The European Summer School on Artificial Intelligence (ESSAI) intends to serve as a central hub for PhD students and young researchers working in all aspects of AI.
The ESSAI Summer School offers a one-week course in the summer, at various sites around Europe, for both beginning and advanced students, and junior and senior researchers. ESSAI provides introductory and advanced courses in all areas of AI, emphasising topics that allow students to gain a broad view of AI and understand connections between subdisciplines. One of the tracks of ESSAI consists of advanced tutorials on a specific subject and corresponds to the traditional ACAI school organised by EurAI since 1989.

ESSAI-2026, the 4th edition of ESSAI, will be held from 6 - 10 July 2026, in Vienna (Austria).

ESSAI 2026 ORGANISERS:

• General Chair: Vida Groznik (University of Ljubljana)
• ESSAI Steering Committee Members: Giuseppe De Giacomo (Chair, EurAI Board representative, University of Oxford) & Brian Logan (University of Aberdeen & Utrecht University) & Magdalena Ortiz (Technical University of Vienna)
• Organisation Committee (TU Wien): Kees van Berkel, Thomas Eiter, Marta Sabou, Leyli Slavata, Mantas Simkus

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

1. Causality and Causal Learning (CL)
2. Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects of AI (ELS)
3. Foundation Models (FM)
4. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR)
5. Learning Theory (LT)
6. Natural Language Processing (NLP)
7. Neuro-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning (NSLR)
8. Planning & Strategic Reasoning (PLAN)
9. Reinforcement Learning (RL)
10. Robotics (ROB)
11. Safe, Explainable and Trustworthy AI (SET)
12. Search & Optimisation (SO)
13. Supervised and Unsupervised Learning (ML)
14. Vision (VIS)
15. Human-In-The-Loop AI (HLAI)
16. AI for Social Good (A4SG)
17. Quantum Machine Learning (QML)
18. Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (MAS)

Each course will consist of five 90-minute lectures offered daily (Monday-Friday) in the week the school takes place.

Visit the website for updated information on the call for courses

Since 1989, EurAI has organised the Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence (ACAI).

The 1st edition of ESSAI (European Summer School on Artificial Intelligence) was held in 2023 in Ljubljana, Slovenia and was extremely successful, attracting over 500 participants.

• The event pictures are available on this page

• The video lectures are available on this page

In 2024, the 2nd edition of ESSAI was celebrated in Athens, Greece, and received excellent feedback from the student and lecturer participants. All ESSAI courses are available on the ESSAI-2024 website

In 2025, the 3rd edition of ESSAI was celebrated in Bratislava, Slovakia. With over 30 lecturers from multiple fields, participants had the opportunity to engage in 5+ parallel tracks of sessions each day, plus the Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence (ACAI), which covered cutting-edge topics in AI. All ESSAI courses are available on the ESSAI-2025 website