Bernhard Schölkopf

Director

Empirical Inference

Office: N4.019
Max-Planck-Ring 4
72076 Tübingen
Germany

+49 7071 601 551

+49 7071 601 552

My scientific interests are in the field of machine learning and inference from empirical data. In particular, I study kernel methods for extracting regularities from possibly high-dimensional data. These regularities are usually statistical ones, however, in recent years I have also become interested in methods for finding causal structures that underly statistical dependences. I have worked on a number of different applications of machine learning - in our field, you get "to play in everyone's backyard." Most recently, I have been trying to play in the backyard of astronomers and photographers.

I am heading the Department of Empirical Inference; take a look at our last formal Research Overview and Alumni List.

Many of my papers can downloaded if you click on the tab "publications;" alternatively, from arxiv or from http://www.kernel-machines.org/. Some additional links:

We have written a book about causality that was just published as an open access title at MIT Press (PDF, with Jonas Peters and Dominik Janzing).
Photographs: view of the Alps from the southern black forest, a rainbow in La Palma, a lunar eclipse in 2007, the Andromeda galaxy, the Milky Way on the Roque de los Muchachos, the North America Nebula, the constellation Orion with Barnard's loop, and finally a picture of a beautiful northern light, which I took a few years ago from the plane, on the way home from a conference in Vancouver. I always try to get a window seat when flying home from the North American west coast - it is surprizingly common to see northern lights. Looking at the night sky is a fascinating and humbling experience.
Some chapters of our book Learning with Kernels.
Review paper on kernel methods in the Annals of Statistics.
Short high-level introduction on statistical learnig theory (in German) that appeared in the 2004 Jahrbuch of the Max Planck Society.
Obituary for Alexej Chervonenkis (NIPS 2014).
I am a member of the LIGO scientific collaboration to detect gravitational waves
With the growing interest in (how to make money with) big data, machine learning has significantly gained in popularity. We have published an article in the German newspaper FAZ, discussing some of the implications. Disclaimer: the text that appears above our names was neither written nor approved by us.
A children's book
open letter against autonomous AI weapons

Machine Learning Causal Inference Artificial Intelligence Computational Photography Statistics

click here

M.Sc. in mathematics and Lionel Cooper Memorial Prize, University of London (1992)
Diplom in physics (Tübingen, 1994)
doctorate in computer science from the Technical University Berlin (1997); thesis on Support Vector Learning (main advisor: V. Vapnik, AT&T Bell Labs) won the annual dissertation prize of the German Association for Computer Science (GI)
scientific member of the Max Planck Society, 2001
awards won by his lab
J. K. Aggarwal Prize of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, 2006
Max Planck Research Award, 2011
Academy Prize of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2012
Royal Society Milner Award, 2014
Member of the German National Academy of Science (Leopoldina)
Fellow of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Preis of the German Science Foundation (2018)
Honorarprofessor at the Technical University Berlin (computer science) and at the Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen (physics)
list of publications as of January 2015
"ISI highly cited" (added in 2010)
the h Index for Computer Science
Google Scholar page
co-editor-in-chief of JMLR
member of the boards of the NIPS foundation and of the International Machine Learning Society
PC member (e.g., NIPS, COLT, ICML, UAI, DAGM, CVPR, Snowbird Learning Workshop) and co-chair of various conferences (COLT'03, DAGM'04, NIPS'05, NIPS'06 and the first two kernel workshops).
co-founder of the Machine Learning Summer Schools
two-page CV: PDF.

If you'd like to contact me, please consider these two notes:

1. I recently became co-editor-in-chief of JMLR. I work for JMLR because I believe in its open access model, but it takes a lot of time. During my JMLR term, please don't convince me to do other journal or grant reviewing duties.

2. I am not very organized with my e-mail so if you want to apply for a position in my lab, please send your application only to Sekretariat-Schoelkopf@tuebingen.mpg.de. Note that we do not respond to non-personalized applications that look like they are being sent to a large number of places simultaneously.

We are always happy to receive outstanding applications for PhD positions and postdocs.

681 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2018

Efficient Encoding of Dynamical Systems through Local Approximations

Solowjow, F., Mehrjou, A., Schölkopf, B., Trimpe, S.

In Proceedings of the 57th IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Miami, Fl, USA, December 2018 (inproceedings) Accepted

arXiv PDF Project Page [BibTex]

2018

Solowjow, F., Mehrjou, A., Schölkopf, B., Trimpe, S. Efficient Encoding of Dynamical Systems through Local Approximations In Proceedings of the 57th IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Miami, Fl, USA, December 2018 (inproceedings) Accepted

arXiv PDF Project Page [BibTex]

Control of Musculoskeletal Systems using Learned Dynamics Models

Büchler, D., Calandra, R., Schölkopf, B., Peters, J.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(4):3161-3168, IEEE, October 2018 (article)

Abstract

Controlling musculoskeletal systems, especially robots actuated by pneumatic artificial muscles, is a challenging task due to nonlinearities, hysteresis effects, massive actuator de- lay and unobservable dependencies such as temperature. Despite such difficulties, muscular systems offer many beneficial prop- erties to achieve human-comparable performance in uncertain and fast-changing tasks. For example, muscles are backdrivable and provide variable stiffness while offering high forces to reach high accelerations. In addition, the embodied intelligence deriving from the compliance might reduce the control demands for specific tasks. In this paper, we address the problem of how to accurately control musculoskeletal robots. To address this issue, we propose to learn probabilistic forward dynamics models using Gaussian processes and, subsequently, to employ these models for control. However, Gaussian processes dynamics models cannot be set-up for our musculoskeletal robot as for traditional motor- driven robots because of unclear state composition etc. We hence empirically study and discuss in detail how to tune these approaches to complex musculoskeletal robots and their specific challenges. Moreover, we show that our model can be used to accurately control an antagonistic pair of pneumatic artificial muscles for a trajectory tracking task while considering only one- step-ahead predictions of the forward model and incorporating model uncertainty.

RAL18final link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Büchler, D., Calandra, R., Schölkopf, B., Peters, J. Control of Musculoskeletal Systems using Learned Dynamics Models IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(4):3161-3168, IEEE, October 2018 (article)

RAL18final link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Learning-based solution to phase error correction in T2*-weighted GRE scans

Loktyushin, A., Ehses, P., Schölkopf, B., Scheffler, K.

1st International conference on Medical Imaging with Deep Learning (MIDL), July 2018 (conference)