Speakers

Ryota Kanai is the Founder & CEO of Araya, Inc. He graduated from the Faculty of Science at Kyoto University in 2000 and went on to earn his PhD (Cum Laude) in 2005 from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he focused on visual information processing in the human brain. Subsequently, he worked as a researcher at the California Institute of Technology in the U.S., University College London in the U.K., and as a JST PRESTO researcher and Associate Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the U.K. In 2015, Ryota founded Araya, Inc. and has since dedicated himself full-time to the company. Since 2020, he has been working on the development of next-generation AI-assisted brain-machine interfaces (BMI) as a Project Manager for the Moonshot Project, an initiative by the Cabinet Office of Japan. 

Katharina Dobs is a research group leader in the Department of Psychology at Justus-Liebig University Giessen working in the field of cognitive computational neuroscience. Her research leverages recent successes in artificial neural networks to address long-standing questions concerning the functional organization of the human visual system. Prior to starting her own lab, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines working with Nancy Kanwisher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She also was a postdoctoral fellow with Leila Reddy at CerCo-CNRS in Toulouse. She obtained her PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen and holds two diplomas from the Philipps-University Marburg in Computer Science and Psychology, respectively. 

Blake Richards is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University and a Core Faculty Member at Mila. From 2014 to July 2019 he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Biological Sciences (Scarborough) with a cross-appointment to the Department of Cell and Systems Biology and a Faculty Affiliation at the Vector Institute. He was the 2019 Canadian Association for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award Recipient, and one of 29 Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Canada AI Chairs announced in 2018. He is also a Fellow of the CIFAR Learning in Machines and Brains Program, and a Lab Scientist with the Creative Destruction Lab. From October 2011 to December 2013, Dr. Richards was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Paul Frankland at SickKids Hospital, where he studied memory consolidation and neural plasticity. From 2007 to 2010, he was a Welcome Trust 4-year PhD student at the University of Oxford in the Department of Pharmacology with Dr. Colin Akerman, where he explored synaptic plasticity in Xenopus laevis embryos. During the MSc component of the program he worked with Dr. Wyeth Bair and Dr. Ole Paulsen, studying computational models of visual processing and voltage bistability in neocortical dendrites. Before his graduate studies, he worked as a programmer and research analyst in magnetic resonance imaging at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health from 2004-2006. Dr. Richards received his Bachelors degree in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Toronto in 2004 

Mayank Agrawal is a PhD Candidate at Princeton University. He completed his BA at Swarthmore College. He studies the computational foundations of human cognition. Mayank's research is largely interdisciplinary and uses the toolkit of cognitive (neuro)science, machine learning, and analytic philosophy to understand high-level cognitive functions such as learning, decision-making, memory, and control. 

Filiz Garip is Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her research lies at the intersection of migration, economic sociology, and inequality. Within this general area, she studies the mechanisms that enable or constrain mobility and lead to greater or lesser degrees of social and economic inequality. She is the author of On the Move: Changing Mechanisms of Mexico-U.S. Migration (Princeton University Press, 2016). Garip received her Ph.D. in Sociology and M.S.E in Operations Research & Financial Engineering from Princeton University and holds a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul. 

Anna Ivanova is a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Quest for Intelligence. She has a PhD from MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, where she studied the neural mechanisms underlying language processing in humans. Today, Anna is examining the language-thought relationship in large language models, using her cognitive science training to identify similarities and differences between humans and machines. 

Caspar J. van Lissa is associate professor of social data science at the department of Methodology & Statistics, chair of the Open Science Community Tilburg, and member of the Tilburg Young Academy. His research addresses the epistemological implications of machine learning for theory formation in the social sciences, evidence synthesis (summarizing existing research quantitatively and qualitatively), and open reproducible science. He is an advocate for open source research software and has (co-)authored ten R-packages.

Rebecca Johnson is an Assistant Professor in Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy (affiliate: Sociology), and received her PhD in Demography and Sociology at Princeton University. Her research studies how social service bureaucracies use a mix of data and discretion to allocate scarce resources, and involves partnering with local and federal government agencies to improve their operation, with work published in outlets including the American Sociological Review, Demography, and the Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences. Her policy affiliations include a role as an Academic Affiliate with the Office of Evaluation Sciences in the US General Services Administration and serving as a Data Science for Social Good Fellow. She has received funding from the NAEd/Spencer postdoctoral fellowship, the National Science Foundation, and the ABF/JPB Foundation Access to Justice Scholars Program. 

Justin Grimmer is a professor in the department of political science and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In his research he develops and applies new statistical methods to study Congress, elections, representation and public opinion. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.