Frank Hutter
Professor
- Postal address:
-
Institut für Informatik
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Sekretariat Hutter/Maschinelles Lernen
Georges-Köhler-Allee 074
79110 Freiburg, Germany
- Room:
- Building 074, Room 00-017
- Coordinates:
- 48.014472, 7.831111 (DD)
- Email:
- fh@cs.uni-freiburg.de
- Phone:
- +49 761 203-67740
- Fax:
- +49 761 203-54217
I'm the Head of the Machine Learning Lab. I'm lucky enough to have an amazing team; all team members are linked in the sidebar on the left.
Important information for students interested in projects, theses, or Hiwi positions
With machine learning being one of the hottest topic around, our small group is flooded with requests. To make the process efficient, please do not email me directly, but follow the instructions posted here. Also, please note that we do not offer any internships for students from other universities.

New book on AutoML! Along with Lars Kotthoff and Joaquin Vanschoren, I edited a new book on AutoML, published with Springer. The book is fully open access, but hard copies can be ordered starting February 2019. The book contains reviews on hyperparameter optimization, neural architecture search, and meta-learning, descriptions of prominent AutoML systems and a review of AutoML challenges.



General research interests
I am interested in all facets of intelligence, and how we can replicate it in artificial systems. In particular, I work on- Statistical machine learning (in particular deep learning), to learn effective representations for large amounts of very noisy data (including uncertainty quantification)
- Automated problem solving, including knowledge representation
- Autonomously-learning software systems, which can improve their performance over time without the need for a human in the loop
- Sequential decision making under uncertainty, to trade off building better models of the world vs. acting better based on them
- Scientific experimentation, to make empirical research more reproducible and to codify human experts' strategies to the point where an autonomous system can execute them.
Specific research areas
I currently focus on a few research areas that combine the general themes above:- Bayesian optimization -- sequential experimental design under uncertainty
- Automated machine learning -- developing an AI that can compete with human data scientists
- Deep learning -- automatically learning representations of the data; in particular, I work on automating structure & hyperparameter search for deep learning, and on improving optimization algorithms for deep networks
- Automated algorithm design -- developing automated methods for parameter optimization, algorithm selection, and algorithm analysis. A few years ago, I gave a Google tech talk on this topic; you can watch it on youtube.
Affiliations
I'm a member of the Department of Computer Science at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Freiburg. I'm affiliated with three programmes by the German Research Foundation (DFG): the Emmy Noether Programme, the Priority Programme Autonomous Learning, and the Excellence Cluster BrainLinks-BrainTools. I'm a former member of the Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia (UBC), specifically of the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence (LCI) and the Bioinformatics and Empirical & Theoretical Algorithmics Laboratory (BETA). I was a machine learning consultant for Zynga Inc and am a co-founder of Meta-Algorithmic Technologies. I earned my PhD at UBC in 2009 and my Diplom (eq. MSc) at Darmstadt University in 2004.
I coorganized/am coorganizing the following workshops and competitions:
- ICML and ECML workshops on Automated Machine Learning: AutoML 2014, AutoML 2015, AutoML 2016, AutoML @ ECML 2017 and AutoML 2018.
- NeurIPS workshops on Meta-Learning 2017 and 2018
- AAAI workshop on Algorithm Configuration: AlgoConf 2015
- Workshop on Algorithm Configuration & Selection: COSEAL 2014
- NIPS workshops on Bayesian Optimization: BayesOpt 2011, BayesOpt 2012 & BayesOpt 2016
- Configurable SAT Solver Challenge: CSSC 2013 & CSSC 2014
I'm currently on the editorial board of JAIR and am regularly area chair, senior programme committee member or reviewer for NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR. I have also served in these roles for IJCAI and AAAI.
For more information, please see my publication page and my academic CV (the CV is updated very irregularly).Misc
Erdös number: 3 (Anne Condon -> Michael E. Sacks -> Paul Erdös)