Prof. Dr. Frank Hutter

Frank Hutter is co-founder and CEO of PriorLabs, the world’s first company focussed on tabular foundation models. He is also a Hector-Endowed Fellow and PI at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen (part-time), as well as Full Professor for Machine Learning at the University of Freiburg (currently on leave). Frank holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia (UBC, 2009) and a Diplom (eq. MSc) from TU Darmstadt (2004). He received the 2010 CAIAC doctoral dissertation award for the best thesis in AI in Canada, and with his coauthors, several best paper awards and prizes in international competitions on machine learning, SAT solving, and AI planning. He is a Fellow of EurAI and ELLIS, the director of the ELLIS unit Freiburg and the recipient of 3 ERC grants. Frank is best known for shaping the field of automated machine learning (AutoML), including works on neural architecture search, efficient hyperparameter optimization, and meta-learning. He co-authored the first book on AutoML and the prominent AutoML tools Auto-WEKA, Auto-sklearn and Auto-PyTorch, won the first two AutoML challenges with his team, is co-teaching the first MOOC on AutoML, co-organized 15 AutoML-related workshops at ICML, NeurIPS and ICLR, and founded the AutoML conference as general chair in 2022 and 2023. In recent years, his focus has been on tabular foundation models like TabPFN.