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Frank Hutter

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:
+49 761 203-74217

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.
Recent News
3/3 ICLR papers accepted! 1. Learning to Design RNA, 2. Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization, and 3. Efficient Multi-Objective Neural Architecture Search via Lamarckian Evolution. The last of these is on neural architecture search (NAS), and our NAS survey has also been accepted for publication in JMLR.

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.
I gave a tutorial on AutoML at NeurIPS 2018. A recording is available here, and slides are available here, with all references being clickable links. My co-speaker was Joaquin Vanschoren. I also coorganized the MetaLearning workshop again at NeurIPS.
We did it again! World champions in automatic machine learning (AutoML)! After winning the first international AutoML challenge 2015-2016, we also just won the second international AutoML challenge, which ran 2017-2018. This second AutoML challenge was again organized by ChaLearn and was affiliated with PAKDD 2018. Our system POSH-Auto-sklearn outperformed all other 41 AutoML participating systems. (Back in 2016, our AutoML system also won against human experts, but this time there was no human track.)

I received a Google Faculty Research Award. I am one of only 14 researchers worldwide selected for a Google Faculty Research Award in the area of Machine Learning and Data Mining in 2017-2018, and the only one in Europe. I will use the award to develop new state-of-the-art methods for efficient joint neural architecture search and hyperparameter optimization, building on our existing work on efficient Bayesian optimization, learning curve extrapolation, and Auto-Net.

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.
Most of my research is of a methodological nature on the meta-level, such as machine learning methods that model & optimize the performance of other machine learning methods. These meta-level problems constitute a great `drosophila' for AI: they require representation learning, reasoning under uncertainty, bounded rationality, active learning, exploration/exploitation tradeoffs, transfer learning, and much more, but they also allow for a perfectly reproducible environment with complex dynamics and available ground truth (given enough computational power). Also, they are great from a practical perspective since their outputs are better algorithms for problems we care about.

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:

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)