greece
Algorithms
Data Science
Artificial Intelligence
ILSP & Archimedes NLP Theme Talk, Thursday 7 March, 16:00 (Greek time)
Speaker: Preslav Nakov (https://mbzuai.ac.ae/study/faculty/preslav-nakov/)
Title: "Jais and Jais-chat: Building the World's Best Open Arabic-Centric Foundation and Instruction-Tuned Open Generative Large Language Models"
Room: Zampolli, Athena Main Building (6 Artemidos str., Marousi, ground floor)
and virtually via MS Teams:
Abstract:
I will discuss Jais and Jais-chat, two state-of-the-art Arabic-centric foundation and instruction-tuned open generative large language models (LLMs). The models are based on the GPT-3 decoder-only architecture and are pretrained on a mixture of Arabic and English texts, including source code in various programming languages. The models demonstrate better knowledge and reasoning capabilities in Arabic than previous open Arabic and multilingual models by a sizable margin, based on extensive evaluation. Moreover, they are competitive in English compared to English-centric open models of similar size, despite being trained on much less English data. I will discuss the training, the tuning, the safety alignment, and the evaluation, as well as the lessons we learned.
Speaker Bio:
Preslav Nakov is Professor and Department Chair for NLP at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. Previously, he was Principal Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, where he led the Tanbih mega-project, developed in collaboration with MIT, which aims to limit the impact of "fake news", propaganda and media bias by making users aware of what they are reading, thus promoting media literacy and critical thinking. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, supported by a Fulbright grant. He is Chair-Elect of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Secretary of ACL SIGSLAV, and Secretary of the Truth and Trust Online board of trustees. Formerly, he was PC chair of ACL 2022, and President of ACL SIGLEX. He is also member of the editorial board of several journals including Computational Linguistics, TACL, ACM TOIS, IEEE TASL, IEEE TAC, CS&L, NLE, AI Communications, and Frontiers in AI. He authored a Morgan & Claypool book on Semantic Relations between Nominals, two books on computer algorithms, and 250+ research papers. He received a Best Paper Award at ACM WebSci'2022, a Best Long Paper Award at CIKM'2020, a Best Demo Paper Award (Honorable Mention) at ACL'2020, a Best Task Paper Award (Honorable Mention) at SemEval'2020, a Best Poster Award at SocInfo'2019, and the Young Researcher Award at RANLP’2011. He was also the first to receive the Bulgarian President's John Atanasoff award, named after the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer. His research was featured by over 100 news outlets, including Reuters, Forbes, Financial Times, CNN, Boston Globe, Aljazeera, DefenseOne, Business Insider, MIT Technology Review, Science Daily, Popular Science, Fast Company, The Register, WIRED, and Engadget, among others.
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To position Greece as a leading player in AI and Data Science
To build an AI Excellence Hub in Greece where the international research community can connect, groundbreaking ideas can thrive, and the next generation of scientists emerges, shaping a brighter future for Greece and the world
Welcome to ARCHIMEDES, a vibrant research hub connecting the global AI and Data Science research community fostering groundbreaking research in Greece and beyond. Its dedicated core team, comprising lead researchers, affiliated researchers, Post-Docs, PhDs and interns, is committed to advancing basic and applied research in Artificial Intelligence and its supporting disciplines, including Algorithms, Statistics, Learning Theory, and Game Theory organized around 8 core research areas. By collaborating with Greek and Foreign Universities and Research Institutes, ARCHIMEDES disseminates its research findings fostering knowledge exchange and providing enriching opportunities for students. Leveraging AI to address real-world challenges, ARCHIMEDES promotes innovation within the Greek ecosystem and extends its societal impact. Established in January 2022, as a research unit of the Athena Research Center with support from the Committee Greece 2021, ARCHIMEDES is funded for its first four years by the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).
Vassilis Alimisis, a postdoctoral researcher at Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Greece, will deliver a tutorial on "Low-Power Analog Hardware Classifier Architecture for ML Applications: From A to Z" at the International Conference on Microelectronics (ICM 2025), taking place on 14-17 December, 2025, in Cairo, Egypt.
Archimedes Research Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece, is featured in a recent article in Dnews. This article is about an Archimedes flagship project in cardiology and AI that aims to use "two-dimensional echocardiographic data to develop deep learning tools and improve the treatment of heart problems."
Vasileios Moustakas, PhD student at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering - NTUA and Academic Fellow at Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Greece, Konstantinos Cheliotis and Anna Mylona, both MEng students at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering - NTUA and interns at Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Vassilis Alimisis, Postdoctoral Researcher at Archimedes, Athena Research Center, and Paul Sotiriadis, Lead Researcher at Archimedes, Athena Research Center, and a Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering - NTUA, received the Best Paper Award (PhD Symposium) at the
Giorgos Papanastasiou, Lead Researcher at the Archimedes Research Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece,and Faculty Research Fellow at Edinburgh Imaging, at the University of Edinburgh, the Queen’s Medical Research Institute, Edinburgh, UK, has co-published a Nature Communications paper on "Clinical implications of bone marrow adiposity identified by phenome-wide association and Mendelian randomization in the UK Biobank."Prof. Papanastasiou mentions that "this project is a strong testament to the power of augmenting biological research with advanced AI and data science methods."
The Archimedes Research Unit, part of the Athena Research Center, Greece, participated in this year's 89th Thessaloniki International Fair, which took place from September 6 to 14, 2025.
The project “ARCHIMEDES Unit: Research in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Algorithms” with code OPS 5154714 is implemented by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan “Greece 2.0” and is funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.
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