February 22, 2025/ 1:00 PM

UCLA Geffen Hall Auditorium

The first Japan-US Science Forum in Southern California

Speakers

AI for neuroscience and neural engineering
Jonathan Kao, PhD Associate Professor, UCLA Electrical Engineering

Jonathan Kao is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. His research interests lie at the intersection of neuroscience, neural engineering and artificial intelligence. He is a member of the UCLA Neuroscience Interdepartmental Program and the UCLA Brain Research Institute. He is the recipient of the National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Brain & Behavioral Research Foundation NARSAD Young Investigator Award, and a Hellman Fellowship.

The Power of Words: NLP to Mine Unstructured Health Data
Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez, MS, PhD, ACMI Fellow, Cedars Sinai Medical Center

Dr. Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez is a Professor and Vice Chair of Research and Education in the Department of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Director of the Health AI Graduate Programs. An expert in natural language processing (NLP) and AI. She has authored over 210 papers and led multiple NIH-funded projects, including her R01 on "Social Media Mining for Pharmacovigilance", which produced key tools, datasets, and over 65 publications. Her recent research applies Large Language Models to electronic health records, social media, and literature. She also serves on the NIH BDMA review panel and NLM Board of Counselors.

The Quest for Conscious AI
Katsushi Arisaka PhD, Department of Physics & Astronomy, Electrical & Computer Engineering UCLA

Katsushi Arisaka is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA. He earned his Ph.D. in 1985 from the University of Tokyo, where he developed the groundbreaking Kamiokande experiment that detected neutrinos from a supernova in 1987 and led to the discovery of neutrino mass in 1998. With over thirty years of expertise in particle physics, Professor Arisaka has spent the last decade applying his profound knowledge to unravel the fundamental principles of the human brain. His ambitious research seeks to illuminate the origins of the Universe, life, and consciousness by discovering novel, yet-to-be-revealed laws of physics through inquiry.

Sponsor(s): Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, Southern California Japanese Scholar Forum (SCJSF), Nichibei Doctors Club (NDC), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)