First Principal Investigators join the ELLIS Institute Tübingen gGmbH as Hector Endowed Fellows

Four talented scientists in the field of machine learning will conduct cutting-edge research at the newly founded ELLIS Institute Tübingen, in close collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) and the Tübingen AI Center.

Sponsored with a 100 Mio EUR endowment from the Hector Foundation, the ELLIS Institute Tübingen is planning to expand even further by recruiting up to 15 Principal Investigators in the next years, with Bernhard Schölkopf in the role of Scientific Director of the Institute.

Celestine Mendler-Dünner joined the ELLIS Institute Tübingen on September 1st to establish the Algorithms and Society group. Her research interests revolve around machine learning at societal scale, from the perspective of building scalable systems and  understanding their impact on society. Celestine received her PhD from ETH Zurich in collaboration with IBM Research. Afterwards, she spent two years as an SNSF postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, and two years as a research group leader at MPI-IS.

Wieland Brendel joined the ELLIS Institute Tübingen on September 1st, leading the Robust Machine Learning group. His research focuses on the development of theoretically grounded yet empirically successful visual representation learning techniques that can uncover the underlying structure of our visual world and close the gap between human and machine vision. Wieland received his PhD from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He then joined the University of Tübingen, first as a postdoc and then as PI at the Tübingen AI Center. Afterwards, he joined the MPI-IS as an independent group leader.

Antonio Orvieto joined the ELLIS Institute Tübingen on September 20th to establish the Deep Models and Optimization group. His research focuses on the intersection between mathematical optimization and large-scale machine learning. Antonio received his PhD from ETH Zurich and his experience at DeepMind, Meta, MILA, and INRIA Paris allowed him to gain valuable insights into the practical challenges associated with training modern deep networks.

Jonas Geiping joined the ELLIS Institute on October 15th to establish the Safety- & Efficiency- aligned Learning group. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher in computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park. His background is in mathematics, more specifically in mathematical optimization, and he is now interested not only in research at the intersection of current deep learning and mathematical optimization in general, but especially in the implications of optimization in machine learning for the design of secure and private ML systems.

More about the ELLIS Institute Tübingen gGmbH:
The ELLIS Institute Tübingen gGmbH is sponsored with a 100 Mio EUR endowment from the Hector Foundation and 25 Mio EUR from Baden-Württemberg, and is located in the historic city of Tübingen, a beautiful university town in the southwest of Germany. The ELLIS Institute is set to become a world-renowned center for pioneering basic research in the field of artificial intelligence. The Institute aims to attract the world's best machine learning talent, providing them with outstanding conditions to conduct research in a state-of-the-art facility located in Tübingen. The vision is part of a broader initiative, the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), which aims to build a pan-European institution for machine learning research.

More About ELLIS Society e.V.:
ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) is a European initiative in AI with a focus on scientific excellence, innovation and societal impact. The initiative unites many of the leading machine learning researchers in Europe and aims to create a pan-European AI Lab.