Speakers

List of MAIN 2024 Speakers and Panelists 

• Laura Driscoll (Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics, WA, USA) ➤ Fast and slow learning in artificial and biological networks

• Eva Dyer (Georgia Institute of Technology, GA) ➤ Large-scale pretraining on neural data allows for transfer across individuals, tasks and species

• Luiz Pessoa (University of Maryland, MD, USA) ➤The entangled brain: integrating perception, cognition, and emotion

• Carlos Ponce (Harvard Medical School, MA, USA) ➤ On the relationship between single units and distributed representations

• Doina Precup (McGill University & Mila, QC, Canada)  ➤ On continual reinforcement learning

• Terrence Sejnowski  (UC San Diego, CA, USA) ➤ State-space dynamics in cortex and transformers

• Yoshua Bengio (Université de Montréal & Mila, QC, Canada) ➤ How can we teach humility to AI to make it safe?

• Ian Charest (Université de Montréal, QC, Canada) ➤ Visual representations in the human brain predicted by large language models 

• Paul Cisek (Université de Montréal, QC, Canada) ➤ Some neuroscience foundations for AI

• Kayvon Daie (Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics, WA, USA) ➤ Illuminating synaptic learning rules

• Patrick Desrosiers (Université Laval, QC, Canada) ➤ Two new perspectives on the structure-function relationship in neural networks

• Elizabeth DuPre (Université de Montréal, QC, Canada) ➤ Aligning representations across individual models: Progress in naturalistic neuroimaging

• Alessandro Gifford (Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany) ➤ Experimentation on in silico neural responses from encoding models 

• Smita Krishnaswamy (Yale University, CT, USA) ➤ Panelist on "Are foundation models for neuroscience the next big thing?"

• Guillaume Lajoie (Université de Montréal & Mila, QC, Canada) ➤ Credit assignment in neural networks without plasticity

• Tegan Maharaj (HEC Montréal, QC, Canada)  ➤ Panelist on "Is better AI more human-like AI?"

• Patrick Mineault (Amaranth Foundation, QC, Canada) ➤ Foundation models for neuroscience

• Alexander Meulmans (Google - Switzerland) ➤ Multi-agent cooperation through learning-aware policy gradients

• Oiwi Parker Jones (Oxford University, Oxford, England) ➤ Scaling-up speech BCIs

• Matthew Perich (Université de Montréal, QC, Canada) ➤ A common neural basis for behavior across individuals and species

• Eva Portelance (HEC Montréal, QC, Canada) ➤ Panelist on "Emergence of reasoning in Brains and Machines"

• Blake Richards (McGill University & Mila, QC, Canada) ➤ Brain-like learning with exponentiated gradients

• Irina Rish (Université de Montréal & Mila, QC, Canada) ➤ Rethinking Intelligence from Dynamical Systems Perspective

• Madineh Sedigh-Sarvestani (Cornell University, NY, USA)  ➤ Comparative analysis of visual sensation and perception

• Maryam Vaziri (University of Delaware, DE, USA) ➤ Visual Processing for Interacting with Objects and People

• Taylor Webb (Microsoft Research, NYC, NY, USA) ➤The emergence of abstraction in minds and machines

• Shahab Bakhtiari (Université de Montréal & Mila) 

• Pierre L Bellec (Université de Montréal & Mila)

• Federica Bencivenga (Université de Montréal)

• Paul Cisek (Université de Montréal)

• Karim Jerbi (Université de Montréal & Mila)

• Elilif Muller (Université de Montréal)

• More TBA