News & Awards

Empirical Inference Award 01-07-2021 Gary Becigneul: Dieter-Rampacher-Prize 2020

Empirical Inference News 24-06-2021 Gary Bécigneul awarded the Max Planck Society’s “Youngest Ph.D.” award Gary Bécigneul completed his doctoral studies at the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems in July 2020, and has since continued to build the start-up he founded after completing his doctoral studies. Gary Becigneul Bernhard Schölkopf Sarah Danes Valerie Callaghan

Empirical Inference Appointment 01-06-2021 Mijung Park becomes Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada

Empirical Inference News 12-03-2021 Teilnehmende für COVID-19 Studie gesucht Künstliche Intelligenz soll Früherkennung eines schweren Krankheitsverlaufs ermöglichen Bernhard Schölkopf Annika Buchholz Stefan Bauer

Empirical Inference News 16-02-2021 Artificial intelligence supports medical prognoses Using COVID-19 as an example, a machine learning method predicts patients' individual mortality risk Estimating the risk of patients dying is arguably one of the most difficult and stressful challenges physicians face. This has been especially true in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with doctors around the world repeatedly confronted with difficult decisions. In the best of cases, they have been able to adjust treatments and save lives. In the worst case scenario, however, physicians have to allocate scarce beds and life-saving machines in intensive care units. An international team led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent System has now developed an algorithm and trained it with machine learning methods to help medical professionals with mortality predictions. The algorithm can also be trained to predict mortality risk for other diseases, and thus support physicians in decision-making processes. Stefan Bauer Bernhard Schölkopf Valerie Callaghan

Empirical Inference News 15-01-2021 Progress in the field of Brain-Computer Interaction: scientists take BCI research out of the lab and into the real world Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen and the University of Vienna have introduced MYND, an open-source software that allows people to participate in brain-computer interaction (BCI) research from home, without expert supervision. Their research could take the field a decisive step forward: MYND can complement laboratory-based basic research with human-computer interaction experiments in a range of real-life environments. The researchers are confident their approach will provide a viable basis for further research on accessible use of BCI in daily life. Matthias Hohmann Bernhard Schölkopf Valerie Callaghan

Perceiving Systems Empirical Inference Award 26-11-2020 Best Paper Award, International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 2020, for the paper "Grasping Field: Learning Implicit Representations for Human Grasps", by Karunratanakul, K., Yang, J., Zhang, Y., Black, M., Muandet, K., Tang, S.

Empirical Inference Award 01-10-2020 Bernhard Schölkopf awarded with "Deutscher KI-Innovationspreis" on October 1, 2020.

Perceiving Systems Autonomous Vision Empirical Inference Probabilistic Numerics Probabilistic Learning Group News 10-09-2020 ELLIS PhD Program: Call for Applications The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems offers an interdisciplinary PhD program. The ELLIS PhD program is a key element of the ELLIS initiative and its goal is to foster and educate the best talent in machine learning related research areas by pairing outstanding students with leading academic and industrial researchers in Europe. The program supports excellent PhDs across Europe by giving them access to leading research through boot camps, summer schools and workshops of the ELLIS programs. Every PhD student is supervised by one ELLIS fellow/scholar and one ELLIS member from a different country and conducts a 1 year exchange at the other location.

Empirical Inference News 13-08-2020 Stefan Bauer elected CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar The research group leader at the MPI-IS is one of thirteen early-career researchers that have been elected. He will join the “Learning in Machines & Brains“ CIFAR research program. Stefan Bauer

Empirical Inference Award 13-08-2020 Stefan Bauer elected CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar. The research group leader at MPI-IS is one of thirteen early-career researchers that have been elected. He will join the "Learning in Machines & Brains" CIFAR research program.

Empirical Inference News 28-07-2020 From picking up a cube to writing with a pen – learning dexterous manipulation skills on real-world robotic systems MPI-IS in Tübingen is hosting a challenge that aims to advance the state of the art in robotic manipulation and make the field more accessible to a greater number of researchers From August 3, researchers around the world are invited to take part in a challenge where each team can run its algorithm on standardized robotic platforms. The tasks range from manipulating a cube to writing with a pen. Participants can advance research, demonstrate that their algorithm works best not only in simulation but also on a real-world task, and win prizes. Stefan Bauer Manuel Wüthrich Bernhard Schölkopf Felix Widmaier / Kloss Vaibhav Agrawal Ossama Ahmed Ann-Sophie Bähr Annika Buchholz Lieya Duong Jonathan Fiene Walter Gasparetto Anirudh Goyal Felix Grimminger Felix Grüninger Bilal Hammoud Shruti Joshi Georg Martius Heiko Ott Ludovic Righetti Sebastian Stark Naomi Tashiro Frederik Träuble Ruben Werbke Jonathan Williams

Empirical Inference Award 16-07-2020 Bernhard Schölkopf receives Marsilius Medal and holds Marsilius Lecture "Symbolische, Statistische und Kausale Intelligenz" at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Empirical Inference Award 26-06-2020 Alex Hawkins-Hooker, Mateo Rojas-Carulla, Bernhard Schölkopf and Gabriele Schweikert are one of the winning teams of the Encode Imputation Challenge.

Empirical Inference News 20-05-2020 Joint European Disruptive Initiative (JEDI) invites scientists to join the fight against COVID-19 The JEDI Billion Molecules against Covid-19 Grand Challenge was launched at the beginning May. The call for submissions is open until June 6. Using supercomputing and AI, participating teams will screen enormous molecular libraries against the virus's protein targets. Results will be cross-correlated to determine a “high potential” list of unprecedented quality, allowing a fast track to clinical testing. Bernhard Schölkopf

Empirical Inference Award 07-05-2020 Sebastian Weichwald (recent graduate of EI Department): won the Causality 4 Climate NeurIPS competition together with his team members.

Empirical Inference News 07-05-2020 Recent MPI graduate and his team win Causality 4 Climate NeurIPS competition Sebastian Weichwald is part of the winning team of a competition that tried to tackle the climate change challenges from a data and causal structure learning perspective Sebastian Weichwald Bernhard Schölkopf

Empirical Inference Award 05-12-2019 Niki Kilbertus wird im Rahmen des #KI50 Projekts der Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) als einen von zwei "Newcomer des Jahres" in der Kategorie "Informatik"gekürt

Empirical Inference Award 12-11-2019 Bernhard Schölkopf: Appointed as Full Member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences of the State of Baden-Württemberg

Empirical Inference News 30-10-2019 Bernhard Schölkopf meets French President Emmanuel Macron The Machine Learning scientist is in Paris to attend the Global Forum on AI for Humanity which brings together many of the world’s leading AI experts who together work on promoting and protecting a human-centric and ethical approach to AI, grounded in human rights. Bernhard Schölkopf

Empirical Inference News 04-09-2019 Verleihung des Körber-Preises 2019 Bernhard Schölkopf erhält am 13. September den Körber-Preis im Hamburger Rathaus - im Gespräch mit Ranga Yogeshwar Hamburg, 2. September 2019. Den mit 1.000.000 Euro dotierten Körber-Preis für die Europäische Wissenschaft 2019 erhält der deutsche Physiker, Mathematiker und Informatiker Bernhard Schölkopf. Der Forscher am Max-Planck-Institut für Intelligente Systeme in Tübingen hat mathematische Verfahren entwickelt, die maßgeblich dazu beitrugen, der Künstlichen Intelligenz (KI) zu ihren jüngsten Höhenflügen zu verhelfen. Weltweites Renommee erlangte Schölkopf mit sogenannten Support-Vektor-Maschinen. Bernhard Schölkopf Valerie Callaghan

Empirical Inference News 03-07-2019 NeurIPS2019 Disentanglement Challenge kicks off - Bringing Disentanglement to the Real World Registration opened on June 28 and the Challenge runs until September 24. The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, GoogleAI, and MILA Montreal have launched the Disentanglement Challenge. Registration is now open: sign up now and bring disentangled representations to the REAL world - with 20,000 euros in prize money and best paper awards! Joel Bessekon Akpo Stefan Bauer Karin Bierig Muhammad Waleed Gondal Arash Mehrjou Bernhard Schölkopf Valentin Volchkov Francesco Locatello Manuel Wüthrich Djordje Miladinovic

Empirical Inference Award 26-06-2019 Bernhard Schölkopf receives the Körber European Science Preis 2019.

Empirical Inference News 26-06-2019 Körber Prize 2019 goes to Bernhard Schölkopf The Körber Foundation honors the MPI-IS Director and Cyber Valley Scientist for his ground-breaking research in mathematical methods that have made a significant contribution to helping artificial intelligence reach its most recent heights. Bernhard Schölkopf Valerie Callaghan

Empirical Inference Award 18-06-2019 Francesco Locatello, Stefan Bauer, Bernhard Schölkopf et. al.: ICML best paper award 2019 for the paper "Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations"

Empirical Inference News 11-06-2019 MPI for Intelligent Systems Scientists among the winning team at world’s leading AI conference Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, ETH Zurich, and Google Research Zurich receive the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). Francesco Locatello Stefan Bauer Bernhard Schölkopf Valerie Callaghan

Empirical Inference Award 31-05-2019 Bernhard Schölkopf: honoured as one of the leading minds in German AI research.

Empirical Inference News 28-05-2019 Bernhard Schölkopf honoured as one of the leading minds in German AI research The Director of the Empirical Inference Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, one of the world's leading researchers in the field of machine learning, has been named among the top ten influential minds in the history of German AI. Bernhard Schölkopf

Empirical Inference Award 24-04-2019 Francesco Locatello: 2019 Google PhD Fellowship for Machine Learning Award.

Empirical Inference News 28-01-2019 Schlüsseltechnologie der digitalen Revolution Wissenschaftspreis der Hector Stiftung geht an Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schölkopf Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schölkopf erhält in diesem Jahr den mit 150.000 Euro dotierten Wissenschaftspreis der Hector Stiftung. Die Jury würdigt damit seine herausragenden Leistungen in der Grundlagenforschung zum maschinellen Lernen und der Künstlichen Intelligenz, die als Schlüsseltechnologien der digitalen Revolution gelten. Bernhard Schölkopf

Empirical Inference News 23-01-2019 Helping to memorize information more efficiently using AI Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems develop algorithms which optimize the well-known spaced repetition method used for memorizing educational material. By using optimal spacing time, the learning process becomes as efficient as possible. Their findings were published in the prestigious journal PNAS on Tuesday. Behzad Tabibian Bernhard Schölkopf Manuel Gomez Rodriguez

Empirical Inference Award 02-01-2019 Jan Peters has been elected IEEE Fellow.

Empirical Inference Award 31-12-2018 2018 Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Advances in System Testing and Validation (Jan Peters et. al.)

Empirical Inference Award 13-12-2018 Olivier Bousquet, Leon Bottou: Test of Time Award, 2018 Neural Information Processing Systems conference, for their 2007 paper on “The Tradeoffs of Large Scale Learning” reporting work originally started in 2003 when Olivier Bousquet was a member of our lab.

Empirical Inference Award 10-12-2018 Bernhard Schölkopf receives the Landesforschungspreis 2018 for Basic Research by the State of Baden-Württemberg.

Empirical Inference News 10-12-2018 Bernhard Schölkopf erhält Landesforschungspreis 2018 Der Direktor der Abteilung für Empirische Inferenz am Max-Planck-Institut für Intelligente Systeme in Tübingen erhält den diesjährigen Landesforschungspreis Baden-Württemberg. Die Auszeichnung ist mit 100.000 Euro dotiert. Theresia Bauer, Ministerin für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst, hat den Experten für Maschinelles Lernen im Rahmen eines Festakts in der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart geehrt. Bernhard Schölkopf

Empirical Inference News 09-11-2018 Bernhard Schölkopf at the Falling Walls Conference in Berlin The International Conference on Future - Breakthroughs in Science and Society Prof. Bernhard Schölkopf, Director of the department "Empirical Inference", is talking about Artificial Intelligence. Friday, November 9, 4:45 p.m, Berlin, Radialsystem V, Holzmarktstraße 33. Bernhard Schölkopf

Empirical Inference Award 01-10-2018 Dominik Janzing, Jonas Peters, Bernhard Schölkopf: Causality in Statistics Education Award (American Statistical Association).

Empirical Inference News 05-06-2018 Machine Learning Frontiers in Precision Medicine Dept. Empirical Inference is part of this new scientific network The Marie Curie Innovative Training Network "Machine Learning Frontiers in Precision Medicine" is funded by the European Commission with 3.6 Mio € for four years (2019-2022). It is coordinated by Professor Karsten Borgwardt from the Machine Learning and Computational Biology Lab of ETH Zurich. Bernhard Schölkopf

Empirical Inference News 24-04-2018 Initiative to establish a European Lab for Learning & Intelligent Systems Warnung vor der Konkurrenz aus USA und China Warning about the competition from the USA and China - appeal to politics Bernhard Schölkopf

Empirical Inference Award 19-03-2018 Bernhard Schölkopf: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Preis 2018, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinsschaft (DFG).

Empirical Inference News 19-03-2018 Award Ceremony of 2018 Leibniz Prize Bernhard Schölkopf receives one of the Leibniz Prizes in Berlin - short video about his and his team´s research on machine learning (in German) "I am very pleased about the Leibniz Prize", says Director Bernhard Schölkopf. "I see it as an award for all my employees and for the research field of machine learning, and it should benefit both in the future. We are only at the beginning, and want to investigate further how computers and living beings can learn to better understand the organizational principles of intelligent behavior." Bernhard Schölkopf

Empirical Inference News 16-03-2018 Süddeutsche Zeitung publiziert Meinungsbeitrag von Bernhard Schölkopf Der Direktor der Abteilung für Empirische Inferenz veröffentlicht einen Gastbeitrag über Künstliche Intelligenz auf Seite 2 der Süddeutschen Zeitung. Thema ist die Kybernetische Revolution und dass Europa dafür die besten Köpfe braucht. Bernhard Schölkopf Claudia Daefler

Empirical Inference News 19-12-2017 The Question is Why Algorithms learn a Sense of Fairness Only if Artificial Intelligence interprets and applies fairness in the same way as humans do, will society accept it. That is why scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen look at the causal reasoning behind data – because it matters how data comes about. Only when self-learning machines satisfy our ethical and legal requirements will the public accept them as just and fair. Niki Kilbertus

Empirical Inference News 14-12-2017 Bernhard Schölkopf receives Leibniz Prize 2018 Germany's most prestigious research funding prize - €2.5 million each for outstanding research work The latest recipients of Germany's most prestigious research funding prize have been announced. The Joint Committee of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) chose ten researchers, three women and seven men, to receive the 2018 Leibniz Prize. The prizes will be awarded on 19th March 2018 in Berlin. Bernhard Schölkopf Claudia Daefler

Empirical Inference Award 11-12-2017 Bernhard Schölkopf: ACM Fellow for contributions to the theory and practice of machine learning.

Empirical Inference News 11-12-2017 Bernhard Schölkopf elected ACM Fellow (2017) for his contributions to the theory and practice of machine learning ACM's most prestigious member grade recognizes the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. Bernhard Schölkopf

Empirical Inference News 27-11-2017 Artificial Intelligence to the rescue in finishing off Fake News An algorithm jointly developed by researchers of the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and for Software Systems in Kaiserslautern promises to optimize which doubtful news stories to send for fact checking and when to do so, helping to prevent fake news from spreading on Social Media. Manuel Gomez Rodriguez

Empirical Inference News 26-10-2017 From small to not so pixel-perfect large The Algorithm EnhanceNet-PAT is OK not being perfect – but shows a better result (Talk at ICCV 2017, Venice) Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen utilize the Artificial Intelligence of a software to create a high definition version of a low resolution image. While the pixel-perfectness is being sacrificed, the reward is a better result. Bernhard Schölkopf Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi Michael Hirsch Claudia Daefler

Empirical Inference Award 06-08-2017 Matej Balog, Nilesh Tripuraneni, Zoubin Ghahramani, Adrian Weller: Honorable Mentions at ICML 2017 for their paper: "Lost Relatives of the Gumbel Trick".