How is intelligence represented, learned and instantiated in biological and artificial systems?
The seventh edition convened researchers across neuroscience, cognitive science, machine learning and applied mathematics at the Villa Wolkonsky, the British Ambassador's Residence in Rome, for four days of submission-led sessions, invited keynotes and rigorous exchange across the four fields.
The conference convenes researchers across neuroscience and cognitive science; machine learning, applied mathematics, and theoretical computer science; and the adjacent fields, to examine how intelligence is represented, learned and instantiated in biological and artificial systems. The points at which the two literatures disagree are, in our experience, the most useful.
The conference is a submission-led, peer-reviewed and selective venue, oriented toward open problems, conceptual clarity and rigorous exchange. The 2026 edition spanned four themed days: Neural Data, Neural Theory, Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence.
Across the week the programme featured twelve keynotes, invited and spotlight talks, three poster sessions, a Conference Dinner at the Hostaria Antica Roma, and the Art Salon curated by Taylor Beck.
Neural Data
Rich behavioural and neural recordings, and the collaborations between experimental and theoretical work that turn them into new computational paradigms in brain processing.
- Dr Ruairidh Battleday (Harvard · MIT)
- Marine Schimel (Meta)
- Dr Marius Pachitariu (Janelia): Supervised and unsupervised learning in mouse visual cortex
- Prof. Tatiana Engel (Princeton): Closing the discovery loop with low-dimensional models and causal perturbations
- Dr Marine Schimel (Meta)
- Dr YoungJu Jo (Stanford)
- Dr Abraham Vollan (NTNU): Adaptive modulation of theta sweeps in the brain's navigation circuit
- Dr Xulu Sun (UCSF): Meta-learning is expressed through altered prefrontal cortical dynamics
- Eva Sevenster (Bristol): Emergent specialization of distributed networks in cortically-embedded RNNs
- 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
Neural Theory
Mechanistic accounts of how networks of neurons afford complex computation, alongside the mathematical theories of how neurons should behave and why.
- Prof. James Whittington (Oxford)
- Dr Kris Jensen (Sainsbury Wellcome Centre)
- Prof. Xiao-Jing Wang (NYU): Towards a foundational brain model of intelligence
- Prof. Marcella Noorman (Chicago): Continuous representations in small, discrete circuits
- Prof. James Whittington (Oxford · Thinking About Thinking)
- Will Dorrell (Harvard): An efficient computing hypothesis, prefrontal working memory edition
- Dr Andy Keller (Harvard): The role of spacetime symmetries in neural networks
- Jin Hwa Lee (UCL): Influence dynamics and stage-wise data attribution
- Dr Sandra Romero Pinto (Columbia): Tonic dopamine and biases in value learning
- Prof. Andrea Brovelli (Aix-Marseille · CNRS): Sensorimotor encoding of epistemic value during goal-directed causal learning
- Clara Kümpel (ETHZ): Learning dynamics of non-linear combinatorial tasks in rats and deep networks
- Dr Aneesh Prema Balakrishnan (Janelia): 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
Cognitive Science
How an intelligent agent should infer, act and learn under uncertainty, using tools from probability theory and statistical inference, in the lab and in the real world.
- Dr Giovanni Pezzulo (CNR Italy)
- Dr Lucy Lai (UC San Diego)
- Prof. Eric Schulz (Helmholtz Munich): Automatic discovery in the cognitive sciences
- Prof. Noah Goodman (Stanford): Where does intelligent behavior come from?
- Prof. Gyorgy Buzsaki (NYU): Memory selection and consolidation in the brain
- Dr Francesco Faccio (Google DeepMind): Building creative agents for scientific discovery
- Dr Angela Radulescu (Mt Sinai): A theory-driven approach to cognitive phenotyping of bipolar disorder
- Dr Christian Shewmake (New Theory AI): Does symmetry discovery underlie grokking?
- Dr Marco Ciapparelli (Trento): Zero-shot learning of complex concepts via conceptual systems alignment
- Saurabh Bedi (Zurich): Sequential efficient coding of perceptual and value representations
- Denis Lan (UCL): Hierarchical, heuristic-guided planning in real-world human conceptual navigation
- Dr Mario Giulianelli (UCL): Incremental alternative sampling and linguistic prediction
- Mariana Amendoeira Duarte (Champalimaud): AI models can track and modulate human memory search dynamics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine learning and the foundations of intelligence, and the points at which the artificial and biological literatures most usefully disagree.
- Dr Ivana Kajic (Google DeepMind)
- Dr Chen Sun (Google DeepMind)
- Dr Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Google): Self-modeling, cooperation, and intelligence scaling
- Prof. Irina Rish (Mila · Montreal): Scaling, transfer, and continual learning in foundation models
- Dr Joel Lehman (Lila): Open-endedness, promise, progress, and the problem of judgment
- Jeremy Dohmann (Perceptron AI): Fine-grained reinforcement learning for image pointing
- Dr Clare Lyle (Google DeepMind): Batched reinforcement learning as bilevel optimization
- Dr Joel Leibo (Google DeepMind): Co-operation beyond the matrix
- Dr Gonçalo Guiomar (ETHZ): Reasoning aligns language models to human cognition
- Dr Spyridon Chavlis (IMBB-FORTH): Bio-inspired structural plasticity in dendritic neural networks
- Dr Max Lange (MIT · KCL): The BODHI framework for collaborative intelligence in clinical decision support
- Prashant C. Raju (Independent): Geometric stability, the missing axis of representations
- Guillaume Pourcel & Alice Dauphin (Groningen · TU Graz): Echo learning and biologically plausible temporal credit assignment
Tuesday 9 June
Wednesday 10 June
Thursday 11 June
Friday 12 June
The Art Salon
Curated by Taylor Beck, the Art Salon was hosted at The Cross Hotel. It drew the largest salon turnout in the conference's history.
Villa Wolkonsky, Rome
The seventh edition was held at the Villa Wolkonsky, the British Ambassador's Residence in Rome, for four days of submission-led sessions and invited keynotes.
