Professor Samuel Kaski, Director of the newly launched ELLIS Institute Finland and Professor at Aalto University and the University of Manchester, has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant of €2.5 million.
This is the only ERC Advanced Grant awarded to Finland in this cycle and comes as the country strengthens its position as a global AI hub.
The ELLIS Institute Finland — the newest node of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) network — brings together all 13 Finnish universities with €40 million in support from the Ministry of Education and Culture. An additional €10 million in professorship funding is backed by Peter Sarlin, co-founder and CEO of AMD Silo AI.
Check out our interview earlier this year with Peter Sarlin.
The highly competitive funding will support groundbreaking research to transform R&D by integrating advanced machine learning with human expertise — aiming to create multidisciplinary human-AI teams that can tackle science’s most complex challenges.
At the heart of the project is a new machine learning paradigm inspired by the progression of real-world research: through iterative design-build-test-learn (DBTL) cycles.
As shown in the diagram above, the right loop represents the real-world DBTL cycle that governs experimental science. But in parallel, Kaski’s approach incorporates an expert re-design loop — an inner loop powered by simulation and human insight.
This structure enables continuous querying, re-learning, and adaptation, overcoming the key limitation of today’s machine learning models: their failure to generalize outside narrow training domains.
By embedding human knowledge directly into the simulation loop and enabling models to actively re-learn, the project targets a critical bottleneck in AI deployment: robust generalisation in out-of-distribution settings.
The result? Machine learning systems that not only work in the lab but transfer to the complexities of real-world R&D — enabling faster discoveries, more adaptive systems, and genuine collaboration between humans and AI.
With Kaski’s ERC project and the momentum behind ELLIS Finland, the country is now drawing top-tier talent and helping lead Europe’s push to develop generalisable, collaborative, and robust machine learning systems that work in the real world.
Lead image: Professor Samuel Kaski, Director of the ELLIS Institute Finland.
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