Focus area: ML Systems
I am an ELLIS PhD student in the Medical Image Computing department at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). Before starting my PhD, I worked as a Junior Data Scientist at AstraZeneca in Gothenburg (Sweden) and as a Research Assistant at Uppsala University.
My current research focuses on improving model generalizability across clinical settings, with a particular emphasis on brain imaging. I am developing a stroke identification algorithm designed to perform robustly in multi-centric environments. I am also collaborating with the University of Amsterdam on analyzing temporal brain image data to extract patterns that enhance model generalization.
I have received several travel grants for international research stays during my PhD, as well as excellence scholarships during my Bachelor’s and Master’s studies.
PhD student, AutoML Freiburg
The research of Massimo Fornasier embraces a broad spectrum of problems in mathematical modeling, analysis and numerical analysis. Fornasier is particularly interested in the concept of compression as appearing in different forms in data analysis, image and signal processing, and in the adaptive numerical solutions of partial differential equations or high-dimensional optimization problems.
Fornasier received his doctoral degree in computational mathematics in 2003 from the University of Padua, Italy. After spending from 2003 to 2006 as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Vienna and University of Rome La Sapienza, he joined the Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (RICAM) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences where he served as a senior research scientist until March 2011. He was an associate researcher from 2006 to 2007 for the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics of Princeton University, USA. In 2011 Fornasier was appointed Chair of Applied Numerical Analysis at TUM. He is a member of VQR, a panel responsible for the evaluation of the quality of research in Italy. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Networks and Heterogeneous Media, Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications and Calcolo.
Since August 2021 Professor Armin Biere is leading the Chair of Computer Architecture at the University Freiburg in Germany after 17 years as head of the Institute for Formal Models and Verification at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria.
Between 2000 and 2004 he held a position as Assistant Professor within the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. In 1999 Biere was working for a start-up company in electronic design automation after one year as Post-Doc with Edmund Clarke at CMU, Pittsburgh, USA. In 1997 Biere received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.
His primary research interests are applied formal methods, more specifically formal verification of hardware and software, using model checking and related techniques with the focus on developing efficient SAT and SMT solvers. He is the author and co-author of more than 279 papers and served on the program committee of more than 206 international conferences and workshops. His most influential work is his contribution to Bounded Model Checking.
Decision procedures for SAT, QBF and SMT, developed by him or under his guidance rank at the top many international competitions and were awarded 107 medals including 60 gold medals. He is a recipient of an IBM faculty award in 2012, received the TACAS most influential paper in the first 20 years of TACAS award in 2014, the HVC’15 award on the most influential work in the last five years in formal verification, simulation, and testing, the ETAPS 2017 Test of Time Award, the CAV Award in 2018, the IJCAI-JAIR 2019 Award, the 1990s Most Influential Paper Award at DAC’23, and the Herbrand Award at IJCAR’24.
Besides organizing several workshops Armin Biere was co-chair of SAT’06, and FMCAD’09, was PC co-chair of HVC’12, co-chair of CAV’14, acted as co-chair of TACAS’20. He served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Automated Reasoning (JAR) (2011 to 2021) and the journal for Formal Methods in System Design (FMSD) (2012 – 2021). From 2019 to 2023 he filled the role of Associate Editor on the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and continues to serve on the editorial board of Journal on Satisfiability, Boolean Modeling and Computation (JSAT) since its inception in 2004, and since summer 2023 as editor in chief.
He is an editor of the Handbook of Satisfiability, for the first edition in 2009 and the second edition in 2021, and initiated and organizes the Hardware Model Checking Competition (HWMCC) from 2007-2024. From 2011-2017 he served as (first) chair and from 2017 to 2020 as vice-chair, now as counselor to the board of the SAT Association. Since 2012 he is a member of the steering committee of FMCAD. In 2006 Armin Biere co-founded NextOp Software Inc. which was acquired by Atrenta Inc. in 2012.
From 2014 to 2021 until he moved to Freiburg Prof. Armin Biere acted as chair of student affairs (Präses) for computer science, helping to organize the PhD program in computer science at JKU. During the same time until May 2015 he also acted as head of the commission of the curriculum committee (Studienkommissionsvorsitzender) for the bachelor and master program in computer science and thus was as well responsible for admission and credit transfer, for both the bachelor and master program in computer science.
Since October 2023 he acts as director of the Informatics Institute Freiburg (IIF), the department of computer science at the University of Freiburg.
Prof. Dr. Mira Mezini received her PhD from the University of Siegen and was Visiting Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Boston (USA) before being appointed to the TU Darmstadt in 2000. There she is head of the software engineering department in the computer science division. Mira Mezini is Co-Director of hessian.AI. She plays important roles in a number of collaborative projects, such as those of the German Research Foundation and the Hessian funding program LOEWE, and holds leading positions, for example, as a member of the Board of the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE. She conducts research in programming languages and software engineering and was among the pioneers of machine learning techniques for automatic completion of programs. Prof. Dr. Mezini’s focus under the LOEWE Top Professorship will be research on programming foundations for the development of reliable and trustworthy decentralized interactive-learning software systems.
Prof. Dr. Kristian Kersting is a co-director of the Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI), head of the research department “Foundations of Systemic AI” at the German Research Center for AI (DFKI), and a professor of AI and Machine Learning at TU Darmstadt. After the PhD at the University of Freiburg in 2006, he was with MIT, Fraunhofer IAIS, the University of Bonn, and TU Dortmund University. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), the European Association for AI (EurAI), and the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), book author (“How Machines Learn”) and received the inaugural German AI Award 2019. He wrote a regular AI column in the Welt am Sonntag.
Marc Toussaint is professor for Intelligent Systems at TU Berlin and was previously professor for ML and Robotics at U Stuttgart, Max Planck Fellow at the MPI for Intelligent Systems, and visiting scholar at MIT. His research interests are in the intersection of AI and robotics, namely in using machine learning, optimization, and AI reasoning to tackle fundamental problems in robotics. Concrete research topics include models and algorithms for physical reasoning, task-and-motion planning (logic-geometric programming), learning heuristics, the planning-as-inference paradigm, and learning to transfer model-based strategies to reactive and adaptive real-world behavior.
Begüm Demir is currently a Full Professor and the founder head of the Remote Sensing Image Analysis (RSiM) group at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, TU Berlin and the head of the Big Data Analytics for Earth Observation research group at the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD). Her research activities lie at the intersection of machine learning, remote sensing and signal processing. Specifically, she performs research in the field of processing and analysis of large-scale Earth observation data acquired by airborne and satellite-borne systems. She was awarded by the prestigious ‘2018 Early Career Award’ by the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society for her research contributions in machine learning for information retrieval in remote sensing. In 2018, she received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for her project “BigEarth: Accurate and Scalable Processing of Big Data in Earth Observation”. She is an IEEE Senior Member and Fellow of European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).
Barbara Plank is Professor and co-director of the Center for Information and Language Processing at LMU Munich. She holds the Chair for AI and Computational Linguistics at LMU Munich and is an visiting Professor at the Computer Science department at the IT University of Copenhagen. Her MaiNLP research lab (Munich AI and NLP lab, pronounced “my NLP”) focuses on robust machine learning for Natural Language Processing with an emphasis on human-inspired and data-centric approaches. Her research has been funded by distinguished grants and awards, including an ERC Consolidator Grant, DFF Sapere Aude Research Leader grant, ELLIS Fellow, and several best paper awards. She regularly serves on international committees, including the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the European Chapter of the ACL, the Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) and Scientific Advisory Boards of Research Centers across Europe.