Technical University of Munich Welcomes Two New Humboldt Professorships in Artificial Intelligence

The Humboldt Professorships aim to attract top talent from all over the world to German universities. Each professorship is endowed with up to five million euros, making it the most highly endowed research award in Germany. The Humboldt Awards for Stefanie Jegelka and Suvrit Sra were presented by Federal Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger and the President of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Robert Schlögl, in Berlin.

The researchers are helping to strengthen TUM’s core competencies in artificial intelligence and machine learning. In particular, the Munich Data Science Institute, established as part of the Excellence Strategy and the BMBF-funded Munich Centre for Machine Learning, will benefit enormously from these top appointments.

Expert in artificial neural networks
Stefanie Jegelka, Professor of Foundations of Deep Neural Networks, researches artificial neural networks that process graphs. The idea is that the structures of social networks, financial markets, or even chemical molecules in computer science are captured by graphs. These pose a challenge for machine learning, as not only the individual points of the network but also the different connections between the points are essential. Stefanie Jegelka is working on optimizing graph neural networks to deliver reliable results.