Max Welling
Dutch computer scientist (born 1968)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Max Welling (born 1968) is a Dutch computer scientist in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam.[1] In August 2017, the university spin-off Scyfer BV, co-founded by Welling, was acquired by Qualcomm.[2] He has since then served as a Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm Netherlands.[3] He is also a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research AI4Science, based in Amsterdam.[4]
Max Welling | |
|---|---|
| Born | 22 October 1968 |
| Alma mater | Utrecht University |
| Known for | Bayesian Inference, Generative modeling, Deep Learning, Variational autoencoders, Graph Convolutional Networks, Group-Equivariant Convolutional Networks |
| Awards | NSF Career Award (2005), Dean’s Mid-Career Award for Research (2008), ECCV Koenderink Prize (2010), ICML Best Paper Award (2012), ICLR Best Paper Award (2017) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Machine learning, Quantum mechanics |
| Institutions | University of Amsterdam |
| Doctoral advisor | Gerard 't Hooft |
| Website | Website of Max Welling |
Welling received his PhD in physics with a thesis on quantum gravity under the supervision of Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft (1998)[5] at the Utrecht University. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles in machine learning, computer vision, statistics and physics,[6] and has most notably invented variational autoencoders (VAEs), together with Diederik P Kingma.
In 2025 Welling was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.[7]
