Call for Participation | Centre for Machine Intelligence (CMI) and Web Science Institute (WSI) Hackathon on Large Language Models Event

Event details

The Centre for Machine Intelligence (CMI) is hosting together with the Web Science Institute (WSI) a hackathon event in Southampton around Large Language Models (LLMs). PhD students and PDRA’s are invited to attend from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and Tsinghua University’s Department of Computer Science and Technology. This is an in-person event, but hybrid participation can be arranged on request. The format of the event will be five working days of focused LLM prototyping based upon a set of hackathon themes. Each theme has an over-arching experiment concept and can involve multiple prototypes being evaluated and have the potential to lead to a full experiment to be written up as a collaborative paper. Prototype coding for the hackathon period is expected to follow a “code quick fail fast” type approach aiming to validate ideas quickly enough to move on to other ideas if they don’t work. For themes with enough successful prototyping there will be follow-up activities led and coordinated by the teams until around Dec 2023 working towards collaborative paper submissions (e.g. long/short ACL-2024 papers). Participating teams are expected to have confidence using Southampton/Tsinghua respective computing clusters so NLP models can be trained quickly on GPU clusters. This hackathon is organized around a set of suggested themes below. Themes attracting enough participants will be run. Below is a tentative set of themes. New themes can be added in the lead up to the event and we will on Thurs 12th Oct at the launch meeting ask all participants which theme they wish to work on and allocate working groups. Academics with a new theme idea and 2+ potential participants in mind for it can email Dr Stuart Middleton sem03@soton.ac.uk prior to the event for it to be added to the options.