Emergence AI Talks
Formal Agentic AI: Conceptual operators from information lattices and formal verification of digital twins
Featured Speaker: Lav Varshney, Co-founder and CEO of Kocree
Event Details
Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Time: 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM EST (Talk starts at 5:00 PM)
Location: Emergence AI
Youtube Livestream: https://youtube.com/live/q5oCMRLRfO0?feature=share
Format: In-person Talk + Interactive Q&A + Networking
Light refreshments will be served
Who This Talk Is For
This isn't just a high-level "AI is cool" talk. We are diving into the mechanics of trust. You’ll get the most out of this session if you are:
AI Researchers & Academics: Interested in the intersection of information theory, formal methods, and autonomous systems.
Machine Learning Engineers: Tired of "prompt engineering by vibes" and looking for rigorous ways to ensure agentic reliability.
Product Leaders & Founders: Building autonomous features and grappling with the liability and safety of AI "taking action" on behalf of users.
AI Safety & Ethics Specialists: Moving beyond qualitative guidelines toward mathematical guarantees of alignment.
Students & Enthusiasts: Those with a technical background who want to see where the next five years of AI development are headed.
About Lav Varshney
Lav Varshney is the Della Pietra Infinity Professor and inaugural director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University. He is co-founder and CEO of Kocree, Inc., a startup company building novel human-controllable AI for discovery and creativity, and chief scientist of Ensaras, Inc., a startup company focused on AI and wastewater treatment. He holds appointments at RAND Corporation and at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He was previously on the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a visiting scholar at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, a principal research scientist at Salesforce Research AI, and a research staff member at IBM Research. He is a former White House staffer, having served on the National Security Council staff as a White House Fellow, where he contributed to national AI and wireless communications policy. His research interests include information theory and artificial intelligence. He received his B.S. degree from Cornell University and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.