While our chair Steffen Herbold is on sabbatical, we have been quite busy during the now-ending summer term.

We welcomed Fabian Pena Lozana and Jonathan Drechsel as a new PhD students in our research group. They are working on the domain adoption and mechanistic explanations of LLMs.

We also disseminated our work in many talks and events:

• At the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024), Alexander Trautsch and Steffen presented highlights from our research.
• At the Trinational Round Table in Budweis, Steffen discussed our work on the essay writing skills of LLMs.
• At the summit community days for Requirements Engineering in Leipzip, Steffen talked about the potential of LLMs for software requirements engineering.
• At the WiN:TeLeKT meet-up between local industry and academics, Steffen explained the challenges a integrating AI into applications.
• At the Inn.Kubator, Steffen discussed the chances and risks of LLMs for start-ups and others wanting to create innovative applications.

Steffen also participated in the Best Business Associations (BBA) Summer Beer event in a panel discussion with Sok-Kheng Taking, the Co-Founder of Dynatrace, Frederic Horsch from the HORSCH Maschinen GmbH, and Werner Fragner from the AMAG Austria Metal AG moderated by Dr. Fritz Audebert.

We also had some fun with outreach. We created a prototype that integrates multiple deep learning models to enable a spoken natural language conversation with a computer. When we tested this in Passau’s old town the citizens liked it, and when we showed this to students at the World Robot Olympics German Final round in Passau, the students there loved it.

Of course, we also did some research. Some is finished, some is in work, some is already available as preprints:

• We demonstrated that LLMs can impersonate politicians together with the research group of Annette Hautli-Janisz: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12855
• We outline some legal compliance issues when working for software developers that want to integrate LLMs together with the research group of Prof. Brian Valerius: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16630

And so much more is now in the pipeline that we cannot make public yet. Exiting times!