Keynote speakers

Jeanine Abrams McLean

https://www.faircount.org/

Dr. Jeanine Abrams McLean is the Vice President at Fair Count, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, founded by Stacey Abrams. The goal of Fair Count is to ensure that every person in Georgia and the nation is seen, heard, and counted for a fair and accurate census and to building pathways to continued civic participation, including voter education and redistricting. Jeanine is a highly skilled researcher with over 15 years of experience designing, managing, and implementing population-based studies and projects. While at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she applied her expertise in computational biology and population research to advance public health initiatives. She has extensive project management experience as well as work in community organizing. In addition to her work in public health, she is passionate about finding creative ways to tackle community-based issues using both strategic planning and innovative ideas.

Keynote: Wednesday, August 18, 12:00 pm EDT

Science for Social Equity: Using Data and Community Engagement to Bring About Real Change

As scientists, we often identify a problem, research its background, and develop solutions to better understand it or solve it. While this approach may work well in the lab, when we apply this strategy to societal issues that impact our communities, we are not as effective because we leave out a critical step—the development of community-driven solutions. Dr. Jeanine Abrams McLean (Vice President at Fair Count and a former Phylogenetics Unit Lead at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) will discuss how scientists can combine research strategies, data, and community engagement to create community-driven solutions that can positively impact underrepresented and marginalized communities that are impacted by social inequities. She will specifically discuss her work with Fair Count’s Science for Social Equity program, which focuses on science-related issues such as mental health, climate change, and health literacy. Dr. Abrams McLean will also discuss the Pandemic to Prosperity: South program, which is a data, policy, and organizing effort comparing the South’s pandemic recovery to the nation’s and highlighting overlooked populations, ultimately working to inspire groundbreaking solutions to entrenched problems that can lead the way for the nation as a whole.

Betül Kaçar

https://mcb.arizona.edu/profile/bet%C3%BCl-ka%C3%A7ar

Dr. Betül Kaçar studies the foundations of life on Earth to understand the potential for life in space. She is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, where she leads a NASA-funded astrobiology research center and her own molecular paleobiology lab. Across research endeavors, Betül explores fundamental questions about how life evolved on Earth and how we find life beyond our solar system. In 2020, she received the NASA Early Career Faculty Award. She has spoken at the Library of Congress and has partnered with the UN Women to expand global representation in STEM.

Keynote: Thursday, August 19, 12:30 pm EDT

Exploring life’s early evolution using ancient enzymes as paleosensors

A generic characteristic of life is that it is tuned to the conditions found on our planet that enable its existence. What is tuned, specifically, is the chemistry that occurs within cells, and enzymes are what makes chemistry within cells possible by catalyzing reactions. In this talk, I will specifically discuss how we use ancient enzymes as (paleo)sensors of geologic conditions in deep time by highlighting our latest work on biogeochemically essential systems. Leveraging the informatic characteristics of enzyme composition, and the tight coupling between internal (cellular) and external (environmental) conditions that are enabled by enzymatic function, can enable the exploration of early life circumstances.

Lana Sinapayen

https://www.sonycsl.co.jp/member/tokyo/6576/

Dr. Lana Sinapayen is an Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Japan. She specialises in predictive coding (the role of prediction in intelligence), artificial perception (sensory illusions in neural networks), and measures of complexity. She has a keen interest in all forms of intelligence, especially the unexpected ones. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Artificial Life and is involved in outreach and equity for the International Society for Artificial Life. She is also a member of the Early Career Advisory Group for the eLife Journal, and is currently working on a web platform for collaborative open science called "Mimosa".

Keynote: Friday, August 20, 10:00 am EDT *note special time!

Harnessing Failure in Predictive Algorithms

Predictive Coding, the idea that brains predict the world around them, has become dominant in cognitive science, neuroscience, and Artificial Intelligence. As an Artificial Life researcher, I am attracted to the bizarre and the unusual, which brought me to study the concept of failure in prediction. In this talk, I will present my work on visual illusions (sometimes considered as perceptual failures), their predictive roots, and the artificial neural networks that can reproduce and discover new illusions. I will also explain how "failure to predict" can be used as a biosignature to detect life on Earth, and possibly on other planets.

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