Invited Talk Thu, Apr 23, 2026 • 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM PDT Amphitheater

From Physics to AI to Materials; A Journey from Foundations to Impact

Max Welling

Abstract

Overflow Room: 201 A/B -

Do we reward strange new, potentially paradigm-shifting ideas or do we focus on engineering, scaling and bold numbers? In this talk I will discuss how insights from physics have inspired me to develop new ideas for AI. In the first part of the talk I will argue that 10 years after the introduction of symmetries in deep learning, spontaneous symmetry breaking may be at the root of modern AI. I will argue that internal symmetries, or capsules, in the broken phase can propagate information over long spatiotemporal distances. As such they can act as memory channels and facilitate reasoning. In the second part of the talk I will discuss the consequences of breaking time-reversal symmetry, leading to information loss and entropy production. The mathematics describing such systems are virtually identical in probabilistic AI and stochastic thermodynamics, the modern theory of thermodynamic systems out of equilibrium. This leads to new insights and methods to e.g. estimate the free energy of a molecule binding to a target. Finally, I will describe my personal journey deploying these powerful AI tools through my startup CuspAI to solve some of society's most urgent problems, such as sustainable energy and climate change. I conclude by stressing that we all have an important role to play in ensuring our tools are used responsibly. We cannot look away.

Speaker

Max Welling

Prof. Dr. Max Welling is a full professor and research chair in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam and a Merkin distinguished visiting professor at Caltech. He is co-founder and CTO of the startup CuspAI in Materials Design. He is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) where he served on the founding board. His previous appointments include Partner and VP at Microsoft Research, VP at Qualcomm Technologies, professor at UC Irvine. He finished his PhD in theoretical high energy physics under supervision of Nobel laureate prof. Gerard ‘t Hooft. He then switched fields to focus on machine learning, first as a postdoc at Caltech under supervision of prof. Pietro Perona and then as postdoc under supervision of Nobel laureate prof. Geoffrey Hinton at UCL & U. Toronto. Max Welling has served as associate editor in chief of IEEE TPAMI from 2011-2015, he serves on the advisory board of the Neurips foundation since 2015, he is co-founder of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligence Systems (ELLIS) and served on its founding board until 2021, he has been program chair and general chair of Neurips in 2013 and 2014 respectively. He was also program chair of AISTATS in 2009 and ECCV in 2016 and general chair and co-founder of MIDL 2018. Max Welling is recipient of the ECCV Koenderink Prize in 2010, and the 10 year Test of Time awards at ICML in 2021 and ICLR in 2024 as well as the inaugural ELIAS Alliance Science-Entrepreneur Award and the Dutch AI Award in 2026.