Speakers
Antonis Anastasopoulos
Assistant professor at George Mason Computer Science & Associate Researcher at Archimedes, Athena Research Center
Presentation title: Machine Translation and Low-Resource NLP
Antonios Anastasopoulos is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at George Mason University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Notre Dame and then did a postdoc at Languages Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research is on natural language processing with a focus on low-resource settings, endangered languages, and cross-lingual learning, and is currently funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DoD, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.
Isabelle Augenstein
Full Professor and Deputy Head of Department for Research at Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen
Lecture title: Understanding the Interplay between LLMs' Utilisation of Parametric and Contextual Knowledge
Isabelle Augenstein is a Full Professor and Deputy Head of Department for Research at Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. Her main research interests are fair and accountable NLP, including challenges such as explainability, factuality and bias detection. Prior to starting a faculty position, she was a postdoctoral researcher at University College London, and before that a PhD student at the University of Sheffield. In October 2022, Isabelle Augenstein became Denmark’s youngest ever female full professor. She currently holds a prestigious ERC Starting Grant on 'Explainable and Robust Automatic Fact Checking’, and her research has been recognised by a Karen Spärck Jones Award, as well as a Hartmann Diploma Prize. She is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and co-leads the Danish Pioneer Centre for AI.
Desmond Elliott
Associate Professor and a Villum Young Investigator at the University of Copenhagen
Lecture title: Vision and Language
Desmond is an Associate Professor and a Villum Young Investigator at the University of Copenhagen. His recent research has focused on tokenization-free language modelling based on visual representations of text, and multilingual and multimodal language processing across languages and cultures.
Nizar Habash
Professor of Computer Science at New York University Abu Dhabi and director of the Computational Approaches to Modeling Language (CAMeL) Lab
Lecture title: Arabic Natural Language Processing : A 40-Year Perspective
Nizar Habash is a Professor of Computer Science at New York University Abu Dhabi and director of the Computational Approaches to Modeling Language (CAMeL) Lab. His research focuses on natural language processing, computational linguistics, and Arabic language technologies, including machine translation and morphological analysis. Before joining NYUAD in 2014, he was a research scientist at Columbia University. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2003 and holds bachelor’s degrees in Computer Engineering and Linguistics. Professor Habash has authored over 300 publications, including Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing, and is the recipient of the Antonio Zampolli Prize (2024) and an ACL Fellow (2025).
Lingpeng Kong
Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and co-director of the HKU NLP Lab
Lecture title: Text Diffusion Models: What's Not an Autoregressive LLM?
Lingpeng Kong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong. From 2017 to 2020, he was a (Senior) Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He received his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. His research goal is to design the next generation of neural architectures and develop corresponding pre-trained sequence models and algorithms, with a focus on harnessing the ability to process ultra-long sequences and advancing complex reasoning capabilities, ultimately for scientific discovery. He has served as a (Senior) Area Chair for top NLP and ML conferences such as ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, EMNLP, and NAACL. He has also served as an Action Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) and ACL Rolling Review (ARR), and as a journal reviewer for Nature and Cell Reports Methods. His research has been recognized with outstanding paper awards from ACL and EACL.
Julia Kreutzer
Senior Research Scientist at Cohere Labs, Cohere for AI
Lecture title: RLHF From Scratch
Julia Kreutzer is a Senior Research Scientist at Cohere Labs, where she focuses on research around multilingual large language models. She has a background in machine translation, with a PhD from Heidelberg University and previously worked at Google Translate. She's passionate about advancing NLP technologies for underrepresented languages and has been part of multiple open science initiatives to work towards this goal collaboratively.
Ryan McDonald
AI consultant and investor
Lecture title: Classification
Ryan McDonald is an expert in Machine Learning and its application to NLP. He currently consults on a variety of efforts from autonomous agents to scientific simulation. Prior to this, Ryan was the Chief Scientist at ASAPP working on NLP and ML research focusing on CX and enterprise and was a Research Scientist in the Language Team at Google for 15 years where he helped build state-of-the-art NLP and ML technologies and pushed them to production. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania focusing on multilingual syntax. In 2023 his work on Universal Dependencies received the ACL 10 year test-of-time award.
Dong Nguyen
Associate professor in Natural Language Processing at Utrecht University (The Netherlands)
Lecture title: RNN + Transformers
Dong Nguyen is an associate professor in Natural Language Processing at Utrecht University (The Netherlands), where she leads the NLP & Society Lab. She works on various topics, such as the fairness and robustness of NLP models, NLP and language variation, and data-centered NLP. She is currently leading an ERC Starting Grant project on the impact of data diversity on the behavior of NLP models.
Anna Rogers
Associate Professor in the Data Science Section at the IT University of Copenhagen
Lecture title: LLMs and Factuality
Anna Rogers is a tenured Associate Professor in the Data Science Section at the IT University of Copenhagen. Her work focuses on interpretability and robustness of NLP applications based on Large Language Models, as well as their sociotechnical impacts. She is currently an editor-in-chief of ACL Rolling Review, the peer review platform for all major NLP conferences. She is also one of the chief scientists of the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAISA).
Emine Yilmaz
Professor and ELLIS Fellow at University College London (UCL), Department of Computer Science
Lecture title: Using Large Language Models for Evaluation: Opportunities and Limitations
Emine Yilmaz is a Professor and ELLIS Fellow at University College London (UCL), Department of Computer Science. At UCL she is one of the faculty members affiliated with the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence, where she leads the Web Intelligence Group. She also works as an Amazon Scholar for Amazon Alexa. Professor Yilmaz’s research interests lie in the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing. She has received several awards for her research, including the Karen Sparck Jones Award, a Google Faculty Research Award and a Bloomberg Data Science Research Award. Her research has been funded by several funding bodies including EU Horizon 2020, EPSRC, Alan Turing Institute, Google, Bloomberg and Elsevier.
Co-Organizers
