Peter-Lucas Jones is a visionary leader at the forefront of Māori language revitalization through technology and media. As CEO of Te Hiku Media, he spearheads the development of cutting-edge te reo Māori natural language processing tools, including speech-to-text and text-to-speech systems, and indigenous language pronunciation modelling transforming the digital landscape for Indigenous languages.

A passionate advocate for intergenerational language transmission, Indigenous data sovereignty, and AI-driven language data licensing, Peter-Lucas plays a pivotal role in shaping the future of Māori language use in the digital age. His expertise in corpus development and AI innovation has positioned Te Hiku Media as a global leader in Indigenous language technology.

Peter-Lucas was named to TIME Magazine’s 100 AI list for 2024—an achievement that underscores his impact on the global movement for Indigenous language preservation through artificial intelligence. This year, he was also honoured with the Te Tihi Award at the Tai Tokerau Māori Business Awards for his efforts in promoting Māori Data Sovereignty globally and leveraging AI to preserve language and culture.

He holds key governance roles, including Chair of Te Rūnanga Nui o Te Aupōuri, the Te Aupōuri Treaty Settlement Trust, Te Whakaruruhau o Ngā Reo Irirangi Māori, and Deputy Chair of Whakaata Māori.

We’re excited to welcome Peter-Lucas as a distinguished keynote speaker at this year’s conference!

Ana-Maria Istrate is a Staff Research Scientist in AI/ML at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, working at the intersection of machine learning, biology, and reasoning. Her work focuses on developing virtual cell models and reasoning-based ML frameworks that integrate knowledge from experimental data, language, and world models of biology. She is particularly interested in how language as a modality interacts with other forms of biological representation. These ideas drive Ana-Maria’s current work on rBio and scGenePT, efforts she’s led at CZI.

Previously, she built NLP models for mining scientific literature at scale, contributing to large-scale open-source datasets such as the CZ Software Mentions Dataset, Open Global Data Citation Corpus, and Global Biodata Resource Inventory. Before that, Ana-Maria worked in Software Engineering roles at at Amazon, after graduating from Stanford with degrees in Applied Math and Computer Science (with a Specialization in AI).

We’re excited to welcome Ana-Maria as a distinguished keynote speaker at this year’s conference!

Cas Simons is the Rare Disease Program Lead at the Centre for Population Genomics (CPG), a joint initiative of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. With a PhD in Genomics and Computational Biology, Cas’ work sits at the intersection of rare disease discovery and scalable technology, developing and applying methods that accelerate diagnosis and gene discovery across large, diverse cohorts. He leads Australian national collaborations that translate complex genomic and clinical data into clinically actionable insights for rare disease diagnosis and discovery.