Announcing RAAIS 2026 headline speakers
Frontier AI, open-ended agents, AI for medicine, world models, and the first data centers in orbit, all at the 10th Research and Applied AI Summit on June 12th, 2026.
The Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS) is a community for entrepreneurs and researchers who accelerate the science and applications of AI technology. The 10th annual summit takes place on June 12th, 2026 in London. We’re delighted to announce the first wave of headline speakers, across five threads: frontier AI, open-ended agents, AI for medicine and science, world models, and the next substrate for compute itself.
Frontier AI and the future of intelligence
Raia Hadsell is VP of Research at Google DeepMind, where she co-leads the Frontier AI unit and has contributed to Gemini 2.5, Gemma 2, RecurrentGemma, and RoboCat. Her earlier seminal work includes Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Neural Networks, Dimensionality Reduction by Learning an Invariant Mapping, and Learning to Navigate in Complex Environments. Raia is also founder and Editor-in-Chief of Transactions on Machine Learning Research, and in November 2025 was appointed an AI Ambassador to the UK government’s DSIT. Read more about Raia.
Open-ended agents that keep learning
Roberta Raileanu is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, leading the Open-Endedness team and building a new Open-Ended Discovery group. Before DeepMind, she led Meta’s Tool Use team for Llama 3 - work that now sits behind Meta AI, Data Analyst, AI Studio, and the Ads Business Agent. Her research targets the gap between models that look capable in short bursts and agents that keep acquiring skills, with contributions including Toolformer and the MLGym benchmark for AI research agents. She is also an Honorary Associate Professor at UCL. Read more about Roberta.
AI for medicine and science
Vivek Natarajan is a Research Lead at Google DeepMind working at the intersection of AI, medicine, and science. He led Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM, the first AI systems to reach passing and expert-level scores on US Medical Licensing Exam questions, and AMIE, a multimodal diagnostic agent that was non-inferior to 21 primary care physicians in a randomized, blinded virtual OSCE study across 100 multi-visit case scenarios. More recently, he co-led the AI co-scientist, which has already surfaced a candidate for repurposing against acute myeloid leukemia and proposed new therapeutic targets for liver fibrosis. Read more about Vivek.
World models and the future of simulation
Jeff Hawke is co-founder and CTO of Odyssey, a frontier AI lab building general-purpose world models. In 2025, Odyssey unveiled the first AI model to stream interactive 3D worlds in real time, a step toward generative environments people can step into rather than watch. Before Odyssey, Jeff was a founding engineer at Wayve, where he pioneered end-to-end neural networks for driving on complex urban roads. Read more about Jeff.
Compute moves into orbit
Philip Johnston is co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, building the first data centers in space. In November 2025, Starcloud-1 launched with an NVIDIA H100 on board, the first H100 ever operated in orbit, and 100x more powerful than any GPU previously deployed in space. Starcloud-2 will follow this year with multiple GPUs including an NVIDIA Blackwell, and Starcloud-3 is being designed as a 200kW spacecraft to launch from SpaceX’s Starship. In March 2026, Starcloud closed a $170M Series A at a $1.1bn valuation. Read more about Philip.
A community of peers
Throughout the day, attendees will meet 200 researchers, engineers, founders, designers, and policymakers from across the field, with more speakers and programme details to follow. RAAIS 2026 is supported by Lambda and Cooley.
