Fireside Chat with Michal Valko

Michal Valko Bio
Michal is the Chief Models Officer at a stealth startup, tenured researcher at Inria, and the lecturer at the MVA master of ENS Paris-Saclay. Michal is primarily interested in designing algorithms that would require as little human supervision as possible. That is why he is working on methods and settings that are able to deal with minimal feedback, such as deep reinforcement learning, bandit algorithms, self-supervised learning, or self play. Michal has recently worked on representation learning, word models and deep (reinforcement) learning algorithms that have some theoretical underpinning. In the past he has also worked on sequential algorithms with structured decisions where exploiting the structure leads to provably faster learning. Michal is now working on large large models (LMMs), in particular providing algorithmic solutions for their scalable fine-tuning and alignment. He received his Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Pittsburgh, before getting a tenure at Inria in 2012 and starting Google DeepMind Paris in 2018 with Rémi Munos. In 2024, he became the principal Llama engineer at Meta, building online reinforcement learning stack and research for Llama 3 and 4.

Richard Marko Bio

Richard Marko has been ESET’s CEO since 2011. Under his leadership, ESET has become one of the leading cybersecurity vendors with its headquarters in the EU and an impressive list of clients including Microsoft, Google, Tesla and Dell. Richard is a board member of the ESET Foundation which is devoted to the support of education, technology, innovation and science with its ESET Science Award signature project.
Richard joined ESET in the early 90s and became one of the authors of its antimalware system with a unique scanning engine. In 2002, Richard invented a new, AI-based advanced heuristics method which had proven highly successful against the huge outbreaks of email-borne viruses that were plaguing the Internet in the early 2000s. He subsequently extended these ideas into the malware DNA detection technology that sits at the core of ESET detection today. CRN, an international IT business magazine, ranked him among the 25 most important ideological leaders in IT in 2010 and his work on heuristic analysis was nominated as the most innovative idea in the world in the fight against malicious software in the last ten years.

DISCUSSION

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