Angela Schoellig named Humboldt Professor for AI 2021
Eighth Alexander von Humboldt professorship for TUM
Machines of the future which are to function autonomously in road traffic or in human health care situations will have to be able to adapt quickly to the circumstances at hand. As a result these machines need the ability to learn from experience and at the same time to ensure the safety of the humans around them.
Prof. Angela Schoellig currently conducts research on these topics and others from the fields of Robotics, Control Engineering and Machine Learning at the Dynamic Systems Lab of the University of Toronto. Her work covers both theoretical and practical applications such as self-driving cars. The native German earned her doctorate in 2013 at the ETH Zurich and has won numerous awards and honors, most recently the Canada CIFAR AI Chair of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Angela Schoellig will be appointed to the Professorship for Safety, Performance and Reliability for Learning Systems at the TUM Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and will become a member of the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology, established as part of the TUM AGENDA 2030. She will reinforce the diverse group of approximately 60 TUM professors with international leading core competencies in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. This scientific mainstay field at TUM will be further reinforced in the upcoming months with strategic new appointments as part of the Hightech Agenda Bavaria. TUM consolidates its expertise in the fields of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence on a transdisciplinary basis at the Munich School of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MSRM), founded in 2017, and the Munich Data Science Institute (MDSI), established in 2020 in the course of the TUM Excellence Strategy.
- The Alexander von Humboldt Professorship awards up to five million euros over a period of five years. The Foundation's objective in awarding the prize is to attract leading world-class researchers to Germany. Bioinformatics expert Prof. Burkhard Rost (Columbia University) became a TUM Humboldt Professor in 2008, followed in 2010 by communications engineer Prof. Gerhard Kramer (University of Southern California) and information system researcher Prof. Hans-Arno Jacobsen (University of Toronto) in 2011. Subsequent TUM Humboldt Professors include diabetes expert Prof. Matthias Tschöp (University of Cincinnati), appointed in 2012, and Prof. Andreas S. Schulz (MIT), appointed in 2013, as well as renowned information scientist and Operations Research expert Prof. Marco Caccamo (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), appointed in 2018, and Prof. Daniel Rückert, expert on the application of AI in medicine (Imperial College London), appointed in 2020. TUM is firmly committed to diversifying the international profile of its professorial staff as a strategic objective.
