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 my team members are linked in the sidebar on the left. In addition to my full-time role at the University of Freiburg, I also consult for the Bosch Center for AI (BCAI) as Chief Expert for AutoML.
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.



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. In addition to my full-time role at the University of Freiburg, I also consult for the Bosch Center for AI (BCAI) as their Chief Expert for AutoML. I hold an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council and an Emmy Noether Grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG). 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 will be program co-chair of ECML 2020 in Ghent. I co-founded and regularly co-organize the NeurIPS workshop series on meta-learning and the ICML workshop series on AutoML. I also co-founded and regularly co-organized the NeurIPS workshop series on Bayesian optimization. Please see http://automl.org/workshops for an up-to-date list of workshops I'm co-organizing..
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.
Please see my publication page and our website http://automl.org for our blog, research topics, events we organize, etc. My academic CV (the CV is updated very irregularly).Misc
Erdös number: 3 (Anne Condon -> Michael E. Sacks -> Paul Erdös)
Tweets
For finer-grained news, here are some of my tweets:
Frank's tweets