bcn.ai – Making Barcelona into the AI hub it has the potential to be

Bringing Together The Top DL Practitioners In Barcelona

Bringing The Top AI Talent In Barcelona Together

Why We Created BCN.ai

Our goal is to make Barcelona into the AI hub it has the potential to be. To accomplish this, we will organize quarterly paper presentations and speaking sessions from the best researchers and practitioners. At these events, we will go beyond fundamentals and dive into bleeding edge Deep Learning research and applications.

Submit Presentation

We acknowledge that there are many interesting deep learning projects in Barcelona – spanning from core research to applied solutions. Therefore, we want to make room for both to allow the most talented researchers and most interesting projects from industry and startups to present. To be as unbiased as possible for research presentations, we expect presenters to have papers published at one of the top ML conferences. For applied presentations, the selection criteria is a bit different and speakers will have to submit a proposal for a presentation.

#BCNai

means deep learning

created here in Barcelona

Barcelona has plenty of talented AI researchers and practitioners from various universities, startups, and corporates. However, to reach the full AI potential, we need a community that brings attention to and shares all the great work. To create more awareness about what is happening in Barcelona, we will use #BCNai to signal locally and globally about the great work in deep learning both across academia and companies.

We are continuously looking for partners who want to push the community forward

Research Presentation

For BCN.ai Research, ideal speaking candidates are researchers from university or industry with a paper published at a top conference (such as NIPS, ICML and ICLR). That said, we’re open to other applications as well. To submit a presentation, use the form provided in the link below.

Submit Paper

Applied Presentation

For our applied presentations, no papers are required. Instead, we’re looking for interesting use-cases and hands-on experience with working with deep learning. The presentations are up to 15 minutes long. To submit a presentation, please send a proposal to our team.

Send Proposal

Pete Soderling Advisor
Jan Carbonell Lead-organizer
Alexandra Canet Marketing
Joan Serra Advisor

Jordi Vitria UB
Johan Bender Founder
Joost van de Weijer CVC & UAB
Xavier Giro UPC

Past Events

Summer '18 Fall '18 Winter '18 Spring '19 Summer '19 Fall '19 Winter '20

Our first event took place at the University of Barcelona (UB). Here, Axel Brando, Industrial PhD student at BBVA Data & UB, talked about his research on using DL for predicting variance in forecasting models. Also, Santi Pascual, PhD at UPC, came to share his research on using GANs for noise reduction in audio files. We want to thank them both for sharing their great work.

See Event Page

At the BCN.ai Fall '18, presentations covered Catastrophic Forgetting in Neural Networks by Joan Serrà from Telefonica Research, AI Health Projects in Industry by Tarek Besold from Alpha, Chatbots by Maurizio Cibelli, CEO of Hutoma AI, and Learning from Unlabeled Datasets by Joost van de Weijer, Senior Researcher at Computer Vision Center Barcelona. For more information about the talks and speakers, please visit the event page.

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At the BCN.ai Winter '18, presentations covered Emotion Recognition from Images by Agata Lapedriza, Professor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and researcher at MIT Media Lab, Learning and Forgetting in Image Generation by Luis Herranz from CVC, and Miha Skalic, PhD at UPF, who won the Youtube Image Classification Challenge on Kaggle.

See Event Page

At the BCN.ai Spring '19 event, topics included Fashion and AI, in which Arnau presented his work for the startup Wide Eyes Technology. Further, we had the pleasure of learning about autonomous driving by Antonio Lopez from Computer Vision Center, Barcelona

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At our Summer 19, we had the pleasure of learning about how Deep Learning is applied to domains such as satellite images by Albert Puyol Torres from Satellogic and food recognition by Petia Radeva. We also got the chance to hear how Miquel Junyent, PhD candidate from UPF, was beating AlphaZero in simple challenges with his own algorithm. Lastly, Ciprian Corneanue from UAB shared his work on what it means to learn from Neural Networks.

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This event included presentations from both industry and research. Jordi Pons Puig came and shared his work on End-to-end music source separation. Axel Brando then followed up with work on using Neural Networks for uncertainty estimation, presented at NIPS. Finally, Vilynx shared their work on human action recognition by David Varas.

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At the Winter' 20 event, Albert Pumarola presented his work on “GANimation: One-Shot Anatomically Consistent Facial Animation” (ICJV 2019) and "3DPeople: Modeling the Geometry of Dressed Humans" (ICCV 2019). Afterwards, we dove into OCR with Lluís Gómez presentation on “Scene text understanding beyond OCR” (ICCV2019, ECCV2018). And finally we wrapped it all up with Iñaki Estella presentation on “Distributed Variational Representation Learning" (IEEE 2019).

Link to event page

Stay Updated

Our Facebook page includes pictures from past events. For research papers and upcoming DL events in Barcelona, follow our Twitter. Finally, you can view past presentations on our YouTube channel. We’re in the process of creating a public list of ML events and companies in Barcelona. If you would like to include a company or event, please use the contact form.