Stefan Bauer elected CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar

Tübingen/ Toronto – Stefan Bauer is a Research Group Leader in the Empirical Inference Department at the MPI-IS in Tübingen. On Wednesday, he has been elected a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar and will join the “Learning in Machines & Brains“ CIFAR research program. It is lead by Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun and since its founding in 2004 played a major part in the AI-revolution by examining how artificial neural networks could be inspired by the human brain, and developing the powerful technique of deep learning.

The CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars program supports outstanding early-career researchers through mentorship, a global network, professional skills development, and $100,000 in unrestricted research support for two years. Each scholars joins a CIFAR research program for 24 months where they collaborate with fellows and contribute new approaches toward the most important questions facing science and humanity. 

“Early-career researchers have the brilliant ideas that will change the world, and we want to help them develop and grow as researchers and professionals,” says Alan Bernstein, CIFAR President & CEO. “These thirteen scholars join an incredible community of researchers from around the world, interested not just in advancing knowledge in a silo, but in seeing the impact that knowledge can have across disciplines and on the wider world.”

The focus of Bauer’s research is machine learning and the pattern recognition in large data sets. “My research focuses on finding stable patterns in data which would eventually allow algorithms to transfer between different related problems, like cycling a bi- or tricycle,” Bauer explains. He has been a research group leader in Tübingen since 2018. Only recently, he and a group of other scientists launched the first global real-world robotics manipulation challenge, a challenge that aims to advance the state of the art in robotic manipulation and make the field more accessible to a greater number of researchers.

After a competitive recruitment process that generated 184 eligible applications from 31 countries, Bauer is one of 13 researchers that have been selected to join one of the four CIFAR programs. These researchers are among the top emerging global researchers with citizenship in six countries and appointments in institutions in Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.