CERN Accelerating science

Prof. Dr. Max Welling was recently appointed Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. He is also a research chair in Machine Learning at the University of Amsterdam (AMLAB) and a VP Technologies at Qualcomm. He is a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and at the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).

Max Welling has served as associate editor in chief of IEEE TPAMI from 2011-2015 and is on the board of the NeurIPS foundation since 2015 and has been program chair and general chair of NeurIPS in 2013 and 2014 respectively. He was also program chair of AISTATS in 2009 and ECCV in 2016 and general chair of MIDL 2018.

He is recipient of the ECCV Koenderink Prize in 2010. Welling is co-founder and board member of the Innovation Center for AI (ICAI) and the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).  He directs the Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab (AMLAB), and co-directs the Qualcomm-UvA deep learning lab (QUVA), the Bosch-UvA Deep Learning lab (DELTA) and the Amsterdam ELLIS Unit.

Cansu is a philosopher and the Founder+Director of AI Ethics Lab and the Ethics Lead and Research Associate Professor at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University, co-leading their Responsible AI practice. Cansu leads teams of computer scientists, philosophers, designers, and legal scholars to provide ethics analysis and guidance to researchers and practitioners. She also serves as an AI Ethics and Governance Expert consultant to the United Nations, working with UNICRI Centre for AI & Robotics and the INTERPOL in building a “Toolkit for Responsible AI Innovation in Law Enforcement”.

Cansu has a Ph.D. in philosophy specializing in applied ethics. Before her work in technology ethics, Cansu spent more than a decade working in population-level bioethics on a range of topics including, resource allocation, human subject research, and end-of-life decisions. She was on the full-time faculty at the University of Hong Kong Medical School and a researcher at the Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, National University of Singapore, Osaka University, and the World Health Organization. 

Cansu also serves as an ethics expert in various ethics, advisory, and editorial boards. She is a founding editor for the international peer-reviewed journal AI & Ethics (Springer Nature), serves as an ethics expert for EU-funded research projects focusing on the ethics of AI, robotics, human enhancement, and law enforcement AI technologies, and chairs the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) AI Experts Network Criteria Committee. 

Ed Boyden is Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT, an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the MIT McGovern Institute, and professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Media Arts and Sciences, and Biological Engineering at MIT.

He leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, which develops tools for analyzing and repairing complex biological systems such as the brain, and applies them systematically to reveal ground truth principles of biological function as well as to repair these systems.

He co-directs the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering, which aims to develop new tools to accelerate neuroscience progress, and is a faculty member of the MIT Center for Environmental Health Sciences, Computational & Systems Biology Initiative, and Koch Institute.

Joscha Bach is the VP research for AI foundation. He works and writes about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He is founder of the MicroPsi project, in which virtual agents are constructed and used in a computer model to discover and describe the interactions of emotion, motivation, and cognition of situated agents. Bach’s mission to build a model of the mind is the bedrock research in the creation of Strong AI, i.e. cognition on par with that of a human being. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.

Joscha earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, where he has taught computer science, AI, and cognitive science. He is also the author of “Principles of Synthetic Intelligence” (Oxford University Press).

Anima Anandkumar holds dual positions in academia and industry. She is a Bren professor at Caltech CMS department and a director of machine learning research at NVIDIA. At NVIDIA, she is leading the research group that develops next-generation AI algorithms. At Caltech, she is the co-director of Dolcit and co-leads the AI4science initiative, along with Yisong Yue.

Prof. Anandkumar is the youngest named chair professor at Caltech, the highest honor the university bestows on individual faculty. She is recipient of several awards such as the Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, Faculty fellowships from Microsoft, Google and Adobe, and Young Investigator Awards from the Army research office and Air Force office of sponsored research. She has been featured in documentaries and articles by PBS, wired magazine, MIT Technology review, yourstory, and Forbes.

Abha is a writer and an obsessive rewriter. Interested in the arts and sciences, she explores the weak interaction between the two.
A CERN Press Officer, she translates physics into English and helps scientists communicate their research to the world.

You can find Abha on twitter  @abhaeli

John Ellis is a theoretical physicist primarily interested in research on particle physics beyond the Standard Model. Much of his work relates directly to interpreting results of searches for new particles and forces. He is very active in efforts to understand the Higgs particle discovered in 2012 at CERN, as well as its implications for possible new physics such as dark matter and supersymmetry.

Currently he is also researching on searches for new physics with gravitational waves. He led the CERN Theory Division for six years, and is now the Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King's College, London.

John Ellis was awarded the Maxwell Medal (1982) and the Paul Dirac Prize (2005) by the Institute of Physics, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1985 and of the Institute of Physics in 1991.

Pushpak Bhattacharyya is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Department, IIT Bombay. His area of research is Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning .

He currently holds the Major Bhagat Singh Rekhi Chair Professorship of IIT Bombay and formerly held Vijay and Sita Vashi Chair Professorship. He was the Director of IIT Patna and President of Association of Computational Linguistics.

A Fellow of National Academy of Engineering and Abdul Kalam National Fellow,  he is an Editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering and an Editor of AI Magazine.

Carla Zoe Cremer is a Research Scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (University of Cambridge). She will begin her doctorate in computational neuroscience at Oxford University in the fall of 2021 on an FHI DPhil scholarship.

Her work lies at the intersection of AI, neuroscience and the democratic evaluation of tail-risks posed by technological progress.  She previously received a research grant by the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, a Max Weber Stipend for academic excellence and an LMU research award.

Luis Lamb  is a Professor of Foundations of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and Secretary of Innovation, Science and Technology in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He was formerly Vice-President for Research at UFRGS and Dean of Informatics. His research focuses on Artificial Intelligence in particular Neurosymbolic AI, Explainable AI, and AI fairness. He has published several foundational works in the field, including “Neural-Symbolic Cognitive Reasoning” with Garcez and Gabbay.

Lamb's research has led to publications in several leading journals and flagship AI and Machine Learning conferences including AAAI, IJCAI, NIPS, and HCOMP.  He was the co-organizer of several workshops on neurosymbolic AI, including two Dagstuhl seminars.

He has designed and led several public programs and policies on innovation, science, and technology and advises government and organizations on AI strategy, technology, and innovation. Lamb holds a PhD in Computer Science from Imperial College London, MSc and BSc from UFRGS, and the MIT Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation and the Certificate in Management and Leadership.