Zeynep Akata is a full professor of Computer Science within the Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning at the University of Tübingen. After completing her PhD at the INRIA Rhone Alpes with Prof Cordelia Schmid (2014), she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics with Prof Bernt Schiele (2014-2017) and at University of California Berkeley with Prof Trevor Darrell (2016-2017). Before moving to Tübingen in October 2019, she was an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam with Prof Max Welling (2017-2019). She received a Lise-Meitner Award for Excellent Women in Computer Science from Max Planck Society in 2014, a young scientist honour from the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring foundation in 2019, an ERC-2019 Starting Grant from the European Commission, The DAGM German Pattern Recognition Award in 2021, The ECVA Young Researcher Award in 2022 and the Alfried Krupp Award in 2023. Her research interests include multimodal learning and explainable AI.

Francesco Locatello is an assistant professor at ISTA, working on Causal Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Before, he was a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services (AWS). He led the Causal Representation Learning research team, where he pursued fundamental research in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and causality. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich (2020), supervised by Gunnar Rätsch (ETH Zurich) and Bernhard Schölkopf (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems), where he was awarded the ETH medal for outstanding doctoral dissertation. During his Ph.D., he was supported by a Google Fellowship and was a Fellow at the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems and ELLIS. During that time, he spent one year at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and two years at Google Brain across Zurich (1.5 years as a part-time Research

Consultant) and Amsterdam (6 months internship). He holds a Computer Science M.Sc. degree from ETH Zurich and a B.Sc. engineering degree (cum laude) in Information Technologies from the University of Padua (Italy). His research on machine learning and artificial intelligence has received awards at several premier conferences and workshops, most notably the best paper award at the International Conference on Machine Learning. Francesco Locatello is heavily involved in the research community, co-organizing the first international conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning (CLeaR), ICLR and UAI workshops, and a NeurIPS competition.

Vittorio Ferrari is the Director of Science at Synthesia, where he leads R&D groups developing cutting-edge generative AI technology. Previously he built and led multiple research groups on computer vision and machine learning at Google (Principal Scientist), the University of Edinburgh (Full Professor), and ETH Zurich (Assistant Professor). He has co-authored over 160 scientific papers and won the best paper award at the European Conference in Computer Vision in 2012 for his work on large-scale segmentation. He received the prestigious ERC Starting Grant, also in 2012.  He led the creation of Open Images, one of the most widely adopted computer vision datasets worldwide. While at Google his groups contributed technology to several major products (with launches e.g. on the Pixel phone, Google Photos, Google Lens). He was a Program Chair for ECCV 2018 and a General Chair for ECCV 2020. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and formerly of the International Journal of Computer Vision. His recent research interests are in 3D Deep Learning and Vision+Language models.