[N] AMA Announcement: Max Welling (VAEs, GNNs, AI4Science & CuspAI)
Pioneer of VAEs and GNNs will discuss building AI for carbon capture and new materials.
Max Welling, a renowned machine learning researcher whose foundational work includes Graph Convolutional Networks (GNNs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), will host an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on April 15th. Currently focused on AI for science, Welling co-founded CuspAI, a company building a specialized "search engine" to discover new materials with specific properties, such as those for carbon capture. The AMA will delve into the practical challenges of applying AI to messy, real-world scientific data and the gaps between theoretical models and physical synthesis.
Welling plans to discuss key topics at the intersection of AI and materials science, including ML architectures for noisy environments, the role of "Physical AI" where real-world experiments become part of the computational loop, and the hardest unsolved problems in the field. He will also share career insights from his journey across academia, Microsoft (where he worked on the Earth foundation model Aurora), and entrepreneurship, emphasizing work with significant societal impact. The session is a unique opportunity to engage with a pioneer who has shaped both core ML techniques and their application to pressing global challenges.
- Max Welling, co-founder of CuspAI, will host an AMA on applying AI to discover new materials, like those for carbon capture.
- He is a pioneer in core ML techniques, authoring seminal papers on Graph Convolutional Networks (GNNs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs).
- Discussion topics include "Physical AI," AI4Science infrastructure, and career advice for working on high-impact societal problems.
Why It Matters
This AMA provides direct access to a leader applying frontier AI to solve critical real-world problems like climate change and materials discovery.