Keynote Speakers

Maja Pantic

Chief AI Research Officer, Natwest Group

Maja Pantic is the Chief AI Research Officer of Natwest Group (NatWest Bank, Bank of Scotland, and Coutts Bank). She is also a Professor in AI at Imperial College London. Previously, she was a Generative AI Research Director at Meta AI (2020 – 2025) and Research Director and Co-founder of Samsung AI Centre Cambridge (2018 – 2020). Prof Pantic has co-authored more than 500 papers with more than 55k citations and an h-index of 107 to date. She received various awards for her work on automatic analysis of human behaviour, including IAPR Maria Petrou Award in 2020 and British Computer Society Roger Needham Award in 2011. She served as an Associate Editor in top AI journals, including International Journal of Computer Vision (2021- to date) and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2011-2021). She is a Fellow of the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering, an IEEE Fellow, and an IAPR Fellow.

Keynote Title: Conversational AI Buddies and Deep Fakes

Abstract: This talk is about conversational AI and how far are we from being able to talk to AI in natural languages. The talk will touch upon modelling and implementation of the AI embodiment in a photorealistic manner. It will explain machine learning, computer vision and Generative AI methods developed to this end and used for photorealistic AI Chat Bots (AI Buddies) generation. The talk will end in discussion of possible applications and misuses of this technology, including Deep Fakes.