Max Welling

Monday, May 5, 2025

1:00 - 2:00 pm (refreshments to follow at at 2:00 pm)

Broad Auditorium (Merkin building, 415 Main St.)

Or via YouTube Livestream: broad.io/ewsc

‍If you are attending in-person and do not have a Broad badge, please show up at the 415 Main Street entrance 10 minutes prior to the event to be escorted to the talk.

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Abstract: Many of humanity's biggest challenges have their roots in materials and molecules. From turning sunlight into energy, capturing carbon from the atmosphere, to designing new drugs, better batteries, better chips, or reactor walls for nuclear fusion, understanding and controlling molecules are at the root of making progress in these applications. In this talk I will discuss the ingredients to build a successful materials design engine using AI. In rough strokes, we need generative models to generate candidates, and a multi-fidelity stack of modules to evaluate these proposals, ranging from cheap AI based emulators to expensive physics based simulators to experiments. All components need to be equipped with uncertainty estimation capabilities and an AI agent will need to orchestrate the computations conditioned on all available resources. I will discuss this overall search engine as we are building it at CuspAI and dive deeper into some of the components such as uncertainty prediction, ML force fields and continuous PDE models to simulate gases and fluids.

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Biography: Prof. Dr. Max Welling is a full professor and research chair in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam and a Merkin distinguished visiting professor at Caltech. He is co-founder and CTO of the startup CuspAI in Materials Design. He is a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) where he served on the founding board. His previous appointments include Partner and VP at Microsoft Research, VP at Qualcomm Technologies, professor at UC Irvine.

He finished his PhD in theoretical high energy physics under supervision of Nobel laureate prof. Gerard ‘t Hooft. He then switched fields to focus on machine learning, first as a postdoc at Caltech under supervision of prof. Pietro Perona and then as postdoc under supervision of Nobel laureate prof. Geoffrey Hinton at UCL & U. Toronto.

Max Welling has served as associate editor in chief of IEEE TPAMI from 2011-2015, he serves on the advisory board of the Neurips foundation since 2015, he is co-founder of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligence Systems (ELLIS) and served on its board until 2021, he has been program chair and general chair of Neurips in 2013 and 2014 respectively. He was also program chair of AISTATS in 2009 and ECCV in 2016 and general chair and co-founder of MIDL 2018. Max Welling is recipient of the ECCV Koenderink Prize in 2010, and the 10 year Test of Time awards at ICML in 2021 and ICLR in 2024.

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This colloquium is part of a series hosted jointly by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

Questions? Email Amanda Ogden at aogden@broadinstitute.org.

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