Theodore Willke (Intel Corporation)

Evelina Fedorenko (MIT)

Evelina (Ev) Fedorenko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an Associate Member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She also holds an appointment in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and is affiliated with the Harvard-MIT Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology. Prior to joining MIT, she spent 5 years as faculty at MGH and Harvard Medical School, supported by an NIH Pathway to Independence K99/R00 award. She received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2007 and an A.B. in Psychology and Linguistics from Harvard University in 2002.

Kenton Lee (Google Research)

Paul Smolensky (Johns Hopkins/Microsoft Research)

Paul Smolensky is a principal researcher in the Deep Learning Group and part-year Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. His work focuses on the integration of symbolic and neural network computation for modeling reasoning and, especially, grammar in the human mind/brain. This work created: Harmony Networks (a.k.a. Restricted Boltzmann Machines); Tensor Product Representations; Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar (grammar frameworks grounded in neural computation); and Gradient Symbolic Computation. The work up through the early 2000’s is presented in the 2-volume MIT Press book with G Legendre, The Harmonic Mind. Before assuming his position at Johns Hopkins he was a professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to that, as a postdoc and Research Professor, with G Hinton, D Rumelhart & J McClelland he was one of the founding members of the Parallel Distributed Processing Research Group at UCSD, which produced the bible of the previous wave of neural network modeling, the two-volume ‘PDP books’. His BA and PhD are in (Mathematical) Physics from Harvard and Indiana University. He received the 2005 David E. Rumelhart Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the Formal Analysis of Human Cognition.