Our next NLP Expert Meeting at our regular venue – ZHAW on Lagerstrasse – with an Apero to follow at Nüü. With this session, we will focus on “Secure & Responsible NLP” and will as always feature three great speakers.
Join us on March 27th, 17:30 at Lagerstrasse 41/45, Room ZL 06.10 (6th floor), 8004 Zurich. The presentations will take place from 17:30 to 19:15, followed by the Apero downstairs at 19:15.
The Swiss NLP Days 2025 are a series of activities in 2025 about Natural Language Processing (NLP), which will take place May 13-15, 2025 in Winterthur, Switzerland. They provide a unique opportunity for everyone interested in NLP applications to connect with experts and gain insights into the current state of NLP, and they serve as a platform for NLP professionals to present their work and exchange with potential clients and other NLP experts.
The Swiss NLP Days consist of two main events:
An NLP Expo for the interested public with more than 70 exhibitors which present current industrial and academic solutions in NLP.
A scientific conference called SwissText for researchers and NLP experts.
These two events are accompanied by an NLP Crash Course – Insightful sessions on practical applications and fundamental technologies of Natural Language Processing – throughout the year with workshops and tutorials.
The Swiss NLP Days 2025 mark the 10th anniversary of the SwissText conference, which was initiated in 2016 by NLP researchers at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW).
Led by industry and academic experts, the NLP Crash Course explores a wide range of NLP topics and aims to help participants understand how NLP can be applied in various business and organizational contexts.
Perfect preparation for the NLP Expo 2025. Biweekly. Free of charge.
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Mascha Kurpicz-Briki (Bern University of Applied Sciences)
Led by industry and academic experts, the NLP Crash Course explores a wide range of NLP topics and aims to help participants understand how NLP can be applied in various business and organizational contexts.
Perfect preparation for the NLP Expo 2025. Biweekly. Free of charge.
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Rico Sennrich (University of Zurich)
Are you ready to discover the future of talent and innovation matching? Join us for this webinar on the “Future of Work” where experts from the Data Innovation Alliance, Rockstar Recruiting and Innofuse share insights, prototypes, and platforms designed to address one of the biggest challenges in today’s professional landscape: connecting the right people with the right opportunities across companies and industries.
Agenda
Dr. Reik Leiterer, data innovation alliance – Introduction, Challenges in Matching Skillsets
Dr. Klaus Fuchs, Rockstar Recruiting AG – Presenting AI based CV Screening (Results from Databooster), Q&A
Ivan Sanicola, Founder Innofuse – working principles of the Innofuse platform – innovation matchmaking.
Dr. Reik Leiterer, data innovation alliance – Sum-up and IB AI Funding Opportunities
What’s in Store?
The Challenge: The Data Innovation Alliance kicks off with a deep dive into the complexities of matching skills across diverse sectors and organizations, highlighting the critical need for smarter, scalable solutions.
AI in Action: How to mitigate the inbound floor of AI-assisted job applications? Klaus Fuchs from Rockstar Recruiting presents an novel AI-based VC screening prototype developed through a Data Booster booster – saving recruiters valuable time by analyzing and pre-filtering hundreds of CVs in parallel – making recruiting faster, cheaper and fairer for everyone involved.
Collaboration Reimagined: Ivan from Innofuse showcases their innovative platform, designed to connect potential project stakeholders from different organizations through skill-based matching. Discover how this ecosystem enables seamless collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Funding Opportunities: Wrap up with an outlook from the Data Innovation Alliance on available funding mechanisms to bring your own innovative projects to life.
Why Attend?
This webinar is a must for recruiters, HR professionals, innovators, and project leaders looking to harness the power of AI and collaborative platforms to drive efficiency, foster innovation, and unlock new opportunities.
Don’t miss this opportunity to stay ahead of the curve. Secure your spot now and be part of the conversation shaping the future of work and innovation.
The next NLP Expert Meeting will focus on the topic of “Agents in 2025”. Join us on February 4th, 2025, at our regular venue – ZHAW on Lagerstrasse.
Flurin Gishamer works at Open System and will discuss Challenges building reliable multi agent systems for real world applications – what they learned from implementing diskurs.dev
Farhad Nooralahzadeh from ZHAW will highlight how they use agentic systems for Explainable Multi-Modal Data Exploration.
Marius Högger works at bbv Software Services AG and will explore AI Agent Collaboration: A roadmap for successful adoption and scaling in organizations.
Join us on February 4th at 17:30. On-Site Registration is booked out.
You can still register for online attendance using the following form:
Our next Expert Meeting on Monday, 21 August 2023, 17:00-18:30, will focus on various aspects and applications of Large Language Models.
It will take place at the ZHAW premises in Lagerstrasse 45, 8004 Zurich in room ZL O3.01 on the third floor. The meeting will be followed by an apéro. Online participation is also possible.
We will then send you a calendar invitation which includes online participation details.
The following presentations are confirmed for the meeting:
Kim Engels, Converto AG – Large Language Models for Cross-Media Marketing
In this talk, Kim briefly presents some examples of how he and his team at Converto use AI and LLM to improve or speed up their projects.
Besides approaches such as text generation for newsletters, there are also variants such as code generation within the team as well as the use of self-developed solutions to create 3D models for customer campaigns.
Florian Tramér, ETH – Are Aligned Neural Networks Adversarially Aligned?
Large language models are now tuned to align with the goals of their creators, namely to be „helpful and harmless.“ These models should respond helpfully to user questions, but refuse to answer requests that could cause harm. However, adversarial users can construct inputs which circumvent attempts at alignment. In this talk, we’ll discuss to what extent these models remain aligned, even when interacting with an adversarial user who constructs worst-case inputs (adversarial examples). We’ll see that existing optimization attacks are insufficiently powerful to reliably attack aligned text models, except when these models are multimodal (i.e., they can process both text and images). In that case, we show these models can be easily attacked, i.e., induced to perform arbitrary un-aligned behavior through adversarial perturbation of the input image.
Alex Paramythis, Contexity AG – Adapting Large Language Models for Customer Request Handling
With the rise of Generative Large Language Models (LLM), companies are looking into the many opportunities proffered by this new technology. One area of particular interest is the automated handling of customer requests (e.g., received through email, chat, social media, etc.) using the institutional knowledge at hand. In such a context, LLMs may need to be trained on, or have access to, privileged, non-public information in the company’s knowledge base. This, in turn, entails that the models need to be prepared within, and served from, a company’s own infrastructure to prevent information leakage — a requirement that points in the direction of commercially friendly open-source models. In this talk we will present our work on generation of responses to customer requests using the IGEL (a BLOOM based model), FLAN-UL2, and Falcon LLMs. For the first two models we will also report on our attempts to fine-tune the models before use, with a variety of training data.
This Expert Meeting will take place at the ZHAW premises in Lagerstrasse 45, 8004 Zurich in room ZL O3.01 on the third floor (online participation is also possible for those who prefer this option) on Wednesday, May 10 from 17:30-19:00. After the meeting, there will be an apéro so that you can carry on your discussions and get to know each other.
We have the following two talks confirmed:
End-to-end ASR for Swiss German at Microsoft: A Transducer Approach Oscar Koller, Applied Scientist at Microsoft
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Swiss German is a challenging task due to the lack of a standardized writing system and the high regional variability of the dialects. In this talk, we present our work on developing end-to-end ASR models for Swiss German at Microsoft using transducer architectures. We show that transducers outperform hybrid models by over 20% in word error rate on a multi-dialectal corpus of Swiss German speech. We also compare our models to Whisper, a state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence model for low-resource ASR, and find that transducer models achieve comparable results with much smaller model size and training time. Finally, we discuss how end-to-end models produce transliterations of Swiss German words instead of standard German translations affecting the readability and usability of the output and propose solutions to this problem.
Revolutionizing Natural Interaction with Swiss German: A Glimpse into the Future of Conversational AI Claudio Paonessa and Yanick Schraner, Researchers at FHNW
Get ready for a glimpse into the future of natural interaction with computer systems in Swiss German! We leveraged the latest advancements in speech-to-text and text-to-speech technology to create an engaging and interactive experience that showcases the results of our cutting-edge research.
Exploring the Acceptance of Intelligent Voice Assistants in Home Care Applications: Opportunities and Obstacles [10 mins presentation, 10 mins discussion] Edith Birrer, Researcher at iHomeLab – HSLU (Hochschule Luzern)
In the scope of co-creation sessions, care workers provided insights on applications and on concerns about Intelligent Voice Assistants (IVA) in the home of their clients or patients. The sessions focused on the potential to support the care documentation process by IVA. Participants’ expectations and worries spanned from the ability to handle dialects, to confidentiality issues, to integration in existing care documentation systems. However, there is a general openness toward the idea to employ IVA as means to improve the quality of care. The challenge foreseen for using IVA is to become as time efficient as care documentation systems in place. Alternatively, as suggested by participants, IVA could complement existing processes or even create new ones in the care context.
If you want to join, please fill in the following registration form by April 27: https://forms.gle/PmRQENtY8aybJeby5 Please note that the registration form includes information for the SwissNLP General Assembly which is co-located.
We invite you to the second iteration of the Expert Day. Join us in an exchange of expertise and find inspiration. These following groups will participate:
Natural Language Processing & Big Data Technologies
Smart Maintenance
Smart Services
Spatial Data Analytics
Detailed Program:
15:00 – Welcome 15:30 – Keynote by Prof. Pierre Dersin 16:10 – Expert Group Meetings in breakout rooms (see below) 17:40 – Apéro
Data-driven Value Added for Words, Images and Things
Digital transformation is a defining feature of our epoch.
Abundance of data, immense increase in hardware processing capabilities and breakthroughs in analytics algorithms have made practical some of the visions put forward about three quarters of a century ago. The branch of Artificial Intelligence called Machine Learning, and in particular Deep Learning, permeates image processing, natural language processing ( “ words”) and smart maintenance (‚things‘), and furthermore enables rich synergies between those three fields, which span a great deal of human activity, with profound potential impacts—some already visible, on industry, science, the arts and social life.
Natural Language Processing & Big Data Technologies
Everyone is talking about ChatGPT these days and some of its output is truly impressive! We will discuss how the most recent wave of text generation algorithms can transform business, science and teaching. The meeting will feature the following expert talks:
Grounded Copywriting with ChatGPT & Co by Michael Wechner (Wyona AG) + Colin Carter (Coop Rechtsschutz) Everyone talks about the pros and cons of ChatGPT, its competitors and how to combine the generated text with grounded knowledge. We will demonstrate how ChatGPT & Co can be applied in insurance and discuss the future of retrieval augmented language models.
Can we Identify Machine-Generated Text? An Overview of Current Approaches by Anastassia Shaitarova (UZH Institute for Computational Linguistics)
The detection of machine-generated text has become increasingly important due to the prevalence of automated content generation and its potential for misuse. In this talk, we will discuss the motivation for automatic detection of generated text. We will present the currently available methods, including feature-based classification as a „first line-of-defense.“ We will provide an overview of the detection tools that have been made available so far and discuss their limitations. Finally, we will reflect on some open problems associated with the automatic discrimination of generated texts.
Using AI to Query the Football World Cup Database in Natural Language by Kurt Stockinger (ZHAW Institute for Applied Information Technology)
Football is one of the most popular sports on earth with millions of people watching the FIFA world cup. In this talk, we describe how we built a system to query the world cup database in natural language. We explain how we translate natural language into the database query language SQL using modern transformer architecture. We also demonstrate how we have used large language models such as Open AI’s GPT-3 and Google’s T5 to explain how the system interprets users’ questions.
We are looking forward to exchanging opinions, experiences and questions, and to exploring this exciting field together!
Smart Maintenance
The value of condition monitoring data: 5 use cases.
In this meeting of the Smart Maintenance Expert Group we will hear about successful student projects conducted together with industry partners from various fields. The focus points of the projects are very diverse, ranging from prediction of energy losses, through anomaly detection, fault diagnostics, prediction of the remaining useful life and optimal maintenance scheduling. We will have 5 short pitch presentations, followed by an interactive discussion of future interest topics of our expert group, including active feedback of all participants.
Anomaly Detection in Marine Engines with Convolutional Neural Networks (Company: WinGD)
Aircraft Scheduling Optimization based on Prognostics Degradation Models (Company: Swiss International Airlines)
Modeling Wake Energy Losses in Wind Farms using Graph Neural Networks (Company: Fluence Energy)
Using Error Code Patterns to Predict Service Requests on Production Machines with Machine Learning (Company: Zünd Systemtechnik).
Fault Detection in Solar Power Plants using Physics Informed Deep Learning (Company: Fluence Energy)
Smart services for sustainability – circular servitization
With data-driven services, industrial companies can create quantifiable value for their customers, partners and themselves. At the same time, these services also have the potential for ecological benefits, e.g., through optimized processes in operations or logistics. To make this possible, economic and ecological goals must be captured in a targeted and combined manner when designing the services.
The 1.5-hour workshop will discuss how specific problems from everyday business can be systematically addressed to create relevant added value for business and ecology. Participants will bring their own business issue and leave the workshop with a first approach on how to create economic and environmental value through smart services. The workshop will run through typical phases of a project in a compressed time format to give an impression of what such a project might look like on a larger scale.
Spatial Data Analytics
High-quality spatial data is increasingly available for free use. However, with the large amount of data and the sometimes very specific data types and formats, it is challenging to find the appropriate data sources. In addition, some of the data access platforms are only partially intuitive and can be used without expert knowledge. Accordingly, the question arises whether the full potential of the available data base could not be better exploited if data access and data sharing were simplified. In this co-creation workshop, concepts and approaches will be reflected and discussed with representatives from research and industry as well as from cantonal and federal agencies, with the aim of developing possible approaches for joint implementation.
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