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.
Tübingen, June 24, 2021 – On the occasion of its Annual General Meeting, the Max Planck Society today awarded its “Youngest Ph.D.” prize to Gary Bécigneul, who graduated from the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems (CLS) in September 2020. CLS is a joint research center between the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) and ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. At the time of his Ph.D. defense, Gary Bécigneul was 25 years old.
“I am honored to be receiving this award, and I look back fondly on my time as a CLS doctoral fellow,” said Gary Bécigneul. “My time at ETH Zurich and MPI-IS allowed me to learn from some of the world’s best scientists and entrepreneurs and to expand my network and build the toolkit I needed to grow into a start-up founder myself.”
A full CLS doctoral fellow based at ETH Zurich, Gary Bécigneul was supervised by Professor Thomas Hofmann of the ETH Data Analytics Lab. Over the course of his studies, he spent six months at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen. During this time, Gary Bécigneul was co-advised and hosted by Professor Bernhard Schölkopf, a director at the MPI-IS in Tübingen and head of the Empirical Inference Department.
Gary Bécigneul joined the program with a very strong mathematical background. This led naturally to the goal of understanding deep learning from a mathematical perspective, using mostly differential geometry and group theory, as well as in deriving new algorithms based on this understanding. He successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation entitled “On the Geometry of Data Representations” in September 2020.
Since completing his Ph.D., Gary Bécigneul has pursued his dream of becoming an entrepreneur. With his start-up Gematria Technologies Ltd, he and his team build on the latest AI breakthroughs to provide critical insights to clients in the financial services and insurance industry. More specifically, they are developing text analytics technology that aims to provide risk managers and analysts with timely information that can help mitigate the risk of a financial crisis. The system applies advanced AI and mathematical methods to process large quantities of information from sources such as news, press releases, social media, and forums such as Reddit.