Max Welling

Max Welling (born 1968) is a Dutch computer scientist in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam.^[1] In August 2017, the university spin-off Scyfer BV, co-founded by Welling, was acquired by Qualcomm.^[2] He has since then served as a Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm Netherlands.^[3] He is also a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research AI4Science, based in Amsterdam.^[4]

Max Welling
Born	(1968-11-01)1 November 1968
Nationality	Dutch
Alma mater	Utrecht University
Known for	Bayesian Inference, Generative modeling, Deep Learning, Variational autoencoders, Graph Convolutional Networks, Group-Equivariant Convolutional Networks
Awards	NSF Career Award (2005), Dean’s Mid-Career Award for Research (2008), ECCV Koenderink Prize (2010), ICML Best Paper Award (2012), ICLR Best Paper Award (2017)
Scientific career
Fields	Machine learning, Quantum mechanics
Institutions	University of Amsterdam
Doctoral advisor	Gerard 't Hooft
Website	Website of Max Welling

Welling received his PhD in physics with a thesis on quantum gravity under the supervision of Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft (1998)^[5] at the Utrecht University. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles in machine learning, computer vision, statistics and physics,^[6] and has most notably invented variational autoencoders (VAEs), together with Diederik P Kingma.