AIMLx26: An artificial intelligence and machine learning expo at Florida State University

Keynote Speaker

Sherwin Wu

Head of engineering, OpenAI Platform

Sherwin leads the engineering for the Platform team at OpenAI, which builds the OpenAI API and its enterprise products. Prior to OpenAI, he worked on residential real estate pricing algorithms at Opendoor. Before that, he worked at Quora on the news feed and digest emails. He studied computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Speakers and Panel Presenters

Markus J. Buehler

McAfee Professor of Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Markus J. Buehler is the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT and a pioneer in AI-driven knowledge discovery. He created powerful graph-aware, multi-agent AI platforms that turn heterogeneous data into science-grounded actionable insight, powering breakthroughs in materials science, biology and healthcare. Buehler is among the world’s most-cited materials scientists and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Feynman Prize, American Society of Medical Engineers Daniel C. Drucker Medal, James R. Rice Medal and The Washington Award. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. For more than a decade he has also taught executive and technical professionals at MIT, shaping the next generation of leaders in engineering, knowledge discovery and artificial intelligence.

Nathan Crock

Manager of AI engineering and operations at Premera Blue Cross; affiliate faculty in the FSU Department of Scientific Computing

Nathan’s research interests center on context engineering for agentic systems, including memory architectures, retrieval-augmentation methods, and context window optimization. He is particularly focused on how these techniques enable scalable multi-agent orchestration and coordination in Large Language Model-based systems. Nathan founded FSU's Machine Learning Expo in 2018, the event that evolved into the current AIMLx series, and previously served as director of NewSci Labs and a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience. His career bridges academic research and industry practice, having led AI teams, co-founded an AI-powered training platform, and consulted on distributed systems for organizations, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and international health organizations.

Alejandro Lopez-Lira

Assistant professor of finance at the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business

Alejandro Lopez-Lira’s research focuses on the intersection of fintech, machine learning, and asset pricing, with recent work pioneering the application of large language models to financial markets and has been published in leading academic journals. He wrote the book “The Predictive Edge: Outsmart the Market Using Generative AI and ChatGPT in Financial Forecasting.”

Zhe He

Professor, FSU School of Information; director, The FSU Institute for Successful Longevity; director, FSU eHealth Lab; chair, American Medical Informatics Association’s Knowledge Discover and Data Mining Working Group

Zhe He is a biomedical informatician whose research integrates human-centered computing, artificial intelligence, and health data science to support clinical decision-making, patient engagement and translational research. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, among others. He is an elected fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics and the American Medical Informatics Association.

Gary Tyson

Professor, FSU Department of Computer Science

Gary Tyson works in AI, machine learning and computer architecture. He has worked at the FSU-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory to develop custom Large Language Models to enhance the user experience at the lab. His interests also include AI tutors for education, transformer alternatives, domain-specific embedding spaces, and hardware accelerators for power efficient inference in deep neural networks.