Taylor Symposium on Applied AI
Please join us for the inaugural Taylor Symposium on Applied AI on May 15th, which focuses on emerging trends in artificial intelligence.
The event showcases the various applied AI research and initiatives underway within the Faculty of Engineering, with a special keynote lecture by Michael Rabbat, former 黑料网爆吃瓜 professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Co鈥慒ounder and Vice President of World Models at AMI. Please register below.
The symposium is organized by the Faculty of Engineering and made possible through the generous support of Scott Taylor.听
Event info and schedule:
Date: May 15, 2026
Location:听黑料网爆吃瓜 Faculty Club (3450 Rue McTavish)
- 8:00 Am | Registration / Breakfast
- 8:30 AM | Welcome / Introduction
- 8:45 - 10:00 AM |听Lightning talks:听Profs. James Clark, Brett Meyer, Lili Wei, and Michael Coates
- 10:00 - 11:00 AM |听Keynote presentation:听Towards AI that learns and acts with World Models by Michael Rabbat, Co-founder and VP World Models at AMI
- 11:00 - 11:15 AM |听Coffee break
- 11:15 AM - 12:00 PM |听Lightning talks:听Profs. Tim Xie, and听Jiangbo Yu
- 12:00 - 1:00 PM | Lunch
- 1:00 - 2:15 PM |听Lightning talks: Profs. Fiona Zhao, Audrey Sedal, Guillaume Durandau, and Jozsef Kovecses
- 2:15 - 3:00 PM | Panel discussion
- 3:00 - 3:15 PM | Coffee break
- 3:15 - 4:30 PM |听Lightning talks: Profs. Roussos Dimitrakopoulos, Mustafa Kumral, Samuel Huberman, Natalie Reznikov, and Codruta Ignea
- 4:30 PM | Closing remarks
- 4:45 PM |听Cocktail reception
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Keynote presentation:听Towards AI that learns and acts with World Models
Keynote speaker: Michael Rabbat
In this talk, Michael Rabbat explores the next frontier in AI - World Models. He discusses how recent work on V鈥慗EPA 2 moves AI beyond simple word prediction toward systems that learn through observation of the physical world. By learning directly from video without the need for human鈥憀abeled data, this self鈥憇upervised approach offers a more efficient path toward machines that can model the underlying dynamics of their environment. He will outline how this direction enables the development of the next generation of intelligent agents鈥攕ystems that do not merely communicate, but can truly understand, plan, and act in the physical world.
Bio:
Michael Rabbat is Co-founder and VP World Models at Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI Labs), where he is building a new breed of AI systems focused on understanding and reasoning about the world. He is also an Associate Industry Member at Mila.
Previously, Michael was a Research Director at Meta, where he was a founding member of FAIR Montr茅al, contributing to the company's fundamental AI research efforts. Prior to that, he spent over a decade as a professor at 黑料网爆吃瓜 in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Throughout his career he has worked on a variety of topics across signal processing, learning, and optimization, including distributed optimization and federated learning. His current research is focused on learning world models and using them for planning and control.
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