European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems

History

The organization was inspired by the Learning in Machines and Brains program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. ELLIS was first proposed in an open letter to European governments in April 2018, which stated that Europe was not keeping up with the US and China. It urged that European governments act to provide opportunities and funding for world-class AI research in Europe.

It was founded on 6 December 2018 at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

Board

The members of the board are:

Serge Belongie (University of Copenhagen & Cornell University)

Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi (Università degli Studi di Milano)

Florence d'Alché-Buc (Télécom Paris)

Nada Lavrač (Jožef Stefan Institute)

Neil D. Lawrence (University of Cambridge)

Nuria Oliver (ELLIS Alicante Unit Foundation | Institute of Humanity-centric AI)

Bernhard Schölkopf (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems) Chairman

Josef Sivic (Czech Technical University, École Normale Supérieure & INRIA)

Sepp Hochreiter (Johannes Kepler University Linz) Board guest

ELLIS sites

ELLIS is creating a network of research sites distributed across Europe and Israel. Currently, there are 43 sites in 17 countries.

Research programs

The ELLIS Programs are inspired by the CIFAR Program model, and closely collaborate with the CIFAR LMB (Learning in Machines and Brains) Program. Each Program has a budget for 2-3 workshops/year to enable meetings of 10-15 Fellows plus guests for intensive scientific exchange. Workshops can be co-located with academic meetings (usually) held in Europe, or organised as stand-alone events, usually at (and with the support of) ELLIS unit sites.

PhD & Postdoc Program

The ELLIS PhD & Postdoc Program connects young researchers them to experienced researchers across Europe and offering networking and training activities, including summer schools and workshops.

There are two tracks within the ELLIS PhD & Postdoc Program: the academic track and the industry track. These tracks have separate requirements for admission and criteria for activity during the appointment, but otherwise offer the same benefits, network and resources to the applicant.

Academic track

PhD students and postdocs in the academic track strive for international collaboration as they partner with two European academic institutions in their research. These candidates are supervised by two advisors from different European countries: one of the advisors must be an ELLIS fellow/scholar or unit faculty; the other advisor should be an ELLIS fellow, scholar, unit faculty or member. PhDs and postdocs in the program visit the exchange institution for min. 6 months (the partitioning of this time is flexible). Normally, the exchange is partially sponsored by the exchange institution; students can also apply for the ELISE mobility grant to support their exchange.

Industry track

The industry track is open to PhD and postdoc candidates that will be part of a collaboration between an academic institution and an industry partner, and will spend time conducting research at the industry partner during their PhD or postdoc. The candidate will spend a minimum of 50% of their time at the academic institution, and at least 6 months (cumulative) with the industry partner.

For this track, both advisors may be located in the same country. One advisor will represent the academic institution and the other the industry partner. One advisor must be an ELLIS fellow/scholar or unit faculty. The second advisor can be an ELLIS fellow, scholar, member, unit faculty OR it is also possible for the second advisor to join if they have co-authored a paper with the applying student as a result of their collaboration, in a top-tier venue in machine learning or related sub-fields (details here).