WARA Media & Language welcomes you to an exciting week of Summer School!

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The format will be a combination of invited lectures from WASP researchers, industry experts and  hands-on experience of central technologies.

During the week you will not only learn about, but also interact and experiment with, modern generative models of human behavior. This includes generative language models, text-to-speech systems, and gesture generation. Outside of the lectures, students work in groups to use the above technologies to create a short story told by 3D avatars. The week is wrapped up by presentations of these assignments in the 3D dome at the Visualization Center.

Examples of last year’s student work can be found below:

Team 1

Team2 

Team 3

Team 4

The social program includes a welcome reception, an excursion, a pitch event and a conference dinner. There will be plenty of networking opportunities with fellow students and the larger WASP community.

 

Agenda

Monday August 21 “Inspiration”

10:15 Registration – Entrance of the Visualization Center

10:30 Ivana von Proschwitz (WARA M&L ) – Welcome & practical information
11:00 Taras Kucherenko (SEED – Electronic arts) – Animation of gestures and body language
11:30 Sara Karimi (King/ KTH) – How Large Language Models have inspired Game AI
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Zenodia Charpy (NVIDIA) – Multi model technologies
13:30 Guy Gadney (Charisma AI) – Non-linear storytelling
14:00 Konrad Tollmar (SEED – Electronic arts) Computer-games for research on human communication
14:30 Coffee break
15:00 Ben Watson (NVIDIA) Performing Large Language Model inference in the cloud

15:30 Teodor Nikolov & Mihail Tsakov (WARA M&L)– Technical presentation of the assignment

18:00 Avatar Crash Course with Softserve + food and drinks

 

Tuesday August 22 “Natural language and meaning”

9:00 Jackie Cheung (Mila – Quebec AI Institute) Language models LLM
10:45 Coffee break
11:00 Henrik Björklund (Umeå University)  – Bias management and fairness                                         

12:00 Lunch
13:00 Marcus Liwicki (Luleå University) – Current limitations and future of large language models
14:00 work on the assignment
15:00 Coffee break
15:00 work on the assignment
16:00 Anders Ynnerman (WASP) – A walk in Space in 3D

17:30 wraps + drinks
18:00-19:00 3D film viewing Making Magic

 

Wednesday August 23 “Spoken and nonverbal communication”

9:00 Shivam Mehta – (KTH) Challenges and solutions in text-to-speech
10:00 Coffee break
10:15 Shivam Mehta (KTH) continued
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Taras Kucherenko (SEED – Electronic arts) – Generation of body animations
14:00 Coffee break
14:20 Teodor Nikolov & Mihail Tsakov (WARA M&L) -Tutorial on mapping speech to gestures
16:00 work on the assignment

19:00 Conference Dinner at VY

 

Thursday August 24  “Assignment and excursion”

09:00 work on the assignment
10:00 work on the assignment
11:00 work on the assignment
12:00 Lunch
13: 30 Excursion to Marmorbruket

19:00 Dragons’ Den with Navigare Ventures + food and drinks

 

Friday August 25 “Demo Day”

9:00 Demo of the assignment in the Visualization Dome
12:00 Lunch
13:00 End-of-summer-school

 

 

Don´t forget to book your own travel and accommodation for the week.

The WARA M&L team will stay at ELITE GRAND HOTEL, NORRKÖPING

 

Hope to see you there!

 

Johanna Björklund

Adj. member AMG, Assoc. Prof., Umeå University, Co-founder, Adlede and Codemill

Ivana von Proschwitz

WARA Media & Language Community Manager
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