. It is also great, that seminar's notebooks are avalaible on GitHub, so I can finish those I haven't done."
-- Dmitry Petrov
"It was an excellent contest. Thanks to it I learnt harder and tried to understand machine learning methods deeper. It really improved my practical skills, especially problem-solving ability."
-- Aibek Alanov
"The venue was very good but it would have been nice to be closer to the city center (nevertheless, I understand it was convenient for the school). Food can be improved and more time to work on the contest would be great.
In general, very good school, I am very happy I attended and I enjoyed and learnt a lot. Congratulations to all the organizers."
-- Antonio Romero
"I liked the high level quality of speakers and team working among participants."
-- Leonardo Cristella
