Invited Speakers.
Manolis Savva (Simon Fraiser Univ., FAIR)
Manolis Savva is an Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University and a visiting researcher at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). He obtained his PhD at the Stanford computer graphics lab, advised by Pat Hanrahan. His research focuses on human-centric 3D scene analysis, 3D scene generation, and simulation for scene understanding. He has also worked in data visualization, grounding of natural language to 3D content, and in creating large-scale scene datasets for 3D deep learning.
Yoav Artzi (Cornell Univ.)
Yoav Artzi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Cornell Tech at Cornell University. His research focuses on learning expressive models for natural language understanding, most recently in situated interactive scenarios. He received an NSF CAREER award, paper awards in EMNLP 2015, ACL 2017, and NAACL 2018, and Google faculty awards in 2015 and 2017. Yoav holds a B.Sc. summa cum laude from Tel Aviv University and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.
Julian Togelius (NYU Univ.)
Julian Togelius is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, New York University. He works on artificial intelligence for games and games for artificial intelligence. His current main research directions involve search-based procedural content generation in games, general video game playing, player modeling, generating games based on open data, and fair and relevant benchmarking of AI through game-based competitions. He is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Games, and has been chair or program chair of several of the main conferences on AI and Games. Togelius holds a PhD from the University of Essex. 
Yuandong Tian (FAIR)
Yuandong Tian is a Research Scientist and Manager in Facebook AI Research, working on deep reinforcement learning and its applications in games, and theoretical analysis of deep models. He is the lead scientist and engineer for ELF Platform for Reinforcement Learning, OpenGo and DarkForest Go project. Prior to that, he was a researcher and engineer in Google Self-driving Car team in 2013-2014. He received Ph.D in Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University on 2013, Bachelor and Master degree of Computer Science in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is the recipient of 2013 ICCV Marr Prize Honorable Mentions.
Shital Shah (Microsoft Research)
Shital Shah is Principal Research Engineer at Microsoft Research AI. He has been working at Microsoft for past 12 years architecting, designing and developing large scale machine learning systems that heavily leverages distributed computing. At Microsoft Research, he conceived and lead the development of AirSim, a physically and visually realistic cross platform simulator for AI research as test bed for designing, applying and evaluating reinforcement learning algorithms for the smart agents in open dynamic world.
Maciek Chociej (OpenAI)
​Maciek Chociej is a software engineer at the OpenAI robotics lab. He worked previously at Google Brain & Brain Robotics. He holds a MSc in theoretical computer science from the Jagiellonian University and a MSc in grid computing from Cranfield University.