Raquel Urtasun keynote speaker

Professor Raquel Urtasun is one of the world's foremost artificial intelligence researchers and entrepreneurs, pioneering the technologies that are bringing AI out of the digital world and into the physical one. She is the Founder and CEO of Waabi, a next-generation Physical AI company developing autonomous vehicles, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and a co-founder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

For more than two decades, Raquel has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and autonomous driving. Her research has helped redefine how machines perceive, understand, and reason about the physical world, with breakthroughs in autonomy and simulation that have influenced the development of modern self-driving systems.

In 2021, Raquel founded Waabi with an ambitious goal: to rethink autonomous driving from the ground up using a new generation of AI. Rather than relying solely on enormous quantities of real-world driving data, Waabi combines an end-to-end AI system capable of reasoning about complex situations with an advanced simulator, creating an approach designed to make autonomous technology safer, more scalable, and more efficient.

Before founding Waabi, Raquel served as Chief Scientist of Uber's self-driving division and led Uber ATG's Toronto research and development center. Her career has uniquely bridged academia and industry, giving her firsthand experience of taking breakthrough AI research from the laboratory into technologies designed to operate at global scale.

Today, Raquel is helping define the emerging field of Physical AI—intelligent systems capable of perceiving, reasoning, and acting in the real world. She sees autonomous transportation as only part of a much larger transformation, with AI increasingly moving beyond screens and software into robotics and other physical systems.

Her contributions have earned international recognition. In 2026, Raquel was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the world's most prestigious scientific distinctions. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a recipient of the Order of Ontario, alongside numerous research awards including the NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Award and NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Awards. She was named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023 and Fast Company's AI 20 in 2025.

As a speaker, Raquel brings audiences directly to the frontier of AI innovation. Combining world-class scientific expertise with the perspective of a founder building one of today's most ambitious AI companies, she offers an extraordinary view into what comes after generative AI, how intelligent machines will interact with the physical world, and what this transformation means for business and society.