ML-NYC Speaker Series and Happy Hour: Carl Vondrick

The ML in NYC Speaker Series + Happy Hour is excited to host Professor Carl Vondrick from Columbia University! His talk will take place Tuesday, November 10th at 4pm at the Flatiron Institute. As always, there will be a reception afterward for all attendees.

NOTE: Registration will close on November 6th. Please be sure to register beforehand! Registration is required for entrance.

Intelligence Beyond Vision and Language

Abstract: I will talk about our explorations into building intelligent machines that don’t reason in language or text, contrary to the tremendous success of LLMs. While we haven’t solved the problem, we are inspired by evidence in animal behavior for how they sense their surroundings and reason about them. I will then discuss some recent work about how LLMs are solving spatial problems.

Bio: Carl Vondrick is the YM Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and a member of the Columbia Core AI Lab. He is also a research scientist at Apple. His research studies computer vision, robotics, deep learning, multimodal learning, and their applications. He was previously a research scientist at Google and a visiting researcher at Cruise. He received his PhD from MIT in 2017, advised by Antonio Torralba, and his BS from UC Irvine in 2011. His awards include the 2024 PAMI Young Researcher Award, the NSF CAREER Award and the Toyota Research Institute Young Faculty Award. He served as Senior Program Chair of ICLR in 2025 and General Chair in 2026, and sits on its board.