School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh / Aveni.ai

Alexandra Birch is Professor and Chair of Multilingual Natural Language Processing at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC), University of Edinburgh, and a leading member of both the StatMT and Edinburgh NLP groups. She is also co-founder and Chief Scientist of Aveni.ai, a fintech company delivering GenAI solutions to the UK finance sector. Her research focuses on multilingual and multimodal NLP, with over 100 peer-reviewed publications spanning ethics, explainability, and efficiency, contributing significantly to the shift toward neural networks and large language models. She has led major EU projects including EuroLLM, UTTER, and GoURMET, and currently leads the FinLLM project with Lloyds and Nationwide to develop a large language model for UK Financial Services.

Allen Institute for AI / ETH AI Center

Valentina Pyatkin is a postdoctoral researcher (and Young Investigator) at the Allen Institute for AI and the University of Washington, advised by Prof. Hanna Hajishirzi. Additionally, she is part-time affiliated with the ETH AI Center, where she mentors students and works on post-training for the Swiss AI Initiative. She completed her PhD in Computer Science at the NLP lab of Bar Ilan University, supervised by Prof. Ido Dagan and Prof. Reut Tsarfaty. She also was a visiting PhD student at UW NLP, with Prof. Yejin Choi, and had the pleasure of interning twice at the Allen Institute for AI. Her work has been awarded an ACL Outstanding Paper Award and the ACL Best Theme Paper Award. Her work has been featured in the press, for example by TechCrunch and GeekWire.