WiML Social @ CoLM 2025
Montreal Convention Centre (Palais des congrès de Montréal)
October 7, 2025
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM EST
Program
Join us for a casual networking lunch designed to connect you with peers, leaders, and mentors in the AI community. You'll get to hear from experts, participate in mentorship roundtable discussions, and meet new people in our open networking sessions. We welcome and encourage participation from our allies!
1:00 PM | Featured Remarks from Leading Experts
Nazneen Rajani (Collinear AI)
Jessy Li (UT Austin)
Arathi Mani (UK AI Security Institute)
Anaelia Ovalle (FAIR)
Our speakers would be around after the session should you wish to interact with them!
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM | Mentorship Roundtables and Open Networking
Choose between open networking or mentorship roundtables:
Balancing Career & Life with Julia Kreutzer (Cohere) and Mor Geva Pipek (Tel Aviv University)
Keeping Pace with AI Research with Sweta Agrawal (Google) and Ruqi Zhang (Purdue University)
Careers in Industry with Olga Golovneva (Meta AI Research Labs), Bahare Fatemi (Google), and Spandana Gella (ServiceNow AI Research)
Responsible AI in Practice with Adina Williams (FAIR) and Saadia Gabriel (UCLA)
Open Networking: Reconnect with old colleagues and build new connections!
For additional information, check Luma or email at nikitasaxena@wimlworkshop.org.
Organizing Committee
Nikita Saxena is a WiML Board Member and was the co-liaison of the WiML@CoLM social. She is a Research Engineer at Google DeepMind, working on enhancing the multimodal understanding and generation capabilities of Gemini in close collaboration with Ishita Dasgupta and Isabelle Guyon. She graduated from BITS Pilani in 2023 with a dual major in physics and computer science. She completed her thesis at the Mila Quebec AI Institute under the supervision of Professor Yoshua Bengio.
Santhoshi Ravichandran completed her Master’s in Computer Science at Mila / Université de Montréal, where she was a Visiting Researcher at ServiceNow, evaluating and fine-tuning web agents using reinforcement learning. Her past work spans detecting fraudulent transactions in capital markets and developing machine learning solutions to enhance accessibility for visually impaired users.
Zina Kamel is a research Master’s student in Computer Science at McGill University and Mila, where she is a McCall MacBain Scholar. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at the Lebanese American University in 2024 through the MEPI Tomorrow’s Leaders scholarship. Her research focuses on improving reasoning and representation in world models.
Minseon Kim is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, ML team, in Montréal. She received her Ph.D. from KAIST in 2025, where her thesis, “Towards Safe and Robust Representation with Self-Supervised Learning,” explored methods to improve model robustness and trustworthiness. Her research focuses on AI safety and controllability, aiming to design systems that can reason about context and handle ambiguous or risky situations more reliably. Recent work investigates context-aware inference, safety modularity, and efficient safety alignment techniques for large language models.
WiML Board Organizers
Erin Grant – D&I chair
Tatjana Chavdarova – VP Events WiML