IMPRS-IS 2024 Interview Symposium Keynotes (Symposium)

The International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS) brings together the MPI for Intelligent Systems with the University of Stuttgart and the University of Tübingen to form a highly visible and unique graduate school of internationally recognized faculty, working at the leading edge of the field. This program is a key element of Baden-Württemberg’s Cyber Valley initiative to accelerate basic research and commercial development in artificial intelligence.

Each year, the program hosts a symposium to interview IMPRS-IS Ph.D. applicants. As the scientific highlight of this year's program, we are excited to announce that Dr. Wieland Brendel (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ELLIS) and Prof. Andreas Bulling (University of Stuttgart) will be featured as keynote speakers for the event.

Their hybrid keynote talks will take place back-to-back at the two sites of MPI-IS on Thursday, February 8. We encourage all community members to join us for these presentations, preferably onsite if possible. 

Wieland Brendel
Date: Thursday, Febrary 8, 2024
Time: 15:30 - 16:15 CET
Onsite Location: MPI-IS Tübingen, Main Lecture Hall, Room N0.002

Cracking the black box: how far are we from understanding the inner workings of deep vision models?

Abstract: How do deep vision models recognize a car? How do they differentiate between cats and dogs? Why do they sometimes fail in peculiar ways? Although the gap between humans and machines has significantly narrowed on a behavioral level, we are still largely in the dark about their exact inner workings. In this talk, I will discuss some recent progress we and others have made in shedding light on these black boxes and will highlight some open challenges we need to overcome. Additionally, I will also highlight a few of our failed attempts, hypotheses, and experiments as a gentle reminder that behind the success stories often seen in publications, there are many more trials and errors that pave the way. These missteps are not just setbacks, but rather essential steps in the journey towards breakthroughs and understanding.

Biography: Wieland Brendel received his Diploma in physics from the University of Regensburg (2010) and his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from the École normale supérieure in Paris (2014). He joined the University of Tübingen as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Matthias Bethge, became a Principal Investigator and Team Lead in the Tübingen AI Center (2018) and an Emmy Noether Group Leader for Robust Machine Learning (2020). In May 2022, Wieland joined the  Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems as an independent Group Leader and is now a Hector-endowed Fellow at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen (since September 2023). He received the 2023 German Pattern Recognition Award for his substantial contributions on robust, generalisable and interpretable machine vision. Aside of his research, Wieland co-founded a nationwide school competition (bw-ki.de) and a machine learning startup focused on visual quality control (maddox.ai).

Andreas Bulling
Date: Thursday, Febrary 8, 2024
Time: 16:30 - 17:15 CET
Onsite Location: MPI-IS Stuttgart, Copper Lecture Hall (Formerly R204)

The academic journey - a personal travel report

 

Abstract: Doing a PhD is clearly a very important, but also only the first in a long sequence of steps required when embarking on the journey of becoming an academic. While seemingly somewhere between fully under our control or completely unpredictable, many career steps along the way merely follow opportunities presented to us by people we meet or places we go to. But the impact of these decisions typically only becomes clear in retrospective, causing uncertainty. Similarly, research interests and emphases change over time, partly as a result of these encounters and decisions. In my talk I will provide an anecdotal "travel report" of my personal academic journey so far. I will try to provide insights into the reasoning behind some of the steps I took, opportunities I did (not) take, and the impact these decisions had. Based on these experiences, I will also try to advise on what I personally think is important to be successful on this journey. All garnished with examples of my research that is (obviously) closely linked to these steps and decisions. Overall, I hope to provide encouragement for those at the beginning of this (long) journey, maybe even to still some of their fears, but also to provide a realistic and thus hopefully practically useful view on what it takes to become an academic.  

Biography: Andreas Bulling is Full Professor (W3) of Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart and Director of the research group Human-Computer Interaction and Cognitive Systems. He is also an ELLIS Fellow and Founding Director of the Stuttgart ELLIS unit, Faculty and Member of the Executive Board of the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS), and Member in the Cluster of Excellence "Data-integrated Simulation Science" (SimTech) as well as the Stuttgart Interchange Forum for Reflecting on Intelligent Systems (IRIS). He received his MSc. in Computer Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, and a PhD in Information Technology and Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Andreas was previously a Feodor Lynen and a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, UK. Before coming to Stuttgart, he was a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and an Independent Research Group Leader (W2) at the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction (MMCI) at Saarland University. He received an ERC Starting Grant in 2018. Group website: https://perceptualui.org/

Participants can watch these talks on-site in either Stuttgart or Tübingen. One talk will be presented live in each location, and the other will be streamed remotely in real time. Both talks can also be watched online via Webex, which is how we anticipate most applicants will join.

We anticipate that each keynote talk will be 30 minutes long plus about 15 minutes for questions and discussion, giving a break of about 15 minutes between them.

Links to access this event will be distributed via our community mailing lists. 

With questions about this event or how to join, please contact Sara Sorce (sara.sorce@tuebingen.mpg.de).