by Giuseppe Manco (CNR) and the AIIS Working Group founding members
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the way we build software, run critical infrastructures, and deliver public services. From healthcare and mobility to cybersecurity and environmental monitoring, AI systems are becoming core components of Europe’s digital ecosystem. At the same time, the growing adoption of data-driven and foundation-model technologies is exposing major scientific and societal challenges: ensuring robustness, transparency, fairness, accountability, and alignment with European values and regulations.
To address these challenges in a coordinated, transnational manner, ERCIM has launched the Working Group on Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems (AIIS). The AIIS WG is conceived as a collaborative forum where ERCIM members, together with academic, industrial, and public stakeholders, can jointly advance both the fundamentals and the real-world impact of AI research.
Why an ERCIM AIIS Working Group now?
AI innovation is accelerating, but progress is not only a matter of performance improvements. Increasingly, AI research is required to address questions such as: Can we trust the behaviour of complex models? Can we understand their decisions? Can they be evaluated rigorously across contexts and populations? Can they meet EU regulatory requirements while remaining useful and scalable?
The AIIS WG was created precisely to strengthen ERCIM’s collective capacity to respond to these questions. Its ambition is to help grow a visible and active ERCIM AI community, to provide a structured channel for joint workshops and thematic seminars, to stimulate competitive European project proposals, and to enable mobility exchanges and shared research initiatives, supported by a public-facing presence and regular reporting.
In line with the ERCIM spirit of the Working Groups, the AIIS WG is designed to build and maintain a network of researchers in the AI and intelligent systems domain. Participation is open to anyone who wishes to contribute, while ensuring a stable ERCIM core (at least three ERCIM member organisations).
Purpose and scope
The AIIS WG focuses on fundamental and applied AI, with a strong emphasis on trustworthy, explainable, and human-centric intelligent systems.
From a methodological standpoint, the WG embraces a broad set of paradigms, including:
- Machine learning and deep learning
- Reinforcement learning and optimisation
- Symbolic AI and knowledge representation
- Hybrid neuro-symbolic systems and cognitive architectures.
A distinctive element of the WG is its explicit commitment to the development of trustworthy AI, including fairness, transparency, robustness, explainability, and ethical alignment, as well as scalable assessment of normative compliance with EU regulations.
The scope also includes emerging directions that are central to the next generation of AI systems, such as multimodal learning, data-efficient and continual learning, and the evaluation, training, and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual Language Models (VLMs).
On the systems side, AIIS addresses the integration of AI with enabling technologies such as IoT, edge computing, robotics, digital twins, scalable AI infrastructures, and energy-efficient deployment approaches for resource-constrained settings.
Finally, the WG explicitly welcomes AI research that is validated through meaningful application domains, including cybersecurity, smart cities, telecommunications, health, bioinformatics, mobility, and environmental challenges.
Activities and expected outcomes
In line with ERCIM Working Group principles, AIIS will be structured around four interconnected activity axes: workshops, projects and proposals, mobility, and dissemination/visibility.
A cornerstone activity is the organisation of at least one international workshop per year, open to researchers in the field. These events will combine scientific exchange with agenda-setting, including identifying research challenges, consolidating collaborations, and shaping joint initiatives that can evolve into publications and project proposals.
The WG will also actively foster joint participation in European funding programmes such as Horizon Europe and Digital Europe, and will contribute to building strategic partnerships that connect ERCIM expertise with the needs of industry and public bodies.
Mobility and talent development represent another key pillar. AIIS will encourage short research visits across member institutes, shared PhD topic development, and contributions to the ERCIM Fellowship Programme through attractive, high-impact research topics.
A growing community: current participants and partner mapping
The AIIS WG currently brings together an initial nucleus of ERCIM institutes including CNR (Italy), FORTH (Greece), HUN-REN SZTAKI (Hungary), Inria (France), and ITIS-UMA (Spain).
The AIIS Working Group warmly welcomes expressions of interest from ERCIM institutes and the wider research community. As AI becomes increasingly central to Europe’s competitiveness and resilience, AIIS aims to provide an ERCIM platform where excellent research, practical impact, and trustworthy innovation can advance together.
Please contact:
Giuseppe Manco, CNR-ICAR, Italy
