Prof. Frank Hutter joins the ELLIS Institute Tübingen as Hector Endowed Fellow

As an expert in Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), the science of progressively automating machine learning, Frank's goals are well aligned with the ELLIS Institute's mission to build the next generation of learning systems and solve fundamental societal and scientific problems for humankind.
 

• “The ELLIS Institute Tübingen is set to become a European Lighthouse of Machine Learning Excellence, and I’m thrilled about the opportunity to be part of it. Together with my new colleagues, and in close collaboration with my Freiburg team, I look forward to expanding my research on AutoML in the most impactful way possible”, said Frank Hutter.
   
• “With his pioneering work in AutoML, Frank will be a major asset to the Tübingen machine learning community. He builds tools to enable non-experts to use state-of-the-art machine learning, which we believe will empower us in our goal to have positive impact in the world”, said Bernhard Schölkopf, Scientific Director of the ELLIS Institute Tübingen.

More info about 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. 

More about the ELLIS Institute Tübingen gGmbH:
Founded in July 2023, 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. 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.