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Distinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Jens Kober (TU Delft)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Jens Kober (TU Delft)! The talk will take place in person on March 5, in room UN32.101. Professor Kober will also be available for meetings on January 5. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email .
Jens Kober is an associate professor at the TU Delft, Netherlands and an ELLIS Fellow. He worked as a postdoctoral scholar jointly at the CoR-Lab, Bielefeld University, Germany and at the Honda Research Institute Europe, Germany. He graduated in 2012 with a PhD Degree in Engineering from TU Darmstadt and the MPI for Intelligent Systems. For his research he received the annually awarded Georges Giralt PhD Award for the best PhD thesis in robotics in Europe, the 2018 IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award, the 2022 RSS Early Career Award, and has received an ERC Starting grant. His research interests include motor skill learning, (deep) reinforcement learning, imitation learning, interactive learning, and machine learning for control.
Title: Robots Learning Through Interactions
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Arthur Gretton (University College London)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Arthur Gretton (University College London)! The talk will take place in person on December 4, in room UN32.101. Professor Gretton will also be available for meetings on December 4. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email .
Arthur Gretton is a Professor with the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, director of the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML) at UCL; and a research scientist at Google Deepmind. His research interests include causal inference and representation learning, generative modeling, and nonparametric hypothesis testing. Arthur has served as associate editor at IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, an Action Editor for JMLR, a Senior Area Chair for NeurIPS (2018,2021) and ICML (2022), and a member of Royal Statistical Society Research Section Committee since January 2020. Arthur was program co-chair for AISTATS in 2016, tutorials co-chair for ICML 2018, workshops co-chair for ICML 2019, program co-chair for the Dali workshop in 2019, and co-organsier of the Machine Learning Summer School 2019 in London.
Title: Learning to Act in Noisy Contexts using Deep Proxy Learning
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Raquel Fernandez (University of Amsterdam)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Raquel Fernandez (University of Amsterdam)! The talk will take place in person on November 6, in room UN32.101. Professor Fernandez will also be available for meetings on November 6. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email .
Raquel Fernández is Full Professor of Computational Linguistics at the Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, where she leads the Dialogue Modelling Group. Her interests revolve around language use in context, including computational semantics and pragmatics, dialogue interaction, visually-grounded language processing, and language learning, among others. Raquel studied language and cognitive science in Barcelona, her home city, and received her PhD in natural language processing from King’s College London. Before moving to Amsterdam, she held research positions at the Linguistics Department of the University of Potsdam and at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University. Over the course of her career, she has been awarded several prestigious personal fellowships by the Dutch Research Council and is the recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant. Raquel is an ELLIS Fellow and a member of the ELLIS NLP program.
Title: Multimodal and Conversational Grounding in the Era of LLMs
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Sabine Süsstrunk (EPFL Lausanne)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Sabine Süsstrunk (EPFL Lausanne)! The talk will take place in person on July 3rd, in room UN32.101. Professor Süsstrunk will also be available for meetings on July 3rd. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email .
Sabine Süsstrunk is Full Professor and Director of the Image and Visual Representation Lab in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. Her main research areas are in computational photography and imaging, color computer vision, and computational image quality and aesthetics. She received the IS&T/SPIE 2013 Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year Award for her contributions to color imaging, computational photography, and image quality, and the 2018 IS&T Raymond C. Bowman and the 2020 EPFL AGEPoly IC Polysphere Awards for excellence in teaching. Sabine is a Fellow of ELLIS, IEEE, and IS&T, and is President of the Swiss Science Council (SSC).
Title: On Generating Image and Video Hallucinations
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Elisabeth André (Augsburg University)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Elisabeth André (Augsburg University)! The talk will take place in person on June 5th, in room UN32.101.
Elisabeth André is a full professor of Computer Science and Founding Chair of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Augsburg University in Germany. She has a long track record in multimodal human-machine interaction, embodied conversational agents, social robotics, affective computing and social signal processing. Her work has won many awards including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz Prize 2021 of the German Research Foundation (DFG), with 2.5 Mio € the highest endowed German research award. In 2017, she was elected to the CHI Academy, an honorary group of leaders in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. To honor her achievements in bringing Artificial Intelligence techniques to Human-Computer Interaction, she was awarded a EurAI fellowship (European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence) in 2013. In 2019, she was named one of the 10 most influential figures in the history of AI in Germany by National Society for Informatics (GI). Elisabeth André is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Academy of Europe, the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association, the National Academy of Science and Engineering acatech and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Furthermore, she is a fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).
Title: AI-supported communication: expressive faces, charismatic voices, and natural gestures
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Iryna Gurevych (TU Darmstadt)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Iryna Gurevych (TU Darmstadt)! The talk will take place in person on May 8th, in room UN32.101. Professor Gurevych will also be available for meetings on May 8th. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email .
Iryna Gurevych (PhD 2003, U. Duisburg-Essen, Germany) is professor of Computer Science and director of the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. In addition, she is an adjunct professor at MBZUAI in Abu-Dhabi, UAE and an affiliated professor at INSAIT in Sofia, Bulgaria. Her main research interests are in machine learning for large-scale language understanding and text semantics. Iryna’s work has received numerous awards. Those include the ACL fellow award 2020, the first-ever Hessian LOEWE Distinguished Chair award (2,5 mil. Euro) in 2021 and an ERC Advanced Grant in 2022 (2,5 Mil. Euro). Iryna is co-director of the NLP program within ELLIS, a European network of excellence in machine learning. In 2023, she was the president of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
Title: How to InterText? Elevating NLP to the cross-document level
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Gerhard Neumann (KIT)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Gerhard Neumann (KIT)! The talk will take place in person on March 6th, in room UN32.101. Professor Neumann will also be available for meetings on March 6th. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email .
Gerhard is a full professor at the KIT and heading the chair “Autonomous Learning Robots” since Jan. 2020. Before that, he was group leader at the Bosch Center for AI and industry on campus professor at the University of Tübingen (from March to Dec. 2019) and full professor at the University of Lincoln in the UK (2016-2019). Gerhard completed his PhD in 2012 at the TU Graz and was afterwards PostDoc and Assistant Professor at the TU Darmstadt. His research is focused on the intersection of machine learning, robotics and human-robot interaction. His goal is to create data-efficient machine learning algorithms that are suitable for complex robot domains, which includes learning from human feedback, versatile skill learning, learning to manipulate deformables, multi-agent reinforcement learning as well as fundamental research in machine learning such as variational inference or meta-learning.
Title: Versatile Imitation Learning and Reinforcement Learning with Motion Primitives in Robotics
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Sepp Hochreiter (Johannes Kepler Universität Linz)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Sepp Hochreiter (Johannes Kepler University of Linz)! The talk will take place in person on February 7th, in room UN32.101. Professor Hochreiter will also be available for meetings on February 6th and on February 7th. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email .
Sepp Hochreiter is heading the Institute for Machine Learning, the LIT AI Lab and the AUDI.JKU deep learning center at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz. Sepp Hochreiter is a pioneer of Deep Learning. His contributions the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and the analysis of the vanishing gradient are viewed as milestones and key-moments of the history of both machine learning and Deep Learning. Sepp Hochreiter laid the foundations for Deep Learning in two ways. Dr. Hochreiter’s seminal works on the vanishing gradient and the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) were the starting points for what became later known as Deep Learning. LSTM has been overwhelmingly successful in handwriting recognition, generation of writings, language modeling and identification, automatic language translation, speech recognition, analysis of audio data, as well as analysis, annotation, and description of video data. Sepp Hochreiter is full professor at the Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria and head of the Institute for Machine Learning. He is a German citizen, married and has three children.
Title: Memory Concepts for Large Language Models
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Andreas Holzinger (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Andreas Holzinger (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna)! The talk will take place online on December 5th.
Andreas Holzinger pioneered in interactive machine learning with the human-in-the-loop promoting robustness and explainability to foster trustworthy AI. He advocates a synergistic approach of Human-Centered AI (HCAI) to put the human in-control of AI, aligning artificial intelligence with human intelligence, human values, ethical principles, and legal requirements to ensure secure and safe human-machine interaction. For his achievements he was elected a member of Academia Europaea in 2019, the European Academy of Science, of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) in 2020, and Fellow of the international federation of information processing (ifip) in 2021. Andreas Holzinger serves as consultant for the Canadian, US, UK, Swiss, French, Italian and Dutch governments, for the German Excellence Initiative, and as national expert in the European Commission (EC). Andreas is in the advisory board of the Artificial Intelligence Strategy AI made in Germany 2030 of the German Federal Government. He obtained his Ph.D. with a topic in Cognitive Science from Graz University in 1998, and his Habilitation (UOG 93, venia docendi) in Computer Science from Graz University of Technology in 2003. Andreas was Visiting Professor for Machine Learning & Knowledge Extraction in Verona (Italy), RWTH Aachen (Germany), and the University College London (UK). From July 2019 until February 2022 Andreas was a Visiting Professor for explainable AI at the University of Alberta (Canada). Andreas Holzinger has been appointed full professor for digital transformation in smart farm and forest operations at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna and had his inaugural lecture on November 7, 2022 – see: https://human-centered.ai/antrittsvorlesung-andreas-holzinger/
Title: On Robustness and Explainability to reach Trustworthy AI
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Jonathan Berant (Tel-Aviv University / Google DeepMind)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Jonathan Berant (Tel-Aviv University / Google DeepMind)! The talk will take place online on November 7th.
Jonathan Berant is an associate professor at the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, currently on sabbatical as a visiting faculty researcher at Google DeepMind. Jonathan earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, and subsequently a post-doctoral fellow at Google Research, Mountain View. Jonathan has worked in many applied areas of natural language understanding, including semantic parsing, question answering, and textual entailment. Jonathan Received several awards and fellowships including the Rothschild fellowship, the ACL 2011 best student paper award, EMNLP 2014 best paper award, NAACL 2019 best resource paper award, and several honorable mentions. Jonathan has won the Kadar prize for outstanding research and is currently an ERC grantee.
Title: Large language models and then age of long texts
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Björn W. Schuller (Imperial College London/University of Augsburg)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Björn W. Schuller (Imperial College London/University of Augsburg)! The talk will take place in person on July 4th, in room UN32.101. Professor Schuller will also be available for meetings on July 4th. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email .
Björn W. Schuller received his diploma, doctoral degree, and habilitation in Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing all in EE/IT from TUM in Munich/Germany. He is Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Head of GLAM at Imperial College London/UK, Full Professor at the University of Augsburg/Germany, and co-founding CEO/CSO of audEERING. Previous stays include Full Professor at the University of Passau/Germany, Key Researcher at Joanneum Research in Graz/Austria, and the CNRS-LIMSI in Orsay/France. He is a Fellow of ELLIS, Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the BCS, Fellow of the ISCA, Fellow and President-Emeritus of the AAAC, and Elected Full Member Sigma Xi. He (co-)authored 1,200+ publications (h-index=100+), and consults companies such as Barclays, GN, Huawei, or Samsung.
Title: Every time we fire an expert, the performance goes up? From features to foundation models
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Lars Kai Hansen (Technical University of Denmark)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Lars Kai Hansen (Technical University of Denmark)! The talk will take place in person on June 6th, in room UN32.101. Professor Hansen will also be available for meetings on June 6th. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email .
Lars Kai Hansen has a PhD in physics from University of Copenhagen. Since 1990 he has been with the Technical University of Denmark, where he heads the Section for Cognitive Systems. He has published more than 350 contributions on machine learning, signal processing, and applications in AI and cognitive systems. His research is generously funded by Danish Private Foundations and Research Councils, by the European Union, and the US National Institutes of Health. He has made seminal contributions to machine learning including the introduction of ensemble methods. His work in functional neuroimaging includes the first brain state decoding work based on PET (1994) and on fMRI (1997). He was elected Catedra de Excelencia at UC3M Madrid (2011), ELLIS Society Fellow (2020), and received the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Distinguished Data Scientist Award (2022).
Title: Explainable AI
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Niao He (ETH Zurich)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Niao He (ETH Zurich)! The talk will take place in person on May 2nd, in room UN32.101. Professor He will also be available for meetings on May 2nd. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email .
Niao He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where she leads the Optimization and Decision Intelligence (ODI) Group. She is also an ELLIS Scholar and a core faculty member of ETH AI Center, ETH-Max Planck Center of Learning Systems, and ETH Foundations of Data Science. Previously, she was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2016 to 2020. Before that, she received her Ph.D. degree in Operations Research from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2015. Her research interests are in large-scale optimization, machine learning, and reinforcement learning. She is a recipient of AISTATS Best Paper Award, NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award, NCSA Faculty Fellowship, and Beckman CAS Fellowship. She regularly serves as an area chair for NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and other machine learning conferences.
Title: The Puzzle of Adaptive Gradient Methods for Machine Learning
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Nuria Oliver (Data-Pop Alliance/Vodafone Institute)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Nuria Oliver (Data-Pop Alliance/Vodafone Institute)! The talk will take place online on March 29th, 15:00 on Webex.
Nuria Oliver, is co-founder and Director of the ELLIS unit in Alicante, devoted to research on “Humanity-centric Artificial Intelligence” (https://ellisalicante.org). She is also Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance, Chief Scientific Advisor at the Vodafone Institute and co-founder and vice-president of ELLIS (The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems). She is a Telecommunications Engineer from the UPM and holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Between March 2020 and April 2022, she was named Commissioner for the President of the Valencian Region on AI Strategy and Data Science to fight COVID-19. She led at team with ~20 data scientists and co-lead the winning team of the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge. Nuria is the only Spanish researcher recognized by the ACM as Distinguished Scientist (2015) and Fellow (2017) at the same time. She is also a Fellow of the IEEE (2017) and the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (2016). She has received an Honorary Doctorate from the Miguel Hernandez University (2018). Dr. Oliver is an elect member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering (2018), Academia Europaea (2016) and SIGCHI Academy (2018), where she is the only Spanish scientist.
Title: Mitigating human and algorithmic biases
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Oliver Brock (TU Berlin)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Oliver Brock (TU Berlin)! The talk will take place in person on February 7th, in room UN32.101. Professor Brock will also be available for meetings on February 8th. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email .
Oliver Brock is the Alexander-von-Humboldt Professor of Robotics in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technische Universität Berlin, a German “University of Excellence”. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2000 and held postdoctoral positions at Rice University and Stanford University. He was an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst before moving back to Berlin in 2009. The research of Brock’s lab, the Robotics and Biology Laboratory, focuses on embodied intelligence, mobile manipulation, interactive perception, grasping, manipulation, soft material robotics, interactive machine learning, motion generation, and the application of algorithms and concepts from robotics to computational problems in structural molecular biology. Oliver Brock directs the Research Center of Excellence “Science of Intelligence”. He is an IEEE Fellow and was president of the Robotics: Science and Systems Foundation from 2012 until 2019.
Title: About the Interplay of Embodiment and Learning in Intelligent Systems
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Simo Särkkä (Aalto University, Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Simo Särkkä (Aalto University, Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence)! The talk will take place online on January 10th, 2023, 17:30, on Webex.
Simo Särkkä is an Associate Professor at Aalto University, Finland. He is also a Fellow of European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), member of the ELLIS Program for Theory, Algorithms and Computation, and member of ELLIS Unit Helsinki. He also leads the AI Across Fields (AIX) program of Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI). His and his group’s research interests are in multi-sensor data processing systems which combine Bayesian statistics, stochastic processes, machine learning, and other interesting technology. His books “Bayesian Filtering and Smoothing” and “Applied Stochastic Differential Equations” have been published via the Cambridge University Press.
Title: Probabilistic differential equation solving as Bayesian filtering and smoothing
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Laura Leal-Taixé (NVIDIA, Technical University of Munich)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Laura Leal-Taixé (NVIDIA, Technical University of Munich)! The talk will take place online on December 6th, 17:30 on Webex.
Title: From handcrafted to end-to-end learning, and back: a journey for multi-object tracking
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Philipp Hennig (University of Tübingen)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Philipp Hennig (University of Tübingen)! The talk will take place in person on November 8th, 17:30, in Universitätstraße 32.101 and will be followed by an informal reception during which finger food and drinks will be provided.
Title: Probabilistic Simulation Methods for Scientific Machine Learning
Click here for more informationDistinguished Lecture Series - Talk by Hinrich Schütze (LMU Munich)
We are pleased to announce our upcoming Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Hinrich Schütze (LMU Munich) which will take place on October 4th, at 16:00, on Webex.
Title: Natural Language Understanding for Task Descriptions and Beyond (joint work with Nora Kassner, Timo Schick and Kerem Senel)
Click here for more informationKick-Off Event of the Stuttgart ELLIS Unit
You are warmly invited to join the team of the Stuttgart ELLIS Unit for their kick-off event celebrating the official start of their operations.
The directors Ingo Steinwart and Andreas Bulling, as well as the rector of the University of Stuttgart Wolfram Ressel, will introduce the unit, its planned activities and its members. This will be followed by a keynote talk by ELLIS Fellow Bernt Schiele (Max Planck Institute for Informatics) and further presentations by Paul Bürkner (University of Stuttgart), Katherine J. Kuchenbecker (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems), Michael Pradel (University of Stuttgart), and Steffen Staab (University of Stuttgart).
The unit’s PostDocs and PhD students will be introduced through lightning talks and poster presentations. A networking event will close the day’s activities.
The event programming is now available online here!
Click here for more informationELLIS-AISA talk by Frank Hütter (University of Freiburg)
We are pleased to announce an upcoming ELLIS-AISA talk by Frank Hütter (University of Freiburg) which will take place on July 13th, in room UN32.101 of the Vaihingen campus of the University of Stuttgart.
Title: Deep Learning 2.0: Extending the Power of Deep Learning to the Meta-Level
Click here for more informationTalk by Stephan Mandt (University of California, Irvine)
We are pleased to announce an upcoming ELLIS talk by Stephan Mandt (University of California, Irvine) which will take place on July 11th, from 14:00-15:30, in Universitätstraße 32.138 (University of Stuttgart, Campus Vaihingen).
Title: From probabilistic forecasting to neural data compression and back: a latent variable perspective
Click here for more information