9:00 - 10:00 a.m.

Registration and Breakfast

10:00 - 10:15 a.m.

Opening Remarks

Glenda Crisp

President & CEO, Vector Institute

10:15 - 10:45 a.m.

Fireside chat 

Nick Frosst

Co-Founder, Cohere

10:45 - 11:15 a.m.

Research Talk

Chris J. Maddison

Faculty Member, Vector Institute

11:15 - 11:45 a.m.

Guardrails for Agentic AI Enterprise

2025 marked a definitive shift from Large Language Models to complex Agentic AI solutions. We have moved from asking 'What can AI answer?' to 'What can AI do?', enabling enterprises to embrace autonomous decision-making. Consequently, the primary challenge has become the governance of Agentic Autonomy—managing systems that perform independent planning, utilize integrated tools, and execute multi-step processes without constant human intervention.

This session traces the evolution of Responsible AI from its foundations in LLMs to the critical necessity of Agentic Governance in 2026. We will also explore the urgent need for non-linear forms of accountability, ensuring ethical guardrails scale alongside AI’s increasing agency.

Ankita Upadhyay

Senior Director, AI Enablement, Thomson Reuters

12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Networking and Lunch

1:00 - 1:30 p.m.

General visual intelligence with video models

Just as Large Language Models (LLMs) transformed natural language processing from bespoke tools into unified foundation models, this talk argues that video generation models are poised to drive a similar paradigm shift in computer vision. The talk will demonstrate that large-scale video models, such as Veo 3, possess emergent zero-shot capabilities that extend far beyond video generation. Without any task-specific training, these models can perform tasks across the entire vision stack—from fundamental perception (e.g., segmentation, edge detection) and physical modeling, to image manipulation and complex visual reasoning. 

Priyank Jaini

Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

1:30 - 2:00 p.m.

El Agente está presente: The era of AI scientists

We stand at the inflection point of Agentic Science, where AI transitions from a passive generator to an active reasoning engine capable of autonomous discovery. The challenge of scientific research—characterized by heterogeneous tools, high-dimensional search spaces, and strict physical constraints—demands systems capable of long-horizon planning and rigorous self-correction. In this keynote, I unveil the El Agente ecosystem, a unified cognitive architecture designed to automate the full lifecycle of research.
Moving beyond standard chain-of-thought prompting, we introduce a hierarchical multi-agent framework that solves the "tool-use bottleneck" through dynamic planning and modular memory. I will discuss how we engineer agents capable of Guided Deep Research—a novel runtime retrieval mechanism that allows systems to parse complex technical documentation and synthesize code for heterogeneous simulation environments they were not explicitly trained on. Furthermore, we address the grand challenge of spatial reasoning by grounding vision-language models in precise 3D Euclidean tools, bridging the gap between generative intent and physical constraints. This architecture represents a blueprint for the next generation of AI: systems that do not just assist, but collaborate, reason, and discover.

Alán Aspuru-Guzik

Faculty Member, Vector Institute

2:00 - 2:30 p.m.

Closing remarks and networking

9:00 - 10:00 a.m.

Registration and breakfast

10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Workshop Tracks - concurrent sessions

Privacy & Security

This workshop convenes researchers and industry experts to examine cutting-edge work in AI privacy and security. Discussions will span privacy-preserving techniques for data and models, empirical insights from real-world use cases, and research challenges such as privacy leakage and security threats.

Privacy & Security speakers include:

• Juan-Carlos Castaneda, Data & AI Security Senior Manager, Accenture
• Jesse Creswell, Staff Machine Learning Scientist, TD/Layer 6
• Gautam Kamath, Faculty Member, Vector Institute
• Areeb Khawaja, Technical Product Manager, TELUS
• Masoumeh Shafieinejad, Applied Machine Learning Scientist – Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Vector Institute
• David Emerson, Applied Machine Learning Scientist, Vector Institute
• Student Lightning Talks

10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Workshop Tracks - concurrent sessions

Agentic AI

This workshop brings together academic and industry researchers to explore the research and real-world deployment of agentic AI systems. Topics include system design, benchmarking, evaluation, and trustworthiness.

Agentic AI speakers include:

• Xiao Xiao Li, Faculty Member, Vector Institute 
• Dana Sharp, Director, Linamar Robotics
• Amrit Krishnan, Technical Team Lead, Vector Institute
• Student Lightning Talks

10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Workshop Tracks - concurrent sessions

Frontiers of Large Language Models (LLMs)

This workshop highlights recent advances in large language models, with a focus on reasoning capabilities, efficiency and scaling, benchmarking, and evaluation. Sessions will also include lessons learned from deploying LLMs in industry.

Frontiers of LLMs speakers include:

• Arash Afkanpour, Applied Machine Learning Scientist, Vector Institute
• Mrinal Trikha, Manager, Deloitte
• Student Lightning Talks

12:00 - 1:30 p.m.

Poster Sessions & Lunch

1:30 - 2:30 p.m.

Concurrent sessions - Breakout discussions

• Privacy & Security
• Agentic AI
• Frontiers of LLMs