Network

The Computer Vision Center (CVC-CERCA) is a non-profit research institution in Barcelona, Spain. It comprises >130 researchers and technical staff. It performs exciting and pioneering research in various Computer Vision areas and has a long track record of technology transfer. The CVC has created 13 spin-off companies and currently hosts 55 PhD candidates. It was ranked in the top-100 government research institutions worldwide in the 2021 Scimago Institutions.

Dimosthenis Karatzas is associate director of the Computer Vision Center, Barcelona. He received the 2013 IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award, a Google Research Award and an Amazon Machine Learning Research Award. In 2019 he ranked in the top 1.5% of the world’s most influential scientists in AI. He has created two spin-off companies. He is an IEEE senior member, and a member of IAPR and ELLIS.

Josep Lladós is the director of the Computer Vision Center, Barcelona. He is in the field of Document Intelligence, with more than 260 papers (40 in indexed journals), 17 PhD theses supervised, and led more than 35 public and private projects. He founded the company Icar Vision Systems in 2002 (now in the Mitek group). He received the 2007 IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award, and he is chair holder of the UAB/Santander KT Transfer. He is a member of the Spanish and Catalan AI strategy task force.

European Molecular Biology Laboratory is Europe’s flagship laboratory for the life sciences. EMBL is an intergovernmental organisation with sites in Barcelona, Grenoble, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Hinxton and Rome. The institute has the mission to promote molecular biology and health research. EMBL promotes, coordinates and operates major digital health and biodata infrastructure in Europe.

Oliver Stegle is Professor for Computational Genomics and group leader at EMBL. He co-directs the ELLIS Health program, is director of the ELLIS Unit Heidelberg and is speaker of the national genome-medicine data platform GHGA. He is ELLIS fellow and ERC investigator (ERC Synergy, 2019-2025).

EPFL is Europe’s most cosmopolitan technical university. It welcomes students, professors and collaborators of more than 120 nationalities. EPFL has both a Swiss and international vocation and focuses on three missions: teaching, research and innovation.

Martin Jaggi is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at EPFL, heading the Machine Learning and Optimization Laboratory. He is a Fellow of ELLIS, member of the ELLIS Unit at EPFL, and serves as an Area Chair at NeurIPS, ICML and ICLR, as well as an action editor at JMLR.

ETH Zurich is situated in the heart of Europe and builds on the ideals of freedom, individual responsibility, entrepreneurial spirit and open-mindedness to provide a climate inspiring top performance. It is associated to 21 Nobel Prize laureates and often considered the best (CS) university in continental Europe (e.g. QS – World University Rankings).

Martin Vechev is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. After receiving his PhD from Cambridge University, UK, he received various recognitions including the ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award and an ERC Starting Grant, has spoken at the European Parliament on AI and co-founded 3 startups, the latest focusing on trustworthy AI.

Andreas Krause is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, Academic Co-Director of the Swiss Data Science Center, Chair of the ETH AI Center and Co-Founder of the Spinoff LatticeFlow on trustworthy AI. Previously he was an Assistant Professor at Caltech, and received his Ph.D. from CMU. He is a Max Planck Fellow at the MPI for Intelligent Systems, an ELLIS Fellow, received ERC Starting and Consolidator Grants, Test of Time awards at KDD and ICML, and served as Program Chair for ICML 2018.

Italian Institute of Technology is the largest private research center in Italy, conducting research over four domains: Robotics, Nanomaterials, Technologies for Life Science, and Computational Sciences. Particularly relevant to the present proposal is IIT expertise on machine learning theory and algorithms.

Massimiliano Pontil is P.I. of the Computational Statistics and Machine Learning research line at IIT, Part-time professor at University College London, ELLIS Fellow and Director of ELLIS Unit Genoa (together with Lorenzo Rosasco), a joint effort of IIT and University of Genoa. He received a best paper runner up at ICML.

KTH Royal Institute of Technology is a leading Nordic Technical University conducting research in a broad area of technical sciences, architecture and industrial management. Significant part of the AI research is supported by the 12 year national initiative Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program.

Danica Kragic is a Professor of Computer Science at KTH Stockholm and ELLIS Fellow. She received an IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career award, ERC Consolidator and ERC Advanced grant. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.

Lancaster University is a research-led university ranked top-10 in the UK situated in the historic city of Lancaster. It sees AI as a priority area in which it invested heavily through its successful Data Science and Security Lancaster Institutes and the Lancaster Intelligent, Robotic and Autonomous systems (LIRA) research centre, all represented in the proposal.

Plamen Angelov is Chair Professor of Intelligent Systems and Director of Research of the School of Computing and Communications as well as Director of LIRA (comprising 60+ faculty members) and a theme lead of the Security Lancaster Institute. He received multiple awards including the 2020 Dennis Gabor award for ‘outstanding contributions to engineering applications of neural networks’ (previous recipients include V. Vapnik and T. Kohonen. He is Editor-in-chief of Springer’s journal Evolving Systems and 3 IEEE Transactions (on AI, on Cybernetics and on Fuzzy Systems). He is Fellow of IEEE and ELLIS and holds a DSc degree.

Leonardo is one of the world’s top ten players in Aerospace, Defence and Security, a trusted long-term partner of choice for governments, institutions and private customers, delivering cutting-edge and dual-use technologies. LeonardoLabs are the company research laboratories with main focus on technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and HPC.

Alessandro Massa is responsible for the research corporate laboratories called “Leonardo Labs”. He has in charge to drive and supervise exploratory high-risk research programs and to develop and coordinate the interdivisiona l research and development programs. His main technical skills are in the areas of AI, Aerial Robotics, On-Board Avionic Equipment, Embedded Control Systems, RF systems (Radar, EW systems, and C-UAV), Inertial and Satellite Navigation Systems, Real-Time Digital Signal Processing.

The Max Planck Society is a world-leading science and technology research organization. The Max Planck Institute for Informatics performs cutting-edge research on robustness and interpretability of machine learning and computer vision models with an emphasis on real-world applications such as autonomous driving.

Bernt Schiele is Max Planck Director at MPI for Informatics, Professor at Saarland University, Associate Editor in Chief of TPAMI, Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of IAPR, ELLIS Fellow, Member of German National Academy of Natural Sciences Leopoldina. He is known for his work in the field of computer vision and perceptual computing.

National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation is a French public research body dedicated to computational sciences. It is a primary contact point for the French Government on digital matters. Jointly supervised by the French ministries for research and industry, Inria’s missions are to produce outstanding research and to ensure the impact of this research on the economy and society.

Catuscia Palamidessi is a Director of Research at Inria, where she leads the research team COMETE, which currently counts 15 people, and which focuses on Privacy, Security, Machine Learning and Concurrency. She received an ERC Advanced Grant (2019-24). She is in the Editorial Board of various journals including the IEEE TPDP and Acta Informatica.

NVIDIA is a multinational technology company developing high-performance computing hardware for AI. Work based on NVIDIA’s collaboration with a multi-hospital initiative led by Mass General Brigham on using federated learning to create robust AI models for healthcare was recently published in Nature Medicine.

PAL Robotics provides robotic products and services which can become an integral part of people’s daily life, as well as research platforms as base for further innovation. It builds robot parts, personalized robot platforms, and robots for different service industries.PAL is interested in the operation of the generated outcome in end-user set-up and gathering relevant end-user feedback to enhance the functionalities of robot platforms for gaining competitive advantage in their respective markets.

Francesco Ferro obtained a MSc degree in Telecommunications Engineering in 2002 at the Polytechnic University of Turin. Francesco started working with the development of stereo vision algorithms and later joined the autonomous robot navigation team in order to implement various SLAM algorithms. He obtained an MBA at the UB university in Barcelona in 2011 and currently he is the CEO of PAL Robotics.

Pluribus One is a research-intensive SME based in Italy and operating in the cybersecurity market. Its staff holds a profound background in machine learning and cybersecurity, which drives innovation inside its products. Its leading product Web Application Security counts more than ten active installations across Italy. The company is currently involved in 8 EU-Funded R&D Projects. Pluribus One will contribute to ELSA in the context of the cybersecurity use case on malware detection.

Davide Ariu obtained a PhD in Computer and Information Engineering from the University of Cagliari in 2010. He worked until 2018 with the Pattern Recognition and Applications Laboratory of the same University, focusing on applications of AI/ML to computer security. Over the years, he participated in 15 EU funded R&D projects. In 2015 he co-founded Pluribus One, of which he is currently the CEO.

The Alan Turing Institute is the UK national institute for data science and AI. Five founding universities – Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL and Warwick – and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council created the Institute in 2015. Eight more universities – Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Queen Mary University of London, Birmingham, Exeter, Bristol, and Southampton – were added in 2018. The Institute has been funded through grants from Research Councils, university partners and from strategic and other partnerships.

Adrian Weller is Programme Director for AI at the Turing Institute, leading work on Safe and Ethical AI, and a Principal Research Fellow in ML at the University of Cambridge. He is a Turing AI Fellow in Trustworthy ML, Programme Director for Trust and Society at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, ELLIS Scholar, and an Advisory Board member of the UK’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. He previously held senior roles in the finance industry.

University of Birmingham is a public research university located in Birmingham, established in 1825 and founding member of the elite Russell Group of British universities. Its mission is to undertake world class-research that matters and provide outstanding global education.

Karen Yeung is Interdisciplinary Professor in Law, Ethics and Informatics in the Law School and School of Computer Science. She is a leading expert on the governance of emerging technologies. Her world-leading research examining the legal, democratic, societal and ethical implications of computational technologies (including AI) is shaping European, national and international policy and law reform via her extensive policy engagement, including as a former member of, and rapporteur for, the EU High Level Expert Group on AI which produced the EU Ethics Guidelines and EU Investment and Policy Guidelines for Trustworthy AI in 2019.

University of Helsinki is the leading research university in Finland. Together with Aalto University, it forms the foundation for Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI, a national flagship of research selected as a center of excellence with societal impact, and ELLIS Unit Helsinki.

Antti Honkela is an Associate Professor of Machine Learning and AI at the University of Helsinki. He leads the Research Programme in Privacy-preserving and Secure AI at FCAI, and serves as an Area Chair at NeurIPS, ICML and AISTATS as well as an action editor at JMLR.

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia was established in 1175 and is the third oldest University in Europe. UNIMORE participates in the project with the Engineering Dept. “Enzo Ferrari” (DIEF) and with the AImageLab group, a research laboratory focused on Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Multimedia and Deep Learning, established as a unit in the ELLIS network.

Rita Cucchiara is Full Professor and leads the AImageLab and is Director of AI research and Innovation Center and the ELLIS unit of Modena. She has been Director of CINI AIIS Lab (2018-21) and coordinates the Italian Board for the National Research Plan PNR 2021-27. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Computer Vision Foundation. Fellow ELLIS and IAPR, she has been PI of many EU and National projects and will be GC of ECCV2022, ACM MM2024 and PC of CVPR 20204. She has been AC AC of top-level AI conferences, including ECCV, ICCV, NeurIPS, CVPR, ECAI, ACM MM, ICPR.

The University of Oxford is widely recognised as one of the world’s leading science universities and the Department of Computer Science offers a vibrant research environment, with close links to the Turing Institute and industry. The Automated Verification group investigates techniques and software tools for safety verification and correct-by-construction synthesis of systems, including those incorporating machine learning components.

Marta Kwiatkowska is Professor of Computing Systems at University of Oxford. She spearheaded the development of probabilistic and quantitative methods in verification on the international scene. Currently working on safety and robustness for machine learning and AI, she is an ELLIS fellow, member of GPAI and recipient of an ERC Advanced grant (2019-25).

Valeo is an automotive supplier, partner to all automakers worldwide. Its Comfort and Driving Assistance is leading the development of research projects and innovative solutions in the fields of Advanced Driving Assistance Systems, Automated Driving, User Experience, Telematics and Digital services.

Valeo is an automotive supplier, partner to all automakers worldwide. Its Comfort and Driving Assistance is leading the development of research projects and innovative solutions in the fields of AdvanceTuan-Hung VU is a Senior Research Scientist at Valeo.ai and a part-time researcher with the Astra Vision team at Inria in Paris, France. His research interests encompass reliable perception, multimodal learning, and generative AI, with a particular focus on enhancing the reliability of perception systems for autonomous driving, especially in challenging conditions. Tuan-Hung also leads initiatives on generating synthetic data to improve the training and benchmarking of perception models.d Driving Assistance Systems, Automated Driving, User Experience, Telematics and Digital services.

Yooz is a 90-person French SME, created in 2015. Yooz offers a Cloud-based Purchase-to-Pay solution which serves more than 3,000 customers and 200,000 users worldwide. It leverages Artificial Intelligence and RPA technologies to deliver a high level of business process automation. Yooz is a fast-growing, award-winning company. For instance, it has been recognized as a SaaS innovator, named as a 10 Best Cloud Solution Provider by Industry Era.

Vincent Poulain d’Andecy is the head of the Yooz Research and Technologies Department since 2015. He is a graduate engineer of INSA Rennes and PhD of La Rochelle University. He started his career at ITESOFT in 1994 and has more than 25 years of experience in the development of Automatic Document Processing Systems. At Yooz, he is in charge of the AI developments with a 7-person team, he supervises PhD and collaborative research projects in partnership with Academia like La Rochelle University and the CVC-CERCA.

The Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC CTU) is a research institute of the Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU).  CIIRC CTU concentrates on cutting-edge research in the fields of computer science, robotics, cybernetics, artificial intelligence and related areas, especially computer vision, machine learning, reasoning, planning and optimization, bioinformatics and natural language processing. Research is focused on high-impact applications in four areas: manufacturing industry, energy, smart cities, and a healthy society.

Torsten Sattler is a senior researcher at CTU, where he is heading the Spatial Intelligence group. His work is in the intersection of 3D computer vision and machine learning, with the goal of making 3D computer vision algorithms such as 3D reconstruction and visual localization more robust and reliable through scene understanding. A special focus of his work is learning (semantic) scene representations for 3D scenes that satisfy certain properties such as privacy or compactness.

Jan Zahálka is a researcher at CTU and the founder & CEO of bohem.ai, an AI development and consultancy company. His research centers on trustworthy AI, with a focus on security, resilience, and the evaluation of trustworthiness. His work specializes in multimodal foundation models and classic interactive machine learning. Connecting research with applications, he contributes to multimedia analytics and robotics.

ELLIS Alicante is a private, non-profit foundation created in June 2020 which started its operations in October 2021, dedicated to advancing responsible AI for Social Good. It is the only ELLIS Unit created from scratch devoted to this topic, being a European pioneer in the field. ELLIS Alicante studies the interaction between humans and intelligent systems, develops computational models of human behavior, and explores the ethical and societal impacts of AI. Its name, The Institute for Human(ity)-Centric AI (IHCAI), reflects its mission: to harness AI’s potential to improve quality of life and promote sustainable progress for all.

Dr. Nuria Oliver is a leading expert in Artificial Intelligence with a Ph.D. from MIT. She is
co-founder and vice president of ELLIS Europe and an independent board member of
AESIA, as well as Spain’s representative on the UK-led panel on AI and Security. An ACM,
IEEE, EurAI and ELLIS Fellow, Dr. Oliver is a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of
Engineering, Academia Europaea, SIGCHI Academy and corresponding member of the
Mexican Academy of Engineering. She is recognized by Research.com as the female
computer science researcher with largest impact in Spain. Author of “Artificial
Intelligence, Naturally”, her work bridges cutting-edge research and public understanding
of AI. Her contributions have earned major awards, including the MIT TR100, the Spanish
National Computer Science Award, the King James I Award in New Technologies, and
the European Hypatia Award. She is a strong advocate for the ethical and human-centric
use of technology.

Founded in 1911, Instituto Superior Técnico is part of the University of Lisbon, and is the largest school of Architecture, Engineering, Science and Technology in Portugal, currently comprising 12,000 active students. Técnico promotes excellence in higher education by developing Research, Development and Innovation (RD&I) activities. The school is divided into 11 departments that teach various undergraduate and postgraduate programs. IST is also part of several networks and international programmes to promote student mobility, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Mário Figueiredo received PhD and habilitation degrees, both in Electrical and Computer Engineering from IST, University of Lisbon, where he is now an IST Distinguished Professor and holder of the Feedzai Chair of Machine Learning. He is also a senior researcher and group leader at Instituto de Telecomunicações. He received several honors, namely: Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), Fellow of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP), Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), member of the Portuguese Academy of Engineering and the Lisbon Academy of Sciences. He co-founded and co-organizes the Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS, 2011-present) and is the director of the ELLIS Unit Lisbon.

Friedrich Schiller University Jena is a dynamic, innovation-driven university centrally located in Germany, with excellence reflected in the profile areas “Light. Life. Liberty.” With around 17,000 students and 10,000 employees, Jena is a vibrant, internationally connected city of science and innovation. Artificial intelligence shapes many aspects of university life, from classroom use and student tools to cutting-edge research and scientific applications. A central hub for AI research is the ELLIS Unit Jena, co-led with the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry.

Joachim Denzler is a full Professor of Computer Vision at the University of Jena and founding Director of the Michael-Stifel-Center for Data-driven and Simulation Science, as well as Director of the Institute of Data Science at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). His research focuses on analyzing, predicting, and understanding complex dynamical systems, with applications in medicine, psychology, and Earth system sciences. Using machine learning, including deep learning and explainable AI, he tackles fine-grained object classification, active learning, and causal inference. Together with Markus Reichstein from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, he co-leads the ELLIS Unit Jena.

IDEAS Research Institute is a public research center dedicated to advancing
scientific research and development in the field of artificial intelligence. Its
mission is to support research groups and scientific initiatives, foster
collaboration with industry, and ensure that research outcomes are adapted to
practical needs. A core part of our vision is to counteract the brain drain by
creating attractive conditions for top talent in Poland and to contribute solutions
for both public administration and other publicly funded institutions. IDEAS
Research Institute is home to the ELLIS Unit Warsaw and a member of the Adra
association.

Prof. Dr. Tomasz Trzciński (DSc, WUT’20; PhD, EPFL’14; MSc, UPC/PoliTo’10) is the
Director of ELLIS Unit Warsaw and Associate Professor at Warsaw University of
Technology, where he leads the Computer Vision Lab. He is also Director for
Research and Development at IDEAS Research Institute. Previously, he served as
an Associate Professor at Jagiellonian University (2020–2023) and was a Visiting
Scholar at Stanford University (2017) and Nanyang Technological University
(2019). He worked with Google (2013), Qualcomm (2012), and Telefónica (2010).
He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Access and MDPI Electronics , and regularly
reviews for top-tier conferences (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML) and journals
(TPAMI, IJCV, CVIU). He is a Senior Member of IEEE, member of the ELLIS Society,
ALICE Collaboration at CERN, and an expert for the National Science Centre and
the Foundation for Polish Science. He also acts as Chief Scientist at Tooploox and
co-founded Comixify, a startup developing machine learning solutions for video
editing.

Prof. Dr. Bartłomiej Twardowski is a researcher at IDEAS Research Institute and
at the Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He obtained
his Ph.D. in 2018, focusing on recommender systems and neural networks.
Afterward, he worked as an Assistant Professor at Warsaw University of
Technology before joining CVC UAB for a postdoctoral program. He is a Ramón y
Cajal fellow. He has more than 15 years of industry experience with international
companies such as Zalando, Adform, Huawei, and Naspers Group (Allegro), and
has supported several startups with research efforts. He has contributed to research projects ranging from €40k to €1.4M and published in major conferences such as CVPR (2020), NeurIPS (2020, 2023), ICCV (2021, 2023), ICLR (2023, 2024), and ECIR (2021, 2023). His research focuses on lifelong machine learning in computer vision, eicient neural network training, transferability, domain adaptation, information retrieval, and recommender systems. He is a member of
the ELLIS Society and serves as a reviewer for top ML/AI conferences (AAAI, CVPR,
ECCV, ICCV, ICML, NeurIPS).

Prof. Dr. Piotr Sankowski is a professor at the Institute of Informatics, University
of Warsaw, where he obtained his habilitation in 2009 and his Ph.D. in computer
science in 2005. His research interests focus on practical applications of
algorithms, ranging from economic applications and learning data structures to
parallel algorithms for data science. In 2009, he also earned a Ph.D. in physics
(solid-state theory) from the Polish Academy of Sciences. He received several
ERC grants: Starting Grant (2010), Proof of Concept (2015, 2023), and
Consolidator Grant (2017). He currently serves as the Acting Director of IDEAS
Research Institute. He was the first CEO of IDEAS NCBR – a center for AI and
digital economy research – and led its group on “Intelligent Algorithms and Data
Structures.” He is also a co-founder of the spin-o` company MIM Solutions.

The Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC) is a leading Spanish research center devoted to advancing the foundations and applications of Artificial Intelligence. Part of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), it focuses on machine learning, multi-agent systems, and reasoning and logic. Founded in 1994, IIIA-CSIC brings together over 100 researchers and is recognized as a Consolidated Research Group (SGR) and technology provider (TECNIO center) by the Government of Catalonia. It coordinates the CSIC Artificial Intelligence Hub, uniting about 500 researchers across 19 disciplines. With strong European leadership and seven EurAI Fellows, IIIA-CSIC maintains an outstanding record of scientific excellence, innovation, and collaboration, participating in major EU projects such as VALAWAI and ALLIES and producing nearly 500 publications in the past five years.

Nardine Osman is a senior researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA),
part of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). She earned her PhD in Informatics
from the University of Edinburgh, UK, in 2008. Her research expertise covers multiagent
systems, normative systems, trust and reputation, and formal verification. Leveraging this
expertise, she has been focusing recently on value engineering in AI, a field aimed at
developing systems that can identify and understand human values, reason according to those
values, and explain behaviour in terms of them. Nardine currently leads the Ethics and AI
research line at IIIA-CSIC and is actively involved in major projects. She heads the €1.8M
Spanish project VAE (Value-Awareness Engineering) and contributes to the EU-funded
VALAWAI project on value awareness in AI. Additionally, she has recently co-founded the
International Workshop on Value Engineering in AI with Luc Steels, which is now in its third
edition at ECAI 2025.

Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) ISTA is a cross‑disciplinary research institute combining fundamental science and graduate education, with work spanning mathematical and physical sciences, life sciences, and information and system sciences. Its small-to-medium research groups collaborate across traditional boundaries, fostering both curiosity-driven exploration and high-impact innovation. The ELLIS Unit Vienna at ISTA, founded in 2019 under Prof. Christoph Lampert, brings together seven core faculty across ML theory, computer vision, causality, information theory, and scientific applications.

Prof. Dr. Christoph Lampert — ELLIS Fellow at ISTA. He leads the Machine Learning & Computer Vision group and, since 2019, directs the ELLIS Unit Vienna. He is also a Board member of the Bilateral AI FWF Cluster of Excellence. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2012 for work on lifelong visual scene understanding. His research focuses on trustworthy learning (robustness, explainability, privacy), lifelong and transfer learning, and generative models of 3D scenes.

Prof. Dr. Dan Alistarh — ELLIS Scholar. He heads the Deep Algorithms & Systems Lab (DASLab) at ISTA, developing compression-based algorithms (e.g., sparse or quantized representations) to make both training and inference significantly more efficient. He received an ERC Starting Grant in 2018 and a later Proof of Concept grant (2023) to scale up distributed machine learning.

Prof. Dr. Monika Henzinger — ELLIS Fellow. Her research at ISTA covers combinatorial algorithms and privacy-preserving algorithms in the batch and continual setting. She holds two ERC Advanced Grants (2014 and 2021), and in 2021 she won the Wittgenstein Award, Austria’s highest endowed science prize.

Prof. Dr. Francesco Locatello — ELLIS Scholar. Assistant Professor at ISTA, he works on causality and AI. He was selected for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) AI Residency to apply his causal learning methods to virtual-cell modelling. 

Prof. Dr. Marco Mondelli — ELLIS Member. His research spans information theory, high-dimensional statistics, non-convex optimization, and inference limits. He has received multiple distinctions, including the Lopez-Loreta Prize, the Simons‑Berkeley Fellowship, and an ERC Starting Grant.

Prof. Dr. Matthew Robinson — ELLIS Scholar. Assistant Professor of Medical Genomics at ISTA, leading work that combines large-scale genetic and medical record data to model disease risk, onset, progression, and interrelations.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Bronstein — ELLIS Fellow. His research focuses on AI/ML methods for scientific and engineering applications. His group develops computational imaging systems, combining optics, sensor design, and learning methods, with applications in structural biology (e.g., protein structure prediction via ML + imaging) and medical imaging. 

The Johannes Kepler University Linz, JKU, was founded in 1966, making it one of the
youngest universities in Austria. As a modern and future-oriented university, the JKU offers
close cooperation between its four faculties – the Faculty of Social Sciences and Economics,
the Faculty of Law, the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences and the Faculty of
Medicine – in order to meet the demands of business and society.

Sepp Hochreiter heads the Institute for Machine Learning, the LIT AI Lab, and is Director of
the ELLIS Unit at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. He is the founder of the company
NXAI, which advances new deep learning technologies such as xLSTM. He is considered a
pioneer of deep learning due to his fundamental work and historical milestones, the
development of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and the analysis of the Vanishing
Gradient. Dr. Hochreiter’s groundbreaking work on LSTM was at the core of the first large
language models that later led to ChatGPT and similar models.

The Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena studies global material cycles and the related chemical and physical processes. In the Department of Biogeochemical Integration, researchers investigate how ecosystems respond to changing weather, rising temperatures, higher carbon dioxide levels, land-use practices, and species diversity. Combining experiments, long-term in-situ observations, and Earth observations from aircraft and satellites, alongside data-driven machine learning and mechanistic modeling, the Institute explores interactions among climate, vegetation, and soil.

Markus Reichstein is Director of the Biogeochemical Integration Department at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. He studies how ecosystems—vegetation and soils—respond to and feed back on climatic variability from an Earth system perspective, with a focus on the interplay of climate extremes with ecosystem and societal resilience. Using artificial intelligence and system modeling, he leverages experimental, ground-, and satellite-based Earth observations. Together with Joachim Denzler from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, he co-leads the ELLIS Unit Jena.

Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) stands for thinking in new dimensions, working to
improve society, teaching with vision, communicating with people all over the world,
achieving more by working together – with science, passion and technology. Its Faculty of
Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering is within the top-10 in Europe for both
Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering. Its basic research in AI/ML, Safety &
Security, Visual Computing, and Biom

Wolfgang Maass is a Professor of Computer Science at the Institute of Machine Learning and
Neural Computation at Graz University of Technology. His research is renowned for
pioneering contributions to spiking neural networks, reservoir computing, stochastic
computation, computational brain models, and neuromorphic engineering. He has been
involved in numerous large research projects, including the Human Brain Project of the EU
and the Bilateral AI Cluster of Excellence supported by the Austrian Science Fund. He is an
ELLIS Fellow and the Director of the ELLIS Unit Graz. Since 2013, he is a member the
Academia Europaea.

TU Delft, the oldest and largest technical university in the Netherlands, is a global
pioneer in AI innovation and research. It hosts over 700 academics across more than 50
AI labs, including the ELLIS Unit Delft, which brings together leading machine learning
researchers to advance trustworthy, human-centered AI. With TU Delft AI Initiative and
partnerships including ELSA, the university drives cutting-edge projects in AI-
augmented engineering, ethics, and data science. TU Delft’s strong emphasis on
responsible AI governance, interdisciplinary collaboration through platforms like
Mondai | House of AI, and a vibrant ecosystem of AI education and innovation make it a
standout leader in shaping the future of trustworthy AI for societal benefit.

Anna Lukina is a professor of computer science at TU Delft and ELLIS member. She
coordinates the theme of Verification & Safe and Responsible AI at ELLIS Unit Delft. She
received Delft Technology Fellowship, Simons-Berkeley Fellowship, DEWIS Award, and
NWO Veni grant. She is co-founder and co-chair of the International Symposium of AI
Verification.

Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) is a private university internationally recognised for
its commitment to excellence in education and research. UCU participates in this
project through its Faculty of Applied Sciences and Machine Learning Lab, which
together constitute the foundation of the ELLIS Associate Unit Lviv. The Machine
Learning Lab focuses its research on Computer Vision, Robotics, Natural Language
Processing, and Responsible AI.

Rostyslav Hryniv is a professor at Ukrainian Catholic University. He has expertise in
mathematics and its applications to machine learning. He serves as co-head of the
Machine Learning Lab at UCU and director of the ELLIS Associate Unit Lviv.

Founded in 1457, the University of Freiburg is one of Germany’s oldest and most renowned universities, with a long tradition of excellence in technology, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. It has eleven faculties, approximately 240 degree programs, and 440 full
professorships, having a broad interdisciplinary spectrum with high-quality research and teaching. The University of Freiburg regularly ranks among the top universities in prestigious rankings.

Abhinav Valada is a Professor of Autonomous Intelligent Systems at the University of Freiburg. He is a DFG Emmy Noether AI Fellow, ELLIS Scholar, IEEE Senior Member, and Chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Learning. For his research, he received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in Robotics and Automation, IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award, NVIDIA Research Award, AutoSens Most Novel Research Award, among others.

Frank Hutter is a Professor for Machine Learning at the University of Freiburg, Hector-Endowed Fellow and PI at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen and co-founder & CEO of PriorLabs. He received the 2010 CAIAC doctoral dissertation award for the best thesis in AI in Canada, as well as several best paper awards and prizes in international competitions on machine learning, SAT solving, and AI planning. He is a Fellow of EurAI and ELLIS, the director of the ELLIS unit Freiburg, and the recipient of 3 ERC grants.

Thomas Brox is a Professor of Pattern Recognition and Image Processing at the University of Freiburg. He received the Longuet-Higgins Best Paper Award in 2004 and the Koenderink Prize for Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision in 2014 for his work on optical flow estimation. He authored seminal works in deep learning, such as U-Net and FlowNet. He is an ELLIS fellow and a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.

Joschka Boedecker is Professor of Neurorobotics at the University of Freiburg. His research lies at the intersection of machine learning, robotics, and cognitive science, with a focus on data-efficient and safe reinforcement learning, deep learning, and their applications to real-world autonomous systems. He is an active contributor to interdisciplinary research on responsible AI at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS).

Armin Biere is a Professor of Computer Architecture at the University of Freiburg. Decision procedures for SAT, QBF and SMT, developed by him or under his guidance rank at the top many international competitions and were awarded 107 medals including 60 gold medals. He is a recipient of a TACAS most influential paper award, ETAPS Test of Time Award, CAV Award, and the Herbrand Award among others.

The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) is a public institution of research and higher education in the fields of engineering, architecture, sciences and technology, and one of the leading technical universities in Europe. Every year, close to 6,000 bachelor’s and and master’s students,more than 300 doctoral students and 1,600 continuing education students graduate.

The UPC has a high graduate employment rate: 95% of its graduates are in work and 88% find a job in under three months. It is ranked in the main international rankings.

The UPC currently has more than 150 research groups, 5 own research institutes, 5 affiliated or linked research institutes, 23 research centres, and 12 affiliated research entities. Its researchers carry out intensive activity in areas of research with high social impact, complying with the highest standards of integrity, ethics, and excellence in research, and actively participating in a large number of international research networks. Under the current Horizon Europe programme (2021-2027), the UPC has to date been granted 190 projects, of which it coordinates 49 (10 of them are funded by the European Research Council), with a total funding of 108,6 million Euros.

BSc/MSc in Mathematics (University of Barcelona, Spain) and PhD in Sciences (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – UPC, Spain). Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at UPC. UPC Artificial Intelligence Champion and Founder of the Research Centre on Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (IDEAI-UPC).
Prof. Angulo has worked on theoretical aspects on kernel machines, reinforcement learning, computer vision and robotics as well as applications on recommender systems, cognitive social robots and assistive technologies. He has authored books in machine learning and robots, and published more than 325 papers in international and national journals and conferences (h-index 37). He has led and participated in more than 45 R&D competitive projects, 18 of them funded by the European Commission.