Programme time: 14-Oct | 14:30 | 75 min
Room: Arrabida Room 

Moderator: Pedro U. Lima (IST/U. Lisbon & ISR Lisboa) 

Speakers

• Ana Paiva (Instituto Superior Técnico)

• Joe Paton (Champalimaud Foundation) 

   

Full description and objectives

Objective: This strategy-oriented workshop addresses Europe’s resilience and competitiveness by proposing an alternative to the unsustainable, resource-intensive digital AI scaling race. It outlines how Europe can leverage a second-mover advantage to achieve true strategic autonomy.

Context: Frontier AI infrastructure demands unsustainable energy and capital, while rising tariffs and export controls expose the risks of foreign dependency. Europe cannot out-spend competitors on brute-force digital scaling. However, history shows second-movers can leapfrog first-generation infrastructure lock-in by occupying uncovered gaps.
Workshop Focus: We will focus on Physical AI, robotics, and bio-inspired computational principles—domains pioneered by European research. Mirroring biological evolution, which creates highly efficient systems that operate on few watts and extrapolate novel solutions, this approach offers a viable alternative to unsustainable data-center interpolation.
Expected Outcomes: Participants will help formulating a strategic roadmap to transition European AI from foreign dependency to efficient, bio-inspired physical systems. By reclaiming these foundational research strengths, the workshop will deliver actionable recommendations for ADRA to secure Europe’s competitive edge, long-term resilience, and technological sovereignty.

Why you want to join?

Format: Strategy-oriented workshops addressing Europe’s resilience, competitiveness, and strategic autonomy through ADR.:
The current approach to AI, focused on massive scale and infrastructure, is unsustainable and creates a widening gap between training and inference costs. Portugal and Europe should focus on areas like physical AI, robotics, and bio-inspired computational principles, where they can leverage existing strengths and avoid direct competition with the US and China.

Running agenda