Hours:
20 hours (5 credits)

Room:

Aula Riunioni del Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Via G. Caruso 16, Pisa - Ground Floor
Aula Riunioni del Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Largo Lucio Lazzarino 2, Piano 6
Lezione online il 20/03/2025

To register to the course, click here

Short Abstract:

This course explores how LLMs transform academic writing and presentations, offering high English accuracy, title suggestions, and support across academic tasks, including social aspects. Participants will learn to critically assess and effectively prompt LLM outputs.
Key challenges, such as unintended text changes, lack of readability and relevance flags, and overly verbose email structures, are discussed.
The course emphasizes manuscript skills (clarity, conciseness, and readability), managing referees, and effective presentations, including co-creating slides with LLMs, selecting inclusive visuals, and improving pronunciation.

Course Contents in brief:

Large Language Models

LLMs are transforming how academic papers and presentations are written. They have some major advantages:

1. they generate texts that are 99.9% accurate from an English point of view (though not from a factual point of view); they can correct texts already in English with at least 95% accuracy
2. they can give suggestions on titles for papers, on how to interact with referees, and on some elements regarding the quality and content of the writing
3. they can help with practically every aspect of academic life - not just studying for also socializing

The key is in learning how to prompt and to judge the bot's output using critical thinking skills.
However LLMs have major drawbacks:

1. when correcting and paraphrasing they may make serious undesired modifications
2. they do NOT flag some major issues that guarantee that a paper will be published: readability, conciseness, relevance, inclusion of all aspects that referees expect to find (e.g. limitations of work)
3. they generate emails that always follow the same verbose style and structure

Manuscript writing skills

Focus on key areas of a paper where special human attention is required – highlighting key findings, differentiate own work from that of others, discussing limitations; short clear simple sentences and paragraphs.
Effective titles and abstracts that will attract attention and thus be read.
Readability.
Dealing with referees and editors.

Presentation skills

Drafting a skeleton presentation co-created with ChatGPT.
Designing, practising and delivering well-structured  presentation that attracts and holds audience attention.
Drafting a script using simple and short sentences.
Choosing appropriate and inclusive images - highlighting importance of diversity.
Learning from TED and 3MTs.
Improving pronunciation and intonation in English.

Schedule:

1. March 6, 2025: 10:30-13.00 - Via Caruso
2. March 7, 2025: 10:30-13.00 - Via Caruso
3. March 11, 2025: 10:30-13.00 - Via Caruso
4. March 13, 2025: 10:30-13.00 - Via Caruso
5. March 18, 2025: 10:30-13.00 - Via Caruso
6. March 20, 2025: 10:30-13.00 - Lezione Online
7. March 25, 2025: 10:30-13.00 - Via Caruso
8. March 27, 2025: 10:30-13.00 - Largo Lucio Lazzarino