Max Welling (born 1968) is a Dutch computer scientist in

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

at the

University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, nl, Universiteit van Amsterdam) is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other bein ...

. In August 2017, the

university spin-off University spin-offs (also known as university spin-outs) are companies that transform technological inventions developed from university research that are likely to remain unexploited otherwise. They are a subcategory of research spin-offs. Promin ...

''Scyfer BV'', co-founded by Welling, was acquired by Qualcomm. He has since then served as a Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm Netherlands. He is also currently the Lead Scientist of the new

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

Lab in Amsterdam. Welling received his

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in physics with a thesis on

quantum gravity Quantum gravity (QG) is a field of theoretical physics that seeks to describe gravity according to the principles of quantum mechanics; it deals with environments in which neither gravitational nor quantum effects can be ignored, such as in the v ...

under the supervision of Nobel laureate

Gerard 't Hooft Gerardus (Gerard) 't Hooft (; born July 5, 1946) is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G. Veltman "for elucidating th ...

(1998) at the

Utrecht University Utrecht University (UU; nl, Universiteit Utrecht, formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2018, it had an enrollm ...

. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles in

computer vision Computer vision is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate t ...

, statistics and

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which rel ...

, and has most notably invented variational autoencoders (VAEs), together with Diederik P Kingma.

References

Living people Academic staff of the University of Amsterdam Utrecht University alumni Dutch computer scientists Qualcomm people 1968 births Machine learning researchers Microsoft people {{Netherlands-scientist-stub