The ESSENCE Summer School on the subject of Evolving Semantic Systems will run from Monday 24th August until Friday 28th August, 2015. The Summer School will be held at the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh and will take place at the Informatics Forum in central Edinburgh.

The School is primarily of interest to PhD students, but the School is also open to undergraduate/postgraduate students and researchers with an interest in the subject area. Tutorials and lectures will be delivered by internationally renowned speakers who are experts in various areas related to the evolution of meaning, from semantic technologies to natural language processing, language evolution and agent-based systems.

For registration details, please see our registration page. A number of bursaries will be offered to cover registration and/or accommodation and subsistence, on the basis of applicants' CVs and motivation letters, which should also explain whether additional funding is available from other sources to cover part of the participation and/or travel cost. Bursaries may involve partial of full reimbursement of accommodation, travel cost, and other participation expenses. Applicants will be notified by 6th August. To apply, please visit the registration page. The deadline for bursary applications is 4th August 2015. Applicants will be notified in good time to make travel arrangements.

About the Summer School

The ESSENCE Summer School will feature a host of lectures, tutorials and training courses delivered by top experts in Artificial Intelligence and related fields. Themes of the Summer School include: computational linguistics; learning; ontology matching; semantic data integration; negotiation in multi-agent systems; robotics; multimedia content analysis. Please visit our Programme page for details.

About ESSENCE

ESSENCE is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network funded under the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme (agreement no. 607062) that runs from November 2013 to October 2017. It is a four-year research training network that will build a European research base for the study of evolving semantic in natural and artificial communication. ESSENCE investigates how meaning emerges and evolves through communication among intelligent systems. We develop methods that enable software agents, sensors, and robots to autonomously negotiate meaning among themselves. Our methods are inspired by the capabilities of humans to understand each other despite differences in their individual viewpoints.

The network supports 15 young scientists at the doctoral and post-doctoral levels who investigate different aspects of the overall research theme in close collaboration with industry and a number of leading academic institutions across Europe. The fellows are supervised by leading experts from at least two institutions. They spend extended periods of time visiting other institutions within the network, including secondments with industrial and governmental organisations.

In addition to scientific training, which includes work on doctoral theses, publications, and participation in conferences and workshops, the network provides training in a broad range of transferable skills, such as project management, technical writing, and entrepreneurship. ESSENCE features an extensive programme of training, dissemination, and outreach events.