Max Welling

Max Welling is a research chair in Machine Learning at the University of Amsterdam's Informatics Institute and a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research (MSR). He also serves as a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), where he is a founding board member. His career spans academic and industrial leadership, including roles as Professor at UC Irvine and Vice President at Qualcomm Technologies.

He co-directs the Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab (AMLab), the Qualcomm-UvA deep learning lab (QUvA), and the Bosch-UvA Deep Learning lab (Delta). His research bridges theoretical physics and machine learning, focusing on probabilistic modeling, neural networks, and statistical learning.

• CIFAR Fellow
• ELLIS Fellow
• ECCV Koenderink Prize (2010)
• ICML Test of Time Award (2021)

Welling earned his PhD in theoretical high energy physics at Utrecht University under Nobel laureate Prof. Gerard ‘t Hooft. He completed postdoctoral work at the University of Toronto, UCL, and Caltech, mentored by Prof. Geoffrey Hinton and Prof. Pietro Perona. He has held editorial leadership roles at IEEE TPAMI and advisory positions at NeurIPS, and chaired major conferences like NeurIPS, AISTATS, ECCV, and MIDL.