Reports from past cohorts

Annual reports

A short report is published after each summer — projects completed, partners involved, and what we have learned.

Below is a short record of recent editions, with the topics covered and a few of the projects that came out of them. Where a project has continued in another setting — with an industry partner, a research group, or as a public report — we note it.

Note The figures below are indicative, drawn from the standing faculty’s working notes. Full per-year reports are published on the chen.ist Academy site after each summer closes.

2024 edition · Cybersecurity & Privacy

The 2024 cohort was organised around three specialised tracks — Network Security & Threat Detection, Privacy-Preserving Technologies and Secure Software Development — taught over three weeks. The 2026 edition consolidates these into the current six-pillar curriculum (cybersecurity, hygiene, awareness, open source, project management and public speaking) and adds the closing hackathon week.

  • Several dozen participants
  • A rotating set of invited speakers across the three weeks
  • Group projects completed and presented at the closing colloquium
  • A handful of those projects continued in partnership with industry afterwards

The figures above are indicative; final per-edition numbers are published on the Academy site after each summer.

Earlier editions

Earlier editions were shorter — typically two weeks — and ran with a single combined cohort of a few dozen participants. They were, in substantial part, experiments conducted in public: we wanted to find out whether a small hybrid summer school could be run on the budget and to the standard the Academy wanted. We concluded that it could.

What we have learned from running the school

A few principles, drawn from the running notes of the standing faculty:

  1. Keep the cohort small. Forty to sixty participants is the right size. Larger and the school stops being a school; smaller and the cohort loses the variety that gives it energy.
  2. Mix the audience. Putting graduate students in the same workshop as senior practitioners is uncomfortable for both for about a day, and then produces the most interesting work of the programme.
  3. Defend the evenings. Unstructured time with the cohort and the visiting faculty is the part of the school that participants remember.

We expect to publish a longer reflection on five years of the school after the 2027 edition.