Zeynep Akata

Director Institute of Explainable Machine Learning

Zeynep Akata

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Research Focus

Our goal is to contribute to the sustainability and trustworthiness of AI-based solutions by designing and implementing vigilant AI systems with improved transparency, such that they are more accountable and in accordance with the GDPR. We do fundamental research in machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing. We use a methodological mix of explainable, multi-modal, and low-shot learning in the context of computer vision to tackle several societal problems and provide machine learning solutions to them.

Key publications

Y Xian, CH Lampert, B Schiele, Z Akata. 2019. Zero-shot learning comprehensive evaluation of the good, the bad, and the ugly. IEEE TPAMI 


L Salewski, S Alaniz, I Rio-Torto, E Schulz, Z Akata. 2023. In- Context Impersonation Reveals Large Language Models' Strenghts and Biases. NeurIPS 


K Roth, L Thede, AS Koepke, O Vinyals, O Hénaff, Z Akata. 2024. Fantastic Gains and Where to Find Them: On the Existence and Prospect of General Knowledge Transfer between Any Pretrained Model. ICLR 

 

Skills & Expertise

Computer Vision Machine Learning Vision and Language Zero - Shot Learning 

Professional Background

2024 - Present

Director of Institute for Explainable Machine Learning, Professor of Computer Science at Technical University of Munich

2019-2023

Professor of Computer Science at University of Tübingen

2020-2023

Senior Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

2017 - 2019

Tenure Track Assistant Professor at Universiy of Amsterdam, Scientific Director of UvA-Bosch Delta Lab

2017-2023

Senior Group Leader at Mx Planck Institute for Informatics

2016-2017

Postdoc at UC Berkeley

2014-2017

Postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Informatics

2011-2014

Research Scientist at Xerox Research Center Europe and PhD student at INRIA Rhone Alpes

Honors and Awards

  • 2014 - Lise Meitner Award for Excellent Women in Computer Science
  • 2018 - ELLIS Fellowship
  • 2019 - ERC Starting Grant
  • 2021 - German Pattern Recognition Award
  • 2022 - ECVA Young Researcher Award
  • 2023 - Alfried Krupp Award

Media Reports

„Zeynep Akata talks about her research on explainable AI and the “ZukunftsWissen” award

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