Led by INESC-ID, the Sustainable Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) will be a transformative project that will upgrade INESC-ID into a world-class Centre of Excellence (CoE) dedicated to the development of state-of-the-art, sustainable, and trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. To achieve its goals, INESC-ID is teaming up with two of Europe’s leading AI institutions: the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).

Funded under the competitive Horizon Europe “Teaming for Excellence” programme, SAIL represents a €27.2M investment in Portugal’s research and innovation capabilities — a €13M grant from the European Union, matched by €14.2M in complementary national funding (€13M from the Portuguese Government and €1.2M from INESC).

The goal is for INESC-ID to become an international reference by establishing a comprehensive research-to-innovation pipeline, tackling grand challenges in AI such as explainability, reasoning, and out-of-distribution performance. By teaming with MPI-SWS’s groundbreaking foundational research and DFKI’s advanced, industry-oriented solutions, SAIL will specifically address Portugal’s productivity gap between research and real-world applications by leveraging the potential of advanced AI to boost the economy, adapt education systems, and position Europe as a global leader in responsible, human-centric AI development.

The Centre of Excellence will also strongly focus on education and advanced human resources training by launching a world-class Dual PhD programme in AI, jointly awarded by Instituto Superior Técnico (Portugal) and Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität (RPTU, Germany). The connection to the industry will focus on collaborative projects, but also on the creation of a Living Lab, and of an ecosystem that fosters technology transfer, the emergence of new businesses, and the attraction of investment. Recognising the critical need for safe and fair AI, SAIL will also establish an AI Ethics and Regulation Hub to provide compliance guidelines and AI programs for citizens and professionals. Finally, SAIL will create a network of physical and computational infrastructures for the development and testing of technologies.

Through these actions, SAIL will contribute to the development of the economy, the attraction of talent and the creation of highly qualified jobs. The project will directly address society’s needs and promote the establishment of tech-based start-ups, shape national policies to ensure AI development adheres strictly to ethical, safe, and sustainable guidelines.

This result would not have been possible without the dedication of the team that worked for a year and a half to bring it to success: Arlindo Oliveira, Inês Lynce, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Sandra Aresta, and Sílvia Castro.

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