Invited Talks

About the speaker Ulrike Luxburg

Ulrike von Luxburg is a full professor for the Theory of Machine Learning at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research analyzes machine learning algorithms from a theoretical point of view, tries to understand their implicit mechanisms, and to give formal statistical guarantees for their performance. In this way, she reveals fundamental assumptions, biases, strenghts and weaknesses of widely used machine learning algorithms, for example in the field of explainable machine learning. Next to her own research group, she is coordinating the research consortium "Machine learning: New Perspectives for Science" and the Tübingen CZS Institute for AI and Law. She has served as program chair and general chair for some of the most important machine learning conferences such as NeurIPS and COLT, and her research has received seven best (student) paper awards at NeurIPS, COLT, ALT and IJCAI. In 2024 she received the communicator award, Germany's highest award for science communication. She is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences.

About the speaker Timothy Gowers

Timothy Gowers was born in 1963 into a family of musicians. He was a chorister at King's College Cambridge from 1973 to 1976, returning to Cambridge in 1982 where he was an undergraduate, PhD student and research fellow in mathematics at Trinity College. From 1991 to 1995 he was a lecturer at University College London, before returning to Cambridge, initially as a lecturer, then as Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics, and then as a Royal Society Research Professor. In 2000 he became the holder of the chair in combinatorics at the Collège de France, He retains a part-time position at Cambridge. He has received several awards, including a Fields Medal in 1998. He is the author of Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction and the main editor of The Princeton Companion to Mathematics.

About the speaker Claire Monteleoni

Claire Monteleoni is a senior research scientist at INRIA Paris where she leads the AI Research for Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability (ARCHES) team, and holds a Choose France Chair in AI. She is also a computer science professor at the University of Colorado Boulder (on leave). Her research on machine learning for the study of climate change helped launch the interdisciplinary field of Climate Informatics. She gave an invited tutorial: Climate Change: Challenges for Machine Learning, at NeurIPS 2014. She co-founded the Environmental Data Science journal, with Cambridge University Press, and the International Conference on Climate Informatics, which held its 15th annual event in 2026.

About the speaker Pelonomi Moiloa

Pelonomi Moiloa is the CEO and founder of Lelapa AI, a company building the world’s most efficient language infrastructure. With a background in electrical and biomedical engineering, she leads Lelapa’s mission to unlock the digital economies of the Global South, starting in Africa, by developing scalable, locally optimised language AI for constrained environments and pioneering more efficient modelling techniques for the world at large. She has been recognised as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, a Bloomberg Catalyst, a Mozilla Rise 25 Award recipient as well as Forbes Africa 30 under 50. She is also a TED speaker, known for her insights on SLMs and human centric AI. Before founding Lelapa AI, Pelonomi worked at the intersection of finance, data science, and machine learning, applying technology to large-scale systems challenges. She also serves as a trustee of a girls’ scholarship fund and a director of a community-based nonprofit. https://womenaibuilders.org/top-100-women-in-ai