It is our great pleasure to announce the next Munich AI Lecture featuring Prof. Dr. Jean-Luc Starck, Director of Research and head of the CosmoStat laboratory at the Institute of Research into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe, Département d'Astrophysique, CEA-Saclay, France. The lecture is organized by relAI director Prof. Dr. Gitta Kutyniok, and co-hosted by Prof. Dr. Jochen Weller, with support of BAIOSPHERE, the Bavarian AI Network.

Event Details:

• Speaker: Prof. Dr. Jean-Luc Starck
• Title: Unveiling the Cosmos: Deep Learning Solutions to Inverse Problems in Astrophysics
• Date and Time: Tuesday, 18. February 2025 from 17:00 pm to 18:30 pm
• Location: Senatssaal, LMU Munich, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, Munich 

Prof. Starck will speak about how inverse problems in astrophysics, such as image reconstruction or gravitational lensing data analysis, have traditionally relied on sparsity-based techniques to recover underlying physical structures from incomplete or noisy data. Deep learning methods are now replacing these classical approaches, offering unprecedented performance gains in accuracy and efficiency. Despite their success, deep learning methods introduce new challenges, including interpretability, generalization across diverse astrophysical scenarios, and robustness to observational biases. In this talk, the speaker will explore the transition from sparsity-driven methods to deep learning-based solutions, highlighting both the opportunities and pitfalls of this paradigm shift. Prof. Starck will discuss recent developments, applications to astrophysical data, and future directions for addressing the emerging challenges in this rapidly evolving field.

To read more information about the event and the speaker, visit this weblink.

relAI is a co-organiser of the Munich AI lectures. Find more info on this and other upcoming events on the Munich AI lectures home page.

Multi-Head Attention has become ubiquitous in modern machine learning architectures, but how much efficiency can still be gained? This question was the focus of Dr. Maximilian Baust’s talk, "Beyond Transformers: Why Beating Multi-Head Attention is Hard."

In his presentation, Dr. Baust explored potential solutions for improving efficiency, ranging from implementation strategies and algorithmic modifications to new architectures, including spiking neural networks.

Dr. Maximilian Baust serves as Director of Solution Architecture Industries EMEA at NVIDIA and is also an industry mentor for one of relAI’s PhD students.

We extend our gratitude to Dr. Baust for sharing his insights and to our director, Gitta Kutyniok, for inviting him to relAI.

We are happy to invite you to the upcoming Munich AI Lecture featuring two distinguished researchers Prof. Holger Hoos from RWTH Aachen University and Prof. Franca Hoffmann from California Institute of Technology. The lecture is organized by the Chair of Mathematics of Information Processing with support by MCML.

In the first talk, “Dynamics of Strategic Agents and Algorithms as PDEs“, Prof. Hoffmann will speak about dynamics of interactions between algorithms and a population.

In the second talk, “Learning, reasoning and optimisation: Adversarial robustness of neural networks”, Prof. Hoos will discuss robustness of neural networks and its verification.

Event Details:

• Speakers: Prof. Dr. Holger Hoos and Prof. Dr. Franca Hoffmann
• Date and Time: December 17, 2024, 16:00 CET (16:00-17:00 talk by Prof. Hoffmann and 17:30-18:30 talk by Prof. Hoos – We will have a small break with coffee/tea and snacks in between)
• Location: Senatssaal, LMU Munich, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, Munich 

Bio Franca Hoffmann

Franca Hoffmann obtained her master’s in mathematics from Imperial College London (UK) and holds a PhD from the Cambridge Centre for Analysis at University of Cambridge (UK). She held the position of von Kármán instructor at Caltech from 2017 to 2020, then joined University of Bonn (Germany) as Bonn Junior Professor and Quantum Leap Africa in Kigali, Rwanda (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences) as AIMS-Carnegie ResearchChair in Data Science, before arriving at the California Institute of Technology as Assistant Professor in 2022.

Bio Holger Hoos

Holger H. Hoos holds an Alexander von Humboldt professorship in AI at RWTH Aachen University (Germany), where he also leads the AI Center, as well as a professorship in machine learning at Universiteit Leiden (the Netherlands) and an adjunct professorship in computer science at the University of British Columbia (Canada). He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the European AI Association (EurAI), past president of the Canadian Association for Artificial Intelligence, former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and chair of the board of CLAIRE, an organization that seeks to strengthen European excellence in AI research and innovation (claire-ai.org).

relAI is a co-organiser of the Munich AI lectures. Find more info on these other upcoming events on the Munich AI lectures home page.

Save the date!

We are pleased to invite you to the upcoming Munich AI Lecture featuring renowned researcher Prof. Dr. Helmut Bölcskei hosted by our relAI director Prof. Dr. Gitta Kutyniok, Bavarian AI Chair for Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence at LMU.

Deep neural networks have led to breakthrough results in numerous practical machine learning tasks. In the lecture “The Mathematical Universe behind Deep Neural Networks,” Prof. Dr. Bölcskei will take us on an exciting journey through the mathematical universe behind these practical successes, elucidating the theoretical underpinnings of deep neural networks in functional analysis, harmonic analysis, complex analysis, approximation theory, dynamical systems, Kolmogorov complexity, optimal transport, fractal geometry, mathematical logic, and automata theory.

Event Details:

 • Speaker: Prof. Dr. Helmut Bölcskei

• Date and Time: November 25th, 2024, 5.15 pm

• Location: Große Aula der LMU (Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, Room 120, 80539 München)

Helmut Bölcskei is a Professor of Mathematical Information Science at ETH Zurich and has been a Principal Investigator at the Lagrange Mathematics and Computing Research Center in Paris since 2021. After earning his degrees from Vienna University, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and has held visiting researcher positions at many leading institutions. In addition to his academic achievements, he is also a successful entrepreneur. Professor Bölcskei has received numerous awards and prestigious fellowships and continues to serve as Editor-in Chief for some of the field's most distinguished journals.

Learn more about it here.

Mark your calendars for these interesting talks coming up in the next weeks!

The next talk, by Daniela Rus, is on July 15th, at 5pm at Lichtenbergstraße 2a, 85748 Garching, Auditorium (Ground floor) of Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), TUM and via zoom. She is the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT.

On Wednesday July 17th, Alexei A. Efros of University of California, Berkeley will discuss whether “We are (still?) not giving data enough credit”. The lecture takes place in cooperation with the ELLIS-Workshop on "Open Problems in Computer Vision & Generative Modelling" on the same day.

Sebastian Scherer, an Associate Research Professor at the Robotics Institute (RI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) will present his approaches, progress, and results on multi-modal sensing on Monday, July 22nd, at TUM Garching Campus, FMI Building, Boltzmannstr. 3, Hörsaal 2 (00.04.011).

relAI is a co-organiser of the Munich AI lectures. Find more info on these other upcoming events on the Munich AI lectures home page.

We are happy to announce that on October 29th, the three DAAD Zuse Schools of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence, ELIZA (Darmstadt), SECAI (Dresden) und relAI (Munich), will celebrate the second joint Meeting in Munich.

The event, co-organized by DAAD and relAI, will be honoured with the presence of representatives from the Bavarian State Ministry for Science and the Arts (StMWK), Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), TUM and LMU presidents, and DAAD, who will introduce the meeting with opening speeches. The program will be followed by talks from research fellows, students, and industry partners of the Zuse Schools and rounded by a podium discussion.

Preliminary Agenda

The next Munich AI Lecture will take place on Tuesday, June 25th at 5pm at Arcisstr. 21, Room 0790 and via zoom.

Ivan Laptev, visiting professor at MBZUAI and a senior researcher on leave from Inria Paris, will talk about "From Video Understanding to Embodied Agents". Mark your calendars and join us there!

For more information on the Munich AI Lectures, co-organized by relAI, visit https://munichlectures.ai/upcoming/.

The next Munich AI Lecture will take place on Tuesday, June 18th at 5 pm at Arcisstr. 21, Room 2750 (Karl Max von Bauernfeind auditorium) and via zoom.

This edition features Ludovic Righetti (New York University), who will talk about "Learning complex robotic behaviors with optimal control". Mark your calendars and join us there!

For more information on the Munich AI Lectures, co-organized by relAI, visit https://munichlectures.ai/upcoming/.