About me
Short Bio. I am an Early Career Research Group Leader AutoML for Science in the Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning for Science at the University of Tübingen. From October 2025, I will start as a professor for ML and AI at the TU Dortmund University and the Lamarr Institute.
Previously, I was part of the ML Lab at the University of Freiburg, where I completed my Ph.D. under the supervision of Frank Hutter and Marius Lindauer (2022). I also co-developed several open-source tools for HPO methods and AutoML systems and have been a member of the team winning three AutoML competitions (2016, 2018, 2020). I am a junior head of the Automl.org group, member of COSEAL and ELLIS, and a faculty member of IMPRS-IS. Furthermore, I co-organized the AutoML workshop series at ICML in 2019, 2020 and 2021, served as a social chair (2022,2023), a program chair (2024) and a non-traditional content track chair (2025) for the AutoML Conference and am part of Tübingen Women in Machine Learning.
Research Interests. I research methods for automated machine learning (AutoML), with a focus on AutoML Systems, Hyperparameter optimization, and Tabular Machine Learning. Motivated by the goal provide easy access to state-of-the-art ML, I research how to improve and extend AutoML to leverage the full potential of ML for new applications in science. Specifically, I aim to understand how to best develop AutoML methods to automatically design, select and fit the best ML solution for a given task.
News
- October'25 · 🥳 Excited to join TU Dortmund University and the Lamarr Institute as a professor for ML and AI. I'll also extend my lab, see here.
- July'25 · 📝 Our paper "In-Context Decision Making for Optimizing Complex AutoML Pipelines" got accepted at ECAI'25. We will present this work also at EWRL'25. See you in Bologna and Tübingen!
- June'25 · 📝 Our paper "In-Context Learning of Soft Nearest Neighbor Classifiers for Intelligible Tabular Machine Learning" got accepted as a poster (and oral) at TRL@ACL'25. See you in Vienna!
- June'25 · 🙏 The 5th AutoML School is over. Thanks to all participants and speakers for this fantastic event and see you next year in Dortmund! Videos can be found here.
- June'23 · 📣 I co-chair the non-archival content track for AutoML 2025 in New-York (together with Nick Erickson. We're looking forward to your (creative) submissions. Deadline Aug 4th.
- March'25 · 📣 Registration is open for the "5th AutoML School", which will take place in Tübingen, June 10th - 13th.
2024
- Nov'24 · 🎨 I participated in the Kreativ-Hackathon "KI neu sehen" as part of the Science and Innovation Days organized by the RHET AI center and the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart. Read more here.
- Oct'24 · 📝 Our paper "Towards Localization via Data Embedding for TabPFN" got accepted TRL@NeurIPS'24.
- Oct'24 · 📮 The deadline for applying for PhD positions at IMPRS-IS is on Nov 15th. Here is an example call for a PhD position or reach out to me in case of any questions!
- Oct'24 · 📓 I offer a seminar on "(Auto-)ML for tabular data" in the winter semester. See here.
- Sep'24 · 🗨️ I gave an invited Talk at the "AutoML Conference X Paris WiMLDS"
- July'24 · 🗨️ I gave an invited talk at the "ML in Science Conference" in Tübingen on "Automated Machine Learning for Science"
- June'24 · 👋 Welcome our new group member: Mykhailo Koshil!
- May'24 · 📝 Our paper "Position: Why We Must Rethink Empirical Research in Machine Learning" has been accepted at ICML'24.
- May'24 · 🗨️ I gave an invited talk at Women in Data Science Regensburg on "AutoML: Streamlining Machine Learning".
- Mar'24 · 📝 Our paper "Towards Bandit-based Optimization for Automated Machine Learning" has been accepted for oral presentation at PML4LRS@ICLR'24.
- Mar'24 · 📝 Our paper "Towards quantifying the effect of dataset selection for benchmarking tabular machine learning approaches" has been accepted at DMLR@ICLR'24.
- Feb'24 · 📝 Our paper "Can Fairness be Automated? Guidelines and Opportunities for Fairness-aware AutoML" has been published at JAIR.
- Feb'24 · 📓 I offered a seminar on "AutoML in the Age of Large Pre-trained Models" in the summer semester. See here.
2023
- 9th Nov'23 · 🗨️ Together with Marius Lindauer I gave a talk at MLOps'23: "Hyperparameter Optimieren mit AutoML"
- Sep'23 · 🥳 I am thrilled to be a program chair for AutoML 2024 in Paris (together with Roman Garnett and Joaquin Vanschoren , and Marius Lindauer as the General Chair)
- 15th Sep'23 · 👋 Welcome my first group member: Amir Rezaei Balef!
- Sep'23 · 📓 I offered a seminar on "Automated Machine Learning and Hyperparameter Optimization" in the winter semester. Find all details here.
- 12th-15th Sept'23 · 🥳 Together with Matthias Feurer I am organizing the social program for AutoML 2023! Find all details here.
- July'23 · 🗨️ Together with Marius Lindauer I will give a lecture on "AutoML: Accelerating Research on and Development of AI Applications" at the ESSAI Summer School!
- June'23 · 🗨️ Together with Eddie Bergman I gave a *Hands-On Session* at the nextgen_AI Freiburg workshop: "Automated Machine Learning with Auto-sklearn"
- Jan'23 · 📝 Our paper Mind the Gap: Measuring Generalization Performance Across Multiple Objectives got accepted at IDA 2023.
- Jan'23 · 📝 Our paper TabPFN: A Transformer That Solves Small Tabular Classification Problems in a Second got accepted to ICLR 2023.
- Jan'23 · 🥳 I am very excited to start my own Early Career Research Group for AutoML for Science at the Cluster of Excellence "ML for Science" at the University of Tübingen!
Misc
Note: For links to slides, tutorials and videos, please see talks, teaching and Automl.org
Want to work with me? See this call for multiple PhD positions for our new lab in Dortmund or reach out to me in case of any questions!