Invited Keynotes

Richard Socher

Bio: Richard Socher is the CEO and co-founder of Recursive, a company building self-improving superintelligence to automate knowledge discovery, and the CEO and co-founder of You.com, a web search infrastructure provider for AI. He is also the co-founder and managing partner at AIX Ventures. Richard previously served as chief scientist and EVP at Salesforce, having joined through the 2016 acquisition of his first AI startup MetaMind. He is widely recognized as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, where he also served as an adjunct professor. He is the author of the book, The Eureka Machine: Why AI Is the Key to Unlocking a New Era of Scientific Discoveries.

Melanie Mitchell

Bio: Melanie Mitchell is the James B. Alley Jr. Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her reseach interests are at the intersection between artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems, and her current focus is on understanding the mechanisms of conceptual abstraction and analogy in humans and machines. In addition to numerous scholarly papers, she has authored or edited six books, including Complexity: A Guided Tour, which won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, and Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, which was named as one of the five best books on AI by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Melanie’s public outreach on science has included a quarterly column for Science Magazine, a Substack newsletter on AI, a 2024 podcast on “The Nature of Intelligence,” and a free online course, “Introduction to Complexity” on the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Explorer website.