PhD Retreat - Hótel Stracta (2026)

The 2026 PhD Retreat of the IHPC and AI Research Group took place on 13–15 October 2026 at Hótel Stracta in Hella, Iceland. Organised by Morris Riedel and Gabriele Cavallaro, it brought together PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and research assistants to share their work and discuss common research challenges.

The programme combined research presentations on Earth observation, AI agents, quantum computing, healthcare, glacial modelling, and integrated sensing and communication with a PhD defence rehearsal and a round-table discussion on postdoctoral experiences. A visit to the LAVA Centre complemented the scientific sessions, and the retreat concluded with a discussion of shared objectives, challenge areas and plans for the next retreat.

Presentations and downloads

Explore the lecture titles below and download the presentation slides in PDF format.

1. Anis Abdollahi-Sissan — Learning Compact Representations from Unlabeled ICU Time Series. Download slides (PDF)
2. Kennedy Adriko — Uncertainty-Weighted Downscaling of District Crop Yield Statistics to Parcels Using Geospatial Foundation Model Embeddings. Download slides (PDF)
3. Zahid Ali — Interactive Visualisation of Traffic Accident and Weather Data in Iceland. Download slides (PDF)
4. Syed Muhammad Azhar — Agentic AI: Understanding the Buzzwords. Download slides (PDF)
5. Pinaki Banerjee — From Natural Language to Crop Type Distribution: An Agentic Approach to Earth Observation. Download slides (PDF)
6. Greta Bellagamba — A Finite Element Glacial Isostatic Adjustment Model of Iceland. Download slides (PDF)
7. Daniele Franch — From MAP to MPM: Quantum Annealing for Sampling-Based Inference in CRFs for Semantic Segmentation with Sparse Ground Truth. Download slides (PDF)
8. Hao Geng — Iterated Simulated Annealing for Combinatorial Optimization. Download slides (PDF)
9. Samy Hashim — Amortized Self-Supervised Pretraining for Compute-Efficient Environmental Monitoring: How Well Do EO Foundation Models Transfer? Download slides (PDF)
10. Ingólfur Hjörleifsson — Research After the AI-Agent Shift: From Ideas to Working Systems? Download slides (PDF)
11. Camelia Lauterbach Oprea — AI-Based Complication Detection in Neonatal Intensive Care Data. Download slides (PDF)
12. Sayan Mandal and Rocco Sedona — Biomazon: A Multimodal Benchmark for Full Vertical Structure and Biomass Modeling in the Amazon Basin. Download slides (PDF)
13. Stefano Maurogiovanni — Timely Crop Phenology Prediction from Field-Level Imagery and Satellite Time Series with Vision–Language Models. Download slides (PDF)
14. Claudia Paris — Integrating Multimodal Satellite Data, Field Photos, and AI to Go Beyond Traditional Mapping. Download slides (PDF)
15. Surbhi Sharma — Advancing Land-Cover and Land-Use Classification with Semantically Consistent and Data-Efficient Deep Learning on Multi-Source Earth Observation Data. Download slides (PDF)
16. Liang Tian — Assessing the Influence of Spatial and Thematic Resolution of Satellite-Derived Images on Landscape Metrics. Download slides (PDF)
17. Vadim Vybornov — Harnessing the Agent: Layered Verification for Autonomous Workflows. Download slides (PDF)
18. Rui Wang — Towards Large Scale Circuit Simulation for Hybrid Diffusion Model. Download slides (PDF)
19. Ehsan Zandi and Edoardo Pasetto — Integrated Sensing and Communication. Download slides (PDF)