Announcing the NeurIPS 2020 keynote speakers

Hsuan-Tien Lin, Maria Florina Balcan, Raia Hadsell and Marc’Aurelio Ranzato

NeurIPS 2020 Program Chairs

In addition to contributed presentations, NeurIPS also features keynote presentations by recognized experts from research areas relevant to our community. Two of these presentations are 1) the Posner Lecture (in honor of Ed Posner, the first president of the NeurIPS Foundation), given by a long-time contributor to the NeurIPS conference; and 2) the Breiman Lecture (in honor of statistician Leo Breiman, who served on the NeurIPS Board for more than 10 years) dedicated to work in statistics relevant to the NeurIPS community. The other keynotes generally span a broad spectrum of topics, both within machine learning and connecting it to other fields.

We are delighted to announce an exciting and stellar lineup of keynote speakers for NeurIPS 2020:

• Christopher Bishop (Posner Lecture). Christopher is Director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, where he oversees a world-leading portfolio of industrial research and development, with a strong focus on machine learning and AI. Christopher is known for his textbooks and strong advocacy of public engagement in science, and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
• Shafi Goldwasser. Shafi is Director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, a member of multiple National Academies (including NAS and NAE), and winner of the ACM Turing award for her pioneering work on foundations of modern cryptography. Shafi is more broadly known for her groundbreaking work in many different areas of theoretical computer science, and most recently has been investigating connections between cryptography and safety and robustness in machine learning.
• Charles Isbell. Charles is Dean of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A leader in interactive artificial intelligence, his research goal is to develop methodologies for building persistent, adaptive, and collaborative agents that must live with other similar agents, including humans. Charles has long been a champion of underrepresented students, serving as a mentor and a role model, and is well-known as a committed mentor of young minority faculty.
• Marloes Maathuis (Breiman Lecture). Marloes is a Professor of Statistics in ETH Zurich. Her research focuses on causal inference, graphical models, high-dimensional statistics, and interdisciplinary applications at the interface between biology, epidemiology and statistics. Marloes is the recipient of the Van Dantzig Award from the Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research.
• Saiph Savage. Salph directs the Human Computer Interaction Lab at WVU and was highlighted as one of 35 Innovators under 35 by the MIT Technology Review. Saiph’s research brings together the areas of Crowdsourcing, Social Computing, and Machine Learning, developing technologies to fight disinformation and help gig workers access better jobs.
• Jeff S. Shamma. Jeff is Director of the Center of Excellence for NEOM Research at KAUST, Saudi Arabia, where he is also the Principal Investigator of the Robotics, Intelligent Systems & Control Laboratory. He is known for his fundamental work in feedback control and systems theory, with recent focus on distributed multiagent learning systems, game theory and network science, with applications to both cyber-physical and societal network systems.
• Tony Zador. Tony is the Alle Davis Harris Professor of Biology and Chair of Neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He studies how the circuitry in the brain gives rise to complex behaviors, and has long been interested in how machine learning can be used to advance neuroscience. Recently, he has begun to focus on how neuroscience can guide AI research. Tony is also developing methods for determining the “Connectome”, complete wiring instructions at single-neuron resolution, of the mouse brain. He is winner of the Gill Transformative Investigator Award.

The selection of keynote speakers was made in consultation with General Chair Hugo Larochelle, Diversity and Inclusion Chairs Katherine Heller and Lester Mackey, and the NeurIPS board so that as many dimensions of diversity as possible were considered.

Have a fun summer and stay safe and healthy!