Yoshua Bengio is Full Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research,head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), CIFAR Program co-director of the CIFAR program on Learning in Machines and Brains,  Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms. His main research ambition is to understand principles of learning that yield intelligence. He teaches a graduate course in Machine Learning (IFT6266) and supervises a large group of graduate students and post-docs. His research is widely cited (over 40000 citations found by Google Scholar in mid-2016, with an H-index of 84).

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Yoshua Bengio is currently action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research, associate editor for the Neural Computation journal, editor for Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning, and has been associate editor for the Machine Learning Journal and the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks.

Since August 1, 2015, Dr Rice has been the Rector (President) of the Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences (Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus). As a biographical curiosity, it is said that this is the first time a non-Norwegian has been at the helm of an institution for higher education in Norway. In addition to his work as Rector, he leads Norway’s Committee on Gender Balance and Diversity in Research, and was the head of the Board for Current Research Information System in Norway (CRIStin) through 2016. He is also a reserve member of the Board for the Language Council of Norway (Språkrådet).

In all of these roles, he works to pursue his conviction that research and education are essential to improving society and that making universities better therefore has the potential to make societies better.

Before becoming Rector, he worked at the University of Tromsø. From 2002–2008, he was the founding director of their first Norwegian Center of Excellence, the Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics (CASTL). From 2009–2013, he served as the elected Vice Rector for Research & Development (prorektor for forskning og utvikling). After his period as Vice Rector, he was elected by the faculty in Tromsø to represent them on the university board, which he did from 2013–2015.

He is part of the European Science Foundation’s genderSTE COST action (Gender, Science, Technology and Environment); and helped create the BALANSE program at the Research Council of Norway, which is designed to increase the numbers of women at the highest levels of research organizations. He is on the Advisory Board of the European Commission projects EGERA (Effective Gender Equality in Research and Academia) (FP7) and LIBRA (H2020); was on the Science Leaders Panel of genSET (FP7), in which they advised the European Commission about gender in science; and is a member of the Steering Committee for the Gender Summits.

Dr Sunita Maheshwari, awarded 2014’s ‘Amazing Indian’ by Times Now, is a Yale University trained Pediatric Cardiologist. She was the winner of the AHA ‘Young Clinician Award’, Yale’s ‘Best Teacher Award’ and has over 200 academic presentations and publications to her credit. She also runs India’s first medical e-teaching program, via the National Board in Delhi.

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She is the Chief Dreamer at Teleradiology Solutions (India’s first and largest teleradiology company that has provided over 4 million diagnostic reports to patients and hospitals globally) apart from incubating other start up companies in the tele-health space and co-running a trust fund-the Telrad Foundation that provides teleradiology and telemedicine services to poor areas in Asia that do not have access to high quality medical care. She was nominated one of the Top 20 women achievers in medicine in India and was among a few innovative entrepreneursinvited to meet President Obama on his trip to India.

Polina Golland is a professor of EECS and an associate director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. She received her PhD from MIT in and her Bachelor and Masters degree from Technion, Israel. Polina's primary research interest is in developing novel techniques for medical image analysis and understanding. With her students, she has demonstrated novel approaches to image segmentation, shape analysis, functional image analysis and population studies.  She has also worked on various problems in computer vision, motion and stereo, predictive modeling and visualization of statistical models. Polina has served as an associate editor or a member of the editorial board for the IEEE Transactions of Medical Imaging, the Journal or Medical Image Analysis and NeuroImage. She served as a board member of the MICCAI Society in 2009-2015, and chaired MICCAI COnference in 2014. Polina received the NSF Career Award in 2007, the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2013 and the ECEDHA Diversity Award in 2014. She was elected a Fellow of MICCAI Society in 2016.

Nassir Navab received his PhD from University of Paris XI, was a research assistant at INRIA, enjoyed two years of Nishidai postdoctoral fellowship award at MIT Media Lab, and severed  as project manager and distinguished member of technical staff at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, before joining TUM in October 2003. He is a full professor and the founder and director of the chair for computer aided medical procedures (CAMP) at TUM and has also a research professorship position at LCSR laboratory in JHU since July 2013. He is a fellow of MICCAI society and served as a member of its board of directors 2007-2012 and 2014-2017. He is also a founder and  member of Steering Committee for IEEE ISMAR and IPCAI. He received the Siemens Inventor of the year award in 2001, the SMIT Medical Technology Innovation Award in 2010 and the ’10 Years Lasting Impact Award’ of IEEE ISMAR in 2015. He has been serving on the editorial boards of different journals including, Medical Image Analysis, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging and International Journal of Computer Vision. He is the senior author of more than 25 awarded papers in most prestigious international conferences.  He is the co-inventor of 46 granted US patents and over 50 European ones.  His research interests include Medical Image Computing, Computer Assisted Interventions, Augmented Reality, Robotic Imaging and Machine Learning.

Nicholas Ayache is a Research Director at Inria, Sophia-Antipolis, France, where he leads the ASCLEPIOS research team on Biomedical Image Analysis & Simulation. He is the author or editor of 12 books (including Artificial Vision for Mobile Robots (MIT-Press) and Computational Models for the Human Body (Wiley)), the author or co-author of 30 book chapters, 12 patents, and more than 400 peer-reviewed scientific publications which received over 36,000 citations (h-index 96), according to Google Scholar. He is the co-founder and co-Editor in Chief with Pr. J. Duncan of the journal Medical Image Analysis (Elsevier) launched in 1996. He co-founded six start-up companies in image processing, computer vision, and biomedical imaging and served as Chief Scientific Officer of the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire (IHU) of Strasbourg during 4 years (2012-2105). Nicholas Ayache was a laureate of the European Research Council for his project MedYMA (2012-2017) dedicated to the Biophysical Modeling & Analysis of Dynamic Medical Images. He was elected a professor at the Collège de France, on the Chair Informatics and Computational Sciences for the academic year 2013-2014, to launch a new course on the “Personalized Computational Patient”.  In 2014 he received the "Grand Prize Inria - Académie des sciences" and was elected a member of the French Académie des sciences

Bram Stieltjes is vice chair of research in radiology and concurrently heads the Clinical Digital Diagnostic Department program at the University Hospital Basel. His scientific background and past is mainly in quantitative diffusion imaging, with over 100 widely cited articles in this field. His scientific work was recognized with several awards such as the contrast media research award for the development of functional magnetic resonance imaging in spinal cord injury using manganese and the Kurt-Decker prize for work on glioma infiltration quantification using diffusion imaging.  

His main current goal is the integration of separate clinical diagnostic routines and fields, e.g. radiology and pathology, through software development in a clinical environment. He has co-founded a company that optimizes and automatically calibrates MRI scanners and is CMO in a big imaging data analysis start-up. These interests align with his long term goal; to create a comprehensive clinical digital diagnostic department.