Johanna Björklund: "SE.LLMA and the WASP Research Arenas"
Speaker: Johanna Björklund, Professor at the Department of Computing Science, Umeå University
Title: SE.LLMA and the WASP Research Arenas
Abstract:
In February, the Swedish government, Knut och Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW)and the Swedish Publishers introduced SE.LLMA, a new initiative to strengthen LLM capabilities for the Swedish language and support national autonomy. An important goal is to create a series of models that not only speaks and writes Swedish but fully understands Swedish contexts – from government decisions to the education system, but equally important, also to build the expertise and infrastructure required to train and adapt such models in Sweden.
At the same time, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, which funds WASP, announced the formation of a new WASP Research Arena, WARA AI-TRICS, to host the initiative. Johanna Björklund represents WARA Media and Language, which contributes through requirements collection and model evaluation. This talk will provide an overview of SE.LLMA and related activities across the arenas, as well as suggestions for how to engage with the work.
Mini-bio:
Johanna Björklund is a Professor at Umeå University’s Department of Computing Science, where her research focuses on the semantic analysis of multimodal data. She is co-founder of Codemill, Aeterna Labs, and DeepTensor, three spin-out companies working at the intersection of media and agentic systems.
She received her PhD in Theoretical Computer Science from Umeå University in 2007. After a research period at TU Dresden, she returned to Umeå University and became a Docent in 2016. Her research is supported by the Swedish Research Council, KAW, Vinnova, and programmes funded by the European Commission. She is also project manager for WARA Media & Language and part of the SE.LLMA team.
