Program

All times are provided in ET (eastern time zone)
Room: Amphithéatre Banque Nationale, HEC Montréal (3000, chemin Côte-Sainte-Catherine) [Ground floor Map]

8:00-8:45 Registration + Coffee, tea & pastries 

8:45-9:00 Day 1 Opening remarks and a welcome address by Dr. Francis Gingras (Associate Vice-Rector of Research and Innovation at the Université de Montréal)

Chairs: Guillaume Lajoie + Eva Portelance

09:00-09:30 Ching Fang (Goodfire AI, San Francisco) - "From Memories to Maps: Mechanisms of In-Context Reinforcement Learning in Transformers"

09:30-10:00 Choong-Wan Woo (Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea) “Pain, interoception, and life-inspired artificial intelligence”

10:00-10:30 Joao Sacramento (Google) - “Emergent temporal abstractions in autoregressive models enable hierarchical reinforcement learning

10:30-11:00 Siva Reddy (McGill & Mila) - “The role of memory in long chain-of-thought reasoning” 

11:00-11:20 break

11:20-12:10 (Keynote #1) - Andreas Tolias (Stanford, CA, USA) - "Foundation models and digital twins of the brain"

12:10-13:00 Panel discussion #1:  The future of Neuroscience - The role of AI ?  with Andreas Tolias, Siva Reddy, Joao Sacramento, Ching Fang + more (Moderator: Patrick Mineault)

13:00 - Groupe picture 

13:00 -14:20 Lunch (Atrium) & Poster session (Salon Mont-Royal) 

Chairs: Lune Bellec & Yann Harel

14:20-14:50 Ida Momennejad (Microsoft Research, NYC) - "Studying Play: What Games Reveal About Minds and Machines"

14:50-15:20 Pablo Samuel Castro (U Montréal / Mila / Google Deepmind) - "The Formalism-Implementation Gap in Reinforcement Learning Research" 

15:20-15:50 Lune Bellec (Université de Montréal & Mila) - "AI Models of Human Brain and Behaviour During Naturalistic Videogame Play" 

15:50-16:10 break 

16:10-17:00 (Keynote #2) - SueYeon Chung (Harvard University) - "Untangling Emergence of Biological and Artificial Intelligence via Computation-aware Representation Geometry"

17:00-22:00 ✿ MAIN 2025 welcome reception + refreshments & snacks + Posters, networking and fun 🧠🤖🎵✨ (Salon Mont-Royal)

All times are provided in ET (eastern time zone)
Room: Amphithéatre Banque Nationale, HEC Montréal (3000, chemin Côte-Sainte-Catherine) [Ground floor Map]

8:00-08:45 Coffee, tea & pastries 

08:45-9:00 Day 2 opening remarks 

Chairs: Karim Jerbi & Isil Bilgin

09:00-09:30 Giulia Lioi (IMT Atlantique, CNRS France) - "REVE: a EEG foundation model adapted to any recording setup and task"

09:30-10:30 Short talks // Joséphine Raugel  “Similar Representations and Learning Dynamics:  What Drives the Convergence Between Human Brains and Vision Transformers?" (Meta / ENS, PSL Université) + Declan Campbell: “From seeing to thinking: evaluating, understanding, and improving visual reasoning in VLMs” (Princeton Neuroscience Institute) + TBC

10:30-11:00 Rufin VanRullen (CNRS, Toulouse) "The Global Latent Workspace: a model of cognition with AI applications"

11:00-11:20 break

11:20-12:10 (Keynote #3) - Yoshua Bengio - (Université de Montréal & Mila)  “Scientist AI: disentangling agency and causal understanding”

12:10-13:00 Panel discussion #2: The future of AI - The role of human cognition?  with Yoshua Bengio, Tegan Maharaj, Maroussia Lévesque, Alison Gopnik, Alex Garcia-Hernandez, Rufin VanRullen (Moderator: Karim Jerbi)

13:00 - 14:20  Lunch (Atrium) & Poster session (Salon Mont-Royal) 

Chairs: Matt Perich + Vanessa Hadid

14:20-14:50 Sara Solla (Northwestern University, Chicago, USA) - "The dynamics of neural populations in the presence of heterogeneities" 

14:50-15:20 Richard Naud (University of Ottawa) “Modular Organization of Electrical Fluctuations in the Mouse Brain”

15:20-15:50 Laurent Perrinet (CNRS / Aix-Marseille Université) “A New Look for Convolutional Deep Networks”

15:50-16:10 break 

15:50-16:30 (Keynote #4) Alison Gopnik (University of California, Berkeley) - "Empowerment and Causal Learning in Humans and Machines"

16:30-17:15 ✿ Prizes + Closing remarks

 
20:00 - 01:00   ✿ Neuro-AI Celebration Time @ Conseil des Arts de Montréal [1210 Sherbrooke St E, Montreal, Quebec H2L 1L9]  🧠🤖🎵✨