EEML 2024 Brings Together Global Scientific Elite for the First Time in Novi Sad

With over 840 applications, EEML 2024 has become one of the most popular summer schools in the event's history, accepting only 20% of applicants. More than half of the participants came from Eastern European countries, including Serbia, Romania, Croatia, Poland, and Slovenia. This year’s participants hailed from 47 countries, from Argentina and Costa Rica to South Korea, Singapore, and Australia.

The school’s program primarily attracted PhD students, talented master's and undergraduate students, and industry representatives. Notably, among the participants were a doctor and a high school student from Hungary. The school also made progress in gender equality, with 40% of attendees being women and 60% men, marking a significant step towards greater inclusivity in the field of artificial intelligence.

Topics covered during EEML 2024 included deep learning, diffusion models, AI for science, autonomous agents, large language models, geometric deep learning, AI startups, AI for therapeutics, as well as reasoning, fairness, and causality.

“It was an honor to host not only 190 young people from 47 countries who are engaged in AI research but also such stars of the scientific community leading research in various aspects of AI, such as professors from the University of Oxford Yee Whye Teh and Michael Bronstein, researchers Razvan Pascanu and Sander Dieleman from Google DeepMind, Prof. Martin Vechev from ETH Zürich, and Alfredo Canziani from New York University and Jan LeCun’s group, a Turing Award winner and leading AI scientist at Meta. Given that Razvan Pascanu comes from Yoshua Bengio's group, our lecturers included direct collaborators of two out of the three Turing Award winners for deep learning, which forms the foundation of all modern AI systems. I can confidently say that an event of such a level, in terms of scientific research and education in AI, has never been organized in Serbia, and with the support of colleagues in the organizing committee from Serbia, especially our own Petar Veličković and Nemanja Rakićević, we provided young scientists with the chance to learn from the best and opened doors for them to collaborate with global leaders in AI. Hosting EEML in our country is also a recognition of the maturity of our ecosystem and the perception of IVI as a good partner for collaboration. This recognition gives us the enthusiasm and confidence to continue developing our young talents, the Institute, and the AI ecosystem in our country”, emphasizes Prof. Dr. Dubravko Ćulibrk, Acting Director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence of Serbia.

Over six days of intensive training, participants had the opportunity to attend lectures and workshops led by distinguished experts from universities such as New York University, ETH Zürich, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, McGill University, as well as representatives from global tech companies like Google DeepMind, Genentech (Roche), Bitdefender, Microsoft, INSAIT, and PolyAI. Two poster sessions were held, and attendees had the chance to interact with over 35 speakers and 20 teaching assistants.

As part of EEML 2024, a public lecture titled “How Ideas Become Reality in AI?” was organized, during which speakers shared their personal stories of career development in artificial intelligence.

By organizing EEML 2024, Serbia has achieved a great success and demonstrated the significance and impact of such events on the promotion and development of artificial intelligence in the region and beyond.

The Institute for Artificial Intelligence of Serbia and the team of scientists from Google DeepMind, which includes experts from Serbia, Croatia, and Romania, are extremely proud of the achieved results and look forward to future challenges and opportunities for advancing knowledge and collaboration in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning.