16th Annual Workshop Series – WTLAB 2025

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.

1) Workshop: Agentic Artificial Intelligence (Agentic AI)

• 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:

1. 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

2. Frameworks for building and using agents:

   • LangChain, smollagents, langgraph, and others

3. Tools and their applications in agents:

   • Defining and using tools

   • Using RAG as a powerful tool

   • Introduction to MCP as a tool-hub

4. Evaluation and observability in agents:

   • Frameworks for evaluation and observability: langfuse, langsmith, etc.

   • Datasets for agent evaluation: GAIA and others

2) Workshop: Designing a Persian Voice Assistant using Open-Source Models (STT & TTS)

• 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

3) Workshop: Designing an Offline Intelligent Assistant using RAG

• 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

Prerequisite

• Familiarity with the Python programming language

Registration Deadline

• Until October 29, 2025

Workshop Dates

• October 30–31, 2025

Format

• All workshops will be held online.

Participation Fee

• 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).

Registration Procedure

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.

For more information, please visit the official websites.