At the end of September, Wolfgang Nejdl and Simon Gottschalk traveled to Japan to talk about the latest developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) at an NII Shonan seminar and in guest lectures at the National Institute for Informatics (NII) in Tokyo.
The visit began with the seminar “Empowering Local Open Source LLMs”, which is part of the renowned NII Shonan Meeting series. Around 30 international experts came together to explore the potential of local open source LLMs and to jointly develop strategies on how these initiatives can act as a response to the developments of large technology corporations. The four-day seminar provided an intensive platform for exchange and networking among female researchers worldwide. More information about the four-day seminar in Shonan is available here.
Afterwards, Wolfgang Nejdl and Simon Gottschalk presented their latest research results in Tokyo. At the invitation of Aizawa Akiko, Wolfgang Nejdl presented the lecture “Foundation Models for Medicine (and Education)”, in which he highlighted the possible applications of LLMs in medicine and school education. He showed what medical information LLMs already provide and how these models could enrich learning processes in education in the future.
Simon Gottschalk spoke at Hideaki Takeda’s research group on “Combining Large Language Models with Knowledge Graphs for Information Extraction and Retrieval-Augmented Generation”. Here he showed how the linking of LLMs with knowledge graphs can help to generate structured information from texts and interactively examine news collections.
