SwissText invites every year prestigious keynote speakers from industry and academia. Please find all keynote speakers below!”

Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face

Lewis Tunstall is a Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face, whose work lies at the intersection of the open-source and research teams. He is the co-author of the bestseller “NLP with Transformers” book and has previously built machine learning-powered applications for start-ups and enterprises in the domains of NLP, topological data analysis, and time series. He holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics, was a 2010 Fulbright Scholar and has held research positions in Australia, the USA, and Switzerland.

Professor of Computational Linguistics at FernUniversität Hagen

Torsten Zesch a full professor of Computational Linguistics at the CATALPA (Center of Advanced Technology for Assisted Learning and Predictive Analytics) at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. He holds a doctoral degree in computer science from Technische Universität Darmstadt and was the president of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL) from 2017 to 2023. 

Founder and Managing Director of Balthasar Legal AG

Dr. iur. Michèle Balthasar, lawyer, founder and managing director of Balthasar Legal AG, has established herself as an experienced data protection, energy, information, and communications lawyer. She specializes in advising small, medium-sized, and internationally active companies. Michèle Balthasar is also an external company data protection officer in accordance with the Swiss Data Protection Act and a certified lead auditor ISO 27001. Prior to that, she worked for more than 15 years as an in-house lawyer in various functions in companies in the energy industry.

Professor at ITU Copenhagen and principal research scientist at NVIDIA

LLM Security & Safety. Experienced scientific leader in machine learning and natural language processing. Has won and directed millions of euro in research funding and published hundreds of articles on NLP & ML. Leads Strømberg NLP research unit at the IT University of Copenhagen. PhD from England’s largest NLP group, the University of Sheffield, with solid international experience across USA, UK, Denmark, China, Russia.

Director of Research Engineering at Google AI Zurich

 Jesse Berent is a Director of Research Engineering at Google AI Zurich. His group focuses on fundamental research and applied AI in the fields of media understanding and generation, digital ink recognition and machine learning. Prior to joining Google in 2009, Jesse was a post-doctoral researcher at Imperial College London focusing on multi-view image analysis. He obtained his PhD in 2008 in Communications and Signal Processing at Imperial College London and his Masters in Microengineering from the EPFL, Switzerland.

Director of Research Engineering at Google AI Zurich

Anna Rogers is an assistant professor at IT University of Copenhagen. She received her PhD in computational linguistics from the University of Tokyo, followed by postdocs in machine learning for NLP (University of Massachusetts) and social data science (University of Copenhagen)

Chief Transformation Officer of the Swiss Data Science Center

Silvia Quarteroni is the Chief Transformation Officer of the Swiss Data Science Center, a joint venture between EPFL and ETH accelerating the adoption of data science in Switzerland. Silvia leads a team of scientists collaborating with major Swiss companies and organizations to adopt data-driven solutions and wire data science in their decision making process.

Professor in Computer Science at University of Neuchatel

Prof. Jacques Savoy is full Professor in Computer Science at University of Neuchatel. J. Savoy received a Ph.D. in quantitative economics from the University of Fribourg in 1987. From 1987-92 he worked on the faculty of Computer Science at the University of Montreal (Canada).

Leader of the Google Digital Ink Understanding team

Claudiu Musat leads the Google Digital Ink Understanding team, focusing on ink understanding and synthesis. Current research interests include recommender systems, AI-driven UIs and UX, as well as broadly applicable NLP techniques. In the past, he led the AI collaboration between EPFL and Swisscom, and created an NLP startup in the EPFL ecosystem.

Research scientist at IBM Research AI

Diego Antognini is a research scientist at IBM Research AI working on efficient machine learning and low-resource settings for NLP. He received his Ph.D. from EPFL where he developed models to infer high-quality explanations from text documents in a scalable and data-driven manner via selective rationalization. 

Professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milano, Italy)

Marco Passarotti is Full Professor of Computational Linguistics at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy), where he is Director of the CIRCSE Research Centre, which he co-founded in 2009. His main research interests deal with building, using and disseminating linguistic resources and natural language processing tools for Latin.

Research scientist at Google

Enrique Alfonseca is a research scientist at Google where he leads a team working on applied deep learning for Document Understanding on the web. Since 2007 he has held several positions in ads targeting, search quality ranking and natural language processing, both in Google Research and in engineering departments. Before that he was a postdoc at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (2005-2006), and obtained his Ph.D. in the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and the University of York.

Senior Principal Scientist at Roche Pharmaceuticals

Raul Rodriguez-Esteban is Senior Principal Scientist at Roche Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland, where he works on natural language processing, machine learning and real-world data applied to pharmaceutical R&D. Previously, he worked in pharmaceutical R&D at Boehringer Ingelheim and Pfizer. He completed his PhD in machine learning applied to text mining at the laboratory of Andrey Rzhetsky at Columbia University. He was a winner of the Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Award in 2020.

AI Lead Architect for DACH region at Accenture

Sebastian is the AI Lead Architect for DACH region at Accenture. He has years of experience with unstructured data analytics, human-machine interaction, machine learning, NLP and IT architecture. His day to day business is solving real world customer problems and transforming and digitalizing customer businesses. His recent focus is on ML platforms and human-machine interaction. In the past, Sebastian was IBM’s lead technical architect for Watson in DACH and is OpenGroup certified as Expert Solution Architect.

Professor of Natural Language Processing at Imperial College London

Lucia Specia is Professor of Natural Language Processing at Imperial College London, with part-time appointments at the University of Sheffield and Dublin City University. Her research focuses on data-driven approaches to language processing, with a particular interest in multimodal and multilingual context models and work at the intersection of language and vision.

Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face

Lewis is a Machine Learning Engineer in the open-source team at Hugging Face. He has several years experience building machine learning powered applications for startups and enterprises in the domains of natural language processing, topological data analysis, and time series. His current work focuses on developing tools for the NLP community and educating people on how to use them effectively.

Deep Learning Solution Architect at Nvidia

Working many years hands-on as an in-house data scientist, an external deep-learning consultant , a cloud solution architect (on Azure) and now a deep learning solution architect at Nvidia. She has equipped herself with years of industrial experiences and practical tips & tricks learned from pitfalls with real-world projects.

Deep Learning Solution Architect at NVIDIA

Adam Grzywaczewski is a deep learning solution architect at NVIDIA, where his primary responsibility is to support a wide range of customers in delivery of their deep learning solutions. Adam is an applied research scientist specializing in machine learning with a background in deep learning and system architecture.

Professor at the Sapienza University of Rome and a Co-founder of Babelscape

Roberto Navigli is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Sapienza University of Rome and a co-founder of Babelscape. He is an expert in multilingual Natural Language Processing and the creator of BabelNet, a popular multilingual knowledge graph and encyclopedic dictionary. He is one of the few researchers in Europe to have received two ERC grants.

Professor of Computer Science at the University of Brighton, UK

Anya Belz is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Brighton, UK. Belz’s research is in the intersection of Machine Learning and NLP, spanning both text generation and text analysis. She is best known for her work on statistical NLG, and on evaluation of automatically generated text.

Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research in Paris

Holger Schwenk is a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research in Paris focusing on Deep Learning for cross-lingual representations and parallel resources. Previously he was founder and Scientific Director of DeepLingo working on customised machine translation engines. Further assignments included: professor at the University of Le Mans from 2007 to 2015 and researcher at MateCat. Holger Schwenk was an early advocate of using neural networks for language modelling and machine translation.

Director of News Partnerships at The Associated Press (AP)

Lisa Gibbs is Director of News Partnerships at The Associated Press and the newsroom’s point person on AP’s Automation and Artificial Intelligence Strategy Group. She oversaw AP’s first significant text automation initiative from 2014, which uses automation software to generate roughly 3700 corporate earnings stories every quarter.

Professor of Computational Linguistics at LMU Munich

Roberto Navigli is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Sapienza University of Rome and a co-founder of Babelscape. He is an expert in multilingual Natural Language Processing and the creator of BabelNet, a popular multilingual knowledge graph and encyclopedic dictionary. He is one of the few researchers in Europe to have received two ERC grants.

Professor of Computational Linguistics at George Washington University

Mona Diab is Principal Scientist at Amazon AWS AI Deep Learning in Seattle, WA, USA. She is also Professor of Computational Linguistics and NLP in the Department of Computer Science, George Washington University (GW), and founder and Director of the NLP lab CARE4Lang at George Washington University.

Professor at University of the Basque Country

Eneko Agirre is Professor at the University of the Basque Country and member of the IXA Natural Language Processing group. His research focuses on lexical and computational semantics, with applications in information retrieval and machine translation. He has been president of SIGLEX, member of the editorial board of Computational Linguistics, and has received a Google research award.

Distinguished Research Staff Member at IBM Research Zurich

Costas Bekas manages the Foundations of Cognitive Computing group at IBM Research – Zurich. Costas’ research covers high-performance computing, massive scale analytics and cognitive computing. He is a recipient of the PRACE Award (2012) and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize (2013 & 2015).

Professor at Technical University of Darmstadt

Iryna Gurevych is Professor for Language Processing at Technical University of Darmstadt, and Director of the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab. Her research aims at lexical-semantics, resources and algorithms, and innovative applications of language processing to social sciences and humanities.

Researcher at European Commission Joint Research Centre

Hristo Tanev, PhD, has been working in the domain of Natural Language Processing for more than 25 years already. His work has been concentrated mostly in the area of Question Answering, Terminology Extraction, Grammar Induction, and Event Extraction. Being researcher and developer of working applications, Hristo Tanev’s work resulted in several software systems for Question Answering, Event Extraction and Terminology Learning.

Principal Data Scientist at Microsoft

Peter Stengard was lead data scientist for BMW Oracle Racing during the team’s victorious challenge of the 33rd Americas’s Cup. He is now working on large-scale solutions for text analytics at Microsoft and develops industry solutions using Artificial Intelligence for Social Analytics and Text Mining.

Professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh

Verena Rieser leads the NLP research group on Spoken Dialogue Systems and Natural Language Generation at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. Her research aims to create accessible, interactive natural language interfaces, and she has pioneered work in using Reinforcement Learning for multimodal dialogue systems. She currently serves as a faculty advisor for the Amazon Alexa Challenge and as an area chair for ACL 2017.

Professor at University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt

Margot Mieskes is Professor for Information Science at the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt. Her research aims at extracting information from natural language sources (both written and spoken) for interdisciplinary applications of NLP. She has worked on text summarization, speech recognition and speech synthesis.

Paolo Rosso

Professor at Universitat Politècnica de València

Jürg Attinger

Innovation Expert at Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI)

Katja Filippova

Research Scientist at Google