Join ELSA for this outstanding workshop on trustworthy AI models for computational healthcare at EMBL in Heidelberg. The workshop is organised by EMBL and ELSA and takes place in conjunction with the EMBO | EMBL Symposium: AI and biology 2026.
What? In person workshop dedicated to advancing private, fair, robust, reliable, and accountable AI models for healthcare applications to unite machine learning researchers, privacy and fairness specialists, experts in data governance and ethics, computational health and biology researchers, bioinformaticians, and other interdisciplinary practitioners.
When? March 9, 2026
Where? EMBL, Heidelberg
About the event
The TrustworthyAI4Health Workshop, co-located with the EMBL AI and Biology Conference, moves toward building private, fair, and reliable AI models for healthcare by emphasizing trustworthiness in model design, evaluation, and deployment. It unites theoretical, clinical, and benchmarking perspectives to promote responsible and transparent AI in medicine. Building on the spirit of the CAMDA Health Privacy Challenge, the workshop aims to broaden the focus to healthcare-specific aspects of trustworthiness throughout the entire AI lifecycle.
We envision this workshop as a collaborative forum for advancing trustworthy AI in healthcare, uniting machine learning researchers, privacy and fairness specialists, experts in data governance and ethics, computational health and biology researchers, bioinformaticians, and other interdisciplinary practitioners to generate new insights and practical pathways forward.
About the EMBO | EMBL Symposium: AI and biology 2026
The ELSA EMBL workshop is co-located with the EMBO | EMBL Symposium: AI and biology 2026. This provides an excellent opportunity to connect with communities focused on AI applications in biology. In addition, our workshop aims to engage researchers from the AI and machine learning domains who are particularly interested in privacy, fairness, explainability, and robustness. We believe the synergy between these two events will greatly enrich the participants’ experience.
Workshop Speakers & Panelists
More speakers and panelists will be announced as the organisation of the workshop progresses.
Florian Buettner, Speaker
Professor
Frankfurt University/DKFZ
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Florian Buettner is a professor at Goethe-University Frankfurt and the German Cancer Consortium (DKTK)/German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). His work centers on developing methods for distributional robustness, explainability, and calibrated uncertainty in medical AI.
Jean Louis Raisaro, Speaker
Assistant Professor
CHUV Biomedical Data Science Center
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Dr. Jean Louis Raisaro holds a PhD in Computer and Communication Sciences from EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland. His work and research focus on the development of technologies to enable safe and privacy-preserving artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML).
Mennatallah El-Assady, Speaker
Assistant Professor
ETH AI Center (CH)
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Mennatallah El-Assady is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich, where she leads the Interactive Visualization and Intelligence Augmentation Lab (IVIA). Her research interest is in combining data mining and machine learning techniques with visual analytics, specifically for text data.
Peter Koo, Panelist
Associate Professor
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
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Peter Koo is an assistant professor at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. His research focuses on deep learning for regulatory genomics, with particular emphasis on model interpretability, representation learning, and uncovering biological mechanisms from sequence data.
Veronika Cheplygina, Speaker
Professor
IT University of Copenhagen
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Veronika Cheplygina is a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on trustworthy, data‑centric machine learning, addressing dataset quality, fairness, evaluation, and challenges in medical imaging AI.
Call for Abstracts
We invite submissions addressing any of the topics listed below, as well as related areas, that advance reliable, clinically aligned AI systems across diverse data modalities and healthcare environments.
Key Areas of Interest
- Privacy & Security: Differential privacy, private synthetic data generation, and healthcare-specific adversarial threat modeling.
- Fairness: Techniques and applications that identify and mitigate disparities across demographic groups, clinical subpopulations, and comorbidity profiles.
- Interpretability & Explainability: Methods and applications grounded in biological or biomedical knowledge and model logic.
- Robustness & Uncertainty: Solutions for noisy, sparse, high-dimensional, or distributionally shifting clinical datasets, with calibrated uncertainty estimation.
- Human-AI Trust: Trust calibration, error communication, and evaluations of AI decision support in high-stakes settings such as intensive care or oncology.
- Benchmarks & Evaluation: Model-agnostic trustworthiness metrics, regulatory-informed benchmarks, and frameworks that articulate trade-offs among privacy, fairness, interpretability, uncertainty, and utility.
Poster Track Submissions
Workshops are ideal venues for presenting work in progress. To encourage evolving research, we invite submissions to a poster track, in the form of a 1-page extended abstract (excluding references) describing ongoing work. A selection of submitted abstracts will be invited for poster presentation at the workshop.
Submit your Abstract
We collect the submissions via EasyChair. An account is needed. Please submit your abstract by February 2, 2026.
Registration
Please register until February 21st via the button below – We are excited to welcome you!
We also kindly ask us to inform us if you need to change or cancel your registration. Simply email our organising team.
Schedule
The schedule will be updated as the organisation of the workshop progresses.
Important Dates
| Call for Posters open | December 2025 |
| Abstract Submission Deadline extended! | |
| Review Period | February 2 – 6, 2026 |
| Notifications | February 7, 2026 |
| Deadline to apply for Mobility Funding | February 9, 2026 |
| Registrations close | February 21, 2026 |
Mobility Support
The ELSA Mobility Fund supports eligible attendees who join this workshop. If you are planning to use mobility funding, please apply in a timely manner. You can find all information in our Terms and Conditions.
To apply for mobility funding, please contact the ELSA Travel Office. They will provide you with the respective forms.
Deadline to apply for mobility funding: February 9, 2026
Organizers
University of Helsinki
EMBL
CISPA
DKFZ / EMBL
Helmholtz Munich
CISPA
Contact
In case you have any questions, please reach out to the organisation team via mail.
Organisational and communications support
Registration
Please register for the event via the button below – We are excited to welcome you!
We also kindly ask us to inform us if you need to change or cancel your registration. Simply email our organising team.