Welcome Sebastian Schelter
BIFOLD is happy to announce that as of June 1st, 2024 Sebastian Schelter is a full Professor at the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD) and Technische Universität Berlin. He chairs the Management of Data Science Processes group (DEEM Lab), whose research is focused on the intersection of data management and machine learning, with the goal to foster the responsible management of data and to democratize data science technologies. The research of his group is accompanied by efficient and scalable open source implementations, many of which are applied in real world use cases, for example in the Amazon Web Services cloud and in large European e-commerce platforms.
"In my group, we are dedicated, among other things, to addressing the problems that arise when applying machine learning methods, developed in an experimental setting, to real-world applications. Under laboratory conditions and defined assumptions about what the data will look like and what the different data sources will be, such systems often work flawlessly. In real-world settings, however, significant sociotechnical problems arise, for example, because the data looks very different than anticipated or has been contaminated with data errors. Such technical issues can cause severe economic problems (data processing becomes too expensive) or social/legal issues (aspects of data protection or privacy are neglected)," said the newly appointed professor.
From the lab to real-world applications
For his group at BIFOLD, he plans to expand his research on responsible data management. "For example, I am interested in the technical implementation of the AI Act rules. On the one hand, I personally bring important knowledge from my previous research. On the other hand, I believe that BIFOLD is perfectly positioned in this field because we have expertise in all necessary areas," said Sebastian Schelter. He places a special focus on the "right to be forgotten." In his opinion, as much research and effort should be invested in this right as has been invested in methods to aggregate personal data about people.
Up to now Sebastian Schelter has been an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, a faculty fellow at New York University, a senior applied scientist at Amazon Research and a research intern at Twitter and IBM Almaden in California. His research contributions have been recognized with an ACM SIGMOD Systems Award, an ACM SIGMOD Best Demo Runner Up Award, and a Best Paper Runner Up Award from the Table Representation Learning workshop at NeurIPS.
In the past, Sebastian has mostly worked in both industry and academia simultaneously: "Now, I am very much looking forward to returning fully to academia and tackling complex fundamental questions." The native Franconian is attracted to Berlin not only because it is a metropolis of cutting-edge AI research in Germany but also due to family connections.