Keynote Lectures

Software Development... for all?

 

Brief Bio
Juan de Lara is full professor at the computer science department of the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid (Spain), where he leads the modelling and software engineering research (miso) team together with Esther Guerra. His main research interests are in automated software engineering, model-driven development, low-code development, domain-specific languages and language engineering, conversational agents, and augmented reality. This research has led to building many practical tools including Asymob, AToM3, metaDepth, merlin, and alter – and the publication of more than 270 papers in international journals and conferences. He has been the PC co-chair of several conferences within his research areas, like MODELS, SLE, ICGT, ICMT and FASE, and has been involved in the organisation of workshops on topics like flexible modelling, multi-level modelling and low-code development.

Keynote Lecture

 

Brief Bio
Dr. Johanna Pirker (Dr. tech. Dipl.Ing. BSc in Software Engineering and Economics and Computer Science from Graz University of Technology) is professor for media informatics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and assistant professor, software engineer, and researcher at the Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science at Graz University of Technology (TUG). She finished her Master’s Thesis during a research visit at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working on collaborative virtual world environments. In 2017, she finished her doctoral dissertation in computer science on motivational environments under the supervision of Christian Gütl (TUG) and John Belcher (MIT). She specialized in games and environments that engage users to learn, train, and work together through motivating tasks. She has long-lasting experience in game design and development, as well as virtual world development and has worked in the video game industry at Electronic Arts. Her research interests include AI, data analysis, immersive environments (VR), games research, gamification strategies, HCI, e-learning, CSE, and IR. She has authored and presented numerous publications in her field and lectured at universitiessuch as Harvard, Berlin Humboldt Universität, or the University of Göttingen. Johanna was listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of science professionals, and was awarded the Futurezone Women in Tech Award(2019), the Käthe Leichter Award (2020), and the Hedy-Lamarr Award(2021).

Past, Present, Future, and Far Future of AI

 

Brief Bio
The New York Times headlined: "When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber 'Dad'." Since age 15, his main goal has been to build a self-improving A.I. smarter than himself, then retire. His lab's deep learning artificial neural networks have revolutionised machine learning and A.I. By 2017, they were on over 3 billion smartphones, and used billions of times per day, for Facebook’s automatic translation, Google’s speech recognition, Google Translate, Apple’s Siri & QuickType, Amazon’s Alexa, etc. He pioneered the principles of artificial curiosity & generative adversarial networks (1990, now widely used), neural network distillation (1991, now widely used), self-supervised pre-training for deep learning (1991, the "P" in "ChatGPT" stands for "pre-trained"), unnormalised linear Transformers (1991, the "T" in "ChatGPT" stands for "Transformer"), and meta-learning machines that learn to learn (since 1987). His lab also produced LSTM, the most cited AI of the 20th century, and the LSTM-inspired Highway Net, the first very deep feedforward net with hundreds of layers (ResNet, the most cited AI of the 21st century, is an open-gated Highway Net). Elon Musk tweeted: "Schmidhuber invented everything." He is recipient of numerous awards, Director of the AI Initiative at KAUST in KSA, Scientific Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, Adj. Prof. of A.I. at Univ. Lugano, and Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of the company NNAISENSE. He is a frequent keynote speaker at major events, and advising various governments on A.I. strategies.