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.

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.