Our Speakers

The New York Times headlined: "When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber 'Dad'." In 1990-91, he laid the foundations of "Generative AI," by introducing the principles of Generative Adversarial Networks (used for deepfakes), unnormalised linear Transformers (the T in ChatGPT), and self-supervised Pre-Training (the P in ChatGPT). His lab also produced LSTM, the most cited AI of the 20th century, and the Highway Net (a variant of which is the most cited AI of the 21st century). Elon Musk tweeted: "Schmidhuber invented everything." His AI is on over 3 billion smartphones, and used many billions of times per day.

Ramin is the co-founder and CEO of Liquid AI and a machine learning Scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ramin’s research focuses on modeling and understanding intelligence and sequential decision making. Ramin is known for his major contributions to the AI and machine learning field in designing explainable and robust deep learning systems. He co-invented liquid neural networks, a class of brain-inspired AI systems that can stay adaptable even after training. He received his Ph.D. degree with distinction in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria.

Fascinated by software development since his childhood in Germany, Thomas Dohmke has built a career building tools developers love and accelerating innovations that are changing software development. Currently, Thomas is Chief Executive Officer of GitHub, where he has overseen the launch of the world's first at-scale AI developer tool, GitHub Copilot. Before his time at GitHub, Thomas previously co-founded HockeyApp and led the company as CEO through its acquisition by Microsoft in 2014, and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Glasgow, UK.

Oliver Brock is the Alexander-von-Humboldt Professor of Robotics in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technische Universität Berlin. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2000 and held postdoctoral positions at Rice University and Stanford University. He was an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst before moving back to Berlin in 2009. Oliver Brock directs the Research Center of Excellence "Science of Intelligence". He is an IEEE Fellow and was president of the Robotics: Science and Systems Foundation from 2012 until 2019.

Thomas Wolf is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, where he leads open-source, educational, and research initiatives. Passionate about making complex AI models and datasets accessible, he created the Hugging Face Transformers and Datasets libraries. Thomas advocates for open science in AI/ML, bridging academia and industry through projects like the BigScience Workshop, resulting in the BLOOM experiments. His research focuses on Large Language Model (LLM) accessibility and overcoming their limitations. He also enjoys creating educational content, including co-authoring "Natural Language Processing with Transformers" and producing blog posts and videos on AI and NLP.

Jonas Andrulis is Founder and CEO of German AI R&D start-up Aleph Alpha. He worked on AI innovation in academia and industry, starting AI software companies for logistics and computer vision and was in Apple AI R&D special projects until 2019.

‍

I am a Senior Director of Research and Robotics at DeepMind. I joined DeepMind in 2014 to pursue new solutions for artificial general intelligence. Currently, I oversee the strategy for DeepMind’s exploratory research efforts, leading teams exploring new innovations in AI that might address the open questions that today's techniques cannot answer.

Vít Růžička is a doctoral student at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford.

For the first time, he and his team have trained a machine learning model in outer space, on board a satellite. This achievement could enable real-time monitoring and decision making for a range of applications, from disaster management to deforestation.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-07-28-researchers-successfully-train-machine-learning-model-outer-space-first-time

‍

Andrea Lavazza is a moral philosopher at Pegaso University and the Centro Universitario Internazionale in Italy. His research focuses on the ethics of new technologies, including neuroscience, neurotechnologies, and artificial intelligence. Lavazza is interested in the impact of novel devices on humans and the moral status of new entities, both biological—such as brain organoids—and non-biological—such as digital agents. He has also explored the fate of free will and certain human functions, such as memory, in a technological age. Lavazza has published 15 books and 180 papers and chapters, both as an author and an editor.

‍

‍

Victor Riparbelli is the CEO and co-founder of Synthesia, the world’s leading AI video communications platform for enterprises. More than 55,000 businesses, including half of the Fortune 100, use it to communicate efficiently and share knowledge at scale using AI avatars. Victor has been involved in technology entrepreneurship for the past 10 years and co-founded Synthesia in 2017 together with prof. Matthias Niessner, prof. Lourdes Agapito, and Steffen Tjerrild. Combining technical, academic, and entrepreneurial excellence, Victor and his team are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible using AI, while striving to pioneer the field in an ethical and responsible way,

Cara Hunter MLA (born 8 November 1995[1]) is an Irish Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) politician, currently serving as a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly (MLA) for East Londonderry, a position she has held since 18 May 2020.[2]

In 2022, she became the target of a pornographic deepfake campaign: (from politico)

CARA HUNTER, A NORTHERN IRISH POLITICIAN, WAS ONLY WEEKS away from the country’s 2022 legislative elections when she received a WhatsApp message from someone she didn’t know. The man quickly asked her if she was the woman in an explicit video — a 40-second clip that he shared with the then-24-year-old. Opening the video, Hunter was confronted with an AI-generated deepfake video of herself performing graphic sexual acts. Within days, the false clip had gone viral, and the Northern Irishwoman was bombarded with direct messages from men around the world with increasingly sexual and violent messages.

“It was a campaign to undermine me politically,” Hunter, who won her 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly seat by just a few votes, told me. “They had felt that, because they saw an explicit of someone who looked like me, it was OK to send me nasty messages. It has left a tarnished perception of me that I can’t control. I’ll have to pay for the repercussions of this for the rest of my life.”

‍

Shaolei Ren is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. He has taught and researched computational sustainability for more than a decade. His work on sustainable AI has been featured in many international AI governance and ethics guidelines, contributed to K-12 education materials, led to industry innovations like real-time water footprint reporting tools, and gained worldwide media coverage.

‍