Gerard de Melo
The More You Know: Towards Knowledgeable AI
Gerard de Melo is a professor at HPI and the University of Potsdam, where he holds the Chair for AI and Intelligent Systems and leads the corresponding research group. Previously, he was a faculty member at Rutgers University in the US and at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and a post-doc at ICSI/UC Berkeley. Gerard de Melo has published over 200 papers on diverse aspects of AI, receiving a number of Best Paper awards. He served as the General Chair for the AI@HPI Conference and has been featured in the press numerous times.
Marta Villergas
Title TBD
I’m the Director of the Language Technologies Laboratory at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), which is at the forefront of advancing natural language processing (NLP) through pioneering research, development, and the application of high-performance computing (HPC). We specialize in the creation of massive language models and unsupervised learning for less-resourced languages and domains. Endorsed by the Spanish and Catalan governments, our Lab is dedicated to developing vital open-source resources and infrastructure for language technology and artificial intelligence, specifically tailored for the Spanish and Catalan languages. I’ve been engaged in various EU-funded international projects and am committed to promoting the transfer of our technological breakthroughs to industry and society at large.
Roberto Navigli
Do Large Language Models Understand Word Meanings?
Roberto Navigli is Professor of Natural Language Processing at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he leads the Sapienza NLP Group. He has received two ERC grants on multilingual semantics, highlighted among the 15 projects through which the ERC has transformed science. He has received several prizes, including two Artificial Intelligence Journal prominent paper awards and several outstanding/best paper awards from ACL. He leads the Italian Minerva LLM Project – the first LLM pre-trained in Italian – and is the Scientific Director and co-founder of Babelscape, a successful deep-tech company developing next-generation multilingual NLU and NLG. He is a Fellow of ACL, AAAI, EurAI, and ELLIS, and serves as General Chair of ACL 2025.