Industry Track

Industry Track Schedule

July 28, 2025
Time	Location	Session Title	Session Chair(s)
11:00 - 12:30	Hall L	Opening Keynote (Lucia Specia) + Oral Presentations	Georg Rehm (DFKI) and Yunyao Li (Adobe)
14:00 - 15:30	Hall L	Oral Presentations	Simon Ostermann (DFKI)

July 29, 2025
Time	Location	Session Title	Session Chair(s)
4:00 - 5:30	Virtual	Virtual Presentations	Ishan Jindal (Samsung Research)
10:00 - 12:00	Hall L	Keynote (Leon Derczynski) + Oral Presentation	Georg Rehm (DFKI) and Yunyao Li (Adobe)
14:00 - 15:30	Hall L	Oral Presentations	Pedro Ortiz Suarez (Common Crawl Foundation)
16:00 - 17:30	Virtual	Virtual Presentations	Sajjadur Rahman (Adobe)

July 30, 2025
Time	Location	Session Title	Session Chair(s)
09:00-10:30	Hall L	Oral Presentations	Trung Bui (Adobe Research)
11:00 - 12:30	Hall L	Careers in NLP Panel + Closing Awards	Georg Rehm (DFKI) and Yunyao Li (Adobe)

Keynotes

From Words to Worlds: NLP for Game Creation and Interaction**

Lucia Specia

• Abstract: The gaming industry is a leading force in global entertainment, surpassing the size of the music and film industries combined. With over 3 billion people playing games, there’s bigger and bigger demand for fresh, high-quality, and immersive experiences. At the same time, user-generated games have become a core component of major gaming platforms, fostering creativity and diversification. These developments present significant opportunities for AI research and AI-driven tools designed to support gaming, from AAA studios to independent creators. In this talk, I will highlight some of these opportunities, focusing on three areas involving language: 1) Speech-driven animation, where we predict lip sync, expression, and head motion of a character from audio to animate photo-realistic characters; 2) Low-resource language code generation, where we build a code generation model for Verse, a new language designed specifically for programming interactive 3D worlds, games, and simulations; and 3) Safety of interactive NPCs at scale, where we design safety strategies to support the deployment of LLMs for speech to speech in-game (Fortnite) conversations between players and NPCs..

• Bio: Lucia Specia is Senior Director of Research Engineering at Epic Games and Professor of Natural Language Processing at Imperial College London. Her work focuses on various aspects of data-driven approaches to multimodal and multilingual context models, with applications including machine translation, image captioning, visual question answering, quality estimation, and content moderation, among others. In 2021, she founded Contex.ai to build multimodal content moderation models for real world applications, focusing in the gaming industry. She now leads a team of research engineers at Epic Games delivering ML solutions across automation and business optimization, safety and security, user experience and content creation. She received a PhD from the University of Sao Paulo and has held positions at University of Sheffield, Meta, and Xerox Research.

We Can’t Do it Alone**

Leon Derczynski

• Abstract: Industry and academic research each have their own deficiences and blindspots, and both rely heavily on each other. This talk explores common themes and describes each side’s view and what they miss for each theme. We will discuss the role in society, the role in research, which narratives work (and don’t), the role in peer review (and its role for us), and where the hard workers, sceptics, and sociopaths fit in either case. All this comes together to form a positive view of good open collaborations, and some concrete advice on how to give and get the most value out of interactions with the other side.

• Bio: Leon Derczynski is principal research scientist for LLM security at NVIDIA and prof in computer science at ITU Copenhagen. He was written inches, if not kilograms, of papers, and won similar quantities of awards etc. Prof. Derczynski has led policy efforts in academia, industry, and civil society. He has held affiliations at a dozen organisations in the past decade, including startups, universities, corporations, and non-profits; built research programmes at both a leading university and a leading corporation; and he retains a deep love of both university and industry research.

Careers in NLP Panel

Yufang Hou - Moderator

Yufang Hou is a professor at IT:U – Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria. At IT:U, she leads the NLP group with a strong focus on large language model (LLM) governance, computational argumentation, fact-checking, knowledge and reasoning, and human-centred NLP applications in education, science, and health. Yufang has served as an organizing committee member and senior program committee member for various NLP conferences, and has co-organized several workshops on topics such as argument mining, efficient NLP, and AI for Science.

Leon Derczynski - Panelist

Leon Derczynski is principal research scientist for LLM security at NVIDIA and prof in computer science at ITU Copenhagen. He was written inches, if not kilograms, of papers, and won similar quantities of awards etc. Prof. Derczynski has led policy efforts in academia, industry, and civil society. He has held affiliations at a dozen organisations in the past decade, including startups, universities, corporations, and non-profits; built research programmes at both a leading university and a leading corporation; and he retains a deep love of both university and industry research.

Pascale Fung - Panelist

Pascale Fung is a Chair Professor of Electronic & Computer Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), and a Senior Director of AI Research at Meta-FAIR. She is also a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She is a Fellow of the AAAI, IEEE, ACL and ISCA. She served on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She served as Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor for all the top academic journals in the field of speech and language processing. Her team has won several best and outstanding paper awards at ACL, ACL and NeurIPS workshops.

She is an expert on the Global Future Council of the World Economic Forum since 2016. She is on the Expert Network of the UN Advisory Body on AI. She is a member of the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society. She has been a keynote or invited speaker in 250 conferences and panels to speak to both the AI technical community and the public. She has been invited as an expert on AI governance by the United Nations, EU, EC, European Parliament, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Singapore, the US Academics of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering, among others. She was invited to a private audience with Pope Francis in 2023 for an occasion to discuss AI ethics. A speaker of seven European and Asian languages, she is currently based in Meta-FAIR in Paris.

Lucia Specia - Panelist

Lucia Specia is Senior Director of Research Engineering at Epic Games and Professor of Natural Language Processing at Imperial College London. Her work focuses on various aspects of data-driven approaches to multimodal and multilingual context models, with applications including machine translation, image captioning, visual question answering, quality estimation, and content moderation, among others. In 2021, she founded Contex.ai to build multimodal content moderation models for real world applications, focusing in the gaming industry. She now leads a team of research engineers at Epic Games delivering ML solutions across automation and business optimization, safety and security, user experience and content creation. She received a PhD from the University of Sao Paulo and has held positions at University of Sheffield, Meta, and Xerox Research.