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One of the world's most important prizes in the research field of AI goes for the first time to a scientist from the Max Planck Society, to Europe for the fourth time.
Tübingen, New York – Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schölkopf, Director of the Empirical Inference Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, will receive the prestigious ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award 2022.
Schölkopf is one of the world's leading machine learning and causality researchers. He develops new learning methods that can recognize structures and causal relationships in large data sets – a subfield of artificial intelligence. His methods have applications in medicine, biology, computer vision, robotics, neuroscience, cognitive science, and astronomy.
The Allen Newell Award was established 1994. Since then, only three researchers working in Europe were among the recipients, with Schölkopf being the fourth. Each year, the award is presented to an individual selected for career contributions that have broad impact within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. The Newell award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000, provided by the Association for Computing Machinery ACM and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence AAAI, and by individual contributions.
ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking. ACM also awards the Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science, comparable to the Nobel Prize or the Fields Medal.
Bernhard Schölkopf, born in 1968, studied physics, mathematics and philosophy in Tübingen and London and received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Technical University of Berlin in 1997. From 2001 to 2010, he was a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. Since 2011, Schölkopf has led the Empirical Inference Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen as one of the institute's founding directors.
Schölkopf has received numerous awards, including the Max Planck Research Award in 2011, the Academy Award of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy in 2012, and the Milner Award of the Royal Society in the United Kingdom in 2014. He was appointed to the Leopoldina in 2016, ACM elected him an ACM Fellow at the end of 2017, and in 2018 he was awarded the most prestigious German research award, the Leibniz Prize. In 2019, he received the Research Award of the State of Baden-Württemberg, the Hector Science Award, and the Körber European Science Prize. In 2021, he received the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award.
Schölkopf was instrumental in founding and shaping the Cyber Valley research consortium and in April 2018 launched the ELLIS Society, of which he is president. Schölkopf is also Co-Director of the Tübingen AI Center, an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Tübingen and an Honorary Professor of Computer Science at Technical University (TU) of Berlin. In December 2018, he was appointed Affiliate Professor of Empirical Inference at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.