Note: We have moved to the MPI for Metals Research and are in the process of reorienting it into an MPI for Intelligent Systems (working title). For a press release in German, click here.

My scientific interests are in the field of inference from empirical data, in particular machine learning and perception, and I am head of the Department of Empirical Inference. In particular, I study kernel methods for extracting regularities from high-dimensional data. These regularities are usually statistical ones, however, in recent years I have also become interested in methods for finding causal regularities.

To learn more about our work, you may want to take a look at the Department Overview from the last report to our scientific advisory board, or at short project reports from the same document:

• Statistical Learning Theory
• Kernel Algorithms
• Causal and Probabilistic Inference
• Vision and Image Processing
• Robot Learning
• Machine Learning in Neuroscience
• Bioinformatics

Many of the papers can downloaded if you click on the tab "publications;" the older ones usually from http://www.kernel-machines.org/. A starting point is the first chapter of our book Learning with Kernels, available online. If your interest in machine learning is a mathematical one, you might prefer our review paper in the Annals of Statistics (arXiv link). For a general audience, I wrote a short high-level introduction in German that appeared in the Jahrbuch of the Max Planck Society.

Click here for a photograph of a beautiful northern light, which I took a few years ago from the plane on the way home from NIPS.

Note: I am not very organized with my e-mail; if you want to apply for a position in my lab, please send your application only to Sabrina.Rehbaum@tuebingen.mpg.de.

Research fields in my department are:

Statistical Learning Theory

Kernel Algorithms

Causal and Probabilistic Inference

Vision and Image Processing

Robot Learning

Machine Learning in Neuroscience

Bioinformatics

Bernhard Schölkopf was born in Stuttgart on 20 February, 1968. He received an M.Sc. in mathematics and the Lionel Cooper Memorial Prize from the University of London in 1992, followed in 1994 by the Diplom in physics from the Eberhard-Karls-Universität, Tübingen. Three years later, he obtained a doctorate in computer science from the Technical University Berlin. His thesis on Support Vector Learning won the annual dissertation prize of the German Association for Computer Science (GI). In 1998, he won the prize for the best scientific project at the German National Research Center for Computer Science (GMD). He has researched at AT&T Bell Labs, at GMD FIRST, Berlin, at the Australian National University, Canberra, and at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK). He has taught at Humboldt University, Technical University Berlin, and Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen. In July 2001, he was appointed scientific member of the Max Planck Society and director at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics; in October 2002, he was appointed Honorarprofessor for Machine Learning at the Technical University Berlin. In 2006, he received the J. K. Aggarwal Prize of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, in 2011, he got the Max Planck Research Award. The ISI lists him as a highly cited researcher. He served on the editorial boards of JMLR, IEEE PAMI, and IJCV.

He is on the boards of the NIPS foundation and of the International Machine Learning Society. Members of his department have won various awards at the major machine learning conference.
Some details:

Journal of Machine Learning Research is an online journal which he helped launch as a founding action editor in early 2000. JMLR is the flagship journal of machine learning.
International Journal of Computer Vision, one of the two flagship journals of computer vision (with IEEE PAMI, see below)
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Information Science and Statistics, a Springer series of monographs
Advances in Data Analysis and Classification

With 5-year impact factors (ISI, 2008) of 10.3 and 8.0, respectively, IJCV and PAMI are the two top journals in the general area of artificial intelligence (they are ranked three and five in all of computer science). JMLR is number four (5.9).

In addition, he has served and serves as PC member (e.g., NIPS, COLT, ICML, UAI, DAGM, CVPR, Snowbird Learning Workshop) and as (program) (co-)chair of various conferences (COLT'03, DAGM'04, NIPS'05 (click here for NIPS'05 author and reviewer information), as well as the first two kernel workshops). He acted as general chair of NIPS'06.