BilAI Summer School 2026 at ESSAI: Connecting with Europe's AI Community

From 6–10 July 2026, the 2nd International BilAI Summer School took place in Vienna, Austria, as part of the 4th European Summer School on Artificial Intelligence (ESSAI 2026). 

See the Summer School in pictures

Bringing together the BilAI community with Europe's largest broad AI summer school, this year's edition offered an exceptional environment for learning, interdisciplinary exchange, and international networking. Co-located with the 5th ACM Europe Digital Humanism Summer School, the event also encouraged participants to explore AI from technical, symbolic, subsymbolic, and societal perspectives.
More than 500 participants from around the world gathered in Vienna for an intensive week of lectures, tutorials, keynote talks, networking events, and social activities. For BilAI's doctoral researchers, the joint format created a unique opportunity to deepen their expertise in Bilateral AI while engaging with one of the most diverse AI communities in Europe.

The Summer School 2026 in numbers

ESSAI26 brought together 514 students from 64 countries across all five continents. Among them were 119 participants from Austria and 36 from the BilAI Cluster. The BilAI community also made a strong contribution to the programme: 11 BilAI researchers delivered lectures and tutorials, while 22 of the 43 events were officially hosted by BilAI.

Exploring the breadth of AI

ESSAI 2026 featured an outstanding scientific programme with introductory and advanced courses, tutorials, workshops and keynote lectures by internationally renowned researchers, including Alessandra Russo, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Sennay Ghebreab, Luc De Raedt, Indrė Žliobaitė, Floris Geerts, Edith Elkind, Eyke Huellermeier, Elisabeth Lex, Markus Reiter-Haas, Robert Peharz, Axel Polleres, Diego Rincon-Yanez, Franz Wotawa, Wolfgang Faber, Marta Sabou, Stefan Szeider, Mena Leemhuis and Kees van Berkel. Among them were 11 BilAI key researchers and postdocs.

With six parallel tracks, participants were able to tailor their own learning journey while discovering topics beyond their primary research area.

The programme reflected the interdisciplinary spirit of BilAI, covering symbolic and subsymbolic AI, machine learning, knowledge representation, recommender systems, trustworthy AI, graph learning, reinforcement learning, knowledge compilation, Wikidata and many other areas at the forefront of AI research.

As BilAI PhD student Bente Gortworst (TU Wien) described her experience:
“It was great to have the opportunity to explore areas of AI I wouldn’t normally encounter.”

Like many participants, she combined courses closely aligned with her own research with completely new topics, illustrating one of the greatest strengths of the joint BilAI–ESSAI format: encouraging curiosity beyond disciplinary boundaries.

Networking beyond the classroom

The Summer School was about much more than lectures. The week began with a memorable welcome reception at the historic Vienna City Hall, providing an excellent opportunity for participants to meet fellow researchers from across the globe.

One particular highlight was the ESSAI networking event, which connected participants with research organisations and companies. It was great to welcome representatives from SAP, WASP/Algoryx/Clear, Siemens, NVIDIA, Bosch, Graphwise, OptiKonf and AI, the AI Factory Austria.

A key factor behind the success of the Summer School was the dedication and hard work of its Organising Committee. BilAI played a central role in bringing the event to life, with the Chair, Co-Chairs and all core organisational roles held by members of the BilAI team: Kees van Berkel, Mantas Simkus, Magdalena Ortiz, Thomas Eiter and Leyli Slavata. A huge thank you to you all!