Theofanis Karaletsos

Theofanis took his first steps as a machine learner at the Max Planck Institute For Intelligent Systems in collaboration with Microsoft Research Cambridge with work focused on unsupervised knowledge extraction from unstructured data, such as generative modeling of images and phenotyping for biology. He then moved to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where he worked on machine learning in the context of cancer therapeutics. He joined a small AI startup Geometric Intelligence in 2016 and with his colleagues formed the new Uber AI Labs. Theofanis' research interests are focused on rich probabilistic modeling, approximate inference and probabilistic programming. His main passion are structured models, examples of which are spatio-temporal processes, models of image formation, deep probabilistic models and the tools needed to make them work on real data. His past in the life sciences has also made him keenly interested in how to make models interpretable and quantify their uncertainty, non-traditional learning settings such as weakly supervised learning and model criticism.