Joint Colloquium Lecture by Max Welling

Overview

Title:
Future Directions in AI for Science

About the Speaker:

Prof. Dr. Max Welling is a full professor and research chair in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam and a Merkin distinguished visiting professor at Caltech. He is co-founder and CTO of the startup CuspAI – a frontier AI company harnessing AI to unlock materials breakthroughs. He is also a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) where he served on the founding board. His previous appointments include Partner and VP at Microsoft Research, VP at Qualcomm Technologies, professor at UC Irvine.

Prof. Max Welling finished his PhD in theoretical high energy physics under supervision of Nobel laureate prof. Gerard ‘t Hooft. He then switched fields to focus on machine learning, first as a postdoc at Caltech under supervision of prof. Pietro Perona and then as postdoc under supervision of Nobel laureate Prof. Geoffrey Hinton at UCL & U. Toronto.

Prof. Max Welling is a preeminent computer scientist and physicist with over 200,000 Google Scholar citations. His landmark contributions include inventing the Variational Autoencoder (VAE), a foundational architecture in generative AI, and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), which revolutionized the processing of structured data such as molecules and social networks. Furthermore, he pioneered Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) for Bayesian learning and has led the advancement of Equivariant Neural Networks, which integrate fundamental geometric symmetries into deep learning models.