Meet our great keynote speakers Kristian, Isabel, Leandro, and Guadalupe, whose expertise spans cutting-edge AI, scientific computing, data ethics, and community building.
2025-04-23 10:30–11:15, Zeiss Plenary (Spectrum)
Kristian Kersting is co-director of the Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI), head of research at the German Research Center for AI / Darmstadt, and professor of AI and machine learning at TU Darmstadt. After his PhD at the Univrsity of Freiburg in 2006, he was with the MIT, Fraunhofer IAIS, the University of Bonn and the TU Dortmund. He is an AAAI, EurAI and ELLIS Fellow, co-author of the popoular science book “Wie Maschinen Lernen”, winner of the “German AI Prize”, member of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature and seed investor at Aleph Alpha. In collaboration with Aleph Alpha Research, he also runs the lab 1141 at TU Darsmtadt on safe and transparent generative AI. He had a regular AI column in the Welt (am Sonntag).
2025-04-24 09:05–09:50, Zeiss Plenary (Spectrum)
Guadalupe is a Theoretical Cosmologist working in understanding how the Universe began, how it evolved and what its ultimate fate could be. In particular, she is interested in studying alternative cosmological models with state-of-the-art astrophysical data using advanced statistical techniques and data science algorithms. Furthermore, she is interested in forecasting the performance of new experiments or new observables, for instance, Gravitational Waves. Currently, she is a Research Fellow in Space Science at the European Space Agency. Moreover, she is an active member of the Euclid Consortium: the scientific group behind the data exploration of the ESA Euclid mission. In particular, she is the maintainer of the code "Cosmology Likelihood for Observables in Euclid" or simply, CLOE. This software is part of the official data analytics pipeline that will be eventually used to extract cosmological constraints of the Euclid data.
2025-04-24 13:25–14:10, Zeiss Plenary (Spectrum)
Isabel Drost-Fromm was up to recently the Chair of the board of directors of the InnerSource Commons Foundation, as well as (former board) member of the Apache Software Foundation. Interested in all things search and text mining with a thorough background in open source collaboration, she is working at Europace AG as Open Source Strategist. True to the nature of people living in Berlin she loves giving friends a reason for a brief visit - as a result she co-founded and is still one of the creative heads behind Berlin Buzzwords, a tech conference on all things search, scale and storage and FOSS Backstage.
2025-04-25 09:05–09:50, Zeiss Plenary (Spectrum)
Leandro von Werra is the head of research at Hugging Face. He promotes open science and works on building large high-quality datasets and training of open LLMs. He lead the BigCode project, is a co-author of the “Natural Language Processing with Transformers” book published at O’Reilly and the creator of the popular Python library TRL, which combines transformers with reinforcement learning and other effective fine-tuning methods.