Fabrizio Silvestri is a Full Professor and the coordinator of the Ph.D. in Data Science, at Dipartimento di Ingegneria informatica, automatica e gestionale (DIAG) of the University of Rome, La Sapienza. His research interests lie in Artificial Intelligence, and in particular, Fabrizio Silvestri deals with machine learning applied to web search problems and natural language processing. He is the author of more than 150 papers in international journals and conference proceedings. It holds nine industrial patents. He is the holder of the "test-of-time" award at the ECIR 2018 conference for an article published in 2007. He is the holder of three best paper awards and other international awards. Fabrizio Silvestri spent eight years abroad in industrial research laboratories (Yahoo! and Facebook). At Facebook AI, Fabrizio Silvestri has directed research groups to develop artificial intelligence techniques to combat malicious actors who use the Facebook platform for malicious purposes (hate speech, misinformation, terrorism, etc.) Fabrizio Silvestri has a Ph.D. in computer science awarded by the University of Pisa with a thesis entitled: "High-Performance Issues in Web Search Engines: Algorithms and Techniques."

We will cover the foundations of Large Language Models by addressing the topics of Training, Supervised Fine Tuning, Instruction-tuning. Then we will show how modern Large Language Models can be used to build knowledge intensive systems making use of external sources of information such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems and Graph RAGs, where the knowledge is explicitly encoded and used as graphs.