Talks/Panels | Malikeh Ehghaghi

Build With AI: Women in Tech conference 2026

Women in Industry Research

Panel Speaker

A panel on personal journeys in AI research, the responsibilities of building and deploying AI systems, and bridging the academia–industry gap — alongside panelists Jekaterina Novikova and Aneri Gandhi, hosted by Google Developer Groups (UofT Mississauga) & ACM-W: ACM's Women in Computing at Shopify Toronto.

Event Website

Shopify, Toronto, ON, Canada

NeurIPS 2025

Model Merging: Theory, Practice and Applications

Tutorial Speaker & Panel Moderator

A tutorial covering model merging from its theoretical foundations to state-of-the-art methods and real-world applications — co-presented with my academic Ph.D. advisor Colin Raffel and Marco Ciccone, with a panel featuring Charles Goddard, Sara Hooker, Edoardo Ponti, Alexandra Chronopoulou, and Margaret Li.

Talk Recording

San Diego, CA, USA

MLOps World | Gen AI Summit 2025 Toronto Machine Learning Summit (TMLS) 2025

Scaling Down, Powering Up: Can Efficient Training Beat Scaling Laws?

Speaker

Challenging the assumption that scaling parameters and data is the only path to better LLMs, this talk surveys state-of-the-art data-centric strategies (data mixing, filtering, deduplication) and model-centric approaches (pruning, distillation, quantization, model merging, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and test-time scaling) that achieve strong performance at a fraction of the cost — with DeepSeek as a compelling real-world case study.

Talk Recording

Toronto, ON, Canada

Girls in Tech Conference (GITCon) 2025

Female Leaders in the GTA in Tech

Panel Speaker

A panel by female tech leaders for girls in grades 6–8 across the GTA, sharing our journeys in tech to inspire the next generation — alongside Susan Yu, Lada Semakova, and Joyce Zhou.

Event Website

Toronto, ON, Canada

Women in Tech (WIT) Conference 2025

From Bias to Brilliance: How Women Are Rewriting the Rules of AI?

Keynote Speaker

By Google Developer Groups (GDG) & ACM-W: ACM's Women in Computing

Event Website

Toronto, ON, Canada

WILS & Toronto ACM-W Professional Chapter, Vanguard, 2025

Toronto ACM-W Professional Chapter Launch

Opening Talk Speaker

Joint event by Women's Initiative for Leadership Success (WILS) and Toronto ACM-W Professional Chapter

Toronto ACM-W Professional Chapter

Vanguard, Toronto, ON, Canada

MScAC Orientation, University of Toronto, 2025

MScAC Alumni Panel

Panel Speaker

A panel discussion connecting with the incoming MScAC cohort alongside fellow alumni Sebastian Regalado Lozano, Jyotheeswar Arvind Manickavasagar, Deepkamal K. Gill, and Lydia Chau.

Event Website

University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

The Small Language Model (SLM) Show, Arcee AI, 2024

LLM Efficiency: What Does It Mean and Can Smaller Models Compete?

Panel Moderator & Co-host

Co-hosted with Julien Simon. A discussion on language model efficiency, the trade-off between model size, accuracy, and performance, with guests Jekaterina Novikova (Principal AI Scientist, Vanguard) and Milica Cvetkovic (Applied AI Solutions Lead, Google).

Watch on YouTube

Virtual Event (San Francisco, CA, USA)

Machine Learning for Cognitive and Mental Health (ML4CMH) Workshop, AAAI 2024

ML4CMH Workshop

Program Co-chair

A workshop addressing the urgent need for ML systems that better understand cognitive and mental health through diverse biomarkers — from speech and EEG to health records and wearables. Brought together experts in multimodal learning, clinical NLP, and AI safety with a focus on robustness, interpretability, and low-resource settings.

Workshop Website Preface