Workshops

The Institute organizes or co-organizes various types of workshops. Upcoming and past events are listed below.

Upcoming events

ICCV 2025

October 20, 2025, Honolulu, Hawaii

Workshop on Foundation and Generative Models in Biometrics

Foundation models (such as CLIP, GPT, etc.) are extensively studied in different domains, including natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, etc. Given the performance and capabilities of these models, many researchers are focused on the development and applications of these models such that we can observe extremely rapid advancements, especially in the last three years. In fact, foundation models have demonstrated great potential in learning feature representations in various learning tasks. Particularly, foundation models have been shown to achieve superior performance for training on multiple tasks with large-scale data and then fine-tuning it to small-scale data for specific tasks or zero-shot generalization. Biometrics is also an active field of research in computer vision community. Given various problems in biometric systems, several researchers are focused on improving the recognition accuracy of biometric systems as well as enhancing security and privacy in such systems.

The Foundation and Generative Models in Biometrics Workshop at ICCV 2025 aims to bring together researchers to discuss state-of-the-art advancements, applications, and challenges at the applications of foundation and generative models for biometrics. The workshop will foster discussions that inspire innovation and address challenges in real-world applications of these advanced models.

 

Past workshops

FM&LLM&GM2025

May 30, 2025, Clearwater, Florida, USA

1st International Workshop on Foundation, Multimodal Large Language and Generative Models for Face and Gesture Recognition (FM&LLM&GM2025)

The field of face and gesture recognition has recently experienced a transformative shift with the rise of foundation models, generative models, and multimodal large language models (LLMs), which offer unprecedented capabilities to process and integrate multimodal data (e.g., text, images, video, and audio) in a unified framework. This workshop aims to explore the implications and potential uses of these models specifically for face and gesture recognition tasks. Foundation models (such as CLIP, GPT, etc.) enable robust feature extraction and transfer learning. In addition, generative models allow synthetic data generation, privacy-preserving learning, and advanced data augmentation techniques. As LLMs increasingly support multimodal functionalities, they provide a promising avenue to advance the field beyond traditional techniques, facilitating richer, contextually aware, and potentially more accurate recognition systems, among other key aspects in the field such as explainability.

 

Martigny Biometrics Workshop

May 19 to May 22, 2025

The European Association for Biometrics (EAB), the Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) and Idiap Research Institute are organising a 2-day biometrics workshop, hosted by the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny Switzerland on May 19-20 2025, on the topics of Presentation/Morphing/Deepfake Attack Detection, Template Security, Foundation Models for Biometrics and Biometrics under the AI Act. This workshop is a third edition of the workshop on Presentation Attack Detection previously hosted at the Idiap Research Institute in 2020 and 2023.
The workshop will be co-located with the CITeR Spring 2025 Program Review.

 

PyData Valais Meetup

April 24, 2025

After a fantastic first edition, PyData Valais is back:

  • Graph Neural Networks in energy grid analysis by Roberto Boghetti (Idiap)
  • Building interactive knowledge bases with RAG tools by Guy Baconniere (Idiap)
  • Bayesian thinking in leadership by Chris Pedder (Obrizum)

 

AI ValaisWallis Workshop 

April 14, 2025

The aim of Valais/Wallis Workshops on Artificiel Intelligence is to bring together engineers and researchers, from the Idiap Research Institute, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, EPFL Valais and other institutions, active in pattern analysis and machine intelligence and related applications in Security, Health or Energy.
The objective is to stimulate collaborations between research institutions in Valais.

Valais/Wallis AI Workshops is a joint initiative between the Idiap Research Institute and HES-SO Valais-Wallis.

More information @ AI ValaisWallis Workshop

 

EAB & CITeR Biometrics Workshop

April 18, 2023

The European Association for Biometrics (EAB) and the Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) are organising a 2-day biometrics workshop, hosted by the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny Switzerland on April 18-19 2023, on the topics of Bias mitigation, Template Security, Presentation Attack Detection and Deepfakes. This workshop is a second edition of the EAB workshop on Presentation Attack Detection previously hosted at the Idiap Research Institute in 2020.

The workshop will be co-located with the CITeR Spring 2023 Program Review and training events of the TReSPAsS-ETN and PriMa-ITN projects.

Organizers: The European Association for Biometrics (EAB) in collaboration with the Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) and IDIAP

=> Program

 

Making Sense of ChatGPT - Understanding the technology, its limitations and opportunities

March 10, 2023

Recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) models such as ChatGPT have captured the imagination of the public on the recent advances of the field, sparking a debate on the potential applications and implications of this technology.

The event is dedicated to the discussion of Large Neural Language Models, the underlying framework behind systems such as ChatPGT. In the workshop we will aim to answer some critical questions about the principles behind these models and the associated challenges, emerging applications and opportunities that this technology brings.

The workshop is targeted towards academic and industrial participants willing to understand how these models work, their strengths, limitations and general societal impact.

=> Program

=> Webcast

 

Valais/Wallis AI Workshop 8th edition: AI & Medecine

May 2, 2022

The aim of Valais/Wallis Workshops on Artificial Intelligence is to bring together engineers and researchers active in pattern analysis and machine intelligence with related applications in Security, Health or Energy. This workshop is organized in partnership with The Sense academic center.

=> Program

 

Valais/Wallis AI Workshop 7th edition: Energy in all its artificial states

November 15, 2021

The aim of Valais/Wallis Workshops on Artificial Intelligence is to bring together engineers and researchers active in pattern analysis and machine intelligence with related applications in Security, Health or Energy.

=> Webcast

 

Valais/Wallis AI Workshop 6th edition: AI for Agriculture, Food and Life Sciences

November 18, 2019

=> Program

 

Valais/Wallis AI Workshop 5th edition: Interpreting Machine Learning

May 3, 2019

Machine learning has become an integral part of many fields of research and has achieved considerable success. Despite continued advancements made, it is not always explainable: (a) what information is the machine learning from the data? and (b) how is the machine making the decisions? The 5th edition of Valais/Wallis AI workshop focuses on these questions by engaging researchers from various fields through presentations and discussions.

=> Webcast