Max Welling

Max Welling (born 1968) is a Dutch computer scientist in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam.^[1] Welling received his PhD in physics with a thesis on quantum gravity under the supervision of Gerard 't Hooft (1998)^[2] at Utrecht University. He has published on machine learning, computer vision, statistics and physics,^[3] and worked on variational autoencoders (VAEs) together with Durk Kingma.

In 2010 he shared with two authors a Koenderink Prize.^[4] In 2025, Welling was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[5]

Career and research

In 2013, Welling co-founded Scyfer BV, a spin-off of the University of Amsterdam.^[6] In August 2017, Scyfer was acquired by Qualcomm.^[6] Welling has since then served as a Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm Netherlands.^[7] While at Qualcomm, Welling helped develop gauge-equivariant convolutional neural networks, a theoretical framework for creating neural networks that can learn patterns on spherical and curved objects rather than only on 2D arrays of pixels.^[8]

Welling was a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research AI4Science, based in Amsterdam.^[9] As part of his work at Microsoft, Welling helped develop Aurora, an AI model that forecasts weather events using less computational power than comparable models.^[10]

In 2024, Welling co-founded CuspAI, a startup company that builds AI models to identify chemicals and materials that help address climate change and improve sustainability for processes such as semiconductor manufacturing.^[11][12] Welling serves as CTO of CuspAI.^[11]

References