Publications - Teaching - Contact - Blog

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I am a full professor for machine learning in the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Interfaces (AIHI) at the University of Salzburg (PLUS), Austria (and currently deputy head of the department). Prior to that, I was part of the medical imaging and computer vision group at Kitware Inc., North Carolina, USA. My research spans multiple areas, but mostly focusses on theoretical and practical aspects of learning methods that allow to leverage and control structural characteristics of data. I am also a member of the ELLIS society.

News

• March 2025: Paolo Pellizzoni (from Karsten Borgwardt’s group at the MPI for Biochemistry completed his 6 month research visit with my group. We already miss u! Stay tuned, as there will be some great work coming out of this collaboration!

• Feb. 2025: Hastings Greer’s and Lin Tian’s paper CARL: A Framework for Equivariant Image Registration accepted at CVPR; joint work with F.-X. Vialard, myself, R. Estepar and M. Niethammer - congrats Hastings and Lin!

• Feb. 2025: Sebastian Zeng successfully defended his PhD thesis - Congrats Sebastian!

• September 2024: Neural Persistence Dynamics will be presented at NeurIPS this year! A great collaboration between my group and Stefan Huber’s group at the FH Salzburg; congrats to Sebastian, Florian and Martin! Preprint on arXiv

• June 2024: uniGradICON: A Foundation Model for Medical Image Registration will be presented at MICCAI ‘24 - Congrats Lin and Hastings!

• June 2024: Neural Persistence Dynamics just dropped; check out the preprint on arXiv; joint work with F. Graf, M. Uray, S. Huber and myself (code to be released soon - stay tuned!)

• May 2024: Check out Hastings Greer’s latest preprint on arXiv CARL: A Framework for Equivariant Image Registration with L. Tian, F.-X. Vialard, myself, R.S.J. Estepar and M. Niethammer

• March 2024: New preprint on arXiv uniGradICON: A Foundation Model for Medical Image Registration with L. Tian, H. Greer, R. Kwitt, F.-X. Vialard, R. San Jose Estepar, S. Bouix, R. Rushmore and Marc Niethammer - thanks Lin and Hastings for the great work on getting the first foundation model for medical image registration out there!

• Feb. 2024: Our position paper Challenges and Opportunities in Topological Deep Learning with a lot of great authors (from various communities) is available on arXiv

• September 2023: Latent SDEs on Homogeneous Spaces got accepted at NeurIPS ‘23 - see our preprint on arXiv - congrats Sebastian Zeng and Florian Graf

• July 2023: Checkout my group’s latest work on Latent SDEs on Homogeneous Spaces on arXiv - joint work with Sebastian Zeng and Florian Graf

• July 2023: Multistep Inverse Consistency by Construction by Hastings Greer, Lin Tian, F.X.-Vialard, myself, Sylvain Bouix, R. Estépar, R. Rushmore and M. Niethammer got accepted at MICCAI ‘23 - checkout the preprint on arXiv

• February 2023: GradICON: Approximate Diffeomorphisms via Gradient Inverse Consistency by Hastings Greer, Lin Tian, F.X.-Vialard, myself, R. Estépar, R. Rushmore, N. Makris, S. Bouix and M. Niethammer got accepted at CVPR ‘23

• November 2022: Check out our latest preprint GradICON: Approximate Diffeomorphisms via Gradient Inverse Consistency by Hastings Greer, Lin Tian, F.X.-Vialard, myself, R. Estépar, R. Rushmore, N. Makris, S. Bouix and M. Niethammer on arXiv

• September 2022: Check out our latest work On Measuring Excess Capacity in Neural Networks on arXiv - a joint effort of Florian Graf, Sebastian Zeng, Bastian Rieck, Marc Niethammer and myself - now accepted at NeurIPS ‘22

• August 2022: My group hosted the Biannual Austrian TDA meeting this year, a joint effort by Herbert Edelsbrunner (IST Austria), Michael Kerber (TU Graz) and myself. Great meeting and great talks!

• January 2022: As of 01/2022, I will serve as deputy head of the newly founded Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Interfaces (AIHI) at the University of Salzburg.

• September 2021: I gave a talk within the Thematic Mini-Conference on Computational Topology and Machine Learning at the TU Berlin - Slides are available here

• September 2021: Sebastian Zeng’s paper Topological Attention for Time Series Forecasting has been accepted at NeurIPS ‘21 - joint work with F. Graf, C. Hofer and myself

• July 2021: Hastings Greer’s paper ICON: Learning Regular Maps Through Inverse Consistency has been accepted at ICCV ‘21 - joint work with Marc Niethammer, F.-X. Vialard and myself

• July 2021: Chris has left our group to work in industry - Thanks for all the great work over the years!

• May 2021: One paper accepted (as long presentation) at ICML ‘21 (congrats Chris and Florian)

• February 2021: Our new preprint Dissecting Supervised Contrastive Learning (joint work with F. Graf, C. Hofer and M. Niethammer) is available at here

• September 2020: One paper (joint work with S. Wei, F.-X. Vialard and M. Niethammer) accepted (as oral) for NeurIPS ‘20

• August 2020: We will be organizing a NeurIPS ‘20 workshop on Topological Data Analysis and Beyond (with B. Rieck, F. Chazal, S. Krishnaswamy, K.N. Ramamurthy, Y. Umeda and G. Wolf)

• June 2020: Two papers accepted at ICML ‘20 (congrats Chris and Florian)

Research interests

• Machine learning
• Computer vision
• Medical image analysis

Current group members

• Florian Graf (PostDoc, graduated 2023)
• Sebastian Zeng (PhD student)

Past group members

• Günther Eder (PostDoc, now in industry)
• Christoph Hofer (PhD student and PostDoc, now in industry)

Selected publications

For a complete list of all papers, go to Publications, or visit my Google Scholar profile.

Connectivity-Optimized Representation Learning via Persistent Homology

ICML 2019

Feature-Space Transfer for Data Augmentation

CVPR 2018 (Oral)

Deep Learning With Topological Signatures

NIPS 2017

AGA: Attribute-Guided Augmentation

CVPR 2017 (Oral)

Regression Uncertainty on the Grassmannian

AISTATS 2017 (Oral)

One-Shot Learning of Scene Locations via Feature Trajectory Transfer

CVPR 2016 (Spotlight)

Parametric Regression on the Grassmannian

IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 2016

Statistical Topological Data Analysis - A Kernel Perspective

NIPS 2015

A Stable Multi-Scale Kernel for Topological Machine Learning

CVPR 2015

Scene Recognition on the Semantic Manifold

ECCV 2012

Recognition in Ultrasound Videos: Where Am I?

MICCAI 2012 (Oral)

Lightweight Probabilistic Texture Retrieval

IEEE Trans. Image Process. 2010

Short biography

• since Jan. 2022 Full Professor
  Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Interfaces
  Univ. of Salzburg
• since Dec. 2020
  Full Professor
  Department of Computer Science
  Univ. of Salzburg
• since Aug. 2017
  Associate Professor
  Department of Computer Science
  Univ. of Salzburg
• Nov. 2013 - Aug. 2017
  Assistant Professor
  Department of Computer Science
  Univ. of Salzburg
• Nov. 2011 - Oct. 2013
  R&D Engineer
  Kitware Inc., NC, USA
• Aug. 2010 - Oct. 2011
  PostDoc
  Department of Computer Science
  Univ. of Salzburg
• May 2007 - Aug. 2010
  PhD student
  Department of Computer Science
  Univ. of Salzburg
  Advisor: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Andreas Uhl

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Professional service

• Area Chair (AC) for NeurIPS 2021-now and ICML 2021-now
• General Chair: OAGM/AAPR Workshop 2015 (Salzburg, Austria)
• PC Chair: ACM IH & MMSEC 2014 (Salzburg, Austria)

I regularly serve as a reviewer for the major vision and machine learning conferences (e.g., CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, BMVC, NIPS, AISTATS, ICIP, ICPR, MICCAI, ICLR) as well as the major journals in the field (e.g.,TPAMI, JMLR, IJCV, TMI, TIP, TSP, MedIA).

Awards

• CVPR Outstanding Reviewer Award (2014)
• MICCAI Young Scientist Award (2012)
• PhD thesis short-listed for the “Heinz-Zemanek” price (2012)
• Special appreciation award (for MSc thesis) of the Austrian ministry of science and research (2005)