Sebastian U. Stich

Sebastian U. Stich is a tenured Professor at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and a member of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). His research focuses on optimization for machine learning, collaborative learning (distributed, federated, and decentralized methods), efficient optimization techniques, adaptive stochastic methods, and privacy/security in machine learning.

• Recent appointments include ERC Consolidator Grant 2024 for the CollectiveMinds project.
• Key contributions in federated/decentralized learning, uncertainty estimation, and communication-efficient optimization.
• Active in workshop organization, including the Optimization for Machine Learning workshop at NeurIPS 2024.
• Teaching modern optimization methods at Saarland University (2023-2025).

His work has been recognized with awards such as the Google Research Scholar Award (2023) and Meta Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Award (2022). His research group includes postdocs Dr. Anton Rodomanov and Dr. Rotem Mulayoff, and PhD students Xiaowen Jiang and Yuan Gao.