Björn Ommer

Björn Ommer is a full Professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) where he heads the Computer Vision & Learning Group. Previously, he was a full professor at Heidelberg University and served as a director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) and the Heidelberg Collaboratory for Image Processing (HCI). He is affiliated with multiple prestigious institutions including the Bavarian AI Council, ELLIS unit Munich, the Helmholtz Foundation, and the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML).

Dr. Ommer received his PhD from ETH Zurich where he was awarded the ETH Medal for his dissertation 'Learning the Compositional Nature of Objects for Visual Recognition.' After completing his doctoral studies, he held a post-doctoral position in the Computer Vision Group of Jitendra Malik at UC Berkeley.

His primary research interests span all aspects of semantic image and video understanding based on deep machine learning, with particular emphasis on generative approaches for visual synthesis (including Stable Diffusion), invertible deep models for explainable AI, deep metric and representation learning, and self-supervised learning paradigms. His work has significant interdisciplinary applications in digital humanities and neurosciences.

His extensive publication record demonstrates a clear progression toward increasingly sophisticated generative models, culminating in the development of Stable Diffusion. His recent work focuses on improving diffusion models, exploring flow matching techniques, and developing more controllable generative systems with applications across multiple domains.

• German AI-Prize 2024
• Technology-Prize of Eduard-Rhein-Foundation 2024
• Nominated for German Future Prize of the President of Germany
• ELLIS Fellow
• ETH Medal for Dissertation
• Best Paper Award at CVPR'21 AI for Content Creation Workshop

Professor Ommer serves as an associate editor for IEEE T-PAMI and has held significant leadership roles in major computer vision conferences including program chair for GCPR and Senior/Area Chair for CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and NeurIPS. He delivered the opening keynote at NeurIPS'23 and has supervised numerous PhD students who have gone on to positions at leading technology companies including Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. His research group is located in downtown Munich and actively recruits talented students and researchers for cutting-edge work in computer vision and machine learning.