Baby Steps and Giant Leaps: Where AI Is Today

Slav Petrov
Vice President, Research, Google DeepMind

Slav Petrov is Vice President, Research at Google DeepMind. He is a co-lead on Gemini, Google’s large models effort. His work has been recognized with multiple Best Paper Awards (ACL’11, NAACL’12, ACL’16, 10-year Test-of-Time Award at ACL’23) and provides better language capabilities to billions of users in a variety of Google products spanning Web Search, Assistant, Ads, Translate & Cloud. Slav is the recipient of the 2014 John Atanasoff Award by the President of Bulgaria and a World Champion at RoboCup 2004. For many years, Slav taught Statistical Natural Language Processing at New York University. He holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

Slav has spent roughly equal parts of his life in Bulgaria, Germany and the US. Whenever Bulgaria plays Germany in soccer, he supports Bulgaria.

Security and Safety of LLMs and AI Agents

Prof. Dr. Mario Fritz
Professor, CISPA Helmholtz Center

Prof. Dr. Mario Fritz is a faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, an honorary professor at Saarland University, and a fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). Until 2018, he led a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science. Previously, he was a PostDoc at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and UC Berkeley after receiving his PhD from TU Darmstadt and studying computer science at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. His research focuses on trustworthy artificial intelligence, especially at the intersection of information security and machine learning. He is Associate Editor of the journal “IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI),” coordinates the Helmholtz project “Trustworthy Federated Data Analytics,” and has published over 100 scientific articles – 80 of them in top conferences and journals.