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[VIRTUAL SPEAKER]: Fall 2025 GRASP on Robotics: Max Welling, University of Amsterdam & CuspAI, “On the Role of Uncertainty in Automating the Scientific Process with AI”
September 19, 2025 @ 10:30 am - 11:45 am
This event had a VIRTUAL SPEAKER. Streaming was in-person only in Wu and Chen.
ABSTRACT
We are in the middle of a transformation of the scientific process. AI is now rapidly automating scientific discovery by accelerating scientific simulation and optimisation. For example, we can now shortcut expensive quantum mechanical calculations such as DFT with much faster machine learned interatomic potentials and forces, numerically “solve” PDEs with neural networks, or accelerate experimental design with Bayesian optimisation. However, in both applications of AI the role of uncertainty is key because ML models can only be trusted in regions of input space where it has seen data. Extrapolating too far away from the data runs the risk of a large prediction error that goes unnoticed. In this talk I will first provide a high level overview of the increasingly important role of AI in science, and then proceed with introducing a new efficient Variational Bayesian method for uncertainty quantification. I will show the effectiveness of this method on PDE solving and molecular generation (BARNN) and on ML interatomic potentials and forces (BLIP).
Presenter
Max Welling
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 member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, 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.