The recap of the final ELSA General Assembly.
As another year has passed, it was time to host the ELSA General Assembly. This was also to be the last event of this kind, so CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, the coordinating institution of ELSA, opened its doors to welcome the network.
From May 5 – 7, 2026, participants from 51 universities and institutes, companies, the ELLIS Society and its units, and the European Commission, including its EU AI Office, arrived in the beautiful city of Saarbrücken, Germany.
Over three eventful days, the focus of this year’s Assembly was on
- highlighting the progress the network has made,
- deep-dives into use case and work package work,
- The impact of the progress of AI, ML, and Foundagion Models of the last 3.5 years on ELSA research,
- learning about possibilities and opportunities within the European AI landscape,
- long-term plans on how experts in the EU can collaborate, innovate, and compete with each other,
- The advent of new frontiers in safe, secure AI,
- collaborating to find opportunities for network partners to continue working together beyond ELSA
And this is just the tip of the iceberg! The General Assembly agenda included
- poster pitches,
- startup and SME pitches,
- an award ceremony,
- an interactive workshop on finding an “Integrated Understanding of Trustworthy AI”,
- a workshop with presentations on AI in “Cybersecurity: Offensive Capabilities, Impacts, and Response Strategies.”
May 6th, 2026
Congratulations!
Of course, outstanding efforts in research and industry deserve recognition. Hence, we awarded three outstanding pitches:
The ELSA Best Poster Award went to Raffaele Mura from the University of Cagliari, for his poster and pitch on “SOM Directions are Better Than One: Multi-Directional Refusal Suppression in Language Models”.
The ELSA Newcomer Award went to Philipp Dewald from Detesia for his pitch on “Restoring Digital Trust in the Age of AI”.
The ELSA Rising Star Award went to Maite del Mundo from Alias Robotics for her pitch on “Sovereign AI Is Not Optional in Cybersecurity: From Research to Real Operations”.
Networking
Amid all of this, we made sure to have plenty of breaks and networking time so participants could exchange both ideas and contact information.
Thank you!
A special thank you goes to everybody who actively shaped the agenda of this year’s General Assembly: workshop and use case owners, external speakers, panelists, those who gave a pitch, and, of course, all of our participants.