Member role: Scholarship Admissions Committee

Matthias Hein is Bosch endowed Professor of Machine Learning and  the coordinator of the international master program in machine learning at the University of Tübingen. He is member of the Excellence Cluster “Machine Learning: New Perspectives for Science” and the Tübingen AI Center. His main research interests are to make machine learning systems robust, safe and explainable and to provide theoretical foundations for machine learning, in particular deep learning. He serves regularly as area chair for ICML, NeurIPS or AISTATS and has been action editor for Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) from 2013 to 2018. He is an ELLIS Fellow and has been awarded the German Pattern recognition award, an ERC Starting grant and several best paper awards (NeurIPS, COLT, ALT).

Abhinav Valada is a Full Professor (W3) at the University of Freiburg, where he directs the Robot Learning Lab. He is a member of the Department of Computer Science, the BrainLinks-BrainTools center, and a founding faculty of the ELLIS unit Freiburg. Abhinav is a DFG Emmy Noether AI Fellow, Scholar of the ELLIS Society, IEEE Senior Member, and Chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Robot Learning.

He received his PhD (summa cum laude) working with Prof. Wolfram Burgard at the University of Freiburg in 2019, his MS in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013, and his BTech. in Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering from VIT University in 2010. After his PhD, he worked as a Postdoctoral researcher and subsequently an Assistant Professor (W1) from 2020 to 2023. He co-founded and served as the Director of Operations of Platypus LLC from 2013 to 2015, a company developing autonomous robotic boats in Pittsburgh, and has previously worked at the National Robotics Engineering Center and the Field Robotics Center of Carnegie Mellon University from 2011 to 2014.

Abhinav’s research lies at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and computer vision with a focus on tackling fundamental robot perception, state estimation, and planning problems to enable robots to operate reliably in complex and diverse domains. The overall goal of his research is to develop scalable lifelong robot learning systems that continuously learn multiple tasks from what they perceive and experience by interacting with the real world. For his research, he received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in Robotics and Automation, IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award, NVIDIA Research Award, AutoSens Most Novel Research Award, among others. Many aspects of his research have been prominently featured in wider media such as the Discovery Channel, NBC News, Business Times, and The Economic Times.

I am a full Professor on Machine Learning at the Department of Computer Science of Saarland University (Saarbrücken, Germany), and Adjunct Faculty at MPI for Software Systems in Saarbrücken (Saarbrücken, Germany).

I am a fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), where I am part of the Robust Machine Learning Program and of the Saarbrücken Artificial Intelligence & Machine learning (Sam) Unit.

Prior to this, I was an independent group leader at the MPI for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen (Germany) until the end of the year. I have held a German Humboldt Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and a “Minerva fast track” fellowship from the Max Planck Society. I obtained my PhD in 2014 and MSc degree in 2012 from the University Carlos III in Madrid (Spain), and worked as postdoctoral researcher at the MPI for Software Systems (Germany) and at the University of Cambridge (UK).