Alejandro Adem
President, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, NSERC
Professor Alejandro Adem has been President of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) since October 2019.As a highly accomplished researcher in the field of mathematics and a faculty member at the University of British Columbia, Professor Adem has significant leadership experience in the Canadian research and innovation ecosystem. Before joining NSERC, he was CEO and Scientific Director of Mitacs (2015–2019) where he oversaw a significant expansion of its domestic and international internship programs, as well as launching the Mitacs Canadian Science Policy Fellowships, an Indigenous engagement initiative and an innovative entrepreneurship program. Prior to that, he served as Director of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (2008-2015), a research and training consortium supporting the mathematical sciences across Western Canada. From 1989 to 2004 he was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA).
Professor Adem earned a B.Sc. at the National University of Mexico and a PhD in mathematics at Princeton University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a Fellow of the Canadian Mathematical Society and a Corresponding Member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. He has authored more than 70 articles as well as two books; delivered close to 400 invited research lectures around the world; and held postdoctoral or visiting positions at Stanford University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the ETH-Zurich, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, the University of Paris and Princeton University. Other distinctions include a senior Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, the Jeffery-Williams Research Prize (awarded by the Canadian Mathematical Society), the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award (USA) and an Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.
Elissa Golberg
Ambassador of Canada to Italy, Ambassador of Canada to Albania and San Marino, High Commissioner to Malta, and Permanent Representative of Canada to the UN Agencies in Rome (IFAD, FAO, WFP)
Elissa Golberg is Ambassador of Canada to the Italian Republic, Albania, Malta, San Marino, as well as Permanent Representative of Canada to the UN Agencies in Rome (IFAD, FAO, WFP). Prior to this, she was Assistant Deputy Minister for Strategic Policy at Global Affairs Canada (2017-2021), the department’s Champion for Innovation and Experimentation, and Head of Performance Management and Results. Ms. Golberg has held several senior Canadian government roles, including Assistant Deputy Minister – Partnerships for Development Innovation (2015-17); Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations (Geneva) and to the Conference on Disarmament (2011-15); Director-General of the Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force (2009-11), and Representative of Canada in Kandahar, Afghanistan (2008-9).
Ms. Golberg is Vice President of the World Food Programme Executive Board and sits on the Board of the Centre for Global Governance and Innovation (CIGI). She was recently Chair of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters (2022-2023), and a member of the UN Central Emergency Revolving Fund Advisory Group (2020-2023).
Ms. Golberg holds a Master’s degree in International Relations. She is a recipient of the NATO ISAF General Service medal, the Queen’s Jubilee Medal, the Public Service Award of Excellence, and several Ministerial Awards for Foreign Policy Excellence. She has published articles on humanitarian, fragile state and public policy related matters.
Joelle Pineau
Vice-President, AI Research at Meta, and Professor of Computer Science at McGill University
Joelle Pineau is the VP, AI Research at Meta, leading its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, with labs across Canada, US and Europe. She is also a core member at Mila and a Professor at the School of Computer Science at McGill University. She holds a BASc in Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and an MSc and PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Pineau's research focuses on developing new models and algorithms for planning and learning in complex domains. She also works on applying these algorithms to real-world problems in robotics, healthcare, and conversational agents. She is a past President of the International Machine Learning Society, the inaugural Reproducibility Chair of the NeurIPS conference, and is the creator of the ML Reproducibility checklist and the ML Reproducibility challenge. She is a recipient of NSERC's E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship (2018), the Governor General's Innovation Awards (2019), a CIFAR Canada AI (CCAI) chairholder, a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC).
Daniel Roy
Research Director, Vector Institute and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto
Daniel Roy is a Research Director at the Vector Institute, an associate professor in the department of statistical sciences with a cross-appointment in the department of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto. He is also an associate professor in the department of computer and mathematical sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Roy’s research in deep learning spans theory and practice. His contributions range from his pioneering work on empirically grounded statistical theory for deep learning, to state-of-the-art algorithms for neural network compression and data-parallel training. His experimental work has shed light on various deep learning phenomena, including neural network training dynamics and linear mode connectivity, while his recent theoretical work introduces simple but accurate mathematical models for deep neural networks at initialization.
Beyond his contributions to deep learning, Roy has made significant advances to the mathematical and statistical underpinnings of AI. His dissertation on probabilistic programming languages and computable probability theory was recognized by an MIT Sprowls Award. Roy recently resolved several open problems in statistical decision theory posed over 70 years ago, by exploiting the properties of infinitesimal numbers to expand the set of allowable Bayesian priors. His latest work, focusing on robust and adaptive decision making, has been recognized by multiple oral presentations at leading conferences and best poster awards.
Elissa Strome
Executive Director, Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
Elissa Strome is the Executive Director of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy at CIFAR. She works with leaders at Canada’s three National AI Institutes in Edmonton (Amii), Montreal (Mila), and Toronto (Vector Institute) and across the country to advance Canada’s leadership in AI research, training and innovation. She is a champion of equity, diversity and inclusion in science, and an ambassador for Canada’s position in AI research, innovation, and policy internationally. Elissa is a member of the federal government’s AI Advisory Council, a member of the OECD’s Network of Experts on AI and Expert Group on AI in Health, a member of the Health Canada Expert Advisory Committee for AI in Health and sits on the Advisory Board of York University’s Centre for AI & Society. Her strong leadership and support of women and gender-diverse people in STEM has been recognized by a Special Jury Recognition at the Women in AI Awards North America (2023) and the Womxn in Data Science Lifetime Achievement Award (2022).
Elissa completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia. Following a post-doc at Lund University, in Sweden, she decided to pursue a career in research strategy, policy, and leadership. From 2008 – 2017 she held senior leadership positions at University of Toronto’s Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation, advancing major institutional strategic research priorities, including establishing and leading the SOSCIP research consortium. She is currently training towards her second-degree black belt in taekwondo.
Adam White
Fellow, Director of Scientific Operations, AMII and Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Alberta
Adam White is an assistant professor at the University of Alberta. He is the scientific director of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, a principal investigator of the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence group at the University of Alberta, and a Canada CIFAR Chair in Artificial Intelligence. Previously, Adam was a staff research scientist at Google Deepmind. Adam co-created the Reinforcement Learning Specialization, taken by over 90,000 students on Coursera. His work has been published in top venues in ML and AI, including JMLR, JAIR, AIJ, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, and AAMAS.
Adam's research is focused on understanding the fundamental principles of learning in both simulated worlds and industrial control applications. His research program explores how the problem of intelligence can be modeled as a reinforcement learning agent interacting with some unknown environment, learning from a scalar reward signal rather than explicit feedback. Adam's group is deeply passionate about good empirical practices and new methodologies to help determine if our algorithms are ready for deployment in the real world. Adam has pioneered applications of reinforcement learning to real drinking and wastewater treatment plants and is the co-founder of RL Core Technologies, a startup applied AI and machine learning across industrial control.
