Research area spotlight: what the FORGE-AI cohort is working on

Twenty-eight researchers, four research directions. Now that our secondees are matched with host institutions across Germany, France, and Armenia, it's worth pausing on what they'll actually be doing once they get there. Here's a closer look at the four core areas driving this cohort's work.

1. NLP and large language models

At DFKI, secondees are pushing speech and language technology into territory standard models struggle with — recognising speech in acoustically difficult environments, strong dialects, and under-resourced languages, while fine-tuning models that work well even with limited training data. Elsewhere in the cohort, secondees are building LLM-based social agents and assistants designed to support both researchers and the people managing their projects.

2. Computer vision and object recognition

This track spans from the lab to the body: secondees are developing computer-vision pipelines for analysing human movement and biomechanics using multimodal data, alongside broader work on object detection, video monitoring, and multimodal AI systems that combine visual input with other data sources for real-world recognition tasks.

3. AI in healthcare

Several secondees are focused on the intersection of AI and medicine — building AI-based tools for EEG data processing, including silent-speech interfaces, for use in human-machine interaction, alongside work applying computer vision and generative AI methods to medical imaging and diagnostic support.

4. AI-driven grant management

A less visible but critical strand of the programme: secondees are working on LLM-based assistants to support researchers and grant managers navigating funding workflows, while others are directly embedded as co-managers on live EU projects, using tools like the European Commission's Funding & Tenders Portal to handle project finances, reporting, and proposal design in real time.

Together, these four areas capture what FORGE-AI's secondment programme is really about: not just placing researchers abroad, but connecting them to concrete, active projects where their skills — and Georgia’s AI ecosystem — can grow.

FORGE-AI has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101216703.