Community/training

Circle U, NLPL, & OpenEuroLLM 2026 Winter School on Multilinguality in LLM Development and Evaluation

Background

In 2026, the NLPL network and Digital Europe project OpenEuroLLM have joined forces to organize the successful winter school series on Web-scale NLP. The winter school seeks to stimulate community formation, i.e. strengthening interaction and collaboration among European research teams in NLP and advancing a shared level of knowledge and experience in using high-performance e-infrastructures for large-scale NLP research. This 2026 edition of the winter school puts special emphasis on NLP researchers from countries who participate in the EuroHPC consortium and is endorsed as a doctoral training event in the European Circle U university alliance. For additional background, please see the archival pages from the 2018, 2019, 2020, 2023, 2024, and 2025 NLPL Winter Schools.

For early 2026, NLPL will hold its winter school from Monday, February 2, to Wednesday, February 4, 2026, at a mountain-side hotel (with skiing and walking opportunities) about two hours north of Oslo. The project will organize group bus transfer from and to the main Oslo airport Gardermoen (OSL), leaving the airport at 9:45 on Monday morning and returning there around 17:30 on Wednesday afternoon.

The winter school is subsidized by the OpenEuroLLM project: there is no fee for participants and no charge for the bus transfer to and from the conference hotel. All participants will have to cover their own travel and accommodation at Skeikampen, however. Two nights at the hotel, including all meals, will come to NOK 3885 (NOK 3485 per person in a shared double room), to be paid to the hotel directly upon arrival.

Programme

The 2026 winter school will have a thematic focus on Multilinguality in LLM Development and Evaluation. The programme will be comprised of in-depth technical presentations (possibly including some hands-on elements) by international experts, with special emphasis on open science and European languages, but also include critical reflections on current development trends in LLM-focussed NLP. The programme will be complemented with a ‘walk-through’ of example EuroHPC experience reports from the OpenEuroLLM consortium.

Confirmed presenters and talks include (more can be added later):

• Barbara Plank, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
• Laurie Burchell and Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Common Crawl
• Max Idahl, ellamind
• Julia Kreutzer, Cohere for Labs
• François Yvon, Sorbonne Université

Preliminary schedule

Monday, February 2, 2026
13:00	14:00	Lunch
14:00	15:30	Session 1
15:30	15:50	Coffee Break
16:00	17:30	Session 2
17:30	17:50	Coffee Break
17:50	19:20	Session 3
19:30		Dinner

Tuesday, February 3, 2026
Breakfast is available from 07:30
09:00	10:30	Session 4
Free time (Lunch is available between 13:00 and 14:30)
15:30	17:00	Session 5
17:00	17:20	Coffee Break
17:20	19:20	Session 6
19:30		Dinner
21:00		Evening Session: Findings from OpenEuroLLM

Wednesday, February 4, 2026
Breakfast is available from 07:30
08:30	10:00	Session 8
10:00	10:30	Coffee Break
10:30	12:00	Session 9
12:30	13:30	Lunch
13:45	16:45	Bus transfer to OSL Airport

Registration

In total, we expect 60–80 participants at the 2026 winter school. Registration for interested participants is open. Requests for participation will be processed on a first-come, first-served basis, with an eye toward regional balance. Interested parties who have submitted the registration form will be confirmed in three batches, on November 28, on December 5, and on December 19, which is also the closing date for winter school registration.

Once confirmed by the organizing team, participant names are published on this page, and registration establishes a binding agreement with the hotel. Therefore, a cancellation fee will be incurred (unless we can find someone else to ‘take over’ last-minute spaces), and no-shows will be charged the full price for at least one night by the hotel.

Logistics

With a few exceptions, winter school participants travel to and from the conference hotel jointly on a chartered bus (the OpenEuroLLM shuttle). The bus will leave OSL airport no later than 9:45 CET on Monday, February 2. Thus, please meet up by 9:30 and make your arrival known to your assigned ‘tour guide’ (who will introduce themselves to you by email beforehand).

The group will gather near the DNB currency exchange booth in the downstairs arrivals area, just outside the international arrivals luggage claims and slightly to the left as one exits the customs area: the yellow dot numbered (18) on the OSL arrivals map. The group will then walk over to the bus terminal, to leave the airport not long after 9:40. The drive to the Skeikampen conference hotel will take us about two-three hours, and the bus will make one stop along the way to stretch our legs and fill up on coffee.

The winter school will end with lunch on Wednesday, February 4, before the group returns to OSL airport on the OpenEuroLLM shuttle. The bus will leave Skeikampen at 14:00 CET, with an expected arrival time at OSL around 17:00 to 17:30 CET. After stopping at the OSL airport, the bus will continue to central Oslo.

Organization

The 2026 Winter School is organized by a team of volunteers at the University of Oslo, supported by a programme committee from the OpenEuroLLM, Circle U, and NLPL networks and beyond, please see below. For all inquiries regarding registration, the programme, logistics, or such, please contact nlpl-training@ifi.uio.no.

The programme committee is comprised of (in alphabetical order):

• Jenia Jitsev (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany)
• Andrey Kutuzov (University of Oslo, Norway)
• Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy)
• Stephan Oepen (University of Oslo, Norway)
• Sampo Pyysalo (University of Turku, Finland)
• David Salinas (ELLIS Institute, Germany)
• Gema Ramirez-Sanches (Prompsit Language Engineering, Spain)
• Jörg Tiedemann (University of Helsinki, Finland)
• Joaquin Vanschoren (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)
• Guillaume Wisniewski (Paris Cité University, France)

Participants

1. Adam Hrin, AMD Silo AI (Finland)
2. Aitor Soroa, University of the Basque Country (Spain)
3. Agnes Toftgård, National Library (Sweden)
4. Aleksandra Krasnodębska, NASK PIB (Poland)
5. Alicia Núñez Alcover, Prompsit (Spain)
6. Aman Sinha, Université de Lorraine (France)
7. Andrey Kutuzov, University of Oslo (Norway)
8. Ankit Sonthalia, Tübingen AI Center (Germany)
9. Anni Moisala, CSC – IT Center for Science (Finland)
10. Artūrs Znotiņš, University of Latvia (Latvia)
11. Barbara Heinisch, Eurac Research (Italy)
12. Barbara Plank, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Germany)
13. Charlotte Noel, LINAGORA Labs (France)
14. Dalton Harmsen, Eindhoven University of Technology, OpenEuroLLM (Netherlands)
15. Diana Kylymnyk, University of Exeter (UK)
16. Elizaveta Kuzmenko, Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)
17. Faton Rekathati, The National Library (Sweden)
18. François Yvon, CNRS (France)
19. Fred Philippy, University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
20. Gianluca Barmina, University of Southern Denmark (Denmark)
21. Hannah Clausen, University of Oslo (Norway)
22. Iglika Nikolova-Stoupak, Sorbonne Université (France)
23. Jan Hajič, Charles University ((Czech Republic)
24. Jiajing Wan, University of Bergen (Norway)
25. Jindřich Helcl, University of Oslo (Norway)
26. Johannes Gabriel Sindlinger, IT University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
27. Jouni Luoma, AMD Silo AI (Finland)
28. Julia Kreutzer, Cohere Labs (Canada)
29. Justyna Sikora, The National Library (Sweden)
30. Kevin Glocker, Linköping University (Sweden)
31. Konstantin Dobler, Hasso Plattner Institute (Germany)
32. Kristýna Onderková, Charles University (Czech Republic)
33. Laurène Cave, Sorbonne Université (France)
34. Lisa Yankovskaya, University of Tartu (Estonia)
35. Manisha Venkat, University of Essex (UK)
36. Markus Heiervang, National Library (Norway)
37. Mattes Ruckdeschel, IT University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
38. Maximilian Idahl, ellamind (Germany)
39. Meihan Tong, University of Oslo (Norway)
40. Muhammad Imran, University of A Coruña (Spain)
41. Nalin Kumar, Charles University (Czech Republic)
42. Nam Luu, Charles University (Czech Republic)
43. Neda Jamshidi, University of Sienna (Italy)
44. Nils Grünefeld, IT University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
45. Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Common Crawl Foundation (USA)
46. Roberts Darģis, University of Latvia (Latvia)
47. Romina Oji, Linköping University (Sweden)
48. Sampo Pyysalo, University of Turku (Finland)
49. Shanshan Xu, University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
50. Shenbin Qian, University of Oslo (Norway)
51. Shibingfeng Zhang, University of Bologna (Italy)
52. Stephan Oepen, University of Oslo (Norway)
53. Taja Kuzman Pungeršek, Jožef Stefan Institute (Slovenia)
54. Tita Enstad, National Library (Norway)
55. Tommaso Green, University of Mannheim (Germany)
56. Tudor Nicolae Mateiu, Prompsit (Spain)
57. Vladislav Mikhailov, University of Oslo (Norway)
58. Wafa Aissa, UCLouvain (Belgium)
59. Xiaorui Yu, King's College London (UK)
60. Yihang Lu, Sorbonne Université (France)
61. Yiheng Wu, University of Helsinki (Finland)
62. Yves Scherrer, University of Oslo (Norway)
63. Zihao Li, University of Helsinki (Finland)