We are happy to announce that next week we will organise a hackathon centered around our latest work Equivariant Neural Fields (ENF) and Geometry Grounded Representations, sponsored by ELLIS and New Theory!

This day will consists of presentations in the morning, of dr. Erik J Bekkers on geometry grounded representations and his vision on how to improve representation learning in the coming years. Secondly, Christian Shewmake, the CEO of New Theory will introduce the company and explain their vision on current advances in foundation models and what is lacking in their opinion. Afterwards two Davids will introduce their latest paper and explain the hackathon in further detail.

After these sessions, we will have some lunch sponsored by ELLIS and will start the hackathon afterwards.The hackathon focusses on coming up with new inference or encoding schemes based on ENFs. ENFs try to overcome texture bias in CNNs and ViTs by grounding representations in geometry. Currently, geometry-grounded methods still struggle to create meaningful positional features and at the same time be as expressive as sota models such as CNNs and standard Transformers. With this hackathon we want to introduce you to ENFs and challenge you to try figure out solutions for new encoding schemes resulting in meaningful positional features. We will work in teams on the hackathon and have a benchmark to evaluate on. The highest performance will be granted honour for life and maybe some chocolate. 

We hope to see you there!