Zeynep Akata is a Liesel Beckmann Distinguished professor of Computer Science at Technical University of Munich and the director of the Institute for Explainable Machine Learning at Helmholtz Munich. After completing her PhD at the INRIA Rhone Alpes with Prof Cordelia Schmid (2014), she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics with Prof Bernt Schiele (2014-17) and at University of California Berkeley with Prof Trevor Darrell (2016-17) and as an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam with Prof Max Welling (2017-19). Before moving to Munich in 2024, she was a professor of computer science (W3) within the Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning at the University of Tübingen. She received a Lise-Meitner Award for Excellent Women in Computer Science from Max Planck Society in 2014, a young scientist honour from the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring foundation in 2019, an ERC-2019 Starting Grant from the European Commission, The DAGM German Pattern Recognition Award in 2021, The ECVA Young Researcher Award in 2022 and the Alfried Krupp Award in 2023. Her research interests include multimodal learning and explainable AI.
