ELLIS - the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems - was founded on December 6, 2018, announced at the NeurIPS conference in Montreal. It is a pan-European scientific organization focused on machine learning and modern AI. The founding initiators were leading European researchers including Bernhard Scholkopf, Sepp Hochreiter, Juergen Schmidhuber, Cordelia Schmid, Zoubin Ghahramani, Nicolo Cesa-Bianchi, and Max Welling, with public endorsements from figures such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.
ELLIS was created out of concern that Europe was losing its best machine-learning talent to North American and Asian tech companies. Its plan combined three things: a distributed network of research units at top European institutions, a pan-European PhD program to train the next generation, and structured industry engagement. It has since grown into dozens of ELLIS units across many countries, plus shared research programs.
Why business readers should care: ELLIS is Europe’s coordinated answer to AI brain drain - a bet that a connected network of academic units, rather than a single national lab, is the way to retain researchers and anchor European competitiveness in AI.