Keynote Speakers
Things people don’t tell you about NeSy AI
Antonio Vergari is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Machine Learning and a member of the ELLIS Unit at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on efficient and reliable machine learning in the wild, tractable probabilistic modeling and neuro-symbolic AI by combining learning with complex reasoning. He is interested in unifying probabilistic reasoning. Recently, he has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant called “UNREAL - a Unified REAsoning Layer for Trustworthy ML”. Previously he has been a postdoc in the StarAI Lab lead by Guy Van den Broeck at UCLA. And before that he did a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen, Germany supervised by Isabel Valera. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Bari, Italy. He published several conference and journal papers in top-tier AI and ML venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, UAI, ICLR, AAAI, ECML-PKDD and more, several of which have been awarded oral and spotlight presentations and a Best Student Paper Runner-up award at UAI 2025. He frequently engages with the tractable probabilistic modeling and the deep generative models communities by organizing a series of events: the Tractable Probabilistic Modeling Workshop (ICML2019, UAI2021, UAI2022, UAI2023, UAI2025), the Tractable PRobabilistic Inference MEeting (T-PRIME) at NeurIPS 2019, CoLoRAI at AAAI2025 and ICML 2026 and presented a series of tutorials on complex probabilistic reasoning and models at UAI 2019, AAAI 2020, ECAI 2020, IJCAI 2021, NeurIPS 2022 and 2025 and AAAI 2025. He organized two Dagstuhl Seminars on these topics.
Neuro-argumentative learning
Francesca Toni is Professor in Computational Logic at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK. She is the founder and leader of the CLArg (Computational Logic and Argumentation) research group and of the XAI research Centre at Imperial. Her research interests lie within the broad area of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in AI and Explainable AI, and in particular include Argumentation, Argument Mining, Logic-Based Multi-Agent Systems, Non-monotonic/Default/Defeasible Reasoning, Machine Learning. She graduated, summa cum laude, in Computing at the University of Pisa, Italy and received her PhD in Computing from Imperial College London. She has coordinated two EU projects, received funding from EPSRC and the EU, was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship from The Royal Academy of Engineering and the Leverhulme Trust, was Technical Director of the ROAD2H EPSRC-funded project and co-Director for the Centres of Doctoral Training in Safe and Trusted AI and in AI for Healthcare and Royal Academy of Engineering/JP Morgan Research Chair on Argumentation-based Interactive Explainable AI (2020-25). She is EurAI fellow, AAAI fellow and a fellow of the BCS, and has been awarded in 2021 an ERC Advanced grant on “Argumentation-based Deep Interactive Explanations”. She has published over 200 papers, co-chaired ICLP2015 (the 31st International Conference on Logic Programming), KR 2018 (the 16th Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning), and COMMA 2022 (9th International Conference on Computational Models of Argument), was the conference chair for ICLP 2023 and is the conference chair for IJCAI-ECAI 2026. She is in the editorial board of the Argument and Computation journal and associate editor for Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. Finally, she is in the Board of Directors for KR Inc. and IJCAI trustee.
More speakers coming soon!