Kristian Kersting


Kristian Kersting is a German computer scientist. He is professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at the department of computer science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany and heads the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Lab.
He is known for his research on statistical relational artificial intelligence, probabilistic programming, and deep probabilistic learning.

Life

Kersting studied computer science at the University of Freiburg, where he received his Ph.D. in 2006. At the university he attended a course on artificial intelligence given by Bernhard Nebel and became interested in the topic. He was a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His advisor at MIT was Leslie Pack Kaelbling. From 2008 to 2012, he led a research group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS. He then became a Juniorprofessor at the University of Bonn and associate Professor at the computer science department of the Technical University of Dortmund. From 2017 to 2019, he was professor of machine Learning and since 2019 professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at the department of computer science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt.
He is also a researcher at ATHENE, the largest research institute for IT security in Europe.

Awards

In 2006, he received the AI Dissertation Award of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence. In 2008, he received the Fraunhofer Attract research grant with a budget of 2.5 million euros over five years. He was appointed Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence and Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems in 2019. In 2019 he received the "Deutscher KI-Preis", endowed with 100,000 euros, for his outstanding scientific achievements in the field of artificial intelligence.

Publications