​​ICAI Summer School – June 29th & 30th, 2026

Elevate your research journey this summer at Lab42!

On June 29th and 30th, join us for a two day event focused on focused on learning, connecting, and growing in the field of artificial intelligence. The ICAI Summer School 2026 is your chance to sharpen your technical skills and explore the future of responsible AI.

What's in it for you?

Across two days, you'll hear from leading researchers working at the frontier of AI. From drug discovery and climate forecasting to neuromorphic computing, causal reasoning, and autonomous scientific discovery. Hands-on workshops, a peer pitch session, and plenty of networking and collaboration moments.

You get to sharpen your thinking, exchange ideas with people working on problems close to your own, and build connections that last beyond the event.

You bring your curiosity, we will provide the rest - breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, a canal cruise in Amsterdam, and interactive activities to close off this event!

Secure your spot today and help shape the future of the AI field!

Agenda

09:00 – 10:00 | Breakfast, Coffee, Registration

10:00 – 10:45 | AI for Science - Rianne van de Berg (Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft)

In this session, Rianne from the AI for Science team at Microsoft Research will discuss their current research, covering latest models for drug discovery, protein modelling, material design, and quantum chemistry.

10:45 – 11:30 | Research Reproducibility in AI - Maurits Bleeker (Research Scientist at Emmi AI)

The session will focus on the AI reproducibility crisis and providing practical strategies for using reproducible research as a foundation for innovation within the AI4Engineering domain.

11:30 – 12:30 | Lunch Break

12:30 – 13:15 | Aurora: A Foundation Model for the Earth System - Ana Lucic (Assistant Prof. in Scientific Machine Learning, Interpretability and AI Safety at UvA)

In this session, Ana will present Aurora, an open-source foundation model for Earth system prediction developed through public-private collaboration. By training on a million hours of geophysical data, it delivers state-of-the-art results for weather, air quality, and ocean waves at 10,000x lower computational cost; this makes high-quality predictions broadly accessible.

13:15 - 14:30 - Short PhD Pitches: Connecting Peers and Reflecting on Research

During this session, PhD students will give a brief pitch about their research. Students will be matched based on their research domain and focus.

14:30 – 14:45 | Break

14:45 - 15:30 | Human AI Interaction - Bart Voorn (CEO of Ditto Care)

15:30 – 16:30 | Neuromorphic Computing - Marcel van Gerven (Prof. of Artificial Cognitive Systems & Director of the Donders AI for Neurotech Lab and Nijmegen ELLIS Unit at RU)

This session focuses on the development of brain-inspired neuromorphic computing systems that utilize efficient learning rules and evolutionary computing to achieve sustainable AI and better understand natural intelligence.

16:45 - 17:30 | Transfer to Canal Cruise by train
17:30 – 19:30 | Social Activity – Canal Cruise

10:00 – 11:00 | Walk-in & Coffee

11:00 – 11:45 | Causal Reasoning and Statistical Tests of Fairness - Joris Mooij (Prof. of Mathematical Statistics at UvA)

This tutorial uses the 1970s Berkeley admissions data to examine causal modeling and Simpson's paradox, testing various fairness definitions to detect gender discrimination. It ultimately warns that identifying bias from observational data requires rigorous modeling assumptions that are rarely met in reality, making definitive conclusions about fairness difficult to reach.

11:45 – 13:00 | Lunch Break

13:00 – 15:15 | Greener Code: Hands-On Energy Profiling for AI Systems - June Sallou (Assistant Prof. in Sustainable Software Engineering & Green AI at WUR)

This interactive workshop makes energy measurement in AI concrete and approachable, combining essential background on metrics and tools with a hackathon-style project where you experiment with real code. You'll explore how choices in code and configuration affect energy consumption, discover how to write greener AI, and navigate the trade-offs between performance, accuracy, and resource usage.

15:15 - 15:30 - Break

15:30 – 16:15 | Large Reasoning Models for Scientific Discovery - Yougang Lyu (Principal Research Scientist at Huawei)

This session introduces EvoScientist, a framework that leverages LLM reasoning to automate scientific discovery, shifting the human researcher's role from manual execution to high-level strategic guidance and intuition.

16:00 – 17:00 | Cyberphysical World Models & Agents: Towards Physical & Embodied General Intelligence - Efstratios Gavves (Associate Prof. of Physical AI at UvA)

In this session, Cyberphysical AI is presented as a research program designed to bridge the gap between digital pattern recognition and physical dynamics. By integrating world, physical, and interaction priors, this framework enables embodied agents to reason, imagine, and act safely through causal understanding rather than just scale. Featuring advancements in digital twins and physics-informed learning, the talk outlines a path toward Physical and Embodied General Intelligence that is accurate, controllable, and auditable.

17:00 - 17:15 | Wrap-up
17:15 – 18:30 | Closing Drinks & Games

*This agenda is subject to change.

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