Our Minds Under Siege

Imagine Switzerland not just as a hub for local startups, but as Europe’s playground for innovation – a place where startups from all over Europe can establish, scale, and validate their technologies in a highly supportive environment. With this unprecedented new division of roles between the EU and Switzerland, innovation and regulation no longer clash – they co-evolve. Governance by Design – A New Paradigm for the European continent. Agenda: 15:00 – 15:05 | Opening words (5min) 15:05 – 15:25 | Presentation of concept by Daniel Naeff (ETHZ) and Christian Hugo Hoffmann 15:25 – 15:45 | Guest contribution from Claudia Keller 15:45 – 16:00 | Break 16:00 – 16:55 | Panel 16:55 – 17:00 | Closing statement 17:00 – 18:30 | Networking apéro +++ This event is part of the Zurich AI Festival, taking place from September 28 to October 3, 2026. Zurich AI Festival unites the minds building the future - visionary founders, bold investors, and tech leaders shaping tomorrow. Connect to tomorrow! Zurich AI Festival is a flagship initiative presented by ETH AI Center, Greater Zurich Area, the City of Zurich, the Canton of Zurich, and Zurich Tourism, and supported by leading partners from academia, industry, government and the broader AI ecosystem. We look forward to welcoming you soon! Zurich AI Festival Team

What does the future of surgery look like when AI and augmented reality become part of surgical practice? Join us for an immersive evening in the OR-X exploring how emerging technologies are reshaping the operating room. Through interactive discussions and live demonstrations, participants will gain insights into developments in AI-supported surgery, augmented reality, surgical data science and digital workflows in the OR. This event brings together leading voices from research, industry, and surgery. +++ This event is part of the Zurich AI Festival, taking place from September 28 to October 3, 2026. Zurich AI Festival unites the minds building the future - visionary founders, bold investors, and tech leaders shaping tomorrow. Connect to tomorrow! Zurich AI Festival is a flagship initiative presented by ETH AI Center, Greater Zurich Area, the City of Zurich, the Canton of Zurich, and Zurich Tourism, and supported by leading partners from academia, industry, government and the broader AI ecosystem. We look forward to welcoming you soon! Zurich AI Festival Team

Most organizations are no longer experimenting with AI - they are trying to scale it. And this is where things start to break. Despite strong models and successful pilots, many AI initiatives fail to deliver real value. Not because the technology doesn’t work, but because success is not well defined, measured and managed in real-world conditions. In this interactive session, participants will step into a simulated AI transformation scenario, making decisions under real constraints such as data limitations, cost pressure, user behavior and governance requirements. Through this exercise, we will uncover why AI systems that “work” in demos often fail in reality and what it actually takes to build systems that are measurable, reliable and worth scaling. +++ This event is part of the Zurich AI Festival, taking place from September 28 to October 3, 2026. Zurich AI Festival unites the minds building the future - visionary founders, bold investors, and tech leaders shaping tomorrow. Connect to tomorrow! Zurich AI Festival is a flagship initiative presented by ETH AI Center, Greater Zurich Area, the City of Zurich, the Canton of Zurich, and Zurich Tourism, and supported by leading partners from academia, industry, government and the broader AI ecosystem. We look forward to welcoming you soon! Zurich AI Festival Team

Zurich's quarterly gathering for the people building AI — capped at 250 people. 250 people in one room: founders, operators, big tech engineers, researchers, and the city's most ambitious students. Hosted at Google's Zurich HQ on Europaallee. This is the AI meetup in Zurich. It runs quarterly, and it's built around one thing: meeting the people actually doing the work. The vibe: 🍕 Free food & cold drinks, all night 💰 Presentation of the newly funded AI startups in town 💬 A panel session you actually want to hear from 🤝 Plenty of time before and after to connect Who's been in the room: Past editions have brought together engineers and researchers from Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Anthropic, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, IBM Research, Prometheus, teams from Hugging Face, ElevenLabs, Isomorphic Labs, Poolside, Databricks, and Exa, and founders and operators from across the Zurich scene like Lakera, nunu.ai, Cerrion, Flexion, mimic, Cradle, LogicStar, Lightly, Rapidata and more, plus a deep research bench from the ETH AI Center, as well as ETH Zurich professors. If you're building in AI in Zurich, this is your room. Important: Curation is what makes the room work: registration is open, but approval isn't automatic. We read every request and prioritise people building or researching in AI, up to venue capacity. If you're here to sell services or source deals, this isn't the room. Agenda: 6:30 PM — Doors open, drinks & networking 7:15 PM — Intro + what happened in Zurich AI this quarter 7:45 PM — Fireside chatJeff Hawke, Co-founder and CTO at Odyssey Alex Stöckl, GP at Founderful (moderator) 8:30 PM — Food & networking 9:30 PM — End Organizers: A Founderful × Google Cloud event, organized by Edo and Gian, in collaboration with Wenger Vieli.

Join us for a XFN panel hosted by Meta with Senior Professionals from other local AI Labs and Professors. Bharath Sankaran (Agent Data & Optimization Team, Meta) Vittorio Ferrari (Codec Labs Team,Meta) Enrique Alfonseca (Consumer Agents Team, Meta) Imanol Schlag (AI Research Scientist, ETH AI Centre) Aliaksei Severyn (Research Director, Google DeepMind) Please register by Tuesday 22nd September as we will be closing registration then. +++ This event is part of the Zurich AI Festival, taking place from September 28 to October 3, 2026. Zurich AI Festival unites the minds building the future - visionary founders, bold investors, and tech leaders shaping tomorrow. Connect to tomorrow! Zurich AI Festival is a flagship initiative presented by ETH AI Center, Greater Zurich Area, the City of Zurich, the Canton of Zurich, and Zurich Tourism, and supported by leading partners from academia, industry, government and the broader AI ecosystem. We look forward to welcoming you soon! Zurich AI Festival Team

Join us in Zurich for an evening built for the local robotics and physical AI community. Gravis Robotics and Foxglove are teaming up to get the local robotics crowd in one room for real technical content and good conversation. Gravis will take the stage on rebuilding a robot's nervous system — moving beyond ROS2 toward a scalable, safety-certifiable open-source stack, while keeping the machine operational at every step of the migration. Foxglove joins on how you keep watch while you rewire a robot mid-run. Two teams, one belief: robots have to work outside the demo, not just in it. This is an invite-only evening, and registration is subject to approval. Space at the Papiersaal is limited, so apply early. Agenda 18:00 — Doors open. Grab a drink, meet the room. 18:45 — Welcome from Gravis and Foxglove. 18:50 — State of Robotics + What's New at Foxglove. 19:10 — Gravis takes the stage: ‘From ROS 2 to iceoryx2: Rebuilding Middleware Under a Live System.’ 19:45 — Live Q&A. Bring your hardest questions. 20:10 — Networking and apéro until 22:00. Speakers Benjamin Rippel — Software Engineer, Gravis Robotics. Benjamin tackles high level architecture decisions for the excavators at Gravis, currently dealing with the middleware migration. Peter Siegel — Software Engineer, Gravis Robotics. Peter works on the perception pipeline architecture and hardware-accelerated edge pipeline deployments for autonomous heavy machinery. Who should come Robotics and physical AI engineers, founders, and researchers who are eager to push beyond current robotics paradigms — especially anyone who's wrestled with middleware, real-time systems, or getting robots to work in the real world. It's also aimed at the people making the technical calls, like CTOs and tech leads. Good to know Food & drinks — drinks all evening, plus a vegetarian and vegan menu. By train — the venue is in Sihlcity, about 5 minutes from Zürich HB to Zürich Saalsporthalle (SZU Sihltal line, every 20 min), then a short walk. T