Schedule

Tues 9th June 2026 (UTC+1)

08:40 Check in and registration

09:40 Conference opening remarks (Dr Ruairidh Battleday and Prof. James Whittington)

Session 1: Neural Data

Chair: Dr Marine Schimel (Meta)

Chair: Dr Kris Jensen (UCL)

10:00 Keynote: Dr. Marius Pachitariu (Janelia) - Supervised and unsupervised learning in mouse visual cortex

10:40 Break

11:20 Keynote: Prof. Tatiana Engel (Princeton) - Closing the discovery loop with low-dimensional models and causal perturbations

12:00 Lunch

14:00 Dr Marine Schimel (Meta) - Data-driven modeling reveals a consensus-building mechanism across neocortical areas

14:20 Dr YoungJu Jo (Stanford) - Data-driven discovery and control of neural computations

14:40 Dr Abraham Vollan (NTNU) - Adaptive modulation of theta sweeps in the brain's navigation circuit

15:00 Break and Poster Setup

15:40 Dr Xulu Sun (UCSF) - Meta-learning is expressed through altered prefrontal cortical dynamics

16:00 Neural Data Spotlights

  • Eva Sevenster (Bristol) - Emergent specialization of distributed networks in cortically-embedded RNNs with macroscopic gradients

  • Mitchell Ostrow (MIT) - Comparing Neural Dynamics by Identifying Optimal Linearizing Embeddings

  • Dr Lin Zhong (Janelia) - Unsupervised pretraining in biological neural networks

  • Dr Miguel Angel Nunez-Ochoa (Janelia) - Building higher-order invariance in mouse visual cortex

  • Katharina Bracher (Freiburg) - Unbiased detection of neural sequences

16:40 Poster Session 1 & Welcome Reception

Weds 10th June 2026 (UTC+1)

Session 2: Neural Theory

Chair: Prof. James Whittington (Oxford)

Chair: Jesseba Fernando (Northeastern)

09:40 Keynote: Prof. Xiao-Jing Wang (NYU) - Towards a foundational brain model of intelligence

10:20 Will Dorrell (Harvard) - An Efficient Computing Hypothesis: Prefrontal Working Memory Edition

10:40 Break

11:20 Keynote: Prof. Marcella Noorman (Chicago)

12:00 Lunch

14:00 Keynote: Prof. James Whittington (Oxford)

14:40 Dr Andy Keller (Harvard) - The Role of Spacetime Symmetries in Neural Networks

15:00 Break and Poster Setup

15:40 Jin Hwa Lee (UCL) - Influence dynamics and stage-wise data attribution

16:00 Dr Sandra Romero Pinto (Columbia) - Tonic dopamine and biases in value learning linked with a biologically grounded reinforcement learning model

16:20 Neural Theory Spotlights

  • Prof. Andrea Brovelli (Aix-Marseille & CNRS) - Expected information and empowerment gain as intrinsic motivational drives for goal-directed causal learning

  • Clara Kümpel (ETHZ) - Learning dynamics of non-linear combinatorial tasks in rats and deep networks

  • Dr Aneesh Prema Balakrishnan (Janelia) - From blank slates to connectomes: how connectivity shapes ring attractor dynamics in trained RNNs

  • Dr Kaining Zhang (ICTP) - Maximizing Memory Capacity in Heterogeneous Networks

  • Dr Changmin Yu (Cambridge) - The hippocampus as a hierarchical predictive map

16:40 Poster Session 2

18:00 Conference Dinner (coaches leave at 17:20)

Thurs 11th June 2026 (UTC+1)

Session 3: CogSci

Chair: Prof. Bill Thompson (Berkeley)

Chair: Prof. Lucy Lai (UCSF)

10:00 Keynote: Prof. Eric Schulz (Helmholtz Munich) - Automatic discovery in the cognitive sciences

10:40 Break

11:20 Invited: Dr Francesco Faccio (DeepMind) - Building creative agents for scientific discovery

11:40 Invited: Prof. Angela Radulescu (Mt Sinai) - A theory-driven approach to cognitive phenotyping of bipolar disorder

12:00 Lunch

14:00 Keynote: Prof. Noah Goodman (Stanford) - Where does intelligent behavior come from?

14:40 Keynote: Prof. Gyorgy Buzsaki (NYU) - Memory selection and consolidation in the brain

15:20 Break and Poster Setup

15:40 Dr Christian Shewmake (New Theory AI) - Does symmetry discovery underlie grokking?

16:00 CogSci Spotlights

  • Dr Marco Ciapparelli (Trento) - Zero-shot learning of complex concepts via conceptual systems alignment

  • Saurabh Bedi (Zurich) - Beyond perception: Sequential efficient coding of perceptual and value representations

  • Denis Lan (UCL) - Signatures of hierarchical, heuristic-guided planning in real-world human conceptual navigation

  • Dr Mario Giulianelli (UCL) - Incremental alternative sampling as a lens into the temporal and representational resolution of linguistic prediction

  • Mariana Amendoeira Duarte (Champalimaud) - Artificial intelligence models can track and collaboratively modulate human memory search dynamics

16:25 Poster Session 3

Evening: Arts Salon (Cross Hotel)

Fri 12th June 2026 (UTC+1)

Session 4: AI

Chair: Dr Chen Sun (DeepMind)

Chair: Dr Ivana Kajic (DeepMind)

09:40 Keynote: Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Google) - Self-modeling, cooperation, and intelligence scaling

10:20 Jeremy Dohman (Perceptron AI) - Fine-grained reinforcement learning for image pointing

10:40: Dr Clare Lyle (DeepMind) - Batched reinforcement learning as bilevel optimization

11:00 Break

11:20 Keynote: Prof. Irina Rish (Mila & Montreal) - Scaling, Transfer, and Continual Learning in Foundation Models

12:00 Lunch

14:00 Keynote: Dr Joel Lehman (Lila) - Open-Endedness: Promise, Progress, and the Problem of Judgment

14:40 Keynote: Dr Joel Leibo (DeepMind) - Co-operation beyond the matrix

15:20 AI Spotlights

  • Dr Gonçalo Guiomar (ETHZ) - Reasoning aligns language models to human cognition

  • Dr Spyridon Chavlis (IMBB-FORTH) - Bio-inspired structural plasticity and dynamic non-linearities in dendritic neural networks for energy-efficient AI

  • Dr Max Lange (MIT/KCL) - The BODHI Framework: Engineering and Testing Epistemic Virtues for Collaborative Intelligence in Clinical Decision Support

  • Prashant C. Raju (Independent) - Geometric Stability: The Missing Axis of Representations

  • Guillaume Pourcel (Groningen), Dr Alice Dauphin - Echo learning enables biologically plausible credit assignment

  • Prof. Bruno Lepri (FBK) - Generative AI collective behavior needs an interactionist paradigm

15:40 Closing Remarks (Dr Ruairidh McLennan Battleday)

15:50 Poster Session 4 & Closing Reception