Tübingen
academicThe Tübingen cluster groups the University of Tübingen with its co-located institutes on the Cyber Valley AI campus: the Tübingen AI Center (BMBF national AI competence center, ~€20M/yr permanent funding, 300+ researchers; co-directed by Bethge, Schölkopf, and Hennig), the ELLIS Institute Tübingen (Europe's first ELLIS institute, 2023, €100M Hector endowment; scientific director Schölkopf; Hector Fellows include Jonas Geiping and Wieland Brendel), and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (~400 staff; Empirical Inference, Perceiving Systems, and Social Foundations departments). The same researchers publish under two to four of these labels — the cluster is the community's own unit of attribution.
Flagship lines: Huginn-3.5B (depth-recurrent latent-reasoning LM pretrained from scratch on 800B tokens on ORNL Frontier, with UMD), Geiger's autonomous-vision and Gaussian-splatting stack (NAVSIM, Mip-Splatting — CVPR 2024 Best Student Paper, 2DGS), Schölkopf and Macke's simulation-based-inference line (DINGO-BNS, Nature 2025), and the Hardt/Bethge benchmark-science agenda (training-on-the- test-task, LLM-judge limits, model-similarity oversight risks).
Industry gravity is strong and two-way: Amazon runs a Tübingen lab (Schölkopf part-time), Epic Games absorbed Meshcapade (Black), and 2026 brought KE:SAI — a Kyutai × ELLIS Tübingen non-profit physical-AI lab with Geiger as CEO — whose future output is tracked separately.
People
- Bernhard Schölkopf Google Scholar — Director, MPI-IS Empirical Inference; Scientific Director, ELLIS Institute Tübingen (formerly Amazon Distinguished Scholar (part-time, ongoing))
- Andreas Geiger Google Scholar — Professor, University of Tübingen (Autonomous Vision); CEO, KE:SAI (2026)
- Matthias Bethge Google Scholar — Professor, University of Tübingen; Co-Director, Tübingen AI Center
- Philipp Hennig Google Scholar — Chair for Methods of ML, University of Tübingen; Co-Director, Tübingen AI Center
- Michael Black Google Scholar — Emeritus Director (from April 2026), MPI-IS Perceiving Systems (formerly Meshcapade (Chief Scientist, until Epic Games acquisition Feb 2026); now VP Digital Human Research, Epic Games)