Chris Williams is Professor of Machine Learning and Director of Research in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. His main areas of research are in visual object recognition and image understanding, models for understanding time-series, AI for data analytics, unsupervised learning, and Gaussian processes. He obtained his MSc (1990) and PhD (1994) at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Geoff Hinton. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021, is a Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (UK), and was program co-chair of the NeurIPS conference in 2009.

Prof. Dr. Max Welling is a research chair in Machine Learning at the University of Amsterdam (AMLAB) and a VP Technologies at Qualcomm. He is a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and at the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). Max Welling has served as associate editor in chief of IEEE TPAMI from 2011-2015 and is on the board of the NeurIPS foundation since 2015 and has been program chair and general chair of NeurIPS in 2013 and 2014 respectively. He was also program chair of AISTATS in 2009 and ECCV in 2016 and general chair of MIDL 2018. He is recipient of the ECCV Koenderink Prize in 2010. Welling is co-founder and board member of the Innovation Center for AI (ICAI) and the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). He directs the Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab (AMLAB), and co-directs the Qualcomm-UvA deep learning lab (QUVA), the Bosch-UvA Deep Learning lab (DELTA) and the Amsterdam ELLIS Unit.

Sepp Hochreiter is heading the Institute for Machine Learning, the LIT AI Lab and the AUDI.JKU deep learning center at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz and is director of the Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence (IARAI). He is regarded as a pioneer of Deep Learning as he discovered the fundamental deep learning problem: deep neural networks are hard to train, because they suffer from the now famous problem of vanishing or exploding gradients. He is best known for inventing the long short-term memory (LSTM) in his diploma thesis 1991 which was later published in 1997. LSTMs have emerged into the best-performing techniques in speech and language processing and are used in Google’s Android, in Apple’s iOS, Google’s translate, Amazon’s Alexa, and Facebook’s translation. Currently, Sepp Hochreiter is advancing the theoretical foundation of Deep Learning, investigates new algorithms for deep learning, and reinforcement learning. His current research projects include Deep Learning for climate change, smart cities, drug design, for text and language analysis, for vision, and in particular for autonomous driving.

Dana Ballard received his PhD from the University of California, Irvine, in 1974. His main research interest is in computational theories of the brain with emphasis on human vision and motor control. Currently Ballard is interested in pursuing this research by using high DOF models of humans’ natural behavior in virtual reality environments. View Profile