Swiss AI Annual Meeting
The Swiss AI Annual Meeting 2026 will take place on 26 August 2026 in Bern. It is the flagship internal gathering of project leads, project members, the Scientific Committee, and industry partners from the Swiss AI Initiative.
The meeting is hosted by the Swiss AI Initiative, and organized in collaboration with the EPFL AI Center and ETH AI Center.
The Annual Meeting serves as a key coordination moment for the community to present the scientific achievements of funded projects, exchange ideas, and explore new collaborations across the multidisciplinary AI domains.
This year's focus is threefold:
Strategic alignment — align on priorities and direction of the Swiss AI Initiative, and discuss key challenges and opportunities for 2026
Sharing progress — present results from funded projects, strengthen scientific dialogue, and explore pathways for translation and impact
Networking and collaboration — foster connections across projects and domains, and identify synergies for future joint scientific endeavors.
Program
Morning
09:00 Registration & Coffee --> Room : Foyer
09:30 — Strategic Update on the Swiss AI Initiative (30 min) | Presenters: Swiss AI Scientific Committee --> Room : Lecture hall S 003
10:00 — Apertus Tech Session (30 min) | Presenters: Apertus Team --> Room : Lecture hall S 003
10:30 Coffee Break --> Room : Foyer
11:00 — Science Impact Spotlights, Part I (90 min) | Presenters: Swiss AI PIs --> Room : Lecture hall S 003
11:00-11:15 - Clintextualization | Mary-Anne Hartley (LiGHT-EPFL) & Menna El-Assady (ETH Zurich)
11:15-11:30 - Foundation Models Bridging 4D Capture and Dexterous Manipulation | Robert Katzschmann (ETH Zurich)
11:30-11:45 - Scaling Unconstrained Machine-Learned Interatomic Potentials | Michele Ceriotti (EPFL)
11:45-12:00 - Virtual Patient Platform | Charlotte Bunne (EPFL)
12:00-12:15 - Large Foundation Models for Climate and Weather | Benedikt Soja (ETH Zurich)
12:15-12:30 - Learning Physics with Multimodal PDE Foundation Models | Siddhartha Mishra (ETH Zurich)
12:30 Networking Lunch --> Room : Foyer
Afternoon
Parallel Sessions:
13:30 — Alps Technical Training (90 min, parallel track) Practical, experience-driven workflows and operational best practices for developing, scaling, debugging, and efficiently running AI workloads on Alps. | Presenters: CSCS team. --> Room : A-126
13:30 — Science Impact Spotlights, Part II (90 min) | Presenters: Swiss AI PIs --> Room : Lecture hall S 003
13:30-13:45 - 3D VLM for Radiology | Michael Krauthammer (UZH) & Michael Moor (ETH Zurich)
13:45-14:00 - Multimodal World Foundation Models for Physical AI | Paolo Favaro (University of Bern)
14:00-14:15 - Beyond Signals and Structure: Enabling Generalizable Multimodal Models |Thomas Sutter (ETH Zurich)
14:15-14:30 - Foundations of Multimodal Learning | Amir Zamir (EPFL)
14:30-14:45 - From Model Training to Model Raising | Robert West (EPFL)
14:45-15:00 - Learning To Scale Next-Level Generative Models | Paolo Favaro (University of Bern)
15:00 Coffee & Networking Break --> Room : Foyer
15:30 — Poster Session (60 min) | Presenters: funded project leads and industry partners. Full list of posters here. --> Room : Foyer
16:30 — Q&A and Conclusions (30 min) | Swiss AI SciCo members final remarks --> Room : Lecture hall S 003
17:00 Networking Apéro --> Room : Foyer
Location: Lecture hall S 003 (formerly A 003) is located on the ground floor of the UniS building of the University of Bern (UniS site plan) at Schanzeneckstrasse 1, directly next to the main train station.