From the first day, the excitement was clear. This was a debut not only for us as participants, but also for ETH Zurich Campus Heilbronn, whose team poured heart and precision into every detail. Their warmth and constant support made us feel welcome. From diverse keynotes and hands-on workshops to thoughtful activities and perfectly timed Lichtfest, the week felt thoughtfully crafted.

Each morning began with Smart Start Breakfasts, coffee, food, and short “thoughts to start the day” that nudged us to see AI as a paradigm shift in how we think. Throughout the week I learned from researchers at ETH Zürich and beyond, seeing how AI touches climate, health, language, and human–AI work. Talks from TU Berlin, TU Munich, UC Irvine, the University of Tennessee, and the Institute of Science Tokyo reshaped how I see AI’s role across fields. One lecture that truly stayed with me was Professor Torsten Hoefler’s public talk; it felt like time travel through the pivotal moments of modern technology. He argued about how we’ve moved beyond the Age of Data into the Age of Computation, and offered an angle I hadn’t considered before: that LLMs’ “hallucinations” might be seen not as flaws, but as sparks of intelligence and creativity.

Workshops with mentors from ETH Zurich, NASA, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory on foundation models turned hard ideas into tools I can use. Much of that learning happened in small teams; mine, XplorAI, included people from Kosova, Portugal, Ecuador, and China. We worked hard, laughed often, and proved that curiosity and good humor help as much as code.

On a very hot afternoon, likely the longest day of the year, we visited LVWO Weinsberg. Among the vineyards we heard how AI helps growers and cellars, from monitoring vines to tuning the process, subtly transforming even the most traditional of crafts. That mix of tradition and innovation mirrored Heilbronn itself, a city changing fast. All week we heard about Dieter Schwarz’s big support to turn the city into an AI innovation hub. It felt like watching a place build its future in real time. 

Perhaps my biggest takeaway was how deeply human this “ML&AI” week felt. We were a global mix of students, scientists, engineers, and thinkers, from all over the world united by open questions and a shared drive to explore them. I left with practical advice, clearer views of the research world, ideas that will stick, and friends. In my farewell note, I wished everyone a symbolic Dieter Schwarz to back their dreams. May readers of this piece find theirs, too.

What challenges arise at high-scale training that you couldn’t imagine, having only experienced lower scale? How can conditional diffusion be brought out to domains where being exact is more important than being creative? Why is it so important to consider uncertainty in modelling?

And more crucially: could Heilbronn, a city of 100,000 inhabitants in Germany that I’m almost sure you never heard of, become the next AI research and development centre of Europe?   

At this very moment, I’m the one taking the lead on this investigation, so let me briefly introduce myself.

Hi, I am Loric Herbé, a regular master student in Data science at ETH Zurich, and for the next few minutes, you will have the opportunity to step into my shoes and discover the backstage of an event that could very well be our most tangible piece of evidence.

Let us first draw some context, so that the investigation board gets clearer in your heads.

On this end of June 2025, a soberly titled “Interdisciplinary School on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Science” was hosted at the emerging ETH Zürich Campus in Heilbronn. Supported by a range of sponsors, it’s part of a broader effort by ETH to establish a serious research and innovation presence in the region. The goal of this event: gathering talents from around the globe, from master to industry, to deepen their intuition and understanding of the latest applications of machine learning in science. How? By alternating between theoretical lectures, talks, and hands-on sessions that polished their mastery, while it was still hot.

My role regarding this event? With a few other colleagues, we were tasked with coming up with hands-on material, under the shape of Jupyter Notebooks. A challenging experience, as we had to find the right balance between tackling High Performance Computing (HPC) problems, along with giving the right amount of theory and intuition, all the while fitting into time constrained blocks.

What I just described took place mostly prior to the event, which means that on-site, I almost became a regular participant, and this is under this prism that I’m willing to unveil with you the fantastic colours of this five-day-long life fragment.

It would be an absolute crime not to start by giving a glimpse of the talks that we have been given. Without going into details, these talks were pure gold from a Data Science student’s perspective. The amount of insights and creative solution tracks to common problems we face in the field was just surprisingly high, especially given the duration of the talks. And this applies to a very broad spectrum of interest, such as the double-edged sword that is given by constrained optimization, large scale training techniques effects on stochasticity, or even techniques to bring in model interpretability for fields that can’t accept treating a result as a black box’s answer, and this is only to name a few.

Among all these thought-provoking talks, I want to give a special shoutout to the one of Professor Andreas Krause, which gave an overview of the active learning and reinforcement learning fields, notably through the lenses of optimism in the face of uncertainty. The reason I’m mentioning this talk is that as a Data science student, the in-depth lecture “Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence” given by Professor Krause was probably one of the most valuable perspectives on Machine Learning that I was ever given, and I’ll even go the extent that this also changed some of my perception and modeling assumptions on my life in general.

On another note, I can’t forget to mention what it felt like to have such brilliant minds buzzing around you for a week. And there I’m referring both to the organisers as well as the participants. To give my words some concrete pictures, imagine that in the first 10 minutes sitting in the bus to Heilbronn, I was discovering the current state of the art quantization technique for LLMs at inference time through some talk with another master student whose thesis built around that, and that my first meal revolved around learning a new perspective on model validation through Posterior Agreement with the eminent Professor Joachim Buhmann.  However, don’t get me wrong, although this could be a brain racking experience at some times, this also retained the social development aspect that you could find in a regular summer camp, where you have good laughs around a nice diner and talk about the near future under a nice sunset.

Taking back half-seriously my investigator costume, I would say that it’s hard to answer whether Heilbronn will truly become tomorrow’s AI centre of Europe, but it’s worth pointing out that it’s through such efforts, organising such events, that it will definitely earn some key position in this fast-paced field. 

What a journey we made together! Now, I believe that the most acute readers will feel that there is a missing piece to conclude this investigation. And they would be right, what happened to the first few questions? Sadly, I don’t yet pretend to be able to answer those questions at the same level those eminent professors did. However, I think I might have a solution… can’t wait to walk, alongside you this time, in a future second edition!

Now in my third year of the physics bachelor’s at ETH Zurich, I recall the dramatic shift of focus towards large language models, and in general, machine learning after the release of ChatGPT in 2022, right at the start of my studies. My name is Kilian Teck, and it is my pleasure to share my experience from attending the ML4QT symposium. I first heard about the conference through an Instagram post by ETH on the day of the application deadline. At the time, I was travelling to the World of Quantum exhibition in Munich for a hackathon and only decided last minute to write to ETH Studios. A few days later, I was delighted to hear that I was invited to attend.

In Zurich, I met up with Isidor Schoch, and we headed to Heilbronn. The opportunity to connect with Isidor, who is an ETH alumnus, was great. He has a master’s degree in quantum engineering and continues to work in the field at NVIDIA. Close to the completion of my bachelor’s, I am in the process of deciding on a direction for my master’s and having an advanced mentor at hand is indispensable.

At first, we were both slightly surprised by the location of the symposium. Heilbronn is a small city, only recently having gained the title of university city. But throughout the stay, I was amazed at the efforts being implemented to grow the location into a hub for innovation. As we learned during a tour with colleagues from ETH Studio Heilbronn, the ‘Bildungscampus’ is being greatly expanded over the next few years, hosting renowned institutes, including ETH, TUM, Fraunhofer and the Max Planck Gesellschaft. Thank you to Marc Ebert and Michele de Lorenzi for showing us first-hand how ETH fosters excellence internationally.

Over two days, I got to hear a plethora of talks on various aspects of applying classical machine learning to accelerating the development of quantum hardware as well as software. Speakers ranged from renowned experts such as Jens Eisert to emerging researchers and companies. The University of Waterloo co-hosted the event with the Fraunhofer IAO and IPO. During numerous coffee breaks, chatting with researchers from across the pond, it was incredibly valuable to hear about the international efforts of pushing quantum technologies to a useful scale. In particular, I recall the talk by Prof. Christine Muschik from the Perimeter Institute and the Waterloo Institute for Quantum Computing, which highlighted how using qudits—quantum systems with more than two states, as opposed to the conventional two states of a qubit—can reduce the number of required operations and therefore potentially enhance the accuracy of calculations performed on quantum computers.

In the evening, we had the chance to enjoy Heilbronn by canoe. A guided tour on the Neckar proved to be a lot of fun. Racing fellow attendees on the water and a ‘Literaturstunde’ by the guide, with a humorous quote about the river Neckar by Mark Twain. The bit of exercise was followed by a delicious dinner at the Experimenta itself.

The symposium was an incredible experience, and I am very grateful to ETH Studios for making it possible to meet with so many interesting people in one place to learn about quantum initiatives.

Find out more about the ETH Studios here: https://ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/global/network/eth-studios.html

by Donald Tillman, Managing Director of the ETH Zurich Foundation, 3 December 2020

Why philanthropy is (increasingly) important for ETH Zurich

Do you enjoy doing puzzles? Are you familiar with the feeling of suspense while you search for the right piece? And the satisfaction that comes from putting all the pieces together to create a coherent whole?

Well, the research process is not so different, often involving lots of small steps forward until the big breakthrough can be made. Philanthropy is able to help the whole process along, and here too, several contributions create impact together. I am often asked why ETH needs extra funding at all, considering that it is financed by the federal government. The answer is that donations give ETH Zurich the flexibility and freedom to accelerate strategic projects. They allow us to support young talent in the best possible way, and bring innovations to society even faster. As a supplement to the limited and earmarked federal funding, donations play an increasingly important role in pushing the boundaries of knowledge – for the benefit of future generations.

From a small donation to a bequest

Although university fundraising has a long tradition in the English-speaking world, we were among the pioneers in Switzerland. The ETH Foundation was just three years old when I returned to my alma mater in 2006 and took over its management. I continue to be inspired on a daily basis by the opportunity to contribute to its ongoing development.

It particularly delights me to see not only that we are able to support and facilitate new projects every year, but also that our circle of donors is constantly growing. Alongside foundations and companies, ETH’s philanthropic community comprises more than 5,000 private individuals, the majority of whom are alumni spread across the world. Many support the Excellence Scholarships for particularly gifted students with an annual donation, and enjoy the personal contact of the traditional “Meet the Talent” event. Others provide funding for a specific research topic that is particularly important to them – such as skin burns in children.

The size of the puzzle piece they decide to contribute is at their own discretion. We appreciate the CHF 20 from a young graduate just as much as the perhaps larger amount from a person who can already look back on a successful career, as both demonstrate their sense of attachment to ETH and their wish to give something back. Sometimes a whole puzzle comes into our hands, already complete – like recently a very generous donation for a highly specialized lab building, taking quantum research to a new level. I am also always particularly moved when a person decides to have an impact beyond that of their own life, and leave a legacy or a bequest to the ETH Foundation, creating a bond between their life history and that of ETH.

Philanthropy accelerates innovations and makes a significant contribution to solving the greatest challenges of our time. The core idea of our new campaign is that everyone can play their part. We look forward to many more puzzle pieces – will we perhaps see one from you?

About the author

Dr Donald Tillman (1966) is Managing Director of the ETH Zurich Foundation, which is a private foundation to support teaching and research at ETH Zurich.

Tillman studied civil engineering at ETH Zurich, before gaining a Master’s degree in environmental engineering at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US) and writing his doctoral thesis on water supply at EAWAG, the aquatic research institute.

His has since worked as an analyst in the water sector at RobecoSAM, an investment company with an exclusive focus on sustainability, and as a project engineer at the engineering company Holinger, among other roles.

In addition, Tillman is Chairman of Immobilien ETHZF AG, and was a long-standing member and Chairman of the MIT Club of Switzerland.

Donald Tillman is married with one daughter. His hobbies include his family, tennis and jazz.He donates a puzzle piece to the Excellence Scholarship & Opportunity Programme each year.