Eckart Altenmüller (MD, MA) is full Professor and Director of the Institute of Music Physiology and Musicians Medicine and the University of Music and Drama, Hanover, Germany.
Oleg Pronin is professor for Laser Technology and Spectroscopy at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, Germany. He is a co-founder of two start-ups, Nordair Systems and n2-Photonics.
Dierk Raabe is director of the Department for Microstructure Physics, Alloy Design and Sustainable Synthesis of Materials at Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung, Düsseldorf and professor at RWTH Aachen
Karoline Wiesner is Professor of Complexity Science at the Institute of Physics and Astronomy, Potsdam University, and author of the book What is a Complex System?, published with Yale University Press. The book is most recently discussed on the podcast ’Simplifying Complexity’.
Gabriel Plunk is a research scientist in the Stellarator Theory department (ST) of IPP, Greifswald. His scientific interests include gyrokinetic stability, turbulence, transport, and the theoretical foundations of stellarator optimization.
Cary Forest is professor at the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and director of the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory. He is also co-founder, CSO and acting CTO of Realta Fusion Incorporation.
Francesco is a co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, a startup headquartered in Munich working on QI stellarators. Following his undergraduate studies at Imperial College and EPFL, Francesco did his PhD at MIT, working on spectroscopy and particle transport in tokamaks. He then joined IPP to do research on divertor spectroscopy and reduced edge modeling at ASDEX Upgrade. In 2022, he was one the EuroFusion Scientific Coordinators for negative triangularity, considered a potential path to tokamak power plants. In January 2023, Francesco and his co-founders co-founded Proxima Fusion to pursue a new path with public-private partnerships to develop QI stellarators in Europe.
Tammy Ma is the Lead for the Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) Institutional Initiative at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the U.S. She was a member of the team achieving burning plasma, followed by fusion ignition in December 2022 at the National Ignition Facility, demonstrating more energy gain from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it. She is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE) and currently sits on the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC). She also chaired the 2022 DOE Basic Research Needs Workshop and Report in Inertial Fusion Energy and served on the German Expert Panel that authored the Memorandum on Laser Inertial Fusion Energy.
Tilmann Lunt is a research scientist in the Plasma Edge and Wall Department (E2M) at IPP Garching. His scientific interests include alternative divertor configurations and the physics of the plasma edge, in particular the effects of 3D magnetic field perturbations. He is also responsible for the visual and near-infrared camera systems of the ASDEX Upgrade experiment.
Stefano Atzeni was Professor of Physics at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and after his retirement has joined Focused Energy GmbH in Darmstadt, Germany, as Consulting Senior Scientist.
Prof. Koderali is a director of the Institute for Bioinformatics at Greifswald University. He made his master in computer science in the University of Cologne in 2001 and got his PhD from the same university in bioinformatics in 2006. He worked in Heidelberg and Dresden before acquiring a chair of bioinformatics in Greifswald in 2015. He serves as an editor in PLoS one and a chief editor in Frontiers in Virology. He was a member of the expert council in COVID-19of the German Federal Chancellor.
Colin is a physicist with a PhD at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (CMS experiment) on heavy-ion cross sections and the connection to astroparticle physics. As co-author of the hadronic interaction tool CRMC, he has deep knowledge in nuclear physics. After several years in the private industry, Colin joined Kyoto Fusioneering. Here, he is author of the high-temperature fusion blanket SCYLLA design and currently oversees technical development of the UNITY programme for fusion thermal cycle and fusion fuel cycle in Japan. He is also a visiting researcher at Kyoto University.
Dr. Florian Nicolai, Akademischer Rat a.Z. at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, passed the first state examination in 2017. He completed his legal clerkship at the Higher Regional Court of Nuremberg (OLG Nürnberg) with the second state examination in 2019. From 2019 to 2023 he was part of the Research Training Group 2475 “Cybercrime and Forensic Computing” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Within the context of his research in the Research Training Group he was a guest researcher at the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Center (Stockholm University) in 2022, where he continues to give guest lectures. In 2023 he received a doctorate in law with a thesis on the impact of the Internet of Things on Criminal Law (Duncker&Humblot, in press). His doctoral thesis was awarded with the doctoral prize of the Department of Law of the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. In his current position as a postdoc Nicolai is involved in teaching as well as research. He is the author of several legal essays, comments on judgements, contributions to anthologies and other publications. Together with Prof. Dr. Mustafa Temmuz Oğlakcıoğlu (Saarland University) he founded the podcast "Räuberischer Espresso", which is published by the legal educational magazine "Juristische Arbeitsblätter".
Hans-Walter Rix is director at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and professor at the University of Heidelberg faculty for physics and astronomy. In his thesis work with Simon White he figured out that most large elliptical galaxies also have sizable stellar disks, and hence must have a different formation history than thought at the time. He also had the opportunity to work with Craig Hogan on gravitational lensing, with Marcia and George Rieke on infrared imaging and spectroscopy, and with Rob Kennicutt. He then went on to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, working on some of the very first Hubble Space Telescope data on gravitational lensing and giving in to the numerous, exciting scientific diversions that Princeton has to offer. After a year at MPA, Garching and three years on the faculty at the University of Arizona, he came to MPIA late 1998. In the first five years, his focus was on galaxy evolution, helping to draw up a comprehensive picture of what the population of galaxies looked like when the Universe was half its age. In recent years he has focused his research on our very own galaxy, the Milky Way, because the intricate detail in which it can be studied, should lead us to a better understanding of galaxy formation as a whole. As of 2016, the Gaia space mission along with other vast spectroscopic surveys of stars, and then Hubble's successor James Webb Space Telescope are the next beacons on his science path.
Alexander Mordvintsev is holding a research scientist position at Google. His current work is focused on Artificial Life and principles of Self-Organizing Systems Design. The very first, and probably the most advanced skill that every living creature masters from the moment of inception is the ability to build and maintain its own body. This happens through collective behavior of countless tiny locally integrating agents pursuing their own goals. Alexander is looking to apply lessons from Differentiable Programming (aka Deep Learning) to create systems based on these principles that are able to act according to a provided specification or objective. This effort was triggered by the presentation “What Bodies Think About” that Prof. Michael Levin gave at NeurIPS 2018.
Previously Alexander worked on understanding deep neural networks by inspecting the computational circuits and their dynamics emerging during training. This work was started after joining Google in 2014 when he got introduced to the modern generation of differentiable machine learning models. DeepDream was probably the most known artifact produced by this line of his research that flooded the internet with psychedelic dog-slug images in summer 2015.
Before joining Google Alexander worked in St.Petersburg, Russia on various 3D computer vision and simulation applications. He studied computer science in St.Petersburg State University of Information Technology, Mechanics and Optics. During the late university years he participated in Google Summer of Code program twice, working on Python integration for OpenCV computer vision library.
As a part of his research, Alexander created a number of artistic projects exploring the themes of self-organization and the beauty of inner mechanics of artificial neural systems.
Featured works
(2023) SwissGL minimalistic web graphics library
Self-Organising Systems
(2023) Isotropic Neural Cellular Automata
(2022) Particle Lenia and the energy-based formulation
(2021) Self-Organising Textures (tweet)
(2020) Self-classifying MNIST Digits (tweet)
(2020) Growing Neural Cellular Automata (tweet)
DeepDream, Neural Network Visualization and Interpretability:
(2018) The Building Blocks of Interpretability
(2018) Differentiable Image Parameterizations
(2017) Feature Visualization
(2015) DeepDream (code)
Featured Art
Hexells (SIGGRAPH’2021, Leicester AI Art festival)
deepdream.c
Neverendeing story music video (with Perforated Cerebral Party)
Featured mentions
(2020) DeepDream: How Alexander Mordvintsev Excavated the Computer’s Hidden Layers by Arthur I. Miller (MIT Press)
(2016) How computers are learning to be creative by Blaise Agüera y Arcas (TED talk)
(2015) Inside Deep Dreams: How Google Made Its Computers Go Crazy by Steven Levy (Wired)
