Meet our Accelerate keynotes – and abstract deadline extended!
We’re excited to announce our keynotes for the Acceleration Consortium’s (AC) 2023 Accelerate Conference – as well as extend the deadline of our call for abstracts! Based at the University of Toronto, the AC is a global community of academia, government, and industry who are accelerating the discovery of new materials and molecules needed for a sustainable future.
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Accelerate Conference
August 22–25, 2023
Toronto (in-person only)
This is an especially momentous year for the Accelerate Conference with the recent investment of $200 million into the Acceleration Consortium from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF)!
With the conference just 2 months away, we are excited to announce our keynote speakers:
Ian Foster, Director of data science and learning division, Argonne National Laboratory; and Rick L. Stevens, Associate laboratory director for the computing, environment and life sciences, Argonne National Laboratory
Joint keynote talk: AI-driven large-scale automated scientific experimental laboratories.
Ian and Rick are trailblazers in computer science, having both worked for Argonne National Laboratory for roughly the last 30 years! Ian is also widely considered the father of grid computing, the precursor to cloud computing.
Argonne is a U.S. Department of Energy multidisciplinary science and engineering research centre, where talented researchers work together to answer the biggest questions facing humanity.
Suzanne Gildert, Co-Founder & CTO, Sanctuary AI
Keynote talk: Human-like intelligence in general purpose robots.
Sanctuary AI is on a mission to create the world's first human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots. It recently began piloting its “human-like intelligence robots” that can complete retail worker tasks at Canadian Tire-owned Mark’s.
Before Sanctuary, Suzanne founded Kindred, the world’s first robotics company to use reinforcement learning in a production environment. The acquisition of Kindred by Ocado in November 2020 was the third-largest exit for a robotics company in Canadian history.
Ivan Zhang, Co-Founder, Cohere
Keynote talk: Large language models (LLMs) are useful general intelligence.
Cohere is an enterprise-focused generative artificial intelligence startup. It is building the future of language AI by empowering every developer and enterprise to build amazing products and capture true business value with language AI.
Recently, Cohere raised $270 million in a Series C round of venture capital which includes Nvidia, Oracle, and Salesforce.
Linda Hung, Manager, Energy & Materials division, Toyota Research Institute
Keynote talk: Accelerating the materials discovery pipeline.
Linda’s work integrates machine learning and data science methods with experiment and simulation to accelerate the development of new, sustainable materials.
Toyota Research Institute (TRI) conducts research to amplify human ability, focusing on making our lives safer and more sustainable.
Registration and Abstracts
We’ve EXTENDED the deadline for abstracts to June 30, 2023, 5:00pm EST. That is the same day that early-bird registration closes, after which prices will increase. If you haven’t yet submitted an abstract but would like a chance to, we would love to hear from you. We are accepting submissions for talks, posters, and workshops that support our 3 distinct content tracks, along with special themes for each:
The tools
The materials
The ecosystem
To learn more about our 3 focus areas, review our submission guidelines.
Invited Speakers
Accelerate will feature a wide range of speakers in the emerging field of accelerated science. In addition to our keynotes, we have confirmed our first ~20 speakers, with more to be confirmed soon:
Tonio Buonassisi, MIT
Carla Gomes, Cornell University
John Gregoire, Caltech
Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto
Andy Cooper, University of Liverpool
Avi Goldfarb, University of Toronto
Marcus Noack, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Elsa Olivetti, MIT
Larry Zitnick, Meta AI
Mahshid Ahmadi, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Robert Black, National Research Council Canada
Cosima Boswell-Koller, National Science Foundation
Tiago Rodrigues, University of Lisbon
Kamal Choudhary, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Kedar Hippalgaonkar, Nanyang Technological University
Jolene Reid, University of British Columbia
Mohamad Moosavi, University of Toronto
Oleksandr Voznyy, University of Toronto Scarborough
Logan Ward, Argonne National Laboratory