Open Source AI Workshops

I am a Senior Data Scientist at Open Systems and the creator of Diskurs—an open-source framework for building multi-agent systems. My work spans natural language processing, large language models, and generative AI, and lately, I have been focusing mostly on multi-agent systems.
I enjoy learning new things, exchanging ideas with others, and sharing my discoveries in ways that spark meaningful dialogue.

Prof. Dr. Marcel Gygli is passionate about advancing Artificial Intelligence in the Public Sector. His focus is to drive transformative innovation, bringing cutting-edge AI research to practical applications in government.

Joel Niklaus is a Research Scientist at Harvey, where he focuses on developing and evaluating LLM systems in the legal domain. He also serves as a Lecturer at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, teaching continuous education courses on NLP. Prior to his current roles, Joel was an AI Resident at (Google) X, where he trained multi-billion parameter LLMs on hundreds of TPUs, achieving state-of-the-art performance on LegalBench. His experience also includes investigating efficient domain-specific pretraining approaches at Thomson Reuters Labs.

Joel’s academic journey led him to Stanford University, where he conducted research on LLMs in the legal domain under the supervision of Prof. Dan Ho and Prof. Percy Liang. He has served as an advisor to companies specializing in the applications of modern NLP to legal challenges and has led research projects for the Swiss Federal Supreme Court. With extensive experience in pretraining and finetuning LLMs for diverse tasks across various compute environments, his research primarily focuses on dataset curation to train and evaluate language models multilingually for the legal domain. His datasets have laid the groundwork for legal NLP in Switzerland.

Joel’s research has been published at leading Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning conferences. It has been covered by the Swiss National Radio & Television and honored with an Outstanding Paper Award at ACL. He holds a PhD in Natural Language Processing, a Master’s in Data Science, and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the University of Bern.

Leandro von Werra ist Forschungsleiter bei der Open Source AI Firma Hugging Face. Er hat die Python-Bibliothek namens TRL, die Transformers mit Reinforcement Learning kombiniert. Ausserdem ist er Co-Leiter des BigCode-Projekts, das grosse Sprachmodelle für Programmier-Code auf Open Source KI-Modellen wie StarCoder entwickelt.

I am a PhD student doing research in NLP. I am working on an interesting Sinergia project that aims to measure the level of sustainability in call for tender documents in the domain of public procurement. Previously I worked as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at BSI, where I was focusing on the deployment and ethical use of Large Language Models within the BSI Customer Suite. Regarding my studies, I earned my masters's in Computer Science, specializing in Data Science, from the University of Bern. During my master's program, I contributed to the development of DiBB, a Python library aimed at distributed black-box optimization.

Outside of work, I keep a close eye on emerging trends in generative AI and human-centered technology. When I'm not exploring the digital realm, you'll find me delving into psychology, decoding escape rooms, and indulging in bicycle rides.

Matthias Stürmer ist Professor an der Berner Fachhochschule (BFH) und Leiter des Instituts Public Sector Transformation im BFH Departement Wirtschaft sowie Leiter der Forschungsstelle Digitale Nachhaltigkeit am Institut für Informatik der Universität Bern. Im Rahmen dieser zwei Affiliationen befasst er sich in der Lehre, Forschung und Beratung mit Digitalisierungs-Themen wie digitale Nachhaltigkeit, Open Source Software, künstliche Intelligenz, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Open Data, Linked Data, Open Government und öffentlicher Beschaffung. Seit 2020 ist er durch seine Habilitation "Perspectives on Digital Sustainability" Privatdozent an der Universität Bern. Von 2009 bis 2013 arbeitete Matthias Stürmer als Senior Consultant bzw. Manager bei EY (Ernst & Young) sowie als Projektleiter beim Schweizer Software-Unternehmen Liip AG. Zuvor doktorierte er an der ETH Zürich am Lehrstuhl für Strategisches Management und Innovation (Dr. sc. ETH Zürich) und erforschte dort die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Open Source Communities und Technologie-Unternehmen. Er hat an der Universität Bern Betriebswirtschaft und Informatik studiert und 2005 sein Studium mit einer Lizenziatsarbeit zu Open Source Community Building abgeschlossen (lic.rer.pol.).
Matthias Stürmer ist Präsident des Digital Impact Network, Präsident von CH Open und Beiratsmitglied von Opendata.ch. Als Mitglied der Arbeitsgruppe Smart Capital Region engagiert er sich für die Digitalisierung der Hauptstadtregion Schweiz. Ausserdem ist er seit 2009 Geschäftsleiter der Parlamentarischen Gruppe Digitale Nachhaltigkeit (Parldigi) und war als EVP-Stadtrat von 2011 bis 2019 Mitglied des Parlaments von Bern.

Ornella Vaccarelli is a Senior Research Scientist at iCoSys and the Lead Scientist at SCAI (Swiss Center for Augmented Intelligence), where she pioneers innovative AI solutions across diverse domains. With expertise ranging from computer vision and computational physics to the latest developments in large language models (LLMs), she bridges cutting-edge research and practical application.

Her collaborative projects span from fundamental research at EPFL—focused on sustainable materials for solar cells—to developing an LLM-RAG system for the Swiss parliament and the Parliamentary Library. Ornella’s work not only advances scientific understanding but also transforms how industry and government leverage AI for informed decision-making.

A prolific researcher, her findings have been published in high-impact journals, and she is a regular speaker at international conferences. Ornella earned her PhD in Computational Physics from Sorbonne University in Paris and holds a Master’s in Theoretical Physics from the University of Bari. Her career exemplifies a commitment to pushing the boundaries of AI while ensuring its responsible and effective integration into real-world applications.

Technische Leiter von Granite-Vision (https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-vision-3.1-2b-preview) und Docling (https://github.com/DS4SD/docling).

Sergio Solórzano Rocha earned a PhD in physics from ETH Zürich focusing on computational physics. He published multiple papers on numerical algorithms for physical simulations and analysis. He is currently a senior researcher and developer at Exeon Analytics, where he works on building systems for anomaly detection in cybersecurity.

Siddhartha Singh is a machine learning researcher at the NLP group (under Marcel Gygli) at Berner Fachhochschule. He works extensively on RAG Systems, training new Large Language models and designing/engineering machine learning systems.

Veton Matoshi ist Wissenschaftler mit Schwerpunkt Natural Language Processing (NLP) und arbeitet derzeit als wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Berner Fachhochschule. Er verfügt über langjährige Erfahrung in der Entwicklung, Anwendung und Evaluation von NLP-Methoden.

Seine Forschung umfasst Themen wie automatisierte Textklassifikation, Large Language Models (LLMs), Information Retrieval und Semantische Textanalyse. Neben akademischen Projekten hat er als NLP-Researcher in der Industrie gearbeitet, unter anderem bei der Know-Center GmbH in Graz und als Freelance-Computerlinguist.

Mit seinem interdisziplinären Hintergrund in Linguistik, Computerlinguistik und maschinellem Lernen vermittelt er praxisnahes Wissen zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache und zeigt, wie NLP-Technologien in verschiedenen Anwendungsbereichen effektiv eingesetzt werden können.

Mit seinem interdisziplinären Hintergrund in Linguistik, Computerlinguistik und maschinellem Lernen vermittelt er praxisnahes Wissen zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache und zeigt, wie NLP-Technologien in verschiedenen Anwendungsbereichen effektiv eingesetzt werden können.