MAIN STAGE
Keynotes and high-level discussions featuring global leaders from industry, academia, and policy. The Main Stage focuses on big-picture questions shaping AI, exploring technological breakthroughs, strategic directions, and their broader impact on society, business, and governance.
INNOVATOR STAGE
A fast-paced format highlighting applied AI in action. Featuring startups and industry players, the Innovator Stage focuses on real-world use cases, product development, and lessons from building and scaling AI solutions, through short talks and focused discussions.
TRACKS AND WORKSHOPS
In-depth sessions designed for deeper engagement with specific AI topics. Tracks are primarily led by academic experts, offering structured deep dives into current research, while workshops bring a mix of academia and industry for more interactive, hands-on sessions, including discussions and Q&A.
EXHIBITIONS
A dynamic demo space featuring startups, industry partners, and research groups. The Exhibition Zone combines technology showcases with direct interaction, allowing attendees to explore AI solutions up close, engage with builders, and discover applications across sectors.
NETWORKING TOOL
A dedicated networking tool designed to help attendees connect before and during the event. Explore the participant list, schedule meetings, and engage with other attendees based on shared interests, making it easier to turn conversations into meaningful connections.
PROGRAM OVERVIEW
*more to come and subject to change
10:30
Intermediate / some technical background required
AI in Medicine: Future Clinicians and Digital Twins
Valeria Bella (IMMERSE/ UZH), Prof. Bernd Stadlinger (ZZM/UZH), Dr. Sebastiano Caprara (Balgrist/UZH), Dr. Flora Vajda (Balgrist/UZH), Dr. Matthias Seibold (Balgrist/UZH), Prof. Claudia Witt (USZ/UZH)
How will AI reshape the clinicians of tomorrow and the patients they care for? This session explores two fast-moving frontiers in medicine: AI-supported clinical practice and digital twins. Experts from UZH, Balgrist and USZ will discuss how AI is entering dentistry and orthopedic surgery, and how medical digital twin models could transform prediction, personalization, training, and treatment planning.
10:30
Intermediate / some technical background required
Translating AI to Clinical Practice: From Data to Impact
Prof. Julia Vogt (ETH Zurich), Prof. Marianna Rapsomaniki (UNIL and CHUV), Dr. Benito Benitez, (Head of Paediatric Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, The University Children's Hospital Basel), Prof. Barbara Solenthaler (ETH Zurich), Dr. Marc Kissling (Kantonsspital Baden), Dr. Luca Finelli, (Head of Insights Strategy & Design (ISD), Data Science & AI, Novartis)
Discover how AI is transforming healthcare - from cutting-edge research to real-world clinical and industry applications. This track brings together researchers, clinicians, and industry leaders to explore the opportunities, challenges, and collaborations needed to translate AI into meaningful impact for patients. Through inspiring talks and an interactive panel, attendees will gain insights into the future of AI-driven medicine.
10:30
Beginner / suitable for non-tech audiences
What does it mean to be intelligent - and who get's to decide?
Dr. Jonnie Penn (Cambridge University)
We examine what "intelligence" means across disciplines – and why it matters for Al design. The session explores how psychological concepts have shaped Al, questions the emphasis on abstract reasoning over embodied and social
cognition, and considers whether Al reflects human or fundamentally different forms of intelligence.10:30
Intermediate / some technical background required
AI in Financial Services & beyond
tbd
This track explores how AI—especially agentic AI, large language models, and sovereign AI—is transforming financial services, with a particular focus on banking. It addresses process optimization, organizational change, risk, compliance, and evolving skill needs.
It also showcases applied AI use cases in Sustainable Finance and Commodity Trading, including ESG controversy verification, gold mine risk assessment, and European natural gas trading.10:30
Intermediate / some technical background required
AI for Education
Kenneth Holstein (CMU, EPFL), Kortemeyer Gerd (ETH Zurich/ETH AI Center), Felix Ohswald (GoStudent), Judit Martínez Moreno (Sparkli)
How is AI reshaping the future of education? This session brings together leading researchers and industry experts to explore the evolving landscape of AI in education—from intelligent tutoring and human–AI collaboration to multimodal learning and generative AI. The discussion will focus on how human-centered AI can enable more effective, personalized, and trustworthy learning experiences.
14:00
Intermediate / some technical background required
Generative (bio)molecular Design
Janani Durairaj (UniBasel), Martin Pacesa (UZH)
Advances in generative deep learning techniques to model and design chemistry and biomolecules for applications in drug discovery, synthetic biology and cellular engineering.
14:00
Beginner / suitable for non-tech audiences
AI Psychology and Ethics
tbd
As AI moves from automated tools to agentic partners, the success of these systems is interrelated with their interactions with human psychology: socio-emotional, cognitive factors, attitudes and behavior. This track, hosted by the ZHAW Institute of Human Behavior, Society, and Technology, led by the new subject area “Humans & AI”, presents a multifaceted exploration of how psychological theory, empirical work, and ethical principles must guide the development of the AI ecosystem.
14:00
Intermediate / some technical background required
AI for Science and Engineering/AI for scienctific discovery
Hosted by Prof. Sid Mishra (ETH Zurich), Orestis Oikonomou (ETH AI Center)
AI is transforming science and engineering through generalized, multimodal foundation models that combine data-driven and physics-based approaches. Covering applications from chemistry to neuroscience, this session highlights advances such as generative AI and physical tokenization, while addressing challenges including data scarcity and model robustness
14:00
Intermediate / some technical background required
Recent Advances in Reinforcement Learning: From Foundations to Real-World Systems
tbd
Reinforcement Learning has long spread beyond computer science labs, becoming a central framework in the development of robotics, learning systems, and recently large language models. To discuss recent advances and foster exchange across sub-fields, we bring together experts from academia and industry working from the fundamentals of sequential decision-making and neuro-inspired mechanisms to the safe and scalable deployment of these techniques in real-world systems
14:00
Intermediate / some technical background required
AI+Social Media
Dr. João Vinagre (European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency / Joint Research Centre), Dr. Angela Müller (Algorithmwatch CH), Dr. Giovanni De Toni (ETH AI Center), Prof. Jing Zeng (University of Zurich), Luka Bekavac (University of St.Gallen), Alice Palmieri (University of St.Gallen), Prof. Konrad Kollnig (University of Maastricht), Henry Tari (University of Maastricht), Sophia Worth (King's College London), Dick Van Blankvoort (University of St.Gallen), Prof. Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux (University of St.Gallen), Prof. Simon Mayer (University of St.Gallen)
The concentration of digital power in a few dominant platforms has created systemic risks where engagement-driven algorithms that include increasingly opaque AI components often prioritize profit over the integrity of global discourse. This track addresses these systemic risks by bridging the gap between abstract legal frameworks and practical technical implementation in Europe and Switzerland.
14:00
Intermediate / some technical background required
Staging × Misalignment Science: When, Where and How Safety Enters LLM Training
Prof. Robert West (EPFL), Dr. Thomas Kleine Buening (ETH Zurich), Xin (Cynthia) Chen (ETH Zurich), Magda Dubois (UK AI Security Institute), Julian Minder (EPFL); Guilherme Santos (Ethical Hacker, CEO at Blindsight)
A model should be capable, fluent and safe; but where in its training is safety actually decided? From filtering pre-training data and aligning "from token zero", through post-training, evaluation and mechanistic interpretability, to deployment-time harness adaptation and adversarial defence, researchers and industry practitioners genuinely disagree. This session hosts keynote(s) and a panel taking opposing positions on when, where and how safety should enter LLM training.
12:00
Intermediate / some technical background required
AI in Critical Infrastructure: From Applied Research to Industrial Translation
tbd
Critical infrastructure requires AI systems that are not only powerful, but also safe, reliable, and trustworthy. This workshop explores how AI can support these critical domains by addressing three questions: which types of AI components are feasible, how they can be embedded safely and in a trustworthy way, and what is needed to translate applied research into industrial practice. The workshop is jointly shaped by perspectives from applied research and industry.
14:00
Beginner / suitable for non-tech audiences
Trustworthiness and data sovereignty in critical AI applications
to be announced
The quality of AI applications relies on the quality of data. Yet high quality data, especially proprietary data, is a scarce and precious resources, a definite competitive advantage. Data sovereignty in AI is a hot topic and in this workshop we will discuss how the cooperation of IDSIA, CSCS and the Canton of Tessin is addressing this issue.
15:30
Beginner / suitable for non-tech audiences
Supporting Long-Term Therapy with AI
Zeinab Sadat Taghavi
This workshop explores how AI can support therapists in managing long-term therapeutic information. We discuss transforming handwritten or spoken notes into searchable text, retrieving relevant context across therapy histories, and generating contextual summaries. The focus is on supporting therapeutic workflows through better information organization, retrieval, and continuity of care — not replacing therapists.
09:00
Opening
Annette Oxenius (VP Research ETH Zurich), and Alex Ilic (Director of ETH AI Center)
Welcome address
09:50
Physical AI: Bringing Value in a Human-Centric World
tbd
Smart and capable robots are coming. The next technology revolution may change the way we work in a more profound way than we’ve experienced in the last 100 years. Are we ready to embrace the change? Do we know how to make the technology safe, reliable, and valuable for people and organizations? Our panel discussion brings together robotics experts, future users, and early adopters to have a critical discussion of human-robot co-existence in the workplace and beyond.
13:00
From Apertus to the Clinic: Open Foundation Models for Global Health
Dr Imanol Schlag (Co-Lead Apertus)
Switzerland's Apertus is one of the few fully open large language models trained at scale, built on the Alps supercomputer by the Swiss AI Initiative. Imanol Schlag (ETH Zurich) and Martin Jaggi (EPFL) present how Apertus was built and where it is headed. Annie Hartley (LiGHT lab, EPFL) shows what open models enable in practice, building leading open medical LLMs: humanitarian deployments in low-resource hospitals and the MOOVE initiative, which validates medical AI with clinicians worldwide. Together, they make the case that openness is not a constraint but a prerequisite for trustworthy AI in high-stakes domains.
18:30
Public Night
Public Night opens the AI+X Summit to a wider audience, creating an accessible space for everyone curious about artificial intelligence and its impact on society. Through engaging talks, conversations, demonstrations, and interactive formats, Public Night invites participants to look beyond the hype and ask what responsible, trustworthy, and human-centred AI can mean in practice.
From Components to Systems: How Thinking Across Domains Unlocks Teep-Tech Value
TBA
MORE INFO COMING SOON...
speakers
Moritz Baecher
Lab Director at Disney’s Zurich-based robotics team
Julian Nubert
Co-Founder & Perception Lead at Flexion Robotics
Nikki Böhler
Founder Intersections
Prof. Sara Beery
Assistant Professor at MIT
Christine Antlanger-Winter
Country Director Google Switzerland
Prof. Dr. Davide Scaramuzza
UZH Robotics & Perception Group and NASA Jet Propulsion Lab
Dr. Claudia Schulz
Thomson Reuters
Christof Roduner
Co-founder & VP Engineering & CIO at Scandit
Prof. Ana Klimovic
Assistant Professor
Prof. Aapo Hyvärinen
Professor at the University of Helsinki
Prof. Dr. med. Dr. phil. Andreas Wicki
Director CCCZ Clinical Program Comprehensive Cancer Center Zurich
Péter Fankhauser
Co-Founder & CEO ANYbotics
what the community says about #Plusxsummit
"LEAD THE WAY TOWARDS TRUSTWORTHY, ACCESSIBLE, AND INCLUSIVE AI SYSTEMS FOR THE BENEFIT OF SOCIETY."