Traditional AI/ML meets LLMs for Reasoning & Knowledge Tasks

Mausam is a Professor of Computer Science at IIT Delhi, and served as the founding head of Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence until September 2023. He is also an affiliate professor at University of Washington, Seattle. He is currently on a sabbatical working as a Visiting NLP Researcher at Bloomberg’s AI group. With an over twenty year research experience in artificial intelligence, he has, over time, contributed to many research areas such as large scale information extraction over the Web, AI approaches for optimizing crowdsourced workflows, and probabilistic planning algorithms. More recently, his research is exploring neuro-symbolic machine learning, computer vision for radiology, NLP for robotics, multilingual NLP, and several threads in intelligent information systems that include information extraction, knowledge base completion, question answering, summarization and dialogue systems. He has over 100 archival papers to his credit, along with a book, two best paper awards, and one test of time award. Mausam was awarded the AAAI Fellow status in 2024 for his sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and unusual distinction in the profession. He was also elected as a fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) — an apex body for India’s most distinguished engineers, engineer-scientists and technologists. He has had the privilege of being a program chair for two top conferences, AAAI 2021, and ICAPS 2017. He was ranked the 56th most influential NLP scholar and 64th most influential AI scholar by ArnetMiner AI2000 Ranking in 2021. He received his PhD from University of Washington in 2007 and a B.Tech. from IIT Delhi in 2001.

AI Agents in the Physical World

Rahul Mangharam is a Professor in the Departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering and Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a founding member of the PRECISE Center for Trustworthy AI and leads xLAB: Safe Autonomous Systems Lab. Dr. Mangharam also serves as the Director for Safety21, a $20 million US DoT National University Transportation Center, and leads the Autoware Center of Excellence in Autonomous Driving. He was a board member of The Autoware Foundation 2023-2025, which is the world’s leading open-source autonomous driving stack involving over 100 companies and institutions. He spearheads the RoboRacer/F1Tenth Autonomous Racing Community which spans 90+ universities worldwide.

Dr. Mangharam’s interdisciplinary research spans formal methods, machine learning, and control systems, with applications in autonomous systems, medical devices, and robotics. His current interests are in multi-agent dynamic games of collaborative teams in adversarial competitions. His professional experience spans international research, including roles at Intel Labs, IMEC Belgium, Apple Inc., National Instruments and FORE Systems.

He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the US Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) from Obama, IEEE Benjamin Franklin Key Award, NSF CAREER Award, and Intel Early Faculty Career Award. His group has received multiple best paper awards and innovation prizes across top venues in cyber-physical systems, controls, machine learning and embedded systems.

Rahul received his BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

The Agentic Internet, Society and Economy: The Future is Here 

Ramesh Raskar is the Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Camera Culture research group focused on AI, imaging, and machine learning for health and sustainability. A pioneer in computational photography, he invented femto-photography (trillion-fps imaging), corner-detecting cameras, and low-cost eye-care solutions like Netra and Catra, earning accolades including the Lemelson Prize (“Engineering Nobel” 2016) and ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award. He co-founded PathCheck for pandemic response tools and advises global ventures, blending academic research with entrepreneurial impact.

Learning Beyond Prediction: Concepts, Logic, and Reasoning

Vineeth N Balasubramanian is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India and a Professor (on leave) in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IIT-H), India. He is the Founding Head of the Department of Artificial Intelligence at IIT-H (2019-22), the first such across IITs in India. His research interests include deep learning, machine learning and computer vision, with a focus on explainability, multimodal learning, reasoning and continual learning. A Fellow of the INAE (2024) and INSA Associate Fellow (2024), he is a recipient of the National Teachers Award (presented by the Hon’ble President of India, 2025), Research Excellence Award at IIT-H (2022), Google Research Scholar Award (2021), NASSCOM AI Gamechanger Award (2022), Teaching Excellence Awards at IIT-H (2017 and 2021), Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship (2022-23), among others. His research has been published at premier venues including ICML, CVPR, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICCV, AAAI, and IEEE TPAMI; he was the General Chair of ACML 2022, serves on the Editorial Board of IJCV and Pattern Recognition, and regularly serves in senior roles for top AI conferences.