Access: alumni, press

An exclusive exhibition tour followed by an informal get-together for returning alumni and members of the press.

17:00 - 18:00 – Exhibition tour

18:00 - 20:00 – Get-together

Welcome to the 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum!

Please take your seats by 14:45.

Tanya Shreedhar & Günter M. Ziegler
Masters of Ceremonies

WELCOME ADDRESSES

• Jens Brandenburg
  Parliamentary State Secretary to the German Federal Minister of Education and Research
• Petra Olschowski
  Minister of Science, Research and Arts, Baden-Württemberg
• Bernhard Eitel
  Rector of Heidelberg University
• Jürgen Odszuck
  First Deputy Mayor of Heidelberg
• Patrick Cramer
  President of the Max Planck Society
• Rafael Lang
  Chairperson of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation
  Co-President of the Klaus Tschira Stiftung
• Anna Wienhard
  Scientific Chairperson of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation

MEET THE YOUNG RESEARCHERS

THE AWARD-GRANTING INSTITUTIONS

• Yannis Ioannidis
  President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Hiraku Nakajima
  President of the International Mathematical Union (IMU)
• Lise Øvreås
  President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (DNVA)

INTRODUCING THE ALUMNI

THE SIGNATORIES OF THE HLF CHARTER

• Vinton Gray Cerf
  Former President of the ACM / ACM A.M. Turing Award 2004
• Ingrid Daubechies
  Former President of the IMU
• Nils Christian Stenseth
  Former President of the DNVA

Music by the saxophone quartet Balanced Action

Access: all participants

Each year, the HLFF showcases an exhibition centered on mathematics or computer science as part of the HLF program. This year will feature a curated selection of previous exhibits entitled "MAINS on Tour", as well as two additional visiting exhibitions.

Volker Gaibler: MAINS on Tour
The exhibition is open Sunday, September 24 through Thursday, September 28, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. It is located in the Senate Hall of the Old University, Grabengasse 1, 69117 Heidelberg (entrance via the University Square) and is open to the public.

Demian Nahuel Goos: Intercultural Science Art Project
The exhibition is located on the second floor of the New University building. It is open only to participants of the 10th HLF.

The Internet began switching packets on October 29, 1969. Since then we’ve suddenly been awash in connectivity – over five billion people are already on the Internet, mostly mobile, mostly video. The stories about connectivity are full of mission, platform, and traffic evolutions, surprises, and pathologies. I’ll tell some of these stories from when I joined the Internet in 1970, helped birth the personal computer by inventing Ethernet and using the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem to help grow the Internet into the billions with 3Com Corporation.

Nitric oxide (NO) is a gaseous molecule found in the earth’s atmosphere, and its source is air pollution and lightning storms. NO, itself, is nontoxic but it is rapidly oxidized to nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), which is deadly toxic. Biologists began studying NO in the laboratory in the late 1970s, and found that it dilated arteries and veins, resulting in a drop in blood pressure and an increase in local blood flow to tissues. NO was also found to prevent excessive blood clotting or thrombosis. During these studies, NO was not known to exist in mammalian cells, and was studied just an interesting chemical. However, in 1986, my laboratory discovered that NO does indeed exist in cells and can be produced in the endothelial cells lining all arteries. Further studies revealed that endothelium-derived NO works to control our blood pressure, regulate blood flow throughout the body, and prevent the blood from clotting in undesirable locations, such as the coronary arteries and the brain. Shortly afterwards, in 1992, we reported that NO is also a neurotransmitter released from the nerves that promote penile erection and sexual arousal. Before this finding, the neurotransmitter was unknown and the cause of erectile dysfunction remained a complete mystery. There were no drugs available to treat erectile dysfunction. Our discovery made it possible for drug industry to develop a drug that increases the actions of NO in the erectile tissue, thereby, allowing penile erection to occur in impotent males. This drug is known to all as the "little blue pill", VIAGRA. Nitric oxide turned out to be a widespread signaling molecule that plays a diverse role in regulating many physiological processes. As a result of this exciting basic research by many scientists, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded, in 1998, to the three pharmacologists who pioneered the early work on nitric oxide. These were: Ferid Murad, Robert Furchgott, and Lou Ignarro. Since then, a myriad of new discoveries have been made that reveal the therapeutic benefits of inhaling NO gas. For example, inhaled NO gas, available commercially, is administered to newborn babies to reverse pulmonary hypertension brought on by anatomical defects in the heart and lungs during birth. In addition, inhaled NO has been used successfully to treat patients with COVID-19. NO works by dilating the airways and pulmonary arteries, and killing the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. I am always impressed with the multitude of diverse protective effects of NO in our bodies. This is why I view nitric oxide as the "Miracle Molecule of Health and Longevity."

To signify the close bond between the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings and the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, each year a laureate is selected to give a guest lecture at the respective meeting. This year’s Lindau Lecture is given by Louis Joseph Ignarro, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1998 together with Robert F. Furchgott and Ferid Murad for their discoveries concerning nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system.

Join our HLF alumni and experts during the lunch break for an informal exchange dedicated to a specific topic.

• HLFF Alumni Activities: Saskia Hellemeier, Mara Hölz, Dietmar Kilian, Peter J. Mirski
• Science Communication: Ksenia Niglas, Fernando Seabra Chirigati 

30 pre-selected young researchers have the opportunity to present their research in a condensed poster format. While the posters are continuously displayed throughout the week, the poster flash will feature young researchers presenting their work in rapid-fire two-minute presentations. During the subsequent poster session, participants can browse the various posters and directly engage with the young researchers in order to discuss their work.

30 pre-selected young researchers have the opportunity to present their research in a condensed poster format. While the posters are continuously displayed throughout the week, the poster flash will feature young researchers presenting their work in rapid-fire two-minute presentations. During the subsequent poster session, participants can browse the various posters and directly engage with the young researchers in order to discuss their work.

What is the fastest way to get to know as many people as possible? Meet fellow participants and wire the network that could lead to connections that not only last throughout the 10th HLF but have the potential to extend beyond.

Access: laureates, young researchers, alumni, press, guests by invitation only

Closing out the first full day of the HLF, attendees meet for dinner at the Halle02 club, located in Heidelberg's new Bahnstadt district.

Access: laureates, young researchers, alumni, press, guests by invitation only

A Bavarian Evening with folklore, dancing, as well as the tapping of the keg with the traditional cry of "O’zapft is". Featuring the Bayern- und Gebirgstrachten Verein e.V. Heidelberg.

Machine learning has made tremendous progress in the last decade, solving a broad range of tasks ranging from recognizing objects to chatting in natural language. However, today's amazing systems have a dark side: They are incredibly easy to fool by malicious actors. In this talk, I will describe some of these attacks, such as adversarial examples and trapdoored systems, and try to solve the mystery of what makes systems which are so powerful so vulnerable.

Celebrating 10 years of the HLF, these are short, rapid-fire, one-slide talks that look back at the last 10 years in computer science and mathematics, or even risk a glimpse into the future. These range from an important breakthrough of the last 10 years, a challenge or problem for the future, or a piece of advice to attending young researchers.

Moderator: Tom Crawford
Dr Tom Crawford is a Mathematician at the University of Oxford with a mission to share his love of maths with the world. He holds the position of Public Engagement Lead at the Department for Continuing Education, as well as teaching the undergraduate students at St Edmund Hall. You may recognise him from Numberphile - the largest maths channel on YouTube - as well as his through his own work with Tom Rocks Maths. To learn more about Tom’s outreach work head to tomrocksmaths.com.

• John E. Hopcroft: A Road to a Successful Career
• Shigefumi Mori: Rational Curves on Algebraic Varieties
• Butler W. Lampson: Safety of IoT
• Madhu Sudan: Reliability in Cumulative Knowledge
• Vinton Gray Cerf: Interplanetary Internet
• Joseph Sifakis: Testing System Intelligence
• Eric A. Brewer: Open Source is a Public Good
• Daniel Spielman: Computer Experiments for Computer Science and Mathematics
• Martin Hellman: Friends Are Better than Enemies
• Alexei Efros: Advances in Visual Computing

Join our HLF alumni and experts during the lunch break for an informal exchange dedicated to a specific topic.

• Women in Science: Cerene Rathilal, Carla Rizzo
• Career Development: Michal Jex, Joonseok Lee 

Master Classes
Closed smaller lectures for a more specialized audience of young researchers, running in parallel with each other.

• Jack J. Dongarra: An Overview of High Performance Computing and Future Requirements
  (master class 7, room HS 6)
• Alexei Efros: Self-Supervised Learning
  (master class 8, room HS 7)
• Jeffrey David Ullman: Big-Data Algorithms That Are Not Machine Learning
  (master class 10, room HS 9)
• Avi Wigderson: Randomness – The Utility of Unpredictability
  (master class 9, room HS 8)
• Efim Zelmanov: Basic Algebraic Structures
  (master class 6, room HS 5)

Workshops
Closed workshops where experts provide practical tools and guidance for young researchers.

• Fatimah binti Abdul Razak: Complex Networks and Topological Data Analysis
  (workshop 2, room SGU 1016)
• Michael Bonfert: Improvisational Theater – Collaborate to Create Something Big
  (workshop 5, room ÜR 4, historical seminar)
• Michal Jex: Stability of Matter Concepts from Quantum Mechanics Saving the Universe
• (workshop 3, room ÜR 3, historical seminar)
• Stjepan Picek: Security and Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Perspectives
  (workshop 1, room SGU 1017)
• Cerene Rathilal: Topological Data Analysis: Data Has Shape and Shape Has Meaning
  (workshop 4, room ÜR 1, historical seminar)

Journalist Workshop

• Johanna Michaels and Carl Smith: How Does Science Journalism Succeed in Mathematics and Computer Science? Research and Practice at MIP.labor
  (time: 11:00 - 12:30, room P 18)

Mathematics has been fundamental to many sciences for a long time and computer science has become central in many scientific disciplines over the past decades. The availability of large amounts of data, the abilities of data analysis methods, improvements in computer hardware as well as advances in machine learning and simulation techniques have accelerated the growing importance of computer science and mathematics for the sciences. Conversely, mathematicians and computer scientists themselves have been inspired in their research by fundamental questions in various other disciplines.

This panel will look at the synergies that have emerged at the interface of mathematics, computer science and the sciences and explore their potential.
 

Moderator: Rebecca Wade
Rebecca Wade studied at the University of Oxford (B.A. Hons. in physics, 1985; D. Phil. in Molecular Biophysics, 1988). She then carried out postdoctoral research at the universities of Houston and Illinois before taking up a position as a group leader in the Structural and Computational Biology Programme at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg in 1992. Rebecca Wade set up the Molecular and Cellular Modeling Group at HITS (which was then known as the European Media Laboratory and later as EML Research) in 2001. She was Adjunct Professor at the International University in Germany in Bruchsal from 2001-2003. Rebecca Wade was appointed full Professor at Heidelberg University in 2012 and is a member of the Faculty of Biosciences. She was Scientific Director of HITS from 2015 to 2016.

Leslie G. Valiant
Nevanlinna Prize - 1986  For contributing in a decisive way to the growth of many branches of computer science: solving the recognition problem of context-free grammars in cubic time; proving that superconcentrators of linear size exist; discovering complete counting problems that correspond to easy search problems, thereby considerably enlarging the scope of the theory of NP-completeness.

ACM A.M. Turing Award - 2010  For transformative contributions to the theory of computation, including the theory of probably approximately correct (PAC) learning, the complexity of enumeration and of algebraic computation, and the theory of parallel and distributed computing.

Efim Zelmanov
Fields Medal - 1994
For the solution of the restricted Burnside problem in group theory

Louis Joseph Ignarro
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine - 1998
For their discoveries concerning nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system

Stefan H. E. Kaufmann
Scientific Chairperson Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. Founding Director & Director Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Berlin. Director Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen. Senior Professor, Charité Berlin. Faculty Fellow of Hagler Institute for Advanced Study, Texas A&M University, College Station. Former President of German Society for Immunology, European Federation of Immunological Societies, International Union of Immunological Societies. Breakthrough finding: Rational design & development of a vaccine which is currently in three phase III clinical trials on protective efficacy and safety, and for therapy for bladder cancer in advanced clinical trials.

Moderator:
Anna Wienhard
Anna Wienhard, Scientific Chair of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation since 2020, studied Mathematics and Theology at the University of Bonn and obtained her doctorate in Mathematics there in 2004. Her career led her to various research stays in Switzerland and the United States, including at Princeton University. Later, Anna Wienhard became Chair of Differential Geometry at Heidelberg University and Group Leader at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies. In 2022, she was appointed director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig. Wienhard has received numerous honors and awards. She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and an elected member of the Heidelberg and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academies of Science, the Leopoldina and the European Academy of Science.

Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck (online)
Abel Prize - 2019
For her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.

Maryna Viazovska
Fields Medal - 2022
For the proof that the E8 lattice provides the densest packing of identical spheres in 8 dimensions, and further contributions to related extremal problems and interpolation problems in Fourier analysis.

Ingrid Daubechies
Ingrid Daubechies majored in physics at the Free University of Brussels where she went on to earn her doctorate in theoretical physics. She is most well-known for her work in the field of wavelets. These mathematical tools allow efficient information packaging, especially when signals undergo sudden dramatic changes. Daubechies is currently the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. She was named a MacArthur Fellow, and her many honors include the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics, the L’Oréal-UNESCO International Award for Women in Science, and the 2023 Wolf Prize in Mathematics. Outside of academia, Dr. Daubechies has teamed up with fiber artist Dominique Ehrmann to create an exhibit called Mathemalchemy.

Please make your way to the Kulturbrauerei (address: Leyergasse 6). It is within walking distance of Heidelberg University (5-10 minutes).

Spark sessions are blocks that include several short plenary "Spark Talks" (15-20 minutes) by laureates. Here they give insights into their current research projects, discuss their work and spark inspiration for new ideas and problem-solving approaches.

Moderator: Tom Crawford
Dr Tom Crawford is a Mathematician at the University of Oxford with a mission to share his love of maths with the world. He holds the position of Public Engagement Lead at the Department for Continuing Education, as well as teaching the undergraduate students at St Edmund Hall. You may recognise him from Numberphile - the largest maths channel on YouTube - as well as his through his own work with Tom Rocks Maths. To learn more about Tom’s outreach work head to tomrocksmaths.com.

• Raj Reddy: Speech to Speech Machine Translation
• Yael Tauman Kalai: The Evolution of Proofs in Computer Science
• Alexei Efros: Computing After the Victory of Data

Party on the boat with music by Martin Stark and Friends.

Dock at Heidelberg Convention Center

Boarding: 13:30-14:00
Boat Trip: 14:00-18:00

Laureates: Visits to local schools

YR: Visits to the following local institutions:

• BioQuant
• German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)
• European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)
• Heidelberg Experimental Geometry Lab (HEGL)
• Heidelberg Engineering
• Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS)
• Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR)
• Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA)
• NEC
• SAP
• SAS
• STRUCTURES

Moderator: Vicki Hanson
Vicki Hanson is a Fellow of ACM, the British Computer Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She is a past President of ACM and currently serves as ACM’s Chief Executive Officer.
Since her post-doctoral research at the Salk Institute, Vicki has focused on making technology accessible. She founded IBM’s Accessibility Research Group, was Professor of Inclusive Technologies at the University of Dundee in Scotland, and a Distinguished Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in the US,  Her work has been recognized by an IBM Corporate Award, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, the ACM SIGACCESS Award for Contributions to Computing and Accessibility, and election to both the ACM CHI Academy and the National Academy of Engineering.

Hugo Duminil-Copin
Fields Medal - 2022
For solving longstanding problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions in statistical physics, especially in dimensions three and four.

Yael Tauman Kalai
ACM Prize in Computing - 2022
For breakthroughs on verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to cryptography.

László Lovász
Abel Prize - 2021
Together with Avi Wigderson for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics.

Robert Endre Tarjan
Nevanlinna Prize - 1982 
For devising near-optimal algorithms for many graph-theoretic and geometric problems for the development and exploitation of data structures supporting efficient algorithms, and for contributing several algorithmic analyses of striking profundity and elegance.

ACM A.M. Turing Award - 1986 
With John E. Hopcroft, for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures.

Graph theory had a very modest beginning. In 1736, Euler solved the puzzle of the Königsberg bridges, and for a long time, it was considered to be “recreational mathematics”. This view was still rather common when I was a student, although due to activities of the great Paul Erdős and others, not only were the results getting more and more deep and difficult, but also finding more and more connections with other branches of mathematics and the sciences.

In this talk, I’ll recall how working on graph-theoretic problems took me to computer science, to optimization and even to physics. Nowadays, a new paradigm of science is emerging: Network theory is the language needed to describe complex structures from the internet to the ecology to the brain. Graph theory can be considered the mathematical foundation of network science, and its importance cannot be questioned any more. True, graph theory does not have the long-established and well-understood structure of analysis (which had a head start of 2-3 centuries), but this makes its study even more challenging and rewarding.

Join our HLF alumni and experts during the lunch break for an informal exchange dedicated to a specific topic.

• Leadership: Đorđe Baralić, Yasmeen George
• Work-Life Balance in Academia: Arpita Biswas, Michelle Stuhlmacher
• DAAD: Holger Finken (Only for the DAAD Grant recipients)

Master Classes
Closed smaller lectures for a more specialized audience of young researchers, running in parallel with each other.

• Gerd Faltings: Diophantine Equations
  (master class  6, room HS 7)
• Martin Hellman: The Technological Imperative for Ethical Evolution
  (master class 7, room HS 8)
• William Morton Kahan: Why was IBM's X/2 < X*0.5 at Times in 1964?
  (master class 10, room HS 6)
• Joseph Sifakis: Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems
  (master class 8, room HS 9)
• Madhu Sudan: Locality in Coding Theory
  (master class 9, room HS 5)

Workshops
Closed workshops where experts provide practical tools and guidance for young researchers.

• Đorđe Baralić: Enhancing International Collaborations in Mathematics
  (worksop 3, room P 18)
• Arpita Biswas: Algorithmic Fairness
  (workshop 2, room ÜR 2, historical seminar)
• Francisco de Melo Virissimo: The Mathematics of Climate Models and Climate Prediction
  (workshop 5, room SGU 1017)
• Ksenia Niglas: Data Science and TikTok: Science Communication in the Age of Social Media
  (workshop 1, room ÜR 1, historical seminar)
• Facundo Sapienza: Physics-Informed Machine Learning
  (workshop 4, room SGU 1016)

Young researchers have the opportunity to engage directly with laureates in a small group setting. These sessions are exclusive to young researchers and provide a more personal atmosphere for effective discussion.

Spark sessions are blocks that include several short plenary "Spark Talks" (15-20 minutes) by laureates. Here they give insights into their current research projects, discuss their work and spark inspiration for new ideas and problem-solving approaches.

Moderator: Tom Crawford
Dr Tom Crawford is a Mathematician at the University of Oxford with a mission to share his love of maths with the world. He holds the position of Public Engagement Lead at the Department for Continuing Education, as well as teaching the undergraduate students at St Edmund Hall. You may recognise him from Numberphile - the largest maths channel on YouTube - as well as his through his own work with Tom Rocks Maths. To learn more about Tom’s outreach work head to tomrocksmaths.com.

• Martin Hellman: Existential Threats of AI
  This talk will address the following questions. How serious a threat does AI pose to civilization? How does that risk compare to other threats? What changes are needed in the international environment to reduce the risk?

• Daniel Spielman: Improving the Design of Randomized Controlled Trials

• Leslie G. Valiant: Computer Science for Understanding Ourselves
   
• Joseph Sifakis: Safe AI – A Systems Engineering Perspective

Access: laureates, young researchers, alumni, press, guests by invitation only

An entertaining evening at the Speyer Museum of Technology. A highlight of the evening will be a talk by HLF alumnus Tim Baarslag.

Access: laureates, young researchers, alumni, press, guests by invitation only

The last evening at the Heidelberg Castle serves as a grand finale after a week full of compelling exchange, networking and interaction between laureates and young researchers. The evening will feature a blend of highlights from the week, as well as a look towards the future.

Welcome Address: Philipp Herzig, Senior Vice President, Head of Cross Product Engineering & Experience at SAP

The Ising model is one of the most classical lattice models of statistical physics undergoing a phase transition. Initially imagined as a model for ferromagnetism, it revealed itself as a very rich mathematical object and a powerful theoretical tool to understand cooperative phenomena. Over one hundred years of its history, a profound understanding of its critical phase has been obtained. While integrability and mean-field behavior led to extraordinary breakthroughs in the two-dimensional and high-dimensional cases respectively, the model in three and four dimensions remained mysterious for years. In this talk, we will present recent progress in these dimensions based on a probabilistic interpretation of the Ising model relating it to percolation models.

As artificial intelligence advancements hurtle forward, society is reckoning with the question of how humans may co-exist with intelligent machines and algorithms they cannot fully predict. AI research has contributed incalculable benefits to humankind, including help with developing the COVID-19 vaccine at record speed. At the same time, many esteemed scientists, including some Turing Award recipients, have expressed deep concerns about the direction and speed at which AI is developing.

In this conversation, we’ll first discuss the effectiveness –or sometimes ineffectiveness – of universities’ efforts in teaching ethics alongside technology. Next, we will consider instances where early computing pioneers may not have fully anticipated all of the risks of some emerging technologies and perhaps could not have done so. Finally, we will discuss some ways in which young AI researchers and entrepreneurs might proceed differently – by asking questions about the public interest alongside work on technical problems.
 

Moderator: Susan D’Agostino
Susan D’Agostino is a Spencer Journalism Fellow at Columbia University and the technology correspondent at Inside Higher Ed, where she reports on artificial intelligence for 2.3 million monthly readers. Her science writing has been published in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Scientific American, Wired, Quanta, BBC, and Nature. Her book, How To Free Your Inner Mathematician (Oxford University Press, 2020), received the Mathematical Association of America’s 2023 Euler Book Prize. Her writing has been recognized with fellowships from the Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, National Association of Science Writers, and Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

Vinton Gray Cerf
ACM A.M. Turing Award - 2004
Together with Robert E. Kahn for pioneering work on internetworking, including the design and implementation of the Internet’s basic communications protocols, TCP/IP, and for inspired leadership in networking

Afua Bruce
Afua Bruce is a leading public interest technologist who works at the intersection of technology, policy, and society. Afua is the Principal of the ANB Advisory Group LLC, a consulting firm that supports organizations developing, implementing, or funding responsible data and technology. With her background in software engineering, data science, and artificial intelligence, combined with experience developing and deploying technology in and with communities, Afua incorporates an equity-based framework into her engagements.
Afua is an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an affiliate at Harvard Kennedy School’s Berkman Klein Center. Afua’s newest book, The Tech That Comes Next: How Changemakers, Technologists, and Philanthropists can Build an Equitable World, describes how technology can advance equity.

With the arrival of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has seemingly reached a tipping point. LLMs are a kind of generative AI trained to produce new data that is statistically similar in structure to the data on which it was trained. Other well-known examples of such AIs are the image-generating DALL·E and Stable Diffusion.

As these AIs appear poised to disrupt and revolutionize many areas of science and industry, it is important for us to appreciate the power and the limitations of this technology.

This panel discussion will explore such issues concerning generative AI. The conversation will open with a panel of experts with a wealth of experience in computer science. They will provide insight into the theory of generative AIs, provide a brief history of the field, and examine the different ways in which engineers can build such systems. The discussion will highlight the enormous power of these systems, while also tackling provocative questions. For example: Are LLMs capable of actual reasoning or are they simply extremely good at sophisticated pattern matching? What happens when the internet is flooded with data generated by generative AIs? Will the next generation of such AIs begin to train themselves on content they produce, causing them to amplify their own errors and mistakes? Finally, what does generative AI tell us about how the human brain works?

Moderator: Anil Ananthaswamy
Anil Ananthaswamy is an award-winning journalist and author. He is a former staff writer and deputy news editor for New Scientist magazine, and former MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow. He is currently the journalist-in-residence at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, and has been the journalist-in-residence at the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley. Ananthaswamy contributes regularly to Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, and others. He is the author of three popular-science books, The Edge of Physics, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and Through Two Doors at Once, and is currently writing a book on the mathematics of machine learning, titled Why Machines Learn.

Sanjeev Arora
ACM Prize in Computing - 2011
For contributions to computational complexity, algorithms, and optimization that have helped reshape our understanding of computation

Sébastien Bubeck
Sébastien Bubeck is a Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research (MSR). He won multiple awards for his machine learning results around robustness and optimization. Most recently, he has been interested in understanding how intelligence emerges in large language models. With collaborators at MSR, he wrote the Sparks of AGI paper studying the emergent abilities of GPT-4. This work was covered in The New York Times, Wired, This American Life, and more.

Björn Ommer
Björn Ommer is a full professor at University of Munich where he is heading the Computer Vision and Learning Group. Before he was a full professor in the department of mathematics and computer science at Heidelberg University and a co-director of the IWR and the HCI. He received his diploma in computer science from University of Bonn and his PhD from ETH Zurich. Thereafter, he was a postdoc in the vision group at UC Berkeley.
Björn serves as an associate editor for IEEE T-PAMI. His research interests include semantic scene understanding and retrieval, generative AI and visual synthesis, self-supervised metric and representation learning, and explainable AI. Moreover, he is applying this basic research in interdisciplinary projects within the digital humanities and the life sciences. His group has published a series of generative approaches, including "VQGAN" and "Stable Diffusion", which are now democratizing the creation of visual content and have already opened up an abundance of new directions in research, industry, the media, and beyond.

Margo I. Seltzer
Margo I. Seltzer is Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing data provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, and systems for constructing optimal and interpretable machine learning models. Professor Seltzer received an A.B. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard/Radcliffe College and a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

The Scientific Interaction is a compelling session where young researchers receive practical guidance and learn helpful tools to shape their future. Experts and alumni from academia and business provide insights into their careers. In three subsequent breakout sessions, young researchers have the opportunity to engage directly with the experts and alumni and ask their questions. This year’s session on career paths in academia is divided into two separate sessions to better accommodate the needs and questions of undergraduates and graduates as well as postdocs.

The session "Career Paths for Mathematicians and Computer Scientists in Academia | Undergraduates & Graduates" will be joined by Gabriele Kotsis, Head of the Telecooperation Department at Johannes Kepler University Linz and HLF Alumnus Facundo Fabián Sapienza, PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley.
Moderator: Dietmar Kilian

The session "Career Paths for Mathematicians and Computer Scientists in Academia | Postdocs" will be joined by Laureate Efim Zelmanov, professor at the University of California in San Diego and HLF Alumna Cerene Rathilal, senior lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in the School of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science.
Moderator: Peter J. Mirski

The session "Career Paths for Mathematicians and Computer Scientists in Business" will be joined by Katharina Schäfer, Global Head of University Alliances at SAP, Fabrizio Gagliardi, Chair of the ACM Europe Policy Committee (EUACM) and Alumnus Fernando Chirigati, Chief Editor at Nature Computational Science.
Moderator: Susann Kruschel

Bios

Parallel to the breakout sessions, the documentary "Solving the Bonnet Problem" by Ekaterina Eremenko will be shown at the Audimax.
The documentary follows the work of three mathematicians as they collaborate to solve a long-standing geometrical problem proposed by Pierre Ossian-Bonnet. Alongside their work, the film explores the lives and contributions of Bonnet and his contemporary Gaston Darboux, as well as the history of French mathematics in the 19th century. Captivating computer graphics help unravel intricate concepts and make them accessible to all.

Trailer