Po-Ling Loh was the one of the key people who created the Midwest Machine Learning Symposium. The symposium aims to convene regional machine learning researchers for stimulating discussions and debates, to foster cross-institutional collaboration, and to showcase the collective talent of machine learning researchers at all career stages. It will be held at the Logan Center at University of Chicago on June 6-7, 2018. The MMLS was founded in 2017 and Prof. Loh is this year’s chair. More information:
http://midwest-ml.org/2018/
Dimitris Papailiopoulos co-chaired the first SysML Conference in Stanford, California February 15-16, 2018. SysML is a new conference targeting research at the intersection of systems and machine learning. The conference aimed to elicit new connections amongst these fields, including identifying best practices and design principles for learning systems, as well as developing novel learning methods and theory tailored to practical machine learning workflows. More information: http://www.sysml.cc/2018/index.html
Dane Morgan is featured in a June 2016, College of Engineering story about 
Discovery Fellows Rebecca Willett and Rob Nowak are creating algorithms to make sense of big data and help machines learn. 
“The computer models Nowak and his team are developing are called adaptive crowdsourcing algorithms. They attempt to weed out the weakest captions as quickly as possible to get more people to vote on the potential winners.”
Jordan Ellenberg is the recipient of the 
The New Yorker is using a machine learning system developed by WID Optimization researchers to sort through captions for their weekly cartoon caption contest.