May 28. 2025

KInIT Natural Language Processing Summer School 2025

The next edition of KInIT’s Natural Language Processing School will take place from September 3rd to September 5th 2025. The main goal of the event is to provide participants with an introduction to natural language processing – the area that currently drives much of the progress in AI. We are going to combine theory with hands-on sessions, starting with the basics and building up to more advanced topics, including where the state of the art is headed.

The event will take place at the Kempelen Institute for Intelligent Technologies (KInIT) in Bratislava, and it will be conducted by experts from KInIT and from our partner institutions. The event is free of charge. We are planning to welcome mostly university students (any year of study), but we are also open to considering applications from smart high school students. The capacity of the venue is limited, and participants will be selected based on their application forms.

Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies (KInIT) is an independent, non-profit institute dedicated to intelligent technology research. On our mission of interconnecting academia and industry, we bring together and nurture experts in artificial intelligence and other areas of computer science, with connections to other disciplines.

When?

  • 3rd – 5th September 2025

Programme:

3. 9.

  • 8:30 – 9:00 Welcome breakfast
  • 9:00 – 10:35 [S1.1] Intro + A deep learning refresher (Michal Gregor & Jaroslav Kopčan, KInIT)
  • 10:35 – 10:50 Coffee break
  • 10:50 – 12:30 [S1.2] A deep learning hands-on (Jaroslav Kopčan, KInIT)
  • 12:30 – 13:15 Lunch
  • 13:15 – 14:50 [S1.3] Introduction to Large Language Models (Marek Šuppa, Comenius University Bratislava)
  • 14:50 – 15:05 Coffee break
  • 15:05 – 16:40 [S1.4] LLM hands-on: inference + fine-tuning (Martin Tamajka, KInIT)
  • 18:30 Social Event (Dinner in the Bratislavský Meštiansky pivovar, Dunajská 21)

4. 9.

  • 9:00 – 10:35 [S2.1] LLMs, a game changer in AI (Michal Gregor, KInIT)
  • 10:35 – 10:50 Coffee break
  • 10:50 – 12:30 [S2.2] Mechanistic Interpretability (intro + hands-on) (Kamil Burda & Michal Gregor, KInIT)
  • 12:30 – 13:15 Lunch
  • 13:15 – 14:50 [S2.3] LLM Evaluation (Peter Bednár, Technical University of Košice)
  • 14:50 – 15:05 Coffee break
  • 15:05 – 15:45 [S2.4a] Vision-Language Models (Ivana Beňová, KInIT)
  • 15:45 – 16:40 [S2.4b] Poster session [participants] (Senior KInIT-ers)

5. 9.

  • 9:00 – 10:35 [S3.1] PEFT (intro + hands-ons) (Ivan Vykopal & Michal Gregor, KInIT)
  • 10:35 – 10:50 Coffee break
  • 10:50 – 11:40 [S3.2a] Ethics in NLP (Juraj Podroužek, KInIT)
  • 11:40 – 12:30 [S3.2b] AI and Sentience (Katarína Marcinčinová, KInIT)
  • 12:30 – 13:15 Lunch
  • 13:15 – 13:55 [S3.3a] (Lack of?) Robustness of Large Language Models (Branislav Pecher, KInIT)
  • 13:55 – 14:50 [S3.3b] Poster session [KInIT] (Junior KInIT-ers)
  • 14:50 – 15:05 Coffee break
  • 15:05 – 16:40 [S3.4] LLM agents (intro + hands-ons) (Marcel Veselý, KInIT)

KInIT team you’ll meet

Michal Gregor
Researcher
Martin Tamajka
Technology Lead
Marián Šimko
Lead and Researcher
Kamil Burda
Researcher
Jaroslav Kopčan
Research Engineer
Ivana Beňová
AI Specialist
Ivan Vykopal
PhD Student
Juraj Podroužek
Lead and Researcher
Katarína Marcinčinová
Ethics Specialist
Branislav Pecher
Researcher
Marcel Veselý
Research Engineer

Partner Speakers

Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Technical University of Košice (TUKE). He earned his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from TUKE in 2010. His academic work specialises in knowledge management, text and data mining, natural language processing, and designing distributed architectures for Big Data processing. He has contributed to numerous European research projects, including H2020 Monsoon, Picasso, FP7 Urban Sensing, Adapt4EE, SPIKE, FP6 Access e-Gov, KP-Lab, and FP5 Webocracy.

Marek Šuppa is a lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics, and Informatics, Comenius University in Bratislava. He teaches machine learning and programming, with research focusing on deep learning and natural language processing. Beyond academia, he leads the Data Team at Slido (Cisco) and has previously worked at DuckDuckGo.

Registration

Register here; deadline: August 10th 2025

Partners

KInIT Natural Language Processing Summer School is sponsored by Nadačný fond Telekom pri Nadácii Pontis.

How to attend?

The event will take place from September 3rd to September 5th 2025, in the KInIT offices at The Spot on the 6th floor.

The Spot, Sky Park Offices, Bottova 7939/2A, 811 09 Bratislava

About us:

Natural language processing (NLP) is the intersection of information technology and linguistics. It is concerned with processing the huge amounts of unstructured natural language data that emerge at lightning speed in the digital era – the age of social networks. We research and deliver novel methods to improve NLP tasks of different types while covering multiple stages of text processing.

Our research combines various approaches, from linguistic and statistical to machine learning and deep learning. We employ novel language models that take advantage of recent advances in the field while covering a variety of application domains. We focus on open problems related to text classification, information extraction, sentiment analysis and text generation. We look for applications of transfer learning and improving the interpretability of NLP models. Our work includes the processing of low-resource languages, such as Slovak.

Read more information about our research here.

Previous editions