Rising Stars in AI Symposium 2024
Following the resounding success of our previous Annual "Rising Stars in AI" Symposia, including the 2022 and 2023 editions, the AI Initiative at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology), located on the scenic Red Sea coast, is thrilled to announce the third installment of this Symposium, scheduled for February 19th to 21st, 2024. This event is tailor-made for emerging researchers, including PhD students, PostDocs, and early career faculty, who have recently made substantial contributions to the field of AI. It presents a remarkable opportunity for participants to engage in lively discussions and share cutting-edge AI research concepts. Our Symposium organizing committee will meticulously curate a selection of speakers based on their outstanding research profiles. Chosen presenters will have the privilege of showcasing their work, which has been recently accepted at prestigious AI conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, EMNLP, ACL, among others. Join us for a dynamic exploration of the latest advancements in AI research at the highly anticipated third edition of our "Rising Stars in AI" Symposium.
Join us in creating an unforgettable experience by applying to be a speaker at the upcoming "Rising Stars in AI" Symposium, where your groundbreaking research will inspire and engage our global audience. The event will be entirely in-person, with flights and hotel expenses covered for the selected speakers.
The applications as speakers are now closed.
Call for spotlight and poster presentations
We invite KAUST researchers to showcase their recently published AI work in spotlight and poster sessions during the Symposium. Selected applicants will be asked to prepare 2-3 slides for a two-minute presentation and a poster for a 40-minute poster session. If you are interested in presenting your work, please complete this form.
Deadline for spotlight and poster application: February 11, 2024
Notification of spotlight and poster acceptance: February 13, 2024
Attending the Symposium
The symposium will be limited to in-person attendance. It will be held on February 19-21, 2024 (Save the date) at Building 19, Halls 1, 2 and 3. To attend the symposium, please register by filling out this form.
Agenda
Arabian Standard Time (UTC+3)
Day 1 - Monday, February 19th, 2024
| Time | Speaker | Presentation |
|---|---|---|
| 08:30 – 09:00 | Breakfast | |
| 09:00 – 09:10 | Welcoming Remarks | |
| 09:10 – 09:30 | Adil Salim (Microsoft Research) | Sampling is as easy as learning the score: theory for diffusion models with minimal data assumptions |
| 09:30 – 09:50 | Chun-Mei Feng (A*STAR) | Large Pretrained Models as Catalysts in Federated Learning |
| 09:50 – 10:10 | Umang Bhatt (New York University) | Algorithmic Resignation |
| 10:10 – 10:40 | Coffee Networking Break | |
| 10:40 – 11:00 | Yisen Wang (Peking University) | Theoretical Understanding of Self-Supervised Learning |
| 11:00 – 11:20 | Shangtong Zhang (University of Virginia) | On the Cheating of Offline Reinforcement Learning |
| 11:20 – 11:40 | Alhussein Fawzi (Google DeepMind) | Discovering new algorithms with AI |
| 11:40 – 12:00 | Sihong He (University of Connecticut ) | Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning and Its Application in Cyber-Physical Systems |
| 12:00 – 14:00 | Lunch Break | |
| 14:00 – 14:10 | AI Initiative - Overview | |
| 14:10 – 14:30 | Hadi Salman (OpenAI) | Adversarial Examples Beyond Security |
| 14:30 – 14:50 | Jindong Wang (Microsoft Research) | Understanding LLMs: Evaluation, Enhancement, and Interdisciplinary Research |
| 14:50 – 15:10 | Yanning Dai (Beihang University) | Reinforcement Learning Enabled Personalized Motor Disease Rehabilitation Program Design |
| 15:10 – 15:50 | Coffee Networking Break | |
| 15:50 – 16:50 | Spotlight Presentations | |
| 16:50 – 17:30 | Poster Session | |
Day 2 - Tuesday, February 20th, 2024
| Time | Speaker | Presentation |
|---|---|---|
| 08:30 – 09:00 | Breakfast | |
| 09:00 – 09:10 | Bernard Ghanem - Overview | |
| 09:10 – 09:30 | Jonathon Luiten (Meta Reality Labs) | Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis |
| 09:30 – 09:50 | Raaz Dwivedi (Cornell Tech) | Kernel Thinning |
| 09:50 – 10:10 | Jun Xia (Westlake University and Zhejiang University) | Deciphering Biochemical Codes with Foundation Models |
| 10:10 – 10:40 | Coffee Networking Break | |
| 10:40 – 11:00 | Qian Liu (Sea AI Lab) | LoraHub: Efficient Cross-Task Generalization via Dynamic LoRA Composition |
| 11:00 – 11:20 | Hao-Wen Dong (University of California San Diego) | Learning Text-to-audio Synthesis from Videos |
| 11:20 – 11:40 | Mengyue Yang (University College London) | Causal Representation Learning: Environment Understanding and Counterfactual Simulation |
| 11:40 – 12:00 | Jane Dwivedi-Yu (Meta) | Teaching Language Models to Use Tools |
| 12:00 – 14:00 | Lunch Break | |
| 14:00 – 14:10 | Peter Richtarik - Overview | |
| 14:10 – 14:30 | Yifan Zhang (National University of Singapore) | Expanding Small-Scale Datasets with Guided Imagination |
| 14:30 – 14:50 | Yue Hu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) | Communication-efficient collaborative perception |
| 14:50 – 15:10 | Shilong Liu (Tsinghua University) | Object Detection in 20 Years: The Evolution of Anchors |
Day 3 - Wednesday, February 21th, 2024
| Time | Speaker | Presentation |
|---|---|---|
| 08:30 – 09:00 | Breakfast | |
| 09:00 – 09:10 | Jürgen Schmidhuber - Overview | |
| 09:10 – 09:30 | Yu Zeng (Johns Hopkins University) | Learning to synthesis images from multi-modal and hierarchical inputs |
| 09:30 – 09:50 | Yupan Huang (Sun Yat-sen University) | TextDiffusers: Diffusion and Language Models as Text Painters |
| 09:50 – 10:10 | Joanna Materzynska (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Customizing Motion in Text-to-Video Diffusion Models |
| 10:10 – 10:40 | Coffee Networking Break | |
| 10:40 – 11:00 | Anant Raj (INRIA) | Algorithmic Stability of Heavy-Tailed SGD |
| 11:00 – 11:20 | Difan Zou (The University of Hong Kong) | (Possible) Theoretical Explanation for Interesting Phenomenon in Training Neural Networks |
| 11:20 – 11:40 | Rustem Islamov (University of Basel) | Unified Analysis of Asynchronous SGD |
| 11:40 – 12:00 | Bohan Wang (MSR Asia & University of Science and Technology of China) | On the convergence analysis of Adam: recent advances and horizons |
| 12:00 – 14:00 | Lunch Break | |
| 14:00 – 14:10 | Francesco Orabona - Overview | |
| 14:10 – 14:30 | Felix Petersen (Stanford University) | Learning with Differentiable Relaxations |
| 14:30 – 14:50 | Shiwei Liu (University of Oxford ) | Fantastic Sparse Neural Networks and Where to Find Them |
| 14:50 – 15:10 | Wei Jin (Emory University) | Deep Learning on Graphs: A Data-Centric Exploration |
| 15:10 – 15:50 | Coffee Networking Break | |
| 15:50 – 16:50 | Spotlights | |
| 16:50 – 17:30 | Poster | |
Organizers
Scientific Committee
Administrative Team
Tagreed Khalil
Liliana Rivera