This year, the school brought together more than 100 in-person participants from Russia, China, the Middle East, and other regions, while approximately 300 more joined the programme online. Interest in the school reached a record high: the organisers received 2,544 applications, with 585 candidates advancing to the extended selection stage.
The participant cohort also became more diverse. Only around half of the Russian in-person participants represented Moscow-based universities; the others came from St Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and other research centres. The school welcomed outstanding students and early-career researchers from Armenia, Nepal, the United Arab Emirates, China, and other countries. The Chinese delegation comprised around 50 participants. Some of the students had already published papers at leading A/A* conferences, including during their undergraduate studies.
The SMILES-2026 faculty was also among the most international in the school’s history. The programme featured 17 leading researchers from seven countries: Russia, China, the United Kingdom, the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
Invited lecturers included Artem Shelmanov of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Ray Buntine of VinUniversity, Yingzhen Li of Imperial College London, Fang Liu of the University of Notre Dame, Maurizio Filippone of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Alexey Zaikin of University College London, Shuihua Wang of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, and Dianhui Wang of La Trobe University.
The school’s academic programme covered large language models, generative artificial intelligence, diffusion and flow-based models, Bayesian methods, uncertainty estimation, trustworthy AI, computer vision, medical AI, intelligent agents, multimodal models, and applied machine learning.
Over the course of two weeks, participants attended lectures by leading academics and industry experts, presented their own research at a poster session, formed international teams, and developed projects addressing current challenges in machine learning. The final stage involved presenting their results to an expert jury.
At the closing ceremony, graduates received certificates, the authors of the best posters were presented with special awards, and the teams received prizes for the strongest projects as well as special awards from industry partners.
“For us, a key outcome of SMILES-2026 is its evolution from a summer school into a research environment. When students from different countries spend two weeks working with leading scientists, presenting projects, and discussing ideas with colleagues from Nanjing University, the result goes beyond education. New topics, teams, and professional connections emerge — and they can continue through papers, internships, and joint research,” said Evgeny Burnaev, Scientific Director of SMILES-2026, Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Skoltech Vice President for Artificial Intelligence Development, and Director of the Skoltech AI Center.
“We deliberately design SMILES not simply as a series of lectures, but as a compressed model of the research process. Under the guidance of mentors, participants move from formulating a problem and conducting initial experiments to receiving feedback, refining their work, and publicly presenting the results. This year, that process was especially intensive: the teams worked in an international environment, received comments from experts, and saw how their ideas were perceived by others,” said Alexey Zaytsev, Director of SMILES-2026, Associate Professor at Skoltech, and Head of the Skoltech–Sberbank Applied Research Laboratory at the Skoltech AI Center.
