This year’s International Summer School on AI and Big Data took place in Leipzig from June 22 – 26 with a focus on the topic “Neuro+Symbolic AI”. More than a hundred interested students, doctoral candidates, researchers and practitioners in the field of artificial intelligence gathered at the Radisson Blu Hotel Leipzig to learn about the latest advances and exchange ideas with other experts.

Both speakers and participants came from all over the world to share their knowledge. Throughout the program, participants followed a structured curriculum that combined introductory and advanced courses on neural methods and symbolic reasoning, designed to prepare them for an in-depth study of neurosymbolic integration.

In the venue’s air-conditioned seminar rooms, participants were able to escape the summer heat and keep a cool head. In the evenings, however, many intrepid souls ventured out to take part in various social activities. Let’s take a look back at the eventful week:

Monday: First day of the ScaDS.AI Summer School

The first day of the summer school began with welcoming remarks and an introduction by Gerik Scheuermann, the director of ScaDS.AI Leipzig, as well as the organizers Frank Loebe and Paramita Mirza. The day’s presentations were given by Marco Valentino (“Large Language Models: Capabilities, Limitations and the Way Forward“, Vaishak Belle (“The Future is Neuro-Symbolic: Where Has It Been and Where Is It Going?“) and Pascal Hitzler (“LLMs for KG and Ontology Engineering“).

Later, the three of them, along with Ostap Okhrin, gathered for the first session of “Connecting the Dots,” an open discussion forum. Questions for the session were collected in advance on a digital bulletin board, giving participants an overview of the topics to be discussed. The day concluded with a second presentation by Valentino on the topic: “Unifying Plausible and Formal Reasoning via LLM-Driven Neuro-Symbolic Integration.”

After a long day, a motorboat ride on Leipzig’s canals offered a glimpse into the city’s history and, of course, a wonderful opportunity to chat in a relaxed atmosphere.

Tuesday

The program for the second day included presentations by Pascal Hitzler(“Analysis of Hidden Neuron Activations in Deep Learning Models using Concept Induction Reasoning“) and Ostap Okhrin (“Foundations of Neural Networks – Part 1” and “Part 2“), followed by two hands-on sessions in the afternoon. Summer school participants could either choose the course “Solving Mazes Using LLMs” taught by Lalith Manjunath or dive deeper into the topic “Evidence-Based Text Generation with LLMs” with Tobias Schreieder and Michael Färber.

In the evening, as in previous years, participants were invited to a social dinner. This time, the dinner took place at Auerbachs Keller.

Wednesday: Halfway through the ScaDS.AI Summer School

Filipp Ilievski spent the morning of the third day giving a presentation on “Commonsense Reasoning Foundations and State of the Art” as well as a presentation on”Analogy in Humans and AI”

The subsequent poster session, featuring a total of 17 posters, rounded out the short day and was a great success. The summer school participants made good use of the time and space to present their research findings to the others. Although Wednesday afternoon was free for everyone, a small group arranged to go on a hike via the summer school’s Slack channel.

Thursday

On the second-to-last day, the program featured two talks by Vincent Derkinderen and Giuseppe Marra on the topic “Deep Parameterized Logics as a Foundation for Neurosymbolic AI” in the morning, followed by a talk on “Conjecturing in Mathematical Reasoning: From Symbolic to Neuro-Symbolic Methods” by Moa Johansson in the afternoon.

Once again, two hands-on sessions with presentations by Robert Haase (“Navigating in Latent Space and Retrieval Augmented Generation“) and Jujia Hu (“LLM Knowledge Materialization“) rounded out the day.

Despite the heat wave and rising temperatures, a small group gathered in the evening for a guided city tour of Leipzig.

Friday: Last day of the ScaDS.AI Summer School

Alessandra Mileo filled the morning program with two presentations on the topic of “Neuro-Symbolic AI for Human-Centered Explainability” and kept the participants engaged with group work. Later on Daria Stepanova’s talk “Towards Unlocking Industrial Potential of Neuro-Symbolic AI at Bosch: Opportunities and Challenges” rounded out the final day. The day concluded with a farewell session.

We would like to thank all the speakers, participants, and organizers once again for this wonderful and inspiring summer school. We really enjoyed the great conversations, questions, and discussions. See you next time!