Every year for almost 20 years, in collaboration with Polish Childrens' Fund, ICM organizes weekly workshops for talented youth. This year's edition has just finished.
Polish Childrens' Fund (KFnrD) is a non-profit NGO which helps the most talented Polish children to grow their passion for art or science. In case of high school students interested in mathematics and computer science, KFnrD organizes workshops at the best Polish research institutes. ICM has had the privilege of collaborating with KFnrD and organining every year a weekly workshop on mathematical modelling. Personally, I have been co-ordinating these workshops for the last couple of years (I have also participated as a student in one of the first workshops).
Our idea for the workshops is to give the participants a taste of the research adventure. In our work, we pose much more interesting questions and problems than we are able to solve. Some of these problems can be attacked, with proper supervision, by the workshop participants. Our guests usually don't know all the "best" practices of solving particular problems, so their approaches are fresh and often surprising! We get an extra pair of hands and a fresh view on a problem, they — an interesting real-world challenge and opportunity to work with experienced researchers. A clear win-win.
This year, the participants formed three teams working on three problems from the following areas:
- image analysis,
- statistical machine learning,
- text mining / network analysis.