ZurichNLP Meetup #8
2024-02-27 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | OAT ETH Zürich (14th Floor), Andreasstrasse 5 (14th floor), Zurich, 8050
We are continuing strong in 2024 with Meetup #8 on February 27th! We’re happy to announce the following speakers:

Brian DuSell, Postdoc @ ETH Zurich
Leandro von Werra, Chief Loss Officer @ Hugging Face

RSVP soon as spots are limited, the last few times we maxed out capacity. Talk details:
Speaker #1: Brian DuSell
Title: Stack Attention: Improving the Ability of Transformers to Model Hierarchical Patterns
Summary: Language contains hierarchical syntactic patterns, but transformers do not have a mechanism for dealing with hierarchies of arbitrary depth. In this talk I will present my work on Stack Attention, a kind of self-attention with a latent model of syntax that addresses this limitation and allows transformers to model any context-free language.
Speaker #2: Leandro von Werra
Title: BigCode: Building LLM’s for Code in an Open and Responsible Way
Hope to see you there!

ZurichCV Meetup #1
2024-03-14 18:00 - 20:00
With all of the success with ZurichNLP we are now kicking off our first ZurichCV meetup this upcoming March 14th (Pi day)! Our first meetup will feature the following speakers:

Felix Bauer, Senior R&D Engineer at SynSense
Songyou Peng, Senior Researcher/Postdoc at ETH Zurich

Please RSVP as soon as possible because spots fill up quick, hope to see you there!

ZurichCV Meetup #2
2024-04-16 17:00 - 20:00
Our computer vision series is continuing strong: ZurichCV #2 on April 16th at 17:00 will feature an in depth talk by Lucas Beyer from Google Brain/DeepMind about structured computer vision in the age of LLMs, specifically:
“Structured output tasks in computer vision are tasks which require more “complicated” output than just a probability, and need to be “globally consistent”. Examples are detection, (panoptic) segmentation, colorization, tracking, and many more. Classically, communities have formed around each such task, with their very specialized approaches. We take a step back, understand why, and devise a general solution, that is surprisingly similar to LLMs, hence bringing the communities closer together. Papers covered: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10337 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08242.”
RSVP soon. See you there!

ZurichNLP Meetup #9
2024-04-25 18:00 - 20:00
We’re happy to announce ZurichNLP #9 on April 25th with the following speakers:

Lewis Tunstall (MLE @ HuggingFace) on How to Align Your LLM
Vilém Zouhar (PhD @ ETH Zurich) on Pride and BPE: How We Solved Tokenization but Got It Wrong
“Tokenization is present in almost all NLP pipelines, but rarely examined mathematically. We formalize and show boundaries to the most popular tokenization algorithm, Byte-Pair Encoding. Then, with information theory, we show what makes some tokenization better than others and how to use this as a metric before training your expensive models. Lastly, we admit how we got this hypothesis wrong.”

Slides from Lewis’s presentation can be found here!
RSVP soon as spots are limited.

ZurichNLP Meetup #10
2024-05-28 18:00 - 20:00
We’re happy to announce ZurichNLP #10 on May 28th with the following speakers:

Kacper Lukawski (Senior Developer Advocate @ Qdrant) on optimizing RAG applications:
“LLM outputs in the Retrieval Augmented Generation pipelines are only as good as the documents we provide for answer generation. We will review the strategies of semantic search optimization depending on your speed, memory, and quality requirements”
Tannon Kew (PhD student @ University of Zurich) on tuning English-centric LLMs into polyglots

RSVP soon as spots are limited.

ZurichCV Meetup #3
2024-06-13 18:00 - 20:00
ZurichCV #3 on June 13th at 18:00 will feature two talks:

Julian Schilliger from ETH Zurich on deciphering ancient papyrus for the Scroll Prize (Vesuvius Challenge):
“On how to unroll and read a 2000 year old papyrus scroll that was buried by the Vesuvius eruption with computer vision, from ancient Rome to a modern particle accelerator and into an high resolution and large CT scan of the scroll.”
Nicolas Muntwyler from nunu.ai on building visual agents to playtest video games

RSVP soon. See you there!
