Professor of Machine Learning, Freiburg · Co-founder of Prior Labs (TabPFN)Professor of Machine Learning, Freiburg · Co-founder of Prior Labs (TabPFN)
deep-learningsystems
The researcher most responsible for making AutoML a field of its own: Auto-WEKA, Auto-sklearn and Auto-PyTorch came out of his lab, as did the first AutoML book and the AutoML conference. PhD and postdoc at UBC; full professor at Freiburg since 2016, director of the ELLIS unit there and a Hector Endowed Fellow at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen. TabPFN, a transformer pretrained on synthetic data to do tabular prediction in a single forward pass, was published in Nature in January 2025 and beat tuned state-of-the-art baselines on most small-data benchmarks. Co-founded Prior Labs with Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir in late 2024 (€9M pre-seed led by Balderton, February 2025); in 2026 SAP agreed to acquire Prior Labs and invest more than €1 billion in it over four years.
The researcher most responsible for making AutoML a field of its own: Auto-WEKA, Auto-sklearn and Auto-PyTorch came out of his lab, as did the first AutoML book and the AutoML conference. PhD and postdoc at UBC; full professor at Freiburg since 2016, director of the ELLIS unit there and a Hector Endowed Fellow at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen. TabPFN, a transformer pretrained on synthetic data to do tabular prediction in a single forward pass, was published in Nature in January 2025 and beat tuned state-of-the-art baselines on most small-data benchmarks. Co-founded Prior Labs with Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir in late 2024 (€9M pre-seed led by Balderton, February 2025); in 2026 SAP agreed to acquire Prior Labs and invest more than €1 billion in it over four years.