Invited Talks

About the speaker Marzyeh Ghassemi

Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi is an Assistant Professor at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES), and a Vector Institute faculty member holding a Canadian CIFAR AI Chair and Canada Research Chair. She holds MIT affiliations with the Jameel Clinic and CSAIL. Professor Ghassemi holds a Herman L. F. von Helmholtz Career Development Professorship, and was named a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar and one of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35. Previously, she was a Visiting Researcher with Alphabet’s Verily. She is currently on leave from the University of Toronto Departments of Computer Science and Medicine. Prior to her PhD in Computer Science at MIT, she received an MSc. degree in biomedical engineering from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, and B.S. degrees in computer science and electrical engineering as a Goldwater Scholar at New Mexico State University.

About the speaker Shakir Mohamed

Shakir Mohamed works on technical and sociotechnical questions in machine learning research, working on problems in machine learning principles, applied problems in healthcare and environment, and ethics and diversity. Shakir is a Director for Research at DeepMind in London, an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and an Honorary Professor of University College London. Shakir is also a founder and trustee of the Deep Learning Indaba, a grassroots charity whose work is to build pan-African capacity and leadership in AI. Amongst other roles, Shakir served as the senior programme chair for ICLR 2021, and as the General Chair for NeurIPS 2022. Shakir also serves on the Board of Directors for some of the leading conferences in the field of machine learning and AI (ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS), is a member of the Royal Society diversity and inclusion committee, and on the international scientific advisory committee for the pan-Canadian AI strategy. Shakir is from South Africa, completed a postdoc at the University of British Columbia, received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and received his masters and undergraduate degrees in Electrical and Information engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

About the speaker Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Doudna, PhD is a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. Her groundbreaking development of CRISPR-Cas9 — a genome engineering technology that allows researchers to edit DNA — with collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier earned the two the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and forever changed the course of human and agricultural genomics research. She is also the Founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute, the Li Ka Shing chancellor’s chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences, and a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Gladstone Institutes, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a leader in the global public debate on the responsible use of CRISPR and has co-founded and serves on the advisory panel of several companies that use the technology in unique ways. Doudna is the co-author of “A Crack in Creation,” a personal account of her research and the societal and ethical implications of gene editing. Learn more at [innovativegenomics.org/jennifer-doudna](https://innovativegenomics.org/jennifer-doudna).

About the speaker John Schulman

John now leads a team working on ChatGPT and RL from Human Feedback at OpenAI, where he was a cofounder. His recent published work includes combining language models with retrieval (WebGPT) and scaling laws of RL and alignment. Earlier he developed some of the foundational methods of deep RL (TRPO, PPO). Before OpenAI, John got a PhD from UC Berkeley, advised by Pieter Abbeel. In his free time, he enjoys running, jazz piano, and raising chickens.