As preparation for the summer school, we highly recommend reading through (or at least glancing through) the first parts of this tutorial, which gives an introduction to graphical models and their application in image analysis/computer vision:
http://cvml.ist.ac.at/papers/nowozin-fnt2011.pdf
Further reading material can be found on this website for a course that Christoph Lampert teaches at IST Austria, which also contains a number of exercises: