Speakers

Csaba Szepesvári holds the prestigious position of Canada CIFAR AI Chair and leads the Foundations team at DeepMind. Additionally, he serves as a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Throughout his career, Csaba has contributed a significant body of work to the field of AI, including the publication of three books, while also regularly publishing in leading journals and conferences. Dr. Szepesvari’s main interest is developing principled, learning-based approaches for problems involving sequential decision. He is the co-inventor of UCT, an influential Monte-Carlo tree search algorithm, a variant of which was used in the AlphaGo program which, in a landmark game, defeated the top Go professional Lee Sedol in 2016, ten years after the invention of UCT.

Sadhika Malladi is a PhD student in computer science at Princeton University, where she work on theoretical machine learning with Sanjeev Arora. Her work focuses on using mathematical insights into deep learning (especially language models) to design and analyze performant and efficient algorithms. Sadhika was recently named a 2025 Siebel Scholar.

Samy Jelassi is a Research Fellow at the Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA) at Harvard University, hosted by Boaz Barak and Sham Kakade. His research focuses on problems related to large language models, spanning problems from creation and optimization of architectures to length generalization. He completed his PhD at Princeton University advised by Boris Hanin.