4th EurAI Summer School on Artificial Intelligence
2nd International Summer School on Bilateral AI
6-10 July 2026, Vienna, Austria

ESSAI is the annual summer school of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI). It is the largest school on broad AI in Europe, offering courses in all AI areas from a rich range of perspectives. ESSAI is a central meeting place for students and young researchers in Artificial Intelligence to discuss current research and share knowledge. The fourth edition of ESSAI will encompass the 2nd International Summer School on Bilateral AI.

We invite top AI researchers to propose courses to be featured as part of this school. The submission will open in September. Detailed information regarding the submission format and the submission page will be announced on this page.

Each course will consist of daily lectures offered between Monday and Friday during the week the school takes place, with a planned duration of 5 hours per course. Courses are categorised into Introductory and Advanced. While introductory courses will typically focus on one subarea of AI only, advanced courses are encouraged to present a broader perspective on AI, and they should be of interest beyond a single specific area. The course proposals will be reviewed by a Program Committee covering all the research areas presented above, who will choose the courses to be taught by the school. The proposal should be submitted by the lecturers, who will typically be one or two well-established and renowned AI researchers. If the course will have more than two lecturers, this must be justified in the proposal. Course proposals should explicitly state the intended course category. Proposals for introductory courses should indicate the intended level, for example, as it relates to standard textbooks and monographs in the area. Proposals for advanced courses should specify the prerequisites in detail.

PARTICIPATION

All lecturers named in the proposal must teach in person at the school. To keep registration fees to a minimum and facilitate the participation of more students, all ESSAI's instructional and organisational work is performed completely voluntarily. The registration fees of instructors will be waived. In addition, and where appropriate and possible, ESSAI will seek to partially reimburse travel and accommodation expenses; typically, the support can only be given to one lecturer per course. If lecturers can cover their travel and accommodation expenses from other sources, this is greatly appreciated.

TOPICS

ESSAI aims to cover a broad range of AI subdisciplines and the interactions thereof. Proposals for courses are invited in all areas of AI, including but not limited to the following:

• Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (MAS)
• Causality and Causal Learning (CL)
• Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects of AI (ELS)
• Foundation Models (FM)
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR)
• Learning Theory (LT)
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Neuro-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning (NSLR)
• Planning & Strategic Reasoning (PLAN)
• Reinforcement Learning (RL)
• Robotics (ROB)
• Safe, Explainable and Trustworthy AI (SET)
• Search & Optimization (SO)
• Supervised and Unsupervised Learning (ML)
• Vision (VIS)
• Human-In-The-Loop AI (HLAI)
• AI for Social Good (A4SG)
• Quantum Machine Learning (QML)

ESSAI 2026 ORGANIZERS

Kees van Berkel, TU Wien

Thomas Eiter, TU Wien

Marta Sabou, WU Wien

Mantas Simkus, TU Wien

Leyli Slavata, TU Wien

ESSAI Steering Committee

Giuseppe De Giacomo, University of Oxford

Brian Logan, University of Aberdeen & Utrecht University

Magdalena Ortiz, TU Wien

Vida Groznik, University of Ljubljana