Terranova funds UNISI PhD scholarship for research on AI and Large Language Models

With an ongoing commitment to technological and process innovation, Terranova has long been a member of SAIHub, a Network of Undertakings conceived to stimulate networking, work on innovative projects and build an effective relationship with the world of research and centres of excellence.

This network is promoted by the SAIHub foundation, set up in Siena in 2020 and consisting of more than 15 companies operating in the ICT sector, which aims to introduce Artificial Intelligence, technology transfer, and the dissemination of scientific skills in the territory through the promotion of training activities or projects involving the collaboration of universities or research centres with companies.

In light of this, the Network has launched the research project related to the study of Large Language Models (LLM) with the University of Siena. The best-known application of LLMs is related to their ability to generate realistic and coherent text, which can be used for both document generation and chat management (e.g., ChatGPT).

A PhD scholarship co-financed by the Network together with Terranova, Datatellers and Mediavoice will be dedicated to the project. The work of Christian di Maio, a PhD student who won the scholarship, will be supervised by Stefano Melacci and Marco Maggini from the University of Siena.
LLM models are often generalist, being able to generate texts relating to very different fields without using terms specific to that field of application. The goal of the project we are funding is to define and implement training protocols that enable the specialisation of LLM models in vertical domains, so that it can learn and then use linguistic and lexical structures specific to the application domain.
Lucio Machetti, Terranova R&D Manager