WASP Thematic Summer School 2025

Rethinking and Rescaling LLMs (August 18-22, 2025)

The speakers and the talks

The 2025 WASP thematic summer school was graced by 8 seasoned speakers. On day 1, we had Shan Muhammad of DFKI, Germany present state-of-the-art papers on LLM-based data annotation. On day 2, we had Salla Franzén of Navigare Ventures, who is celebrated on the cover page of the WASP 10th year anniversary magazine, present “Rethinking Usage”, providing use cases from IKEA and SEB, among others. She also hosted an open discussion with the participants about any topic on their PhD journey and the use of LLMs. On the same day we had Clara Rivera of IE University, Spain, and former Google DeepMind researcher, present “Rethinking Data”, where she advocated for new ways of approaching data.

On day 3, we had Thomas Breuel of Nvidia, who spoke on “Rethinking Training” and examined AI alignment. Thereafter, Christoforos Kanellakis from LTU spoke on ”Rethinking Usage in Robotics” and introduced VLAs, which are advanced vision-language-action models. Homam Mokayed from LTU gave the final talk that day with assistance from Saleha Haseeb on “Enhancing Educational Chatbots for Teachers and Students”, describing plans for LLM-based tutoring. Later that evening, students and speakers together enjoyed the boat cruise to the dinner on the island of Sandön at the Klubbviken restaurant. On day 4 Lars Lindsköld from Svensk Förening för Medicinsk Informatik spoke on ”Rethinking AI Ethics” in an interactive atmosphere. Petter Ericson from Umeå University spoke on “Rethinking LLMs as AI Agents”, highlighting LLMs’ limitations. Marcus Liwicki, head of the Machine Learning group at LTU, prepared the participants for their project presentations in a final motivation for the day that included breathing exercises. The summer school also had a brief demo on document image analysis by Chang Liu from LTU and 40 “brain candies” (pop quizzes) after most of the talks.

The participants and the feedback

The school had kicked off with an introductory survey to gauge the knowledge level of the participants on August 18 to compare with a final survey at the end on day 5. 18 PhD candidates took part in the summer school, 15 of whom are WASP or WASP-affiliated students across 6 universities in Sweden. 17 of these took part in the introductory survey and only 10 responded to the final survey. Besides the survey, there were 4 Canvas modules, a Github repo of technical implementations of project examples and quizzes (of 54 total questions with possibility for multiple attempts) to objectively assess the students.

The quiz results, which appear very good, are presented in the Figure. 15 students did all 4 quizzes while 2 did only quiz 1 and 1 did not do any. The participants also gave engaging presentations on their self-initiated group projects, followed by QnA, on the final day. There were a total of 9 projects. These include, in no specific order, “Vibe Music Coder”, “Knowledge Distillation”, “WASPscape – landscape of WASP research over time”, “Can a robot pick up a cat?”, “Efficient Fine-Tuning of LLMs: PEFT and QLoRA with TinyLlama”, “Launch of CatGPT 5.0”, and “HTR Post-correction with LLMS for Arabic Scripts”. Among the many interesting ideas, Vibe Music Coder was novel in framing the hallucination challenge of LLMs into an advantage of creativity in music generation.

The closing feedback showed that all can identify the ethical challenges with LLMs and possible mitigation. 90% said the summer school was either excellent or very good for reasons such as “Broad topics…nice discussions, beautiful Luleå”, “Socializing, the presentations and the group project”, “The keynote speakers’ talks…”, “I valued the different talks…”, and “Good to know that our (registration) feedback has been acknowledged.”. The social dinner was described with words like “Excellent! The best social activity I have ever attended in a WASP event.”, “Very nice cruise”, “Perfect choice!”, and “It was very well managed”. On the other hand, there were also observations like “…a lot to process”, “…maybe a bit more ‘technical’ presentations”, and “…would prefer if there were activities until at least 17 every day”.

Organisers: Marcus Liwicki, Lama Alkhaled, Tosin Adewumi, Rihab Gargouri and Nudrat Habib