Preslav Nakov is Professor and Department Chair for NLP at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. He led the teams at MBZUAI's Institute for Foundation Models that developed Jais, the world's best open-source Arabic-centric LLM, Nanda, the world's best open-weights Hindi model, and Sherkala, the world's best open-weights Kazakh model. Previously, he was Principal Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, where he led the Tanbih mega-project, developed in collaboration with MIT, which aims to limit the impact of "fake news", propaganda and media bias by making users aware of what they are reading, thus promoting media literacy and critical thinking. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, supported by a Fulbright grant. He is Chair of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Secretary of ACL SIGSLAV, and Secretary of the Truth and Trust Online board of trustees. Formerly, he was PC chair of ACL 2022, and President of ACL SIGLEX. He is also member of the editorial board of several journals including Computational Linguistics, TACL, ACM TOIS, IEEE TASL, IEEE TAC, CS&L, NLE, AI Communications, and Frontiers in AI. He authored a Morgan & Claypool book on Semantic Relations between Nominals, two books on computer algorithms, and 250+ research papers. He received a Best Paper Award at ACM WebSci'2022, a Best Long Paper Award at CIKM'2020, a Best Resource Paper Award at EACL'2024, a Best Demo Paper Award (Honorable Mention) at ACL'2020, a Best Task Paper Award (Honorable Mention) at SemEval'2020, a Best Poster Award at SocInfo'2019, and the Young Researcher Award at RANLP’2011. He was also the first to receive the Bulgarian President's John Atanasoff award, named after the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer. His research was featured by over 100 news outlets, including Reuters, Forbes, Financial Times, CNN, Boston Globe, Aljazeera, DefenseOne, Business Insider, MIT Technology Review, Science Daily, Popular Science, Fast Company, The Register, WIRED, and Engadget, among others.

Dr. Lisa Amini leads IBM's Data & AI Platforms innovation efforts, along with IBM Research's AI Horizons Network. She is also an IBM Distinguished Engineer (DE). The mission of her team is to infuse generative and agentic AI throughout IBM's Data Platform, to make it more intelligent, self-service, and autonomous, and to optimize its performance on AI workloads. She has previously been Lab Director of IBM Research Cambridge (home of the MIT-IBM AI Lab), Director of Knowledge & Reasoning Research at IBM Research (NY), and the founding Director of IBM Research Ireland, the first woman Lab Director for an IBM Research Global (i.e., non-US) Lab (2010-2013), and the founding Chief Architect for IBM's InfoSphere Streams product. She earned her PhD degree in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Dan Roth is the Chief AI Scientist at Oracle and the Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, Dan was a VP/Distinguished Scientist at AWS AI where he led the scientific effort behind Amazon's first-generation GenAI products, including Titan Models, Amazon Q, and Amazon Bedrock. Dan is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, AAAI, and ACL, and a recipient of the IJCAI John McCarthy Award "for major conceptual and theoretical advances in the modeling of natural language understanding, machine learning, and reasoning." He has published broadly in natural language processing, machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, and learning theory, was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and has served as a Program Chair and Conference Chair for the major conferences in his research areas. Roth has been involved in several ML/NLP/GenAI startups in domains that range from legal and compliance to health care. Dan received his B.A. Summa cum laude in Mathematics from the Technion, Israel and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1995.

Heng Ji is a Professor of Computer Science at Siebel School of Computing and Data Science of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the Founding Director of Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE), and the Founding Director of CapitalOne-Illinois Center on AI Safety and Knowledge Systems (ASKS). She is a faculty member affiliated with Coordinated Science Laboratory, and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is named as an Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Fellow in 2025 for her "significant contributions to information extraction, multimodal and multilingual knowledge extraction and AI for science." She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University, and B.A. and M.A. in Computational Linguistics from Tsinghua University. The awards she received include Outstanding Paper Award at ACL2024, two Outstanding Paper Awards at NAACL2024, "Young Scientist" by the World Laureates Association in 2023 and 2024, "Young Scientist" and a member of the Global Future Council on the Future of Computing by the World Economic Forum in 2016 and 2017, “Outstanding Advisor of the Year” by UIUC Engineering Council in 2026, Amazon Scholar 2020-2025, "Women Leaders of Conversational AI" (Class of 2023) by Project Voice, "AI's 10 to Watch" Award by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2013, NSF CAREER award in 2009, PACLIC2012 Best paper runner-up, "Best of ICDM2013" paper award, "Best of SDM2013" paper award, ACL2018 Best Demo paper nomination, ACL2020 Best Demo Paper Award, NAACL2021 Best Demo Paper Award, Google Research Award in 2009 and 2014, IBM Watson Faculty Award in 2012 and 2014 and Bosch Research Award in 2014-2018. She has given many keynote speeches at top conferences including IJCAI2025 and EMNLP2025. She served as the Program Committee Co-Chair of many conferences including NAACL-HLT2018 and AACL-IJCNLP2022. She was elected as the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) secretary 2020-2023.

Dr. Hamid Palangi is a Staff Research Scientist at Google, Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Washington and an advisor for Koidra. His work is centered around building more reliable, useful and controllable AI systems, with a specific focus on enabling foundation models and multi-agent workflows to advance AI-driven discovery and tackle complex long-horizon tasks.