Novel thinkers and pioneers in brain research, technology, healthcare and the economy will gather this month in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the third conference of The Brain Forum. The forum, on May 26 and 27, will also be attended by researchers, engineers, healthcare professionals, entrepreneurs, industrialists, investors, funding agencies and policy makers to advance the understanding of how the brain works and to accelerate the application and value of this knowledge in society and the economy. The event will be divided into two sections – with Day 1 focusing on entrepreneurship and innovation, and Day 2 on new advances in science and technology. During Day 1, the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Day, entrepreneurs and investors will share their expertise in translating science into business, and discuss their ideas for the future. The keynote lecture'Practical lessons in machine learning', will be presented by Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, and scalable machine learning at Google Research, and will explore aspects of machine learning – upon which much of Google's work on language, speech, translation, visual processing, ranking and prediction relies.