Focus area: ML Systems
Ola Engkvist, PhD, is Executive Director and Head of Molecular AI within Discovery Sciences at AstraZeneca R&D, where he leads the development and application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to accelerate drug design. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed scientific articles and is an ELLIS fellow at the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems and a 2025 Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. He holds an adjunct professorship in machine learning and AI for drug design at Chalmers University of Technology, serves as a Trustee of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, and is recognized for his work in pharmaceutical innovation.
Matthias W. Seeger received a Ph.D. from the School of Informatics, Edinburgh university, UK, in 2003 (advisor Christopher Williams). He was a research fellow with Michael Jordan and Peter Bartlett, University of California at Berkeley, from 2003, and with Bernhard Schoelkopf, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tuebingen, Germany, from 2005. He led a research group at the University of Saarbruecken, Germany, from 2008, and was assistant professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne from fall 2010. He joined Amazon as machine learning scientist in 2014. He received the ICML Test of Time Award in 2020.
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
Christian Theobalt is The Scientific Director of the Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence Department at the Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany. He is also a Professor of Computer Science at Saarland University, Germany. Christian is also the Founding Director of the Saarbrücken Research Center for Visual Computing, Interaction and Artificial Intelligence (VIA), a strategic research partnership between Google and MPI for Informatics. From 2007 until 2009 he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. He received his MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, his Diplom (MS) degree in Computer Science from Saarland University, and his PhD (Dr.-Ing.) from the Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics. In his research he looks at algorithmic problems that lie at the intersection of Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and Machine Learning, such as: static and dynamic 3D scene reconstruction, neural rendering and neural scene representations, marker-less motion and performance capture, virtual humans, virtual and augmented reality, computer animation, intrinsic video and inverse rendering, computational videography, machine learning for graphics and vision, visual generative AI, new sensors for 3D acquisition, as well as image- and physically-based rendering. He is also interested in using reconstruction techniques for human computer interaction. For his work, he received several awards, including the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max-Planck Society in 2007, the EUROGRAPHICS Young Researcher Award in 2009, the German Pattern Recognition Award 2012, the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award in 2017, and the EUROGRAPHICS Outstanding Technical Contributions Award in 2020. He is a Fellow of EUROGRAPHICS and of ELLIS (European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems). He received two ERC grants, an ERC Starting Grant in 2013 and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2017.
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.