Elena Voita is a Research Scientist at FAIR (Meta AI). She is widely known in the NLP community for her accessible writing and her illustrated NLP course at lena-voita.github.io, which has reached a global audience of self-learners and students.

At the inaugural school, she delivered the core lecture series, tracing the history of NLP from rule-based systems to modern Transformer architectures and alignment techniques. Her talks connected theory to current research practice and set the intellectual foundation for the week.

Ilya Boytsov is an applied Deep Learning Scientist and NLP Lead at Wayfair in Berlin. His main professional interests include information retrieval, aspect-based sentiment analysis, and generative AI. He has extensive experience designing machine-learning bootcamps and lectures for diverse audiences.

At the 2023 school, visa issues prevented him from attending in person. He led the hands-on workshops online to a live in-person audience, a format that turned an obstacle into something participants found unexpectedly effective. He is also co-founder of the Street Smart AI community in Berlin.

Maksim Zubok is a doctoral candidate in Politics at Oxford University, Nuffield College. His research explores how large language models can be used for social science, from standard data labelling tasks to using models as snapshots of the internet to study how people structure concepts and beliefs.

He conceived and organised the inaugural school in 2023, and has led the programme through each edition since. He has also helped organise the Oxford Summer Institute for Computational Social Science.