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.
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
- 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 June 27th.
- 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? I recruit PhD students via IMPRS-IS (Deadline 15th November 2024). Here is an example call for a PhD position or reach out to me in case of any questions!