What's
May 28. 2025
KInIT Natural Language Processing Summer School 2026
The next edition of KInIT’s Natural Language Processing Summer School will take place from September 2nd to September 4th 2026. 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.
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 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 talented high school students / other participants. The capacity of the venue is limited so the 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?
- 2nd – 4th September 2026
Registration
Register here. The application deadline is August 10th 2026.
Detailed programme
The programme combines guided learning blocks, expert discussions, and informal opportunities to meet researchers working on NLP and AI at KInIT and partner institutions.
- Learning sessions
- Panel discussions
- Joint PhD event
- Social program
| 2. 9. | Large Language Models and Agentic AI | |
|---|---|---|
| 8:30 – 9:00 | Welcome breakfast | |
| 9:00 – 9:05 | Opening |  Michal Gregor |
| 9:05 – 10:35 | Introduction to large language models |  Jaroslav Kopčan |
| 10:35 – 10:50 | Coffee break | |
| 10:50 – 12:30 | Agentic AI |  Marcel Veselý |
| 12:30 – 13:15 | Lunch | |
| 13:15 – 14:50 | Agentic engineering: from 0 to eiπ |  Marek Šuppa |
| 14:50 – 15:05 | Coffee break | |
| 15:05 – 16:40 | Evaluating LLMs |  Andrej Ridzik |
| 3. 9. | Multimodal AI, Interpretability, and Fine-tuning | |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00 – 10:35 | Understanding audio and speech with language models |  Viktor Gregor |
| 10:35 – 10:50 | Coffee break | |
| 10:50 – 11:50 | Panel discussion with AI experts |     |
| 11:50 – 12:30 | Vision-language models |  Ivana Beňová |
| 12:30 – 13:15 | Lunch | |
| 13:15 – 14:50 | Mechanistic interpretability | Michal Gregor Kamil Burda |
| 14:50 – 15:05 | Coffee break | |
| 15:05 – 16:40 | Fine-tuning LLMs (SFT, RLVR, LoRA) |  Ivan Vykopal |
| 4. 9. | Research Pathways, Robustness, Ethics, and Future Directions | |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00 – 9:30 | Breakfast with KInIT’s PhD students | |
| 9:30 – 10:35 | Research skills and career pathways session | ?TBA |
| 10:35 – 10:50 | Coffee break | |
| 10:50 – 11:30 | (Lack of?) Robustness of large language models |  Branislav Pecher |
| 11:30 – 12:30 | Poster session | PhD students and interns |
| 12:30 – 13:15 | Lunch | |
| 13:15 – 14:50 | Ethics panel: AI as a reflection of our minds? Anthropomorphism and ethics of human-AI interaction | ?  ? |
| 14:50 – 15:05 | Coffee break | |
| 15:05 – 16:40 | Beyond scaling: the future ingredients of intelligence | Michal Gregor |
Partner Speakers
-
Peter Bednár Technical University of Košice More info - Radovan Garabík Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics, Bratislava More info
- Marek Šuppa Comenius University Bratislava More info
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.
Partners
How to attend?
The event will take place from September 2nd to September 4th 2026, in the KInIT offices at The Spot on the 6th floor.
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.