How do you plan to kick off your summer this year? How do you plan to kick off your summer this year? If you're like me, you will attend the Starmus Festival Of Science And Arts in gorgeous Trondheim, Norway, between 18 – 23 June. The Starmus -- "stars" and "music" -- Science and Arts Festival was the brain child of astrophysicist Brian May, lead guitarist for the rock band Queen, and his dissertation advisor, Garik Israelian, an astrophysicist who led the team that discovered the first observational evidence that supernova explosions are responsible for the formation of stellar mass black holes. This festival is designed to bring together the sciences -- astronomy, physics, and the biological sciences -- with art, film, music and other performing arts, specifically to communicate science to the public.

The department's research in Machine Learning contributes to the state-of-the-art of individual methods and algorithms as well as combinations of methods targeting particular tasks, for example, combining data-intensive methods with knowledge-based methods to produce user explanations for decision support. Our strongest contributions to the international research front until now have been within Bayesian learning and probabilistic reasoning, evolutionary learning and neural networks, and instance-based learning and case-based reasoning. In addition, we have ongoing activities at a high international level within large-scale data and information management. Over the last years there has been an increased interest in combined methods, e.g.