Introducing the NeurIPS 2022 Keynote Speakers
By Alekh Agarwal, Danielle Belgrave, Kyunghyun Cho, and Alice Oh
We are delighted to announce the six keynote speakers for NeurIPS 2022! After two years of fully virtual conference, we will finally have a week of in-person and a week of virtual conference. The keynote speakers will be featured during the in-person week, all talks live streamed with in-person and online Q&A. NeurIPS keynote speakers have always engaged the community to look beyond our own field to new and creative research directions, hence we selected pioneering researchers in a variety of fields. We look forward to listening to these excellent speakers and hope you will join us in New Orleans and virtually.
Rediet Abebe is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Abebe’s research examines the interaction of algorithms and inequality, with a focus on contributing to the scientific foundations of this emerging research area. Abebe co-launched the ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO), for which she serves on the executive committee and was a program co-chair for the inaugural conference. Abebe’s work has received recognitions including the MIT Technology Reviews’ 35 Innovators Under 35, the Bloomberg 50 as a one to watch, the ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award, and an honorable mention for the ACM SIGecom Dissertation Award. Abebe is on leave as an assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University and Master’s degrees in mathematics from both the University of Cambridge and Harvard University.
Emmanuel Candès is the Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University, and Professor of Electrical Engineering (by courtesy). His research interests lie at the interface of statistics, information theory, signal processing and computational mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University in 1998. Candès has received several awards including the Alan T. Waterman Award from NSF, which is the highest honor bestowed by NSF to early-career scientists, and the MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the ‘genius award’. He has given over 80 plenary lectures at major international conferences, not only in mathematics and statistics but in many other areas as well including biomedical imaging and solid-state physics. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.
David Chalmers is University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. He is the author of The Conscious Mind (1996), Constructing the World (2012), and Reality+ (2022). He co-founded the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and the PhilPapers Foundation, and is current president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division). He has given the John Locke Lectures and has been awarded the Jean Nicod Prize. He is known for formulating the “hard problem” of consciousness, which inspired Tom Stoppard’s play The Hard Problem; for the idea of the “extended mind,” which says that the tools we use can become parts of our minds; and for work on foundational issues in AI, including language and learning in artificial neural networks.
Isabelle Guyon recently joined Google Brain as a research scientist. She is also professor of artificial intelligence at Université Paris-Saclay (Orsay). Her areas of expertise include computer vision, bioinformatics, and power systems. She is best known for being a co-inventor of Support Vector Machines. Her recent interests are in automated machine learning, meta-learning, and data-centric AI. She has been a strong promoter of challenges and benchmarks, and is president of ChaLearn, a non-profit dedicated to organizing machine learning challenges. She is community lead of Codalab competitions, a challenge platform used both in academia and industry. She co-organized the “Challenges in Machine Learning Workshop” @ NeurIPS between 2014 and 2019, launched the “NeurIPS challenge track” in 2017 while she was general chair, and pushed the creation of the “NeurIPS datasets and benchmark track” in 2021, as a NeurIPS board member.
Geoffrey Hinton received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh in 1978. After five years as a faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon he became a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and moved to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto where he is now an emeritus professor. He is also a VP Engineering fellow at Google and Chief Scientific Adviser at the Vector Institute. Geoffrey Hinton was one of the researchers who introduced the backpropagation algorithm and the first to use backpropagation for learning word embeddings. His other contributions to neural network research include Boltzmann machines, distributed representations, time-delay neural nets, mixtures of experts, variational learning and deep learning. His research group in Toronto made major breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification. Geoffrey Hinton is a fellow of the UK Royal Society and a foreign member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His awards include the David E. Rumelhart prize, the IJCAI award for research excellence, the Killam prize for Engineering, the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt medal, the NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal, the IEEE James Clerk Maxwell Gold medal, the NEC C&C award, the BBVA award, the Honda Prize and the Turing Award.
Juho Kim is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at KAIST, affiliate faculty in the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI at KAIST, and a director of KIXLAB (the KAIST Interaction Lab). His research in human-computer interaction and human-AI interaction focuses on building interactive and intelligent systems that support interaction at scale, with the goal of improving the ways people learn, collaborate, discuss, make decisions, and take action online. He earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2015, M.S. from Stanford University in 2010, and B.S. from Seoul National University in 2008. In 2015-2016, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor and a Brown Fellow at Stanford University. He is a recipient of KAIST’s Songam Distinguished Research Award, Grand Prize in Creative Teaching, and Excellence in Teaching Award, as well as 14 paper awards from ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, ACM Learning at Scale, ACM IUI, ACM DIS, and AAAI HCOMP. He is currently spending his sabbatical year at Ringle Inc., a startup building an online language tutoring platform, to transfer his research on automatically analyzing and diagnosing learners’ English proficiency into a real product.
Alondra Nelson is an experienced higher education administrator and non-profit executive. Alondra Nelson serves as Deputy Assistant to President Joe Biden and leads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she is also the Deputy Director for Science and Society. (Dr. Nelson is currently on leave from her position as the Harold F. Linder Chair and Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent research center in Princeton, NJ). From 2017-2021, Dr. Nelson was President and CEO of the international research non-profit, the Social Science Research Council. She served on the faculty of Columbia University for a decade (2009-2019), where she was appointed as the inaugural Dean of Social Science. Alondra Nelson began her academic career on the faculty of Yale University. An interdisciplinary social scientist, her writing and research explore the intersections of science, technology, medicine, and inequality. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Medicine, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.