Tufa Talks episode 2 - Mattia Rigotti (IBM Research Zürich)

We are a small, independent research group working on fundamental AI research.
Join us for the second in a series of talks hosted at our office. Our goal is to share the latest ML research and foster open discussion and collaboration among ML researchers in Zürich.
Speaker: Mattia Rigotti (IBM Research Zürich)
https://www.matrig.net/
Mattia Rigotti is a Senior Research Scientist at IBM Research Zürich and a Columbia University PhD alumnus in Neuroscience. His work sits at the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience — spanning LLM reasoning, visual foundation models, and the geometry of neural representations in the brain. He is best known for his research on mixed selectivity in the prefrontal cortex, showing how high-dimensional neural representations enable flexible cognition. His most recent work asks whether reasoning in LLMs can be elicited without reinforcement learning, drawing on cognitive psychology to show that equipping a base model with a small set of "cognitive tools" — modular reasoning operations each executed by the LLM itself — is surprisingly effective at unlocking structured, multi-step reasoning
Agenda:
📅 Date: May 26
🕕 Time: 6:00–8:00 PM
📍 Place: Tufa Labs
17:45 – Doors open
18:00 – Talk
18:30 – Open Q&A
19:00 – Pizza, drinks, networking
Please note: doors open at 17:45 and close promptly at 18:00. Make sure to arrive within that window.
We'll have pizzas and drinks after the talk, hope you can stay!
Spots are limited, and registration requires approval. If selected, you will be notified by the Friday before the event.