Causal World Models for Real-World Intelligence

Causal World Models for Real-World Intelligence - A Talk by Prof. Biwei Huang An evening with Prof. Biwei Huang (UC San Diego) on causal discovery, world models, and the next paradigm of AI — beyond pattern recognition. About This Event Today's AI can recognise, generate, and predict at extraordinary scale — but the systems that matter most, from robots to biological systems to scientific experiments, respond when we act on them. Getting those systems right takes more than pattern recognition. It takes an understanding of mechanisms: what variables matter, how they interact, and why outcomes occur. Prof. Biwei Huang, founder of Aether AI, is building this next class of systems — causal world models that reason under intervention and operate reliably in the real world. We're thrilled to host Prof. Biwei Huang for a talk on the science driving this shift. Prof. Huang will share her research on causal discovery and inference, causality-empowered foundation models, world models, and VLA models — and what it takes to move AI from passive prediction toward reasoning about consequences, counterfactuals, and interventions. About the Speaker Biwei Huang is an Assistant Professor at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), UC San Diego. Her research spans causal discovery and inference, causality-empowered ML/AI and foundation models, white-box LLMs, GUI agents, world models, and VLA models. She earned her Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University (2022), advised by Prof. Kun Zhang and Prof. Clark Glymour, following work on causal discovery at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Bernhard Schölkopf's lab). She is a 2021 Apple Scholar in AI/ML, a Rising Star of the Trustworthy ML Initiative, and creator of the widely used causal-learn package and the Causal-Copilot autonomous causal analysis agent. Who Should Attend Researchers, engineers, and founders working in causal AI, robotics and Physical AI, foundation models, reinforcement learning, and scientific discovery. Agenda Date & Time: August 5th · 3:30pm — Doors open & networking · 4:00pm — Talk by Prof. Biwei Huang · 4:50pm — Q&A · 5:00pm — Networking Snacks and beverages will be provided!