Profile

Zeynep Akata is a Liesel Beckmann Distinguished professor of Computer Science at Technical University of Munich and the director of the Institute for Explainable Machine Learning at Helmholtz Munich. After completing her PhD at the INRIA Rhone Alpes with Prof Cordelia Schmid (2014), she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics with Prof Bernt Schiele (2014-17) and at University of California Berkeley with Prof Trevor Darrell (2016-17) and as an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam with Prof Max Welling (2017-19). Before moving to Munich in 2024, she was a professor of computer science (W3) within the Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning at the University of Tübingen. She received a Lise-Meitner Award for Excellent Women in Computer Science from Max Planck Society in 2014, a young scientist honour from the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring foundation in 2019, an ERC-2019 Starting Grant from the European Commission, The DAGM German Pattern Recognition Award in 2021, The ECVA Young Researcher Award in 2022 and the Alfried Krupp Award in 2023. Her research interests include multimodal learning and explainable AI.

Experience

• Professor of Computer Science, Technical University of Munich, 2024 - Now
• Director of Institute for Explainable Machine Learning, Helmholtz Munich, 2024 - Now
• Professor of Computer Science, University of Tübingen, 2019 – 2023
• Senior Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, 2020-2023
• Senior Group Leader at Max Planck Institute for Informatics, 2017 – 2023
• Assistant Professor at University of Amsterdam, 2017 – 2019
• Post Doctoral Researcher at UC Berkeley, 2016-2017
• Post Doctoral Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Informatics, 2014-2017

Education

• PhD: University of Grenoble, France, 2014
• MSc: RWTH Aachen, Germany, 2010
• BSc: Trakya University, Turkey, 2008

External Activities

• Program Chair:
  • GCPR-DAGM 2020, IEEE CVPR 2024, ECCV 2026​
• Senior Area Chair:
  • NeurIPS 2023, ICML 2024
• Area Chair:
  • WACV 2016, IJCAI 2018, ECCV 2018, BMVC 2019, CVPR 2019-2023, ICCV 2019-2023, ICML 2020-2023, ECCV 2020-2022, ICLR 2021-2023
• Associate Editor:
  • Pattern Recognition Journal (Appointment between Aug 2018 - Aug 2020)
  • Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) (2020 - Now)
• Reviewer:
  • TPAMI 2015-2017, IJCV 2015-2017
  • ICCV 2015-2017, ECCV 2016, ACCV 2016, CVPR 2015-2018, EMNLP 2018, NIPS 2016-2018, AISTATS 2017, AAAI 2018, ICLR 2018, ICML 2018-2019
• Organization Committees and Invited Talks:
  • Gender Diversity in STEM fields, Springboard training program, 2015
  • Tutorial on Embeddings and Metric Learning, GCPR 2016
  • Tutorial on Zero-Shot Learning, CVPR 2017
  • CD-Make 2018, Cross Domain Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction
  • WiCV@ECCV 2018, Women in Computer Vision Workshop
  • Interpretable Machine Learning for Computer Vision Tutorial at CVPR 2020, Invited Speaker
  • Fair, Data-Efficient and Trusted Computer Vision Workshop at CVPR 2020, Invited Speaker
  • Human in the Loop Learning (HILL) Workshop at ICML 2020, Invited Speaker
  • XXAI Workshop at ICML 2020, Invited Speaker
  • Women in Computer Vision (WiCV) Workshop at ECCV 2020, Invited Speaker
  • Task-CV Workshop at ECCV 2020, Invited Speaker
  • RIIAA 2020 - International Meeting on Artificial Intelligence, Invited Speaker
  • Sketching for Human Expressivity (SHE) Workshop at ICCV 2021, Co-organizer
  • Human in the Loop Learning (HILL) Workshop at ICML 2021, Co-organizer
  • Natural XAI: Natural Language Explanations Tutorial at ICML 2021, Co-organizer and Speaker
  • ImageNet: The Past, The Present and The Future Workshop at NeurIPS 2021, Co-organizer

Awards and Funding

• Lise-Meitner Award for Excellent Women in Computer Science from Max Planck Society in 2014
• Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) grant from DARPA in 2017
• ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council in 2019
• Young Investigator honour from Werner-von-Siemens-Ring Foundation in 2019
• DAGM German Pattern Recognition Award in 2021
• ECVA Young Researcher Award in 2022

Publications

Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=jQl9RtkAAAAJ&hl=en

Teaching

• BSc Level Lecture: Introduction to Machine Learning, SS 2023
• Seminar on Explainable Machine Learning, WS 2020/2021 and WS 2021/2022
• Seminar on Weakly Supervised Learning, SS 2022
• Leren (Introduction to Machine Learning), 2017 (BSc AI, Y2, P2)
• Leren (Introduction to Machine Learning), 2018 (BSc AI, Y2, P2)
• Philosophy of AI (Guest Lecture), March 2018
• Computer Vision 2 (Guest Lecture), May 2018
• Back2Basic 2018, Annual Computer Science Event, Amsterdam, Invited Speaker
• DSSV 2018, Conference on Data Science, Statistics and Visualization, Invited speaker
• BMVC 2018, British Machine Vision Conference, Invited Speaker
• Advanced topics in Explainable Machine Learning, WS 2019/2020 (MSc of CS, ML, MI)
• TUM-AI Lecture Series 2021, Invited Speaker
• SIKS-AI Lecture Series 2021, Invited Speaker
• Advanced topics in Explainable Machine Learning, WS 2020/2021 (MSc of CS, ML, MI, CogSci)
• Learning with Limited Labeled Data, WS 2020/2021 (MSc of CS, ML, MI, CogSci)

PhD Students

• 2024-Now Jessica Bader @ TUM
• 2023-Now Yiran Huang @ TUM
• 2023-Now Lukas Thede @ University of Tübingen (with Matthias Bethge)
• 2023-Now Luca Eyring @ TUM (ELLIS PhD with Alexei Dosovitskiy)
• 2023-Now Leander Girrbach @ University of Tübingen
• 2021-Now Shyamgopal Karthik @ University of Tübingen
• 2021-Now Jae Myung Kim @ University of Tübingen and INRIA (ELLIS PhD with Cordelia Schmid)
• 2021-Now Karsten Roth @ University of Tübingen and Deepmind (ELLIS PhD with Oriol Vinyals)
• 2021-Now Anders Christensen @ Denmark Technical University and University of Tübingen (co-supervision, ELLIS PhD with Ole Winther)
• 2021-Now Otniel Mercea @ University of Tübingen (with Andreas Geiger)
• 2020-Now Thomas Hummel @ University of Tübingen
• 2020-Now Leonard Salewski @ University of Tübingen (with Hendrik Lensch)
• 2019-Now Lennart van Goten @ KTH Stockholm (co-supervision, with Kevin Smith)
• 2021-2023 Uddeshya Upadhyay @ University of Tübingen
• 2017-2022 Stephan Alaniz @ University of Tübingen and Max Planck Institute for Informatics
• 2016-2020 Yongqin Xian @ Max Planck Institute for Informatics (with Bernt Schiele)
• 2018-2019 Marco Federici @ University of Amsterdam (with Nate Kushman, Patrick Forre)
• 2017-2019 Victor Garcia @ University of Amsterdam (with Prof. Max Welling)
• 2017-2019 Sadaf Gulshad @ University of Amsterdam (with Prof. Arnold Smeulders)
• 2018-2019 Maartje ter Hoeve @ University of Amsterdam (with Prof. Maarten de Rijke)
• 2018-2019 Rodolfo Corona @ UC Berkeley (with Prof. Trevor Darrell)