16th Annual Workshop Series – WTLAB 2025
In conjunction with the ICCKE 2025 International Conference at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, the 16th Annual Workshop Series of the Web Technology Laboratory (WTLAB) will be held.
This year’s series includes three workshops, prepared and presented by faculty members and researchers of the lab. All enthusiasts of the mentioned topics are invited to participate in this scientific and educational event.
Date: Thursday, October 30, 2025
Time: 14:00 – 18:00 (Online)
Presenter: Amirhossein Dermani, Ph.D. candidate in Artificial Intelligence, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad; Member of the Web Technology Laboratory
Workshop Content:
Introduction to Agentic AI:
Reasoning and planning capabilities in large language models
The think–act–observe cycle in agents
Prompt engineering techniques for agentic applications, including the ReAct method
Frameworks for building and using agents:
LangChain, smollagents, langgraph, and others
Tools and their applications in agents:
Defining and using tools
Using RAG as a powerful tool
Introduction to MCP as a tool-hub
Evaluation and observability in agents:
Frameworks for evaluation and observability: langfuse, langsmith, etc.
Datasets for agent evaluation: GAIA and others
Date: Friday, October 31, 2025
Time: 08:00 – 12:00 (Online)
Presenters:
Fatemeh Mohsennia, Ph.D. candidate in Software Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad; Member of the Web Technology Laboratory
Hossein Farahmand, M.Sc. student in Software Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad; Member of the Web Technology Laboratory
Workshop Content:
Part 1: Introduction to Speech-to-Text (STT)
Overview and applications of STT and TTS
History and evolution of speech technologies
STT architecture (feature extraction, acoustic model, language model)
Introduction to DeepSpeech and Whisper
Short demo: Running Whisper
Advanced STT topics and fine-tuning
Comparison: DeepSpeech vs. Whisper
Evaluation metrics (WER, CER)
STT challenges in Persian (dialects, noise, data)
Fine-tuning Whisper (motivation, data needs, general workflow)
Part 2: Text-to-Speech (TTS) Fundamentals and Models
TTS architecture (preprocessing, acoustic model, vocoder)
Overview of models: Tacotron2, FastSpeech, VITS, Coqui TTS, Bark
Quality metrics (MOS, naturalness, intelligibility)
Hands-on demo: Running Coqui TTS
Model comparison
Final project and wrap-up
Date: Friday, October 31, 2025
Time: 14:00 – 18:00 (Online)
Presenter: Ali Moameri, M.Sc. student in Software Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad; Member of the Web Technology Laboratory
Workshop Content:
Goal: Understanding concepts and implementing a complete, practical RAG system using local/offline models.
Part 1: Introduction to RAG and LLMs
Fundamentals and significance of RAG
Getting started with offline models (Ollama) and embeddings
Part 2: Preparing the Knowledge Base and Vector Database
Loading documents (web, PDFs, text sources)
Document chunking and preprocessing
Building a vector database
Part 3: Implementing the RAG Core and Chatbot
Building a retriever
Creating an RAG chain using LangChain
Designing the user interface
Practical demo: Offline Persian chatbot
Part 4: System Evaluation
Evaluation methods for retrieval performance
Assessing model response quality
Analyzing system limitations and weaknesses
Part 5: Improvements and Future Work
Advanced RAG types: GraphRAG, Hybrid, Query Expansion, Re-ranking, etc.
Q&A and further resources
Familiarity with the Python programming language
Until October 29, 2025
October 30–31, 2025
All workshops will be held online.
General Registration: 1,500,000 IRT
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad students: 750,000 IRT
Students from other universities: 1,000,000 IRT
WTLAB members: Free of charge
Participants will receive an official certificate of attendance from the Web Technology Laboratory (WTLAB).
Interested participants can transfer the participation fee for their chosen workshop(s) to the following account:
Card Number: 6037-9973-6553-7100
Account Holder: Mohsen Kahani
Bank: Bank Melli Iran
Note: After making the payment, please complete the workshop registration form and enter the last four digits (rightmost) of your card number or the origin account number in the corresponding field of the form.
Paper Submission Deadline
2025-07-22Extended Paper Submission Deadline
2025-08-01Paper Submission Hard Deadline
2025-08-15Notification of Acceptance
2025-09-15Deadline for revising papers
2025-09-28Camera-ready Deadline
2025-10-14Workshop Dates
2025-10-20 TomorrowRegistration Deadline
2025-10-24 5 DaysConference Dates
2025-10-28 9 Days