Frank Hutter

Frank Hutter has been a Full Professor for Machine Learning at the University of Freiburg (Germany) since 2016, and an Emmy Noether Research Group Lead since 2013. Before that, he did a PhD (2004-2009) and postdoc (2009-2013) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada. He received the 2010 CAIAC doctoral dissertation award for the best thesis in AI in Canada, as well as several best paper awards and prizes in international ML competitions. He is a Fellow of ELLIS and EurAI, Director of the ELLIS unit Freiburg, and the recipient of 3 ERC grants. Frank is best known for his research on automated machine learning (AutoML), including neural architecture search, efficient hyperparameter optimization, and meta-learning. He co-authored the first book on AutoML and the prominent AutoML tools Auto-WEKA, Auto-sklearn and Auto-PyTorch, won the first two AutoML challenges with his team, is co-teaching the first MOOC on AutoML, co-organized 15 AutoML-related workshops at ICML, NeurIPS and ICLR, and founded the AutoML conference as general chair in 2022. In recent years, his focus has been on the intersection of foundation models and AutoML, including the first foundation model for tabular data, TabPFN, and improving pretraining and fine-tuning with AutoML.