What we’re about
We are BLISS e.V., the AI organization in Berlin that connects like-minded individuals who share great interest and passion for the field of machine learning. This winter 2025/26, we will, again, host an exciting speaker series on site in Berlin, featuring excellent researchers from Tübingen AI Center, DeepMind, Microsoft, King's College London, cohere, and ETH Zürich.
For more information about us, especially our weekly reading group, visit bliss.berlin
Upcoming events
8
#23 AI Series: DeepMind - F. Barbero
C130, Institut für Chemie, Technische Universität Berlin, Chemiegebäude, Str. des 17. Juni 115, 10623 Berlin, Berlin, DEWe are back! Get ready for the BLISS AI Speaker Series Winter 2025/26! NOTE: We changed rooms and will now be in C130!
We are excited to feature Federico Barbero, who is currently at DeepMind in London and PhD Student at University of Oxford and will discuss "Why do LLMs struggle with Long Context?", lasting approximately 45 minutes. After the talk, seize the opportunity to connect with fellow AI enthusiasts to share ideas and questions while enjoying free drinks and pizza. Door close by 7.15pm, so please come early! Also, "attend"ing (RSVP) here on Meetup is strictly necessary to be guaranteed entry.
Please note that Meetup has recently been quite keen on promoting its Plus program. However, you are not obligated to purchase it, as both our events and the platform remain free.Who is this event for?
This event is open to everyone interested in state-of-the-art AI research. We especially design it for students, PhD candidates, academic researchers, and industry professionals with a research focus in machine learning.Abstract: There is great interest in scaling the number of tokens that LLMs can efficiently and effectively ingest, a problem that is notoriously difficult. Training LLMs on a smaller context and hoping that they generalize well to much longer contexts has largely proven to be ineffective. In this talk, I will go over our work that aims to understand the failure points in modern LLM architectures. In particular, I will discuss dispersion in the softmax layers, generalization issues related to positional encodings, and smoothing effects that occur in the representations. Understanding these issues has proven to be fruitful, with related ideas now already being part of frontier models such as LLaMa 4. The talk is intended to be broadly accessible, but a basic understanding of the Transformer architectures used in modern LLMs will be helpful.
Bio: Federico is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Oxford (Trinity College), supervised by Michael Bronstein, where he works on Geometric Deep Learning with a broader interest in ML security, robustness, and privacy. He is currently at Google DeepMind in London, collaborating with Petar Veličković on Algorithmic Reasoning. In 2023, he interned at Microsoft Research Amsterdam with the AI4Science team on protein sampling. Before that, he completed an MPhil in Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence at the University of Cambridge (King’s College), supervised by Pietro Liò and Cristian Bodnar, where he worked on Topological Deep Learning.
We are BLISS e.V., the AI organization in Berlin that connects like-minded individuals who share great interest and passion for the field of machine learning. This winter 2025/26, we will, again, host an exciting speaker series on site in Berlin, featuring excellent researchers from Tübingen AI Center, DeepMind, Microsoft, King's College London, cohere, and ETH Zürich.
Website: https://bliss.berlin
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@bliss.ev.berlinDisclaimer: By attending this event you agree to be photographed.
410 attendees
#24 AI Series: cohere - B. Ermiş
C130, Institut für Chemie, Technische Universität Berlin, Chemiegebäude, Str. des 17. Juni 115, 10623 Berlin, Berlin, DENOTE: We changed rooms and will now be in C130!
We are excited to feature Beyza Ermiş, who is currently a Senior Research Scientist at cohere and will discuss "Scaling AI Safety Across Cultures and Languages", lasting approximately 45 minutes. After the talk, seize the opportunity to connect with fellow AI enthusiasts to share ideas and questions while enjoying free drinks and pizza. Door close by 7.15pm, so please come early! Also, "attend"ing (RSVP) here on Meetup is strictly necessary to be guaranteed entry.
Please note that Meetup has recently been quite keen on promoting its Plus program. However, you are not obligated to purchase it, as both our events and the platform remain free.Who is this event for?
This event is open to everyone interested in state-of-the-art AI research. We especially design it for students, PhD candidates, academic researchers, and industry professionals with a research focus in machine learning.Abstract: TBD
Bio: Beyza is a Senior Research Scientist at Cohere in Berlin, working on large-scale machine learning with a focus on language models. Prior to this, she was a Research Scientist at Amazon Web Services (2017–2022) and held research assistant and intern positions at Boğaziçi University and Amazon, where she worked on applied machine learning problems. She completed her PhD and MSc in Computer Science at Boğaziçi University, following a BSc in Computer Engineering at Bilkent University.
We are BLISS e.V., the AI organization in Berlin that connects like-minded individuals who share great interest and passion for the field of machine learning. This winter 2025/26, we will, again, host an exciting speaker series on site in Berlin, featuring excellent researchers from Tübingen AI Center, DeepMind, Microsoft, King's College London, cohere, and ETH Zürich.
Website: https://bliss.berlin
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@bliss.ev.berlinDisclaimer: By attending this event you agree to be photographed.
94 attendees
#25 AI Series: DeepMind - A. Edwards
C130, Institut für Chemie, Technische Universität Berlin, Chemiegebäude, Str. des 17. Juni 115, 10623 Berlin, Berlin, DEWe are excited to feature Ashley Edwards, who is currently a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and will discuss "Generative World Models", lasting approximately 45 minutes. After the talk, seize the opportunity to connect with fellow AI enthusiasts to share ideas and questions while enjoying free drinks and pizza. Door close by 7.15pm, so please come early! Also, "attend"ing (RSVP) here on Meetup is strictly necessary to be guaranteed entry.
Please note that Meetup has recently been quite keen on promoting its Plus program. However, you are not obligated to purchase it, as both our events and the platform remain free.Who is this event for?
This event is open to everyone interested in state-of-the-art AI research. We especially design it for students, PhD candidates, academic researchers, and industry professionals with a research focus in machine learning.Abstract: TBD
Bio: Ashley is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where she works on reinforcement learning and foundational world models. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2019, where she developed models for inferring latent actions, rewards, and policies from videos. Previously, she was a Research Scientist at Uber AI Labs and an intern at Google Brain. She holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Georgia.
We are BLISS e.V., the AI organization in Berlin that connects like-minded individuals who share great interest and passion for the field of machine learning. This winter 2025/26, we will, again, host an exciting speaker series on site in Berlin, featuring excellent researchers from Tübingen AI Center, DeepMind, Microsoft, King's College London, cohere, and ETH Zürich.
Website: https://bliss.berlin
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@bliss.ev.berlinDisclaimer: By attending this event you agree to be photographed.
111 attendees
#26 AI Series: Tübingen AI Center - A. Prabhu
C130, Institut für Chemie, Technische Universität Berlin, Chemiegebäude, Str. des 17. Juni 115, 10623 Berlin, Berlin, DEWe are excited to feature Ameya Prabhu, who is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Tübingen AI Center and will discuss "What's Next in Continual Learning for Foundation Models?", lasting approximately 45 minutes. After the talk, seize the opportunity to connect with fellow AI enthusiasts to share ideas and questions while enjoying free drinks and pizza. Door close by 7.15pm, so please come early! Also, "attend"ing (RSVP) here on Meetup is strictly necessary to be guaranteed entry.
Please note that Meetup has recently been quite keen on promoting its Plus program. However, you are not obligated to purchase it, as both our events and the platform remain free.Who is this event for?
This event is open to everyone interested in state-of-the-art AI research. We especially design it for students, PhD candidates, academic researchers, and industry professionals with a research focus in machine learning.Abstract: TBD
Bio: Ameya is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Bethge Lab, Tübingen AI Center, where he works on developing frontier benchmarks for foundation models with a broader focus on automated scientific discovery. He received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Oxford in 2024, working on continual learning and robustness, including contributions such as GDumb and RanDumb. He previously held research roles at Intel Labs, Verisk, IBM, and WizCal, spanning topics from large-scale continual learning to neural architecture search and uncertainty estimation. Before Oxford, he completed a dual Bachelor’s and Master’s by Research in Computer Science at IIIT Hyderabad. His work has been published at NeurIPS, ICML, ICCV, EMNLP, and TMLR.
We are BLISS e.V., the AI organization in Berlin that connects like-minded individuals who share great interest and passion for the field of machine learning. This winter 2025/26, we will, again, host an exciting speaker series on site in Berlin, featuring excellent researchers from Tübingen AI Center, DeepMind, Microsoft, King's College London, cohere, and ETH Zürich.
Website: https://bliss.berlin
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@bliss.ev.berlinDisclaimer: By attending this event you agree to be photographed.
40 attendees
Past events
27
