Max-Planck-Institut für Intelligente Systeme

The #ELLISPhD Program is a treasure trove of inspiring stories about young #AI scientists, and this is one of them: Originally from Shanghai, Zhijing Jin studied in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the USA. As an ELLIS #PhD student, she gained further experience at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in #Germany and at ETH Zürich in #Switzerland, where she dedicated her dissertation to the intersection of #Causality and #NaturalLanguageProcessing (NLP). The next big career step is already on the horizon: In 2025, she will start a new role as an Assistant Professor in #NLP at the University of Toronto in Canada. In this interview, she reflects on her experiences as a young researcher in Europe and her plans for the future: https://lnkd.in/eU6xMJUN The ELLIS #PhDProgram connects outstanding students from all over the world to leading #MachineLearning scientists across Europe. It is supported by the #EU-funded projects ELISE, ELSA, and ELIAS - European Lighthouse of AI for Sustainability. The next call for applications will open in October. Learn more about the program here: https://lnkd.in/dViSBcar cc ETH AI Center

🎉 👏 Congratulations Diego Baptista Theuerkauf for defending your Ph.D. thesis with the title "Optimal Transport: The Dynamical Monge-Kantorovich Model as a Bridge between Theory and Applications"! Diego's research focused on optimal transport theory, a mathematical framework that explores the most cost-effective ways to move mass, such as goods to different locations while taking into account traffic constraints. Together with his colleagues, he developed methods based on these notions to solve problems in other areas, such as community detection in networks and image classification. Diego began his doctorate at MPI-IS in April 2019. He had received his Master's degree from the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and his Bachelor's degree from Los Andes University in Mérida, Venezuela.

🎉 👏 Congratulations Diego Baptista Theuerkauf for defending your Ph.D. thesis with the title "Optimal Transport: The Dynamical Monge-Kantorovich Model as a Bridge between Theory and Applications"! Diego's research focused on optimal transport theory, a mathematical framework that explores the most cost-effective ways to move mass, such as goods to different locations while taking into account traffic constraints. Together with his colleagues, he developed methods based on these notions to solve problems in other areas, such as community detection in networks and image classification. Diego began his doctorate at MPI-IS in April 2019. He had received his Master's degree from the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and his Bachelor's degree from Los Andes University in Mérida, Venezuela.

Hurray! Michael Kirchhof successfully defended his doctoral thesis. Many congratulations on this huge milestone!   "I investigated how computer vision models should behave when they face images that are ambiguous, for example blurry or low-resolution. This leads to some quite fundamental mathematical questions about what uncertainties are in the first place, and I found IMPRS to be an ideal space for inspiring discussions about this with other scholars. Right now, I'm applying these insights to make Chatbots and Image Generators more trustworthy at Apple Machine Learning Research in Paris." Michael began his doctorate in 2021 at the University of Tübingen, supervised by Prof. Dr. Enkelejda Kasneci and Dr. Seong Joon Oh. He completed a BSc and MSc in Statistics as a valedictorian at TU Dortmund University. His research focuses on the foundations of machine learning models in probability theory, and how to bring models with theoretical guarantees to large scale applications.   #MPIIS #IMPRSIS #unituebingen #IntelligentSystems #Phdstudent #Phdthesis #ThesisDefense 

🎉 Congratulations to Abdullahi Ibrahim! Just now, he successfully defended his Ph.D., graduating magna cum laude! His family was the first to congratulate him, along with his advisors and his Physics for Inference and Optimization team. As Abdul's research focus was on optimal transport theory to improve congestion in complex transport networks, his artful hat represents a multilayer network: "In particular, in my PhD, I investigated how different parameters influence the traffic dynamics on multilayer networks." The hat also shows how Abdul's journey as a scientists brought him a long way from Nigeria to Tübingen and Stuttgart. Before joining our doctoral school, the IMPRS-IS, Abdul obtained a Master's degree in Mathematics from the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Senegal and a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Ekiti State University in Nigeria. All the best to you! #MachineLearning #MaxPlanck

Our Max Planck Institute is a research organization for basic research. Not always, but sometimes it is also the breeding ground for a promising start-up. A great example is EndoSurge - the culmination of several years of research collaboration by a great team that was supported by Max Planck Innovation and the MAXIMIZE incubator for Max Planck startups. EndoSurge is led by scientist-turned-CEO Martin Phelan. His research vision is so innovative that he won the 2023 Falling Walls Lab Baden-Württemberg and just recently, he was a panelist at the Start-up BW Summit, discussing "AI Innovation in Baden-Württemberg" together with Cyber Valley's CEO Rebecca C. Reisch and others. So, what is EndoSurge all about? It is about the development of an MRI-compatible robotic platform that enables real-time guidance and radiation-free treatment. Learn more by watching this Falling Walls Lab video: https://lnkd.in/eprkDT6J

Zebras, wild horses and teams of flying robots: On July 11, Baden Württemberg's Minister of Economic Affairs Dr. Nicole Hoffmeister-Kraut awarded the prize "AI Champion Baden-Württemberg 2024" to our research group leader and University of Stuttgart Junior Professor Aamir Ahmad and his team. Their Wildcap project is about developing autonomous aerial robots for observing wild animals, a project that makes an important contribution to species conservation: https://lnkd.in/eZ3eNaSe

Learning from the Nobel Laureates in Lindau: Early this month, Zhijing Jin and Andrew K. Schulz were invited to the 73rd Annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. They had the time of their life meeting many inspiring nobel laureates, as can be read here: https://lnkd.in/e-qUjrtq #LINO24 #MaxPlanck #AI #Robotics

Our Group Leader in the Perceiving Systems Department and University of Stuttgart Professor Aamir Ahmad (second from left) is one of this year's „KI-Champions Baden-Württemberg“ awarded by Baden-Württemberg's Ministry of Economic Affairs, Labor and Tourism. They were very impressed by the Cyber Valley funded project WildCap: Autonomous Non-Invasive Monitoring of Animal Behavior and Motion or "Intelligente Flugroboter für den Wildtierschutz". It is a great example for an outstanding, innovative application-orientated artificial intelligence solution made in Baden-Württemberg and really impressed the jury at the Start-up BW Summit: https://lnkd.in/ezZ5fRki Congratulations to your team! #AI #Robotics #BadenWürttemberg