Voices of ICLR2020: Announcing our Keynote Speakers

ICLR
3 min readMar 27, 2020

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Last December we announced all the papers that were accepted and will be presented at the 2020 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Much has changed since then with the conference now being hosted in a fully virtual format, but all the great content remains, especially the collection of excellent speakers and talks.

The collection of accepted papers formed #OurHatata: Our inquiry into the principles and practice of machine learning and artificial intelligence. All accepted papers will be presented as videos with live video poster sessions. These presenters are joined by a set of incredible keynote speakers, who will amplify our conversations during the conference. This blog introduces you to our speakers and what they will be talking about.

\ICLR2020 Keynote Speakers (Left to right): Aisha Walcott-Bryant, Devi Parikh, Mihaela van der Schaar, Laurent Dinh, Leslie Kaelbling, Michael I Jordan, Ruha Benjamin, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Benjio.

📚 Keynote Topics and Speakers

We are proud this year to have 9 keynote speakers who will share their work and insights with us. The themes and speakers (in order of expected live Q&A sessions) for 2020 are:

  • AI + Africa = Global Innovation. Dr Aisha Walcott-Bryant, IBM Research Africa, Nairobi
  • Doing for Our Robots What Nature Did For Us. Prof. Leslie Kaelbling, MIT
  • 2020 Vision: Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology & Society. Prof. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University
  • Invertible Models and Normalizing Flows. Dr Laurent Dinh, Google AI
  • Machine Learning: Changing the Future of Healthcare. Prof. Mihaela van der Schaar, University of Cambridge, The Alan Turing Institute, University of California Los Angeles
  • AI Systems That Can See And Talk. Prof. Devi Parikh, Georgia Tech and Facebook AI Research
  • Reflections from the Turing Award Winners. Prof. Yann LeCun, Facebook AI Research and New York University, and Prof. Yoshua Bengio, Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms
  • The Decision-Making Side of Machine Learning: Dynamical, Statistical and Economic Perspectives. Prof. Michael I Jordan, University of California, Berkeley.

🎙 Live Q&A Sessions

Each speaker’s talk will be pre-recorded and released for you to watch. As you are watching you can leave questions for the speakers on our Q&A tool. Live sessions with each speaker are scheduled to take place each day, and will let us all come together around the insightful ideas raised by the speakers, and let us dive deeper into their talks. We will discuss the questions submitted to the Q&A tool, and also take live questions.

🟢 Registration Open and Conference Updates

  • Registration: Already open, go to iclr.cc for details and register as soon as you can.
  • Questions: Check the FAQ, which we update regularly.
  • Volunteers: We request volunteers to help us with testing and quality control. Apply here.
  • Authors of accepted papers: Please complete your videos and sign up for poster slots before 8 April. Reminder of instructions online.
  • Next steps: We’ll continue to share updates on our progress, with more details on workshops, code of conduct updates, and how to prepare for the conference.

See our previous updates and get a sneak peek at what is happening behind the scenes like #OurHatata: The Reviewing Process and Research Shaping ICLR in 2020, or on making the big switch to ICLR as a Fully Virtual Conference, and more details on the Format for the ICLR2020 Virtual Conference.

Your ICLR2020 Organising Committees

Sasha Rush and Shakir Mohamed (General Chair and Senior Programme Chair); Dawn Song, Kyunghyun Cho, Martha White (Programme Chairs); Asja Fischer and Gabriel Synnaeve (Workshop Chairs); Anima Anandkumar and Kevin Swersky (Diversity Chairs); Andrea Brown and Lee Campbell (ICLR Organisation team), and the ICLR Board.

We hope you are all safe during this challenging period of social distancing and lockdown. We wrote this post safely indoors, in constant discussion about virtual conference organising, and listening to DJ D-Nice’s Homeschool 🎧 .

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ICLR

International Conference on Learning Representations