Keynote Speakers
Prof. Mackenzie W. Mathis is the Bertarelli Foundation Chair of Integrative Neuroscience and an Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). Following the award of her PhD at Harvard University in 2017 with Prof. Naoshige Uchida, she was awarded the prestigious Rowland Fellowship at Harvard to start her independent laboratory (2017-2020). Before starting her group, she worked with Prof. Matthias Bethge at the University of Tübingen in the summer of 2017 with the support of the Women & the Brain Project ALS Fellowship. She is an ELLIS Scholar, Vallee Scholar, a former NSF Graduate Fellow, and her work has been featured in the news at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Nature, and The Atlantic. She was awarded the FENS EJN Young Investigator Prize 2022, the Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientist Prize in 2023, The Robert Bing 2024 Prize, and the National Swiss Science Prize Latsis 2024.
Saining Xie is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and is affiliated with NYU Center for Data Science. Before joining NYU in 2023, he was a research scientist at FAIR, Meta. In 2018, he received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California San Diego. He works in computer vision and machine learning, with a particular interest in scalable visual representation learning. His contributions have been recognized with several honors, including the Marr Prize Honorable Mention, CVPR Best Paper Finalists, AISTATS Test of Time Award, Amazon Research Award, NSF CAREER Award, and the PAMI Young Researcher Award.
Julian Straub is a Lead Spatial AI Research Scientist at Meta Reality Labs Research (RLR) working on Computer Vision and 3D Perception. Before joining RLR, Julian obtained his PhD on Nonparametric Directional Perception from MIT, where he was advised by John W. Fisher III and John Leonard within the CS and AI Laboratory (CSAIL). On his way to MIT, Julian graduated from the Technische Universität München (TUM) and the Georgia Institute of Technology with a M.Sc. He did his Diploma thesis in Eckehard Steinbach’s group with the NavVis founding team and in particular with Sebastian Hilsenbeck. At Georgia Tech Julian had the pleasure to work with Frank Daellart’s group.
Angel Change is an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University. Prior to this, she was a visiting research scientist at Facebook AI Research and a research scientist at Eloquent Labs working on dialogue. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford, where she was part of the Natural Language Processing Group and advised by Chris Manning. Her research focuses on connecting language to 3D representations of shapes and scenes and grounding of language for embodied agents in indoor environments. She has worked on methods for synthesizing 3D scenes and shapes from natural language, and various datasets for 3D scene understanding. In general, she us interested in the semantics of shapes and scenes, the representation and acquisition of common sense knowledge, and reasoning using probabilistic models. Her group also works on using machine learning for biodiversity monitoring, specifically with DNA barcodes as part of the larger BIOSCAN project.
Iro Armeni is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University. Her area of focus is on developing quantitative and data-driven methods that learn from real-world visual data to generate, predict, and simulate new or renewed built environments that place the human in the center. Her goal is to create sustainable, inclusive, and adaptive built environments that can support our current and future physical and digital needs. As part of her research vision, she is particularly interested in creating spaces that blend from the 100% physical (real reality) to the 100% digital (virtual reality) and anything in between, with the use of Mixed Reality.