Microsoft Research is holding its Machine Learning Summit at Microsoft's "Le Campus" in Paris. But if you are not attending in person. Keynotes and the interviews from the event will be streamed live, complete with online Q&A sessions.

According to the Microsoft Research Connections Blog, this free online event will kick off with the opening keynote (recorded earlier in the day) from Andrew Blake, director of Microsoft Research Cambridge. Professor Blake will describe advances in computer vision, with machines that learn to see.

Later you can watch the live stream of Judea Pearl, director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Pearl will speak about the development and application of mathematical tools to study cause-and-effect relationships.

Following their keynotes, both Balke and Pearl will conduct half-hour online Q&A sessions, giving virtual participants the opportunity to engage directly with these eminent researchers. 

The virtual event rounds off with two 15-minutes live "Research in Focus" interviews. In the first, Fei-Fei Li of the Stanford Vision Lab and Sebastian Nowozin of Microsoft Research will discuss developments in teaching machines to see. In the other, Zoubin Ghahramani of the University of Cambridge will describe his work on building an “automated statistician.”

And if you have already missed the live virtual event the videos should still be available together with the keynote from Hermann Hauser with the title "Data is accumulating at such a rate that there are no longer enough qualified humans to analyze it".

As this is a Microsoft production, viewing the video requires Silverlight - when will Microsoft Research get the memo about not using Silverlight?

There's a trailer for the event that you can use to test whether you are equipped in advance of its start time of 13:30 GMT (which is equivalent to 09:30 ET; 06:30 PT; 14:30 BST and 15:30 CET in Paris itself).