Max Welling

Prof. Dr. Max Welling is a professor and research chair in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam and a Merkin distinguished visiting professor at Caltech. He is the co-founder and CTO of the startup CuspAI in Materials Design. He is 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, and professor at UC Irvine. He finished his PhD in theoretical high-energy physics under the supervision of Nobel laureate prof. Gerard ‘t Hooft. He then switched fields to focus on machine learning, first as a postdoc at Caltech under the supervision of prof. Pietro Perona and then as postdoc under the supervision of Nobel laureate prof. Geoffrey Hinton at UCL & U. Toronto. Max Welling has served as associate editor-in-chief of IEEE TPAMI from 2011-2015. He serves on the advisory board of the Neurips foundation since 2015 and he has been program chair and general chair of Neurips in 2013 and 2014, respectively. He was also program chair of AISTATS in 2009 and ECCV in 2016 and general chair and co-founder of MIDL 2018. Max Welling is the recipient of the ECCV Koenderink Prize in 2010, and the 10-year Test of Time awards at ICML in 2021 and ICLR in 2024.