Max Welling
Max Welling is a Dutch computer scientist in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam. In August 2017, the university spin-off Scyfer BV, co-founded by Welling, was acquired by Qualcomm. He has since then served as a Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm Netherlands. He is also a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research AI4Science, based in Amsterdam.
Welling received his PhD in physics with a thesis on quantum gravity under the supervision of Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft at the Utrecht University. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles in machine learning, computer vision, statistics and physics, and has most notably invented variational autoencoders, together with Diederik P Kingma.
In 2025 Welling was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.