Sandra Avila

UNICAMP

Sandra Avila is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Computing of the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). She earned her Bachelor’s degree from the Federal University of Sergipe (2006), her Master’s degree from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG, 2008), and a joint PhD from UFMG and Sorbonne Université (2013). Her research addresses Responsible AI, grounded in Brazilian and Latin American realities. Her work has been recognized with the Google Latin America Research Awards (2018–2021), the Google Award for Inclusion Research (2022), the UNICAMP–Vladimir Herzog Institute’s Human Rights Recognition (2023, 2024), and L’Oréal Brazil’s “More Inclusive Dermatology” award (2025).

Sara Hooker

Adaption

Sara Hooker is Co-Founder and CEO of Adaption, which builds intelligence that continuously evolves. She leads a large team of AI researchers and engineers developing highly efficient, adaptable systems. Previously, Sara was VP of Research at Cohere, a USD 6.8 billion frontier AI company focused on generative AI for enterprise, and before that built large-scale computer vision and NLP systems at Google DeepMind. Her work has been featured in TechCrunch, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Axios, MIT Technology Review, and The Atlantic. She advises AI research and policy initiatives globally, including Kaggle’s ML Advisory Research Board and the World Economic Forum, and was named one of Fortune’s top 13 AI innovators and a Time100 Most Influential Person in AI.

Meire Fortunato

Google DeepMind

Dr. Meire Fortunato is a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Originally from Brazil, she holds a PhD in Mathematics from UC Berkeley and degrees from UNICAMP. Her work spans reinforcement learning, graph neural networks, and physical simulations, with current research interests in reasoning, scientific discovery, and agent systems. She is a co-first author of GraphCast, an AI weather forecasting system featured on the cover of Science and awarded the MacRobert Award. Beyond research, she is dedicated to advancing diversity in AI—having served as Diversity & Inclusion Co-Chair for WiML at NeurIPS—and to strengthening the Latin American AI ecosystem.

Omar Florez

National Center for AI (CENIA)

Dr. Omar Florez is a senior AI researcher focused on training large-scale language and reasoning models. He currently works on training large-scale reasoning models for LatamGPT, with a focus on efficient reasoning and tool-calling training. Previously, he was a senior machine learning researcher at Twitter Cortex, Intel, and Capital One, where he worked on training multilingual LLMs and large-scale multimodal toxicity detection systems. Omar is also a co-founder of LatinX in AI, an organization supporting Latin American researchers at leading AI conferences. His work centers on foundation model training, reasoning, tool calling, and technological sovereignty in Latin America.

Oriol Vinyals

Discovery Loop

Oriol Vinyals is an AI researcher, co-founder and CTO of Discovery Loop, building systems to accelerate scientific discovery. Previously Vice President of Research at Google DeepMind, he co-led the development of Gemini and led AlphaStar, which achieved Grandmaster-level performance in StarCraft II. His pioneering contributions span sequence-to-sequence learning, knowledge distillation, and AlphaFold, the protein-structure prediction technology recognized by the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and was named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35. His work bridges foundational research and ambitious applications, advancing AI’s potential to solve complex problems and expand the frontiers of knowledge.

Nando de Freitas

Revolution Labs

Nando de Freitas is a leading AI researcher and former Corporate Vice President at Microsoft AI, where he helped build foundation models for language, image, speech, and audio. Previously he co-led Google DeepMind’s GenMedia team, delivering Veo, Imagen and Lyria. Nando served on DeepMind’s research board for 10 years and contributed to numerous projects, including learning to learn, neural-program interpreters, reinforced self-training, AlphaGo tuning, AlphaCode, Genie and Gato. Earlier in his career, he was a professor at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of CIFAR during the early development of modern deep learning. He started coding neural networks on device in 1994. He is now the CEO of Revolution Labs.

Vukosi Marivate

African Institute for Data Science and AI, University of Pretoria

Prof. Vukosi Marivate is Director of the African Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AfriDSAI), ABSA UP Chair of Data Science and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pretoria, where he leads the Data Science for Social Impact group. His research focuses on Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly for African and other low-resource languages. He co-founded Lelapa AI, the Masakhane Research Foundation, and the Deep Learning Indaba. His work spans social challenges in science, energy, public safety, and utilities, aiming to create AI for Africans by Africans. Vukosi is a member of the Independent Scientific Panel for AI for the UN and a member of the African AI Council at Smart Africa.