Talk at 1014: What are the Consequences of AI?

Jesse Thaler is a theoretical particle physicist who fuses techniques from quantum field theory and machine learning to address outstanding questions in fundamental physics. His current research is focused on maximizing the discovery potential of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) through new theoretical frameworks and novel data analysis techniques. Prof. Thaler is an expert in jets, which are collimated sprays of particles that are copiously produced at the LHC, and he studies the substructure of jets to enhance the search for new phenomena and illuminate the dynamics of gauge theories. He is also interested in new strategies to probe the nature of dark matter at the LHC and beyond, as well as in the theoretical structures and experimental signatures of supersymmetry.

Hendrik Strobelt is the Explainability Lead at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and Senior Research Scientist at IBM Research. His recent research is on visualization for and human collaboration with AI models to foster explainability and intuition. His work involves NLP models and generative models while he is advocating to utilize a mix of data modalities to solve real-world problems. His research is applied to tasks in machine learning, in NLP, in the biomedical domain, and in chemistry. Hendrik joined IBM in 2017 after postdoctoral positions at Harvard SEAS and NYU Tandon. He received a Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) from the University of Konstanz in computer science (Visualization) and holds an MSc (Diplom) in computer science from TU Dresden. His work has been published at venues like IEEE VIS, ICLR, ACM Siggraph, ACL, NeurIPS, ICCV, PNAS, Nature BME, or Science Advances. He received multiple best paper/honorable mention awards at EuroVis, BioVis, VAST, ACL Demo, or NeurIPS demo. He received the Lohrmann medal from TU Dresden as the highest student honor. Hendrik has served in program committees and organization committees for IEEE VIS, BioVis, EuroVis. He served on organization committees for IEEE VIS, VISxAI, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS. Hendrik is visiting researcher at MIT CSAIL. (more: http://hendrik.strobelt.com)

As President of the Kurt Forrest Foundation, Renate Kurowski-Cardello has been creating and supporting scholarship programs for institutions of higher education such as MIT, NYU and Washington University in St. Louis. In addition, she has initiated and sponsored numerous projects within teaching hospitals in Laos and Cambodia, as well as other educational organizations. Prior to her appointment at the Foundation, she founded RKC Productions, a television production company, where she produced news and magazine style pieces for Stern TV, ARD German Television and other media outlets. As a journalist, she started her career as producer at ARD German Television’s New York Studio. She holds a Master’s Degree from Ludwig Maximilian's University, Munich in Communication Science. Currently, she serves as Honorary Trustee at German International School New York where she joined the Board in 2006 and served as Board Secretary within the Executive Committee and later headed the Personnel Committee for numerous years. She also serves on the Board of Governors of Off-the-Record.