2026-05-19 –, Cineac
In recent years, the creation of sovereign national and European Large Language Models (LLMs) has accelerated significantly. With numerous initiatives underway, including major projects like OpenEuroLLM and GPT-NL, as well as community-driven efforts such as GEITje, various stakeholders are collaborating to develop LLMs that are trained on official EU languages, leverage national and EU infrastructure, and adhere to open and transparent data management practices.
This discussion will delve into the technical and policy challenges associated with developing these models, while also exploring the potential benefits and implications they may have for research and the public sector. Both for the presence as well as the future.
Join us in this open discussion and let's connect our minds!
Johannes Schleiss (SURF) will moderate this discussion.
This panel aims to connect researchers, startups, and policymakers interested in developing national European sovereign LLMs and their responsible deployment.
What is the key take away of your session?:Experts in LLM training, deployment, responsible AI, and intelligent virtual humans emphasize advancing national European and sovereign LLMs requires cutting-edge research, ethical governance, optimized infrastructure, and human-centered applications.
Roel Boumans graduated from Delft University of Technology in Aerospace Engineering on the topic of space robotics in 1988. He worked in industry for over 25 years, and obtained is PhD in Medical Sciences at Radboud University in 2020 on the topic of robots in healthcare. He is now working as an assistant professor at the Behavioural Science Institute of the Radboud University. He has started in 2020 the social human agent and robot communication (SHARC) lab on research into designing and building virtual humans. Several experiments have already been done with virtual humans for healthcare, politics, sports and commerce.
Doctoral candidate researching the development and use of EU foundation models within the OpenEuroLLM project. Diana is working at the AMOR/e Lab at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her current research focuses on scaling multilingual dense and diffusion large language models. Diana graduated with a MSc in Data Science & AI with a thesis on Graph Score Matching for Cosmology.
As the founder and AI-expert at AI Studio Delta, Edwin develops trustworthy and compliant AI applications for Dutch partners. Before AI Studio Delta, Edwin worked at the Netherlands Forensic Institute on custom AI solutions for criminal justice applications. As a side project, Edwin developed an open Dutch large language model that was later taken down following objections from BREIN regarding the use of training data.