On 21.11.2025, NCC Montenegro successfully delivered a short course as part of the EUROCC 2 and EUROCC4SEE initiatives. The program brought together an excellent cohort of students, researchers, and industry professionals who demonstrated remarkable curiosity, teamwork, and practical problem-solving skills throughout the training.
The course explored the evolution of conversational AI, beginning with traditional natural language understanding (NLU) approaches based on intents and entities, and progressing toward modern Large Language Model (LLM) architectures and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Participants were introduced to prompt design, tool and function calling, and essential aspects of safety, privacy, and guardrails in AI systems. The curriculum also covered embeddings, vector indexes, hybrid search techniques combining BM25 with dense vectors, and re-ranking strategies for improving retrieval quality.
A significant component of the course was a hands-on laboratory session where participants built a small RAG-based chatbot using domain-specific documents. The HPC perspective was also highlighted, including batch embedding generation, large-scale indexing considerations, and methods for stress testing AI pipelines. The course concluded with live demonstrations using Azure AI Foundry, showcasing Prompt Flow, Evaluate, and AI Search capabilities.
Participants quickly absorbed the theoretical concepts, engaged with thoughtful and challenging questions, and worked independently during practical sessions. By the end of the course, they delivered functional prototype systems featuring grounded answers and clear evaluation reports—demonstrating both strong technical understanding and applied competence.