21–30 March, 2026
Paphos, Cyprus

JASS 2026

An immersive simulator of real-world software development
10-day engineering bootcamp for students

Theme: “Intelligence-Driven Smart Eco City”

Registration

JASS (Joint Advanced Student School) is an international, project-driven school founded in 2012, focused on emerging technologies and real-world engineering practice.

Each year, JASS brings together high-potential students and leading academic experts from different countries to work in intensive, short-term engineering teams. Over the course of 9 fully immersive days, participants design, build, iterate, and deliver a finished project.

Topics typically covered include:

  • Mobile devices

  • Internet of Things (IoT)

  • Industrial applications

  • Autonomous mobile robotics & transportation

  • Virtual reality

500+
Participants

40+
Completed projects

30+
Invited Professors

14
Years of history

Why JASS is unique

Immersive, project-driven format

  • 9 days of intense, full immersion (within a 10-day program)

  • 90% project work / 10% theory

  • Students act as engineers, not passive learners

  • A simulated full-cycle software development environment, covering the entire process from problem definition and system design to implementation, testing, integration, and delivery

  • Daily iterations, reviews, simulations, and system integration, mirroring real-world engineering workflows

World-class invited lecturers

Participants work directly with experts from top global institutions and industry:

  • Stanford University — Artificial Intelligence, Time-Series Language Models

  • Imperial College London — Agile Methods, Continuous Integration & Delivery

  • Technical University of Munich (TUM) — Advanced software engineering & system design

  • JetBrains — Industry-grade development practices & tooling

Living & learning as one ecosystem

All participants and organizers:

  • live together in one hotel

  • work, discuss, and build continuously

  • form strong international teams

A mid-program outdoor hike is a long-standing JASS tradition — a reset moment for reflection, trust, and team cohesion.

Meet Our School's Lecturers

  • Prof. Kirill Krinkin

    Neapolis University Pafos, Cyprus
    JetBrains, Cyprus

  • Prof. Dr. Bernd Brügge

    Technical University of Munich, Germany

  • Dr. Paul Schmiedmayer

    Dr. Paul Schmiedmayer

    Stanford University, USA

  • Dr. Robert Chatley

    Imperial College London, UK

Topic 2026: Intelligence-Driven Smart Eco City

Building Urban Digital Twins with Distributed AI Agents

The project continues JASS's evolution toward AI-augmented cyber-physical systems, building on previous work with autonomous vehicles (2023), LLM-controlled smart cities (2024), and hardware abstraction for robotics (2025). This year, we take the next step: creating a distributed multi-agent system where each component reasons about temporal data streams and collaborates through shared context.

Core Concept: The Urban Digital Twin

  • Central Intelligence Hub

    A unified coordination center responsible for aggregating data from all monitoring subsystems, generating city-wide state representations, forecasting trends using Time-Series Language Models (TSLM), detecting anomalies and cross-domain correlations, and orchestrating responses to critical events. The hub maintains a shared context that enables different monitoring agents to understand each other's observations and coordinate their actions.

  • Distributed Monitoring Agents

    Semi-autonomous edge systems that operate independently while contributing to the collective intelligence. Each agent handles local data collection and preprocessing, edge inference for real-time decision making, context formation using Model Context Protocol (MCP), and bidirectional communication with the central hub.

Key technologies and equipment

Time-Series Language Models

Based on Stanford's OpenTSLM framework, we integrate time series as a native modality into Large Language Models. This enables natural-language reasoning over sensor data streams, automatic generation of human-readable descriptions of temporal patterns, trend forecasting with explainable rationales, and anomaly detection with contextual understanding. TSLM bridges the gap between continuous sensor signals and discrete reasoning, allowing agents to "understand" what sensor readings mean rather than just processing numbers.

Model Context Protocol

MCP provides the integration layer connecting all components. Each monitoring agent exposes its capabilities as MCP tools, while the central hub aggregates contexts from all agents. This architecture enables seamless tool interoperability across heterogeneous systems, dynamic context sharing between agents, standardized interfaces for LLM-agent communication, and an extensible plugin architecture for new sensors and capabilities.

LLM-Based Agents

Each subsystem operates as an intelligent agent capable of autonomous decision-making within its domain, natural language interaction with operators, collaborative reasoning with other agents, and learning from historical patterns. The distributed agent architecture ensures resilience -- individual agents continue operating even if central coordination is temporarily unavailable.

Hardware Platform

  • Duckietown Platform: Autonomous vehicles equipped with environmental sensors for mobile monitoring

  • Drone Fleet: Aerial platforms for visual inspection and wide-area monitoring

  • Sensor Networks: Air quality sensors (PM2.5, PM10, CO2, NO2), water quality probes, environmental monitors

  • Edge Computing: Jetson/Orange Pi units for local inference and agent hosting

  • OptiTrack System: Precision positioning for an indoor testing environment

21-30 March, 2026

Who can apply?

  • Undergraduate, graduate, or postgraduate students

  • Strong background in software engineering or development

  • Interest in AI, IoT, robotics, and cyber-physical systems

  • Motivation to work intensively in international teams

Completely free for students

  • Participation in JASS is 100% free, removing financial barriers and ensuring
    selection is based purely on talent, motivation, and potential.

  • All selected participants are fully accommodated at Coral Beach Hotel & Resort, Paphos

  • Accommodation is provided by Neapolis University Pafos and Leptos Group

Selection process

  • Application submission: 20 February

  • Technical test task: 20–28 February

  • Interview stage: 28 February – 10 March

Apply now
 

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