Speakers
Organizers
André Freitas, Idiap/University of Manchester
Oskar Wysocki, University of Manchester
Lonneke van der Plas, Idiap
Local Organization (Idiap)
Justine Darioly
Maxime Bourlard
Vincent Spano
Speakers/Panelists
Al Brown, Fujitsu
Al Brown works at Fujitsu’s Centre for Cognitive and Advanced Technologies. Al is a former Research Fellow at Oxford University and Chief of the General Staffs’ Scholar researching perception, information integration, and optimisation for competitive advantage in biological and computational systems. Al was previously the lead for UK Ministry of Defence on the study of global strategic trends in robotics and artificial intelligence and its impacts on conflict. He authored a short book on this and has been one of the Group of Government Experts providing advice to and speaking at the United Nations. He writes and has often lectured on related subjects at the Alan Turing Institute, the Royal United Services Institute, Oxford University, UCL, and Cranfield University. Al is also a former Army Officer. He commanded a bomb disposal and high-risk search Regiment, led the counter-IED squadron in Afghanistan, in addition to othere operational tours in Afghanistan and the Balkans. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.
André Freitas, Idiap
André Freitas leads the Reasoning & Explainable AI Lab (ExplAIn Lab) at Idiap and at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He is also the AI group leader at the digital Experimental Cancer Medicine Team (CancerResearchUK). His main research interests are on enabling the development of AI methods to support abstract, explainable and flexible inference. In particular, he investigates how the combination of neural and symbolic data representation paradigms can deliver better inference. Some of his research topics include: explanation generation, natural language inference, explainable question answering, knowledge graphs and open information extraction. He is actively engaged in collaboration projects with industrial and clinical partners.
Ana Andrijevic, Centre for Law, Technology and Society
Ana Andrijevic is a PhD candidate at the University of Geneva (“The Impact of AI on Copyright Law”), a visiting researcher at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa, and an affiliated researcher at the Digital Law Center at the University of Geneva.
She studied at the University of Geneva where she graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Law, a Master's degree in International and European Law, and a Certificate in Transnational Law. In addition, she completed a University Diploma in Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence at the Centre for International Intellectual Property Studies (CEIPI, University of Strasbourg).
From 2017 to 2022, she was a research and teaching assistant to Professor Jacques de Werra at the University of Geneva and is writing a PhD thesis in English on the impact of artificial intelligence on copyright law under his supervision. In addition, she has completed a series of research stays at various institutions, including the Institute for Technology & Society in Rio de Janeiro (2019, Boninchi Foundation Fellowship), the Max Planck for Innovation and Competition in Munich (2022, Ernst & Lucie Schmidheiny Foundation Fellowship), as well as the Centre in Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa (2023, Doc.Mobility Fellowship awarded by the University of Geneva and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies).
Bertrand Audrin, EHL Hospitality Business School
Bertrand is an Assistant Professor at EHL Hospitality Business School where he teaches courses in the field of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior. He received his PhD at Université de Fribourg (2014-2019) on the topic of sensemaking in digital transformation. His main topics of research and specialization are digital transformation of organizations and its consequences on HRM and employment.
Biljana Petreska von Ritter-Zahony, University of Education Vaud
Biljana Petreska von Ritter-Zahony is an associate professor in computer science didactics at the HEP Vaud. After a PhD in computational neuroscience at the EPFL and postdoctoral studies at Harvard University and the Gatsby at University College London, her recent research work is in the field of education sciences with a focus on teaching artificial intelligence.
Daniel Dobos, Swisscom
Daniel is a Research Director in Swisscom Digital Lab. He is responsible for research projects and academic relations. He has a passion for advanced data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence in R&D, innovation, quantum technologies, sustainability, and security contexts. Daniel is inspired by working on challenges in interdisciplinary teams, collaborations, and hackathons. He holds a PhD in particle physics and was researcher at CERN on big data and advanced data analytics. Previously he worked on strategic technology foresight projects with the United Nations and analyzed global aviation data in a startup he co-founded.
Deborah Ferreira , MathWorks
Deborah Ferreira is a Senior Natural Language Processing Engineer at MathWorks with a Ph.D. (University of Manchester), specializing in the adaptation of Large Language Models for mathematical text. Her previous research has contributed to the development of NLP techniques applied to scientific text. She currently leads the Text Analytics team and works to develop cutting-edge solutions that help users streamline their workflows, using NLP to accelerate the pace of engineering and science.
Floris Keijser, N98 Digital Marketing
Floris Keijser is an AI marketing consultant helping companies to benefit from existing AI technologies. He takes a low-threshold-testable-gain approach that allows companies to test new technologies within a few months. He has over 15 years of experience as a digital marketer and business coach, a master's degree in Entrepreneurship and over 15 AI-related certifications. He has applied digital marketing in several fields such finance, publishing, tourism and more. Floris Keijser marketingai.ch
Jacopo Chevallard, Bloom Social Analytics
Jacopo Chevallard is a Science & Innovation Senior Lead at BLOOM. He participates in the development of tools, the implementation of the collection and combination of data from different social networks, and conducts increasingly varied studies. Prior to that, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (2017-2019) and as Postdoctoral Fellow in the European Space Agency. He graduated in 2009 with a Master's degree in Astrophysics and Cosmology, he only imagines himself as a researcher. He obtained his PhD in Astrophysics in Paris, at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (IAP) working on understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies. He defended his thesis “Modeling and interpretation of the spectral energy distributions of galaxies and their uncertainties”,
James Henderson, Idiap
James Henderson is a Senior Researcher at the Idiap Research institute, where he heads the Natural Language Understanding group. He is currently an Action Editor for the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL). Previously he was a Chargé de Cours in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Geneva, where he participated in running the interdisciplinary research group Computational Learning and Computational Linguistics. Before moving to Idiap, Dr Henderson was the Principal Scientist of the Parsing and Semantics group at Xerox Research Centre Europe, in Grenoble, which is now Naver Labs Europe. Before that he was a Maître d'Enseignement et de Recherche (MER) in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Geneva. Earlier he was a Research Fellow in the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems at the University of Edinburgh , a Maître-Assistant in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Geneva, and a Lecturer in the then Department of Computer Science at the University of Exeter, UK.
Joël Rossier, CimArk
Joël has a PhD in bio-inspired informatics from EPFL. He then worked for 5 years at the University of Applied Sciences HEIG-VD, realizing R&D projects at the interface between the academic world and the industries in the field of HW-SW acceleration and codesign and bio-informatics, financial and biometrics algorithmics. He then joined CimArk where he is active for more than 10 years in the support of technological innovation for The Ark Foundation. He works closely with economic actors and R&D institutes of the Canton on the valorization and technology transfer dedicated to industrial SMEs and Tech Startups.
Lonneke van der Plas, Idiap
Lonneke van der Plas is head of the Computation, Cognition and Language group at the Idiap research institute in Martigny, and Associate Professor in Language Technology, in affiliation with the University of Malta. She previously held a junior-professorship at the University of Stuttgart, and a postdoc position at the University of Geneva. She earned a PhD from the University of Groningen and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. She has been leading several research projects under SNF, H2020, Erasmus+, and the German Research Foundation, and was a visiting fellow at the University of Zurich, the University of Melbourne, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She has over 50 publications in the field of natural language processing, more in particular on the following topics: multi-lingual natural language processing, distributional semantics, and computational creativity.
Marco Valentino, Idiap
Marco is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Idiap Research Institute. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Manchester with a thesis titled "Explanation-Based Scientific Natural Language Inference". Marco's main research activity focuses on Explainability and Natural Language Inference, investigating the construction of models capable of performing reasoning through the generation of natural language explanations in complex domains. To this end, he draws inspiration from theories and accounts of explanations, attempting to capture explanatory inference patterns in hybrid neuro-symbolic models to improve generalization, controllability and scalability.
Oskar Wysocki, University of Manchester
Oskar Wysocki is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and at the Digital Experimental Cancer Medicine Team (dECMT), CRUK Manchester Institute. He obtained his PhD (Gdańsk University of Technology) in the area of predictive modeling. Before joining the University of Manchester, Oskar gained 3 years of industrial experience working as mechanical designer and data analyst, and then worked as researcher at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. His main research interests are on biologically informed models, which incorporate domain knowledge and lead to interpretable and trustworthy inference. Currently he works on deep learning models for cancer and large language models to support new biomarker discovery and better patient stratification in clinical trials.
Vinay Pondenkandath, Cerebras Systems
Vinay is a Member of Technical Staff at Cerebras Systems. He has 7+ years experience in Artificial Intelligence working on image, text, video, document and sensor data. He is a capable Python programmer with extensive experience in Deep Learning frameworks (like PyTorch), *nix environments, MLOps and research (18 publications). He defended his PhD at the Universität Freiburg. During his research, he was mainly interested in: semantic segmentation, classification, representation learning, GANs, network initialization strategies, and adversarial data poisoning. After that, he worked as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at AXA, Winterthur, Zurich. He is an author of an open-source framework (DeepDIVA) to facilitate reproducible DL research (with Python and PyTorch).