Invited Speakers/Panelists
Megan Peters (UC Irvine)
Professor Peters is on the vanguard of current work on human metacognition, drawing on practically all modern behavioural and neuroimaging techniques together with computational modelling of cognitive processes.
Yoshua Bengio (Montreal)
Yoshua Bengio is Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montreal, as well as the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila and the Scientific Director of IVADO. Considered one of the world’s leaders in artificial intelligence and deep learning, he is the recipient of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award with Geoff Hinton and Yann LeCun, known as the Nobel prize of computing. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of London and Canada, an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.
Taylor Webb (UCLA)
A rising talent in the field of metacognition, Taylor's work explores connections between the modelling of confidence in neural networks and human decision making
Jürgen Schmidhuber (IDSIA and University of Lugano)
Since age 15 or so, the main goal of professor Jürgen Schmidhuber has been to build a self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) smarter than himself, then retire. His lab's Deep Learning Neural Networks based on ideas published in the "Annus Mirabilis" 1990-1991 have revolutionised machine learning and AI. By the mid 2010s, they were on 3 billion devices, and used billions of times per day through users of the world's most valuable public companies, e.g., for greatly improved (CTC-LSTM-based) speech recognition on all Android phones, greatly improved machine translation through Google Translate and Facebook (over 4 billion LSTM-based translations per day), Apple's Siri and Quicktype on all iPhones, the answers of Amazon's Alexa, and numerous other applications. He is recipient of numerous awards, author of over 350 peer-reviewed papers, and Chief Scientist of the company NNAISENSE, which aims at building the first practical general purpose AI.
Susan L. Epstein (CUNY)
Professor Epstein is Professor of Computer Science at Hunter College and The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. She studies how brains and minds solve problems, and how a computer can capitalize on that knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is key in her work in knowledge representation and machine learning. She is an Executive Councilor for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a co-Pi at the National Science Foundation's Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, and has served as chair of The Cognitive Science Society.
Bernhard Schölkopf (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems)
Director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany, Professor Schölkopf has built a strong reputation within the machine learning community for his work on causality, a key ingredient to metacognition.
Lucina Uddin (UCLA)
A cognitive neuroscientist, Professor Uddin has done research on brain connectivity and social cognition - which has important implications for meta-cognition - in typical and atypical development.
Simona Ghetti (UC Davis)
Known for her research on memory, Professor Ghetti's expertise includes meta-memory - a pioneering subfield in the development of human metacognition.
Hakwan Lau (UCLA)
An expert on the mechanisms of conscious perception, attention, and metacognition in humans, Professor Lau's research has been highly influential in the development of metacognition as a subfield of cognitive neuroscience.
Jiangying Zhou (DARPA)
Jiangying Zhou became a DARPA program manager in the Defense Sciences Office in November 2018, having served as a program manager in the Strategic Technology Office (STO) since January 2018. Her areas of research include machine learning, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) exploitation technologies. She previously oversaw the Competency-Aware Machine Learning initiative, which was aimed at exploring automated agents that are aware of their own abilities and failings.
Nick Roy (MIT)
As a roboticist, Professor Roy's work has frequently focused on uncertainty in the world, such as sensor noise or unpredictable action outcome.