Terry Sejnowski, Salk Institute

Terrence J. Sejnowski is Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Distinguished Professor at the University of California at San Diego. He has published over 500 scientific papers and 12 books, including ChatGPT and The Future of AI: The Deep Language Learning Revolution. He was instrumental in shaping the BRAIN Initiative that was announced by the White House in 2013, and he received the prestigious Gruber Prize in Neuroscience in 2022 and the Brain Prize in 2024. Sejnowski was also a pioneer in developing learning algorithms for neural networks in the 1980s, inventing the Boltzmann machine with Geoffrey Hinton; this was the first learning algorithm for multilayer neural networks and laid the foundation for deep learning.

 He is the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Foundation, which organizes the largest AI conference, and he is a leader in the recent convergence between neuroscience and AI.