On June 4, 2026, eight Mila researchers stepped into the spotlight for the finale of the fourth edition of Mila’s science communication competition, Speed Science. They had exactly 3 minutes to present their complex AI research in front of a jury and a diverse audience at Mila’s Agora.
The challenge: translating their research into a story anyone could understand.
Participants attended workshops and received professional coaching focused on science communication, storytelling, and public speaking to help them synthesize and communicate their work to a non-specialist audience.
The five jury members evaluated the finalists across four core criteria: public speaking skills, science popularization, structure of the presentation, and creativity.
By the end of the contest, the eight researchers had proven that the impact of their work strongly depends on clear and effective communication.
We are proud to announce this year's winners and to celebrate their will to make science accessible to everyone.
1st place and Audience Choice Award: Jesuino Vieira, Master’s student at Université de Montréal, for his presentation “How we move through ideas”.
2nd place: Guillaume Payeur, PhD student at Université de Montréal, for his presentation “From Galaxies to Medicine: Solving High-Dimensional Inference”.
3rd place: Tim Arni, Master’s student at Université de Montréal, for his presentation “The Power of One-Trick-Models”.
Here were the topics of each of the finalists’ presentations:
- Missael Barco, Teaching Telescopes to See Dark Matter
- Neda Adl, Does AI Really Know What I Like?
- Alejandro Salinas-Medina, Neuroagents. From a Single Vibration to a Living Brain: Simulation at the Click of a Button
- Andreas Filipp, Seeing the Invisible
- Wietze Suijker, Who Gets Looked At?
Mila extends its sincere thanks to Bell, BrainBox AI and Telus for their generous contribution.
See you soon for the next edition!
