by Siobhan Duncan, Heriot Watt University
6 December 2018
In August of this year the Multi Drone project hosted a summer school in Thessaloniki, Greece. Three PhD students from the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, Hugo Sardinha, Helmi Fraser and myself, attended the summer school funded by the SICSA Summer/Winter School Bursary along with 90 participants from Scotland, Greece, Hungary, Germany, Belgium, France and Turkey.
The school was joint organised by the ICARUS.auth R&D team and the Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis (AIIA) Lab, the School of Computer Science, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The main focus of the summer school was deep learning and its application to multi-drone cinematography, which is the key area of research involved in the multidrone project.
Luckily there was only a single track so we were able to attend every lecture and workshop at the summer school. The lectures were all located in Aristotle University’s beautiful, and well air conditioned, Kedea building and a demo of a drone audiovisual shooting was held just outside in the greek summer sun by Deutsche Welle.
On the first day we learnt about mapping and localisation, machine learning, computer vision, and an introduction to multiple drone imaging. These lectures were delivered by key members of the multidrone project, Prof. A. Tefas, Prof. N. Nikolaidis and Prof. I. Pitas of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Dr B. Guerreiro of IST Portugal, and Prof. J. R. Martínez-de Dios of University of Seville.
That evening the workshop had organised a welcome party for the attendees in the Treehouse in the city centre, which is a large outdoor venue with music. This gave us the opportunity to meet the other attendees on a more informal basis, many of who were also planning to use deep learning or computer vision within the scope of their PhD research.
Day two’s focus centred on target detection/tracking, drone mission planning and control, drone safety, drone cinematography, human-robot/drone-interaction. In addition to this there were two keynote speeches Civil Drone Operations (Current & Future): Regulatory Matters – Challenges & Opportunities by Peter van Blyjenburgh who is the President of UVS International and Privacy protection, ethics, safety and regulatory issues by Prof. N. Heise from Deutsche Welle.
We were then treated to a traditional meal at the Kivotos Ton Gefseon bar and taverna which is a 5 minute walk from the seafront in Thessaloniki. The restaurant was laid out with long wooden tables and food was brought out in large sharing platters throughout the night. In addition to sampling greek cuisine our hosts had organised for traditional greek music to be played along side out meal. However once the meal was over our new greek friends taught us their traditional dance which we continued until the venue closed.
The final day involved a hand-on deep learning workshop where we were shown how to use OpenCv and TensorFlow, applied to face and object detection. Our tutor was a final year PhD student who has been working closely with these technologies and who’s expertise guided us through our first deep learning experiments.
We really enjoyed our time there, not just because of the amazing city, great food and lovely hosts, but because we had the opportunity to learn a crash course in deep learning, cinematography for drones and multi drone systems which directly feeds back into each of our PhD projects in different ways. In addition we have made some great contacts within the multidrone project, which includes AI/Robotics departments in Spain, Portugal and Greece.
This opportunity wouldn’t have been possible without funding from the SICSA Summer/Winter School Bursary and we are very grateful for the experience!
