General: Keynote, talks, hands-on sessions
Formats: workshops, discussions, inspiration sessions

What are some key thematic areas?

• Fundamentals of neural networks: weights/parameters, activation functions, forward vs. backpropagation, supervised vs. unsupervised learning

• Introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP), typical NLP tasks (part-of-speech tagging, sentiment analysis, question answering, etc.)

• Fundamentals of word embeddings and sentence embeddings (Word2Vec, etc.)

• Selection and application of suitable tokenizers and embedding models

• Transformer architecture, multi-head attention, encoders vs. decoders, BERT, GPT

• Attention mechanism, query/key/value concept, flash attention

• Fundamentals of LLMs, including pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference

• Technical design of AI systems with appropriate architecture, computing resources, etc.

• Prompt optimization, development and testing of system prompts for custom AI systems

• Quality measurement (performance) of LLMs using benchmarks; classic benchmarks (MMLU-Pro, HellaSwag, SuperGLUE, HLE, etc.), leaderboards

• Introduction to and examples of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

• Evaluation and configuration of vector databases

• Concept and practical examples of agentic AI

• Fundamentals and application of MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Join us to uncover the opportunities and challenges of Open Source AI!

Take a look back at last year’s Open Source AI workshops! Our 2025 edition brought together innovators, experts, and enthusiasts for two days of inspiring keynotes, hands-on sessions, and vibrant community exchange.

Explore the highlights, photos, and impressions from the event here — and get a feel for the energy that awaits you again this year.

Participation costs:

Price per workshop - CHF 540
Price per workshop - CHF 420 (member CH Open, IPST-Partner und Partnervereine)