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.
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.
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".
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)
Ulrich Meier studied Chemistry at the Universities of Bochum, Germany and St. Andrews, Scotland. He received a PhD in Quantum Chemistry at the University of Bochum 1988. Before joining IQM Quantum Computers he worked for almost 30 years as a High Performance Computing expert for companies like Convex Computers, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems and Go Virtual Germany. Ulrich’s responsibilities evolved from performance benchmarking and system architectures to marketing and market development.
