2026-2027 DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES

Bjarne Stroustrup, Columbia University

21st Century C++

Bio:
Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++ as well as the author of The C++ Programming Language (4th Edition), A Tour of C++ (3rd edition), Programming: Principles and Practice using C++ (3rd Edition), and many popular and academic publications. Dr. Stroustrup is a professor at Columbia University in New York City. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and an IEEE, ACM, and CHM fellow. He received the 2018 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the IEEE Computer Society's 2018 Computer Pioneer Award, and the 2017 IET Faraday Medal. His research interests include distributed systems, design, programming techniques, software development tools, and programming languages. He is actively involved in the ISO standardization of C++. He holds a masters in Mathematics from Aarhus University, where he is an honorary professor, and a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University, where he is an honorary fellow of Churchill College.

View slides of the lecture

Watch video of lecture

Mohit Bansal, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

AI Challenges: Trustworthy Collaboration, World Discovery, and Long-Horizon Memory

Abstract:

Abstract:
In this talk, I will discuss 3 major pitfalls and challenges of current state-of-the-art AI agents, and present potential solutions for: (1) Teaching agents to be trustworthy and safe collaborators based on: social/pragmatic multi-agent interactions via speaker-listener confidence calibration, learning to balance positive and negative persuasion, and multi-agent AI safety through the lens of compositional privacy and theory-of-mind based belief prediction and steering; (2) Improving skills/world models needed for efficient, robust, safe action and collaboration based on: discovering reusable programmatic skills (including skill profiling for robust, safer multi-agent setups), weakness-driven adaptive data/environment generation, and structured world model discovery and inference; (3) Planning of long-horizon memory for multi-step reasoning and generation over continuously evolving, conflicting, and scattered information. We will cover diverse domains (math, commonsense, coding, tool-use, computer use, embodied actions, etc.), modalities (text, images, videos, audio, gaze, layouts, etc.), and real-world applications (early medical diagnosis and classroom education engagement).

Bio:
Dr. Mohit Bansal is the John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor, Director of the MURGe-Lab (UNC-AI Group), and Core AI Lead of the ENGAGE NSF-AI Institute in the Computer Science department at UNC Chapel Hill. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley and his BTech from IIT Kanpur. His research expertise is in multimodal generative models, reasoning and planning agents, faithful language generation, and interpretable, efficient, and generalizable deep learning. He is an ACL and AAAI Fellow and recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), IIT Kanpur Young Alumnus Award, DARPA Director's Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, Google Focused Research Award, Microsoft Investigator Fellowship, Army Young Investigator Award (YIP), DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), and outstanding paper awards at ACL, CVPR, EACL, COLING, CoNLL, and TMLR. He has been a keynote speaker for the IEEE/CVF WACV 2027, IEEE MLSP 2026, ECAI 2025, ACM-CODS 2025, AACL-IJCNLP 2023, CoNLL 2023, and INLG 2022 conferences. His service includes EMNLP Program Co-Chair, Associate Editor-in-Chief for TPAMI, CoNLL Program Co-Chair, ACL Executive Committee, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee, ACL Doctoral Dissertation Award Co-Organizer, ACL Mentorship Program Co-Founder, and Associate Editor for ACM AI Letters, TACL, CL, IEEE/ACM TASLP, and CSL journals. Webpage: https://www.cs.unc.edu/~mbansal/

Luciano Floridi, Yale University

AI and the Digital Society as Neo-Manufacturing

Abstract:

Abstract:
The digital revolution is moving from exploring a new continent to building a new society. This talk argues that AI is best understood as agency without intelligence. It's less a tool than a change in our environment, comparable to electricity. That agency is already taking over real-world tasks: in 2025, AI agents moved from pilots to live transactions with real money. The talk looks at six trends shaping this shift. First, artificial agency is becoming ubiquitous across our onlife environments and turning into the infrastructure of the infosphere. Increasingly, we reshape the world to suit artificial agents rather than the other way round. Second, AI is becoming embedded as the operating system of competitive organisations. Third, the focus is moving from replicating intelligence to optimising agency. Fourth, the eclipse of the analogue means we rely more on digital models than on the systems they represent. Fifth, the hardware turn makes control of infrastructure the main way to control the digital. Sixth, a possible "Pax Digitalis" could see digital powers dividing up the infosphere along corporate lines. Across all six, one point stands out: there is no innovation without integration. That means second-order qualities like usability, security and trust matter most. The talk ends by describing information societies as a form of neo-manufacturing, where information is both the raw material and the finished product. In that world, artificial agents will be judged by how well they integrate with human work. The call is to think like a seamstress, not a sorceress.

Bio:
Luciano Floridi is the John K. Castle Professor in the Practice of Cognitive Science and the Founding Director of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University. He is also a Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication in the Department of Legal Studies at the University of Bologna. Widely recognised as one of the most authoritative voices in contemporary philosophy, he is, according to Scopus, the most cited living philosopher. He pioneered the philosophy and ethics of information and has become a leading interpreter of the digital revolution, with foundational contributions to the normative frameworks of the digital society. His scholarly output exceeds 400 publications, spanning the philosophy of information, digital ethics, AI ethics, the philosophy of technology, and the history of philosophy, with many of his works translated worldwide. His recent books include The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2023) and The Green and the Blue: Naive Ideas to Improve Politics in the Digital Age (Wiley, 2023). Artificial Agency: Explorations of a Post-AI Culture (Wiley) and Encounters: An Experiment in Distant Writing (Columbia University Press) are forthcoming in 2027. In 2022, he was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for his contributions to philosophy.