Bringing the AI Research Community Together in Lisbon: ELLIS Doctoral Symposium 2026
Since its first edition in Tübingen (2021), EDS has grown into one of the key annual events within the ELLIS network, with subsequent editions held in Alicante (2022), Helsinki (2023), Paris (2024) and Warsaw (2025). The Lisbon edition continued the symposium’s role as a vital meeting point for the next generation of AI researchers in Europe.
This year’s symposium, centred on “Trustworthy AI,” provided a dedicated space for PhD students and early-career researchers to share their research, exchange ideas, build connections, and engage with leading figures in AI and machine learning. The four-day programme combined scientific presentations, keynote talks, poster sessions, panel discussions, and an Industry Fair, creating opportunities for participants to engage with researchers and representatives from industry.
The scientific programme brought together a diverse group of established and early-career researchers from ELLIS and beyond, covering topics including multilingual and multimodal NLP, the theory and safety of deep learning models, trustworthy AI in finance, causality and climate science, social robotics, medical imaging, AI in healthcare, knowledge discovery, and trustworthy foundation models. Keynote speakers and their topics included:
André Martins (IST, ELLIS Fellow, Program Director) on EuroLLM, Dynamic Sparsity, and Beyond: Open Multilingual LLMs for Europe and Challenges Ahead
Desmond Elliott (University of Copenhagen, ELLIS Member) on Towards Understanding and Explaining Vision-Language Models
Asja Fischer (Ruhr University Bochum, ELLIS Scholar, Unit Director) on How to find trust in a world full of fakes: On detecting and watermarking AI generated content
Gustau Camps-Valls (University of Valencia, ELLIS Fellow, Program Director) on Climate Extremes: Explaining, Attributing, Communicating with AI
Matthias Bethge (University of Tübingen and Tübingen AI Center, ELLIS Fellow, Unit Director, Program Director) led ELIAS Alliance Science Entrepreneurship Workshop
Miguel Couceiro (IST, ELLIS Member) on Knowledge knowledge on the wall, can we reconcile you all?
Ana Paiva (IST, ELLIS Fellow) on A missing layer in today’s AI: social intelligence
Mario Figueiredo (IST, ELLIS Fellow & ELLIS Unit Lisbon Director)
Isabel Trancoso (INESC-ID, IST, ELLIS Fellow)
João Santinha (Champalimaud Foundation) on Medical imaging data privacy, explainability, and acquisition optimization using diffusion-based generative models
Jacopo Bono (Feedzai) on Foundation Models for Financial Data
The programme also highlighted the work of early-career researchers within ELLIS Unit Lisbon, with contributions from:
Catarina Barata (ISR-Lisboa and IST, ELLIS Scholar) on Multimodal and Longitudinal Integration of Healthcare Data in the Real World - When Missing Data Can't Be Ignored
Emanuel Gonçalves (INESC-ID and IST, ELLIS Scholar) on Deep generative models of large-scale functional genetic screens for drug target discovery
Zita Marinho (University of Lisbon, ELLIS Member) on RL and test time adaptation
Marcos Treviso (Instituto de Telecomunicações and IST, ELLIS Member) on Dynamic Sparse Attention at Scale: Faster, Cheaper, More Reliable Long-Context Models
A central part of the symposium was the opportunity for PhD students to present their own research: 16 PhD students delivered scientific talks, alongside more than 50 poster presentations showcasing research from across the ELLIS community.
An Industry Fair and social events fostered lively interactions
The Industry Fair brought together 18 companies and organisations working across different areas of AI, technology, research, and innovation. Participating organisations included CircuitLeap, Critical TechWorks, DareData, ELIAS Alliance, Faber, Feedzai, Fraunhofer AICOS Portugal, G-Research, IB-IDEAS Poland, IDMind, INESC-ID, Instituto de Telecomunicações, LOKA, NeuralShift/Affine, Opnova, OutSystems, Sword Health, and Zendesk.
The Fair gave PhD students the opportunity to learn about different career paths, explore potential collaborations, and connect directly with companies and organisations working on real-world AI applications and technologies. This was complemented by an ELIAS Alliance Entrepreneurship Session, which explored the path from research to entrepreneurship and provided participants with insights into the opportunities and challenges of building a company around research and innovation.
Beyond the scientific programme, participants also had several opportunities for informal interaction and networking, including a Gala Dinner and a rooftop gathering overlooking Lisbon. These social activities complemented the academic programme and helped strengthen connections across the ELLIS community.
Award for the Best Poster
The symposium also recognised outstanding student research through the Best Poster Award. The award was presented to Yinghong Yu (Aalto University) for her poster, “PlaneCycle: Training-Free 2D-to-3D Lifting of Foundation Models Without Adapters.”
Marcel Graetz (Champalimaud Foundation) was named runner-up for “Learning Speed as a Unifying Reason for Sequential Processing.”
Honourable mentions were awarded to Maria Fernanda Alcalá-Durand (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) for “Gaze-Based Screening for Parkinson’s Disease from Early Clinical Detection to Prodromal Cohorts”, and Albert Kjøller Jacobsen (Technical University of Denmark) for “Beyond the Laplace Approximation: Better Uncertainty for Bayesian Deep Learning.”
Looking ahead to EDS 2027
Through its combination of scientific exchange, opportunities for students to present their work, industry engagement, and social activities, EDS 2026 brought together a vibrant international community and helped strengthen connections among the next generation of AI researchers in Europe.
We are pleased to announce that the next edition of the ELLIS Doctoral Symposium will be organised by ELLIS Unit Jena in Germany. We look forward to EDS 2027!
EDS 2026 was organised by ELLIS Unit Lisbon, with further support from Instituto Superior Técnico, ELLIS Society e.V., ELLIS Unit Jena, ELSA, and Zuse School ELIZA.
The event was generously sponsored by G-Research, Feedzai, Sword Health, Critical TechWorks, and Visit Lisboa.
