Max Welling (born 1968) is a Dutch computer scientist in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam.
[1] In August 2017, the university spin-off Scyfer BV, co-founded by Welling, was acquired by Qualcomm.
[3] He is also a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research AI4Science, based in Amsterdam.
[4] Welling received his PhD in physics with a thesis on quantum gravity under the supervision of Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft (1998)[5] at the Utrecht University.
He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles in machine learning, computer vision, statistics and physics,[6] and has most notably invented variational autoencoders (VAEs), together with Diederik P Kingma.