Speakers

List of MAIN 2025 Speakers and Panelists 

• Andreas Tolias (Stanford University, CA, USA) ➤ Foundation models and digital twins of the brain 

• SueYeon Chung (Harvard University, USA) ➤ Computation-aware Representation Geometry Beyond Second Order Statistics via Statistical Physics

• Yoshua Bengio (Université de Montréal / Mila) ➤ Scientist AI: disentangling agency and causal understanding

• Alison Gopnik (University of California, Berkeley, USA) ➤ Empowerment and Causal Learning in Humans and Machines

• Ching Fang (Goodfire AI, San Francisco) ➤ From Memories to Maps: Mechanisms of In-Context Reinforcement Learning in Transformers

• Choong-Wan Woo (Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea) ➤ Pain, interoception, and life-inspired artificial intelligence

• Joao Sacramento (Google) ➤ Emergent temporal abstractions in autoregressive models enable hierarchical reinforcement learning

• Siva Reddy (McGill University & Mila) ➤ The role of memory in long chain-of-thought reasoning

• Ida Momennejad (Microsoft Research, NYC) ➤ Studying Play: What Games Reveal About Minds and Machines

• Pablo Samuel Castro (U Montréal / Mila / Google Deepmind) ➤ The Formalism-Implementation Gap in Reinforcement Learning Research

• Lune Bellec (Université de Montréal & Mila) ➤ AI Models of Human Brain and Behaviour During Naturalistic Videogame Play

• Giulia Lioi (IMT Atlantique, CNRS France) ➤ REVE: An EEG foundation model adapted to any recording setup and task

• Joséphine Raugel (Meta / ENS, PSL Université) ➤  Similar Representations and Learning Dynamics:  What Drives the Convergence Between Human Brains and Vision Transformers ?

• Declan Campbell (Princeton Neuroscience Institute) ➤  From seeing to thinking: evaluating, understanding, and improving visual reasoning in VLMs

• Rufin VanRullen (CNRS, Toulouse) "The Global Latent Workspace: a model of cognition with AI applications"

• Tegan Maharaj (HEC Montréal, QC, Canada)  ➤ Panelist on "The future of AI - The role of human cognition ? "

• Maroussia Lévesque (Harvard Law School, MA, USA)  ➤  Panelist on "The future of AI - The role of human cognition ? "

• Alex Hernandez-Garcia (U Montreal / Mila, QC, Canada) ➤ Panelist on "The future of AI - The role of human cognition ? "

• Sara Solla (Northwestern University, Chicago, USA)  ➤ The dynamics of neural populations in the presence of heterogeneities

• Richard Naud (University of Ottawa)  ➤ Modular Organization of Electrical Fluctuations in the Mouse Brain

• Laurent Perrinet (CNRS / Aix-Marseille Université) ➤ A New Look for Convolutional Deep Networks

• Matt Perich (Université de Montréal & Mila) 

• Lune Bellec (Université de Montréal & Mila)

• Guillaume Lajoie (Université de Montréal)

• Karim Jerbi (Université de Montréal & Mila)

• Yann Harel (Université de Montréal & CRIUGM)

• Vanessa Hadid (McGill University / U Montréal)

• Patrick Mineault (Amaranth Foundation)

• Isil Bilgin (Université de Montréal & CRIUGM)

• More TBA