We welcome visiting researchers (postdoc, faculty, or Ph.D. students from other institutions) to collaborate with us for short-term or long-term research stays in the following research areas.

LLM Post-Training Techniques: Investigating and developing advanced techniques for fine-tuning, reasoning, alignment, LLM agents, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and knowledge injection for pre-trained LLMs to enhance their performance and safety.

Multilingualism in LLMs: Researching methods, e.g., continual pre-training, finetuning, and inference, to improve LLM performance for diverse languages, including low-resource languages.

AI for Healthcare: Designing, implementing, and evaluating autonomous LLM powered agents for tasks such as clinical decision support, medical information retrieval, patient education, virtual assistants, and workflow automation in healthcare. Addressing critical considerations related to fairness, bias, explainability, and privacy of LLMs in healthcare and social good applications.

Multimodality in LLMs: Developing and evaluating multimodal LLMs that can integrate and reason over various data types. In healthcare, they include clinical text, medical images (X-rays, MRIs), and electronic health records (EHRs).

We Offer

• A stimulating and supportive research environment with access to state-of-the-art computational resources (e.g., GPUs, computing clusters).
• A dynamic working environment in collaboration with the ELLIS Institute Finland, the TurkuNLP research group, and other international partners.
• Opportunities for collaboration with leading researchers in AI, NLP and health domains.
• Participation in cutting-edge projects with real-world impact on healthcare.

There are some external funding opportunities that prospective students and researchers may explore, for example, the EDUFI Fellowship for doctoral researchers. If you have an external fellowship or self-support for your visit, we encourage you to reach out and explore potential collaborations. We also very likely have some funding to host short-term visitors.

For additional information, kindly contact ELLIS PI, Assistant Professor Shaoxiong Ji shaoxiong.ji@utu.fi.

About Us

TurkuNLP is an internationally recognized multidisciplinary research group specializing in the development of machine learning-based resources, models, and tools for NLP tasks using internet-scale data. In recent years, TurkuNLP has created several openly available Transformer-based language models, such as FinBERT and FinGPT, Finland’s leading BERT and GPT-3 models, and subsequently the Poro and Viking models. TurkuNLP was also selected as a pilot user of Europe’s largest supercomputer, LUMI, and the group has a long tradition of using high-performance computing in NLP.

ELLIS Institute Finland is a newly established world-class research hub in AI and machine learning. We are developing an ecosystem of top talents, businesses and investments in Finland, with fundamental machine learning research at the core. The Institute is part of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), which aims to build a pan-European institution for machine learning research.

Photo by Juho Luomala on Unsplash