I am leading a group “AI for data-driven simulations” at the Institute for Machine Learning at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz. Additionally, I am a Head of Research (AI4Simulation) at NXAI - our new European AI hub in Linz (Austria).

I have obtained my PhD after working several years at the CMS experiment at CERN. During this time, I had the privilege of learning from brilliant minds from all around the world, and got the chance to co-author seminal papers in the realm of Higgs boson physics. In 2018, after completing my PhD, my career trajectory shifted towards machine learning, and I was fortunate to join the research group of Mr LSTM Sepp Hochreiter in Linz. Under Sepp’s mentorship, I delved into the intricacies of machine learning and modern deep learning over a span of 2.5 years.

From 2021 to 2023, I had the pleasure of spending three remarkable years in Amsterdam. Initially, I was part of the Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab lead by Max Welling, and subsequently joined Microsoft Research for 2 years. During this period, my passion for Geometric Deep Learning, particularly involving Geometric (Clifford) algebras, and my interest in partial differential equations (PDEs), with a particular focus on developing neural surrogates for (PDEs), became profound. Most importantly, I pivoted towards large-scale PDEs, including weather and climate modeling.

My years in Amsterdam have shaped my research vision. I am firmly convinced that AI is on the cusp of disrupting simulations at industry-scale. Every day thousands and thousands of compute hours are spent on turbulence modeling, simulations of fluid or air flows, heat transfer in materials, traffic flows, and many more. Many of these processes follow similar underlying patterns, but yet need different and extremely specialized softward to simulate. Even worse, for different parameter settings the costly simulations need to be run at full length from scratch.

This is what I want to change! Therefore, I have started a new group at JKU Linz which has strong computer vision, numerical simulation, and engineering components. We want to advance data-driven simulations at industry-scale, and place the Austrian industry engine Linz as a center for doing that.