Dmitry Kobak

dmitry kobak photo

dmitry.kobak@uni-tuebingen.de

Google Scholar | Institute webpage

ORCID Github Pubmed Dblp

@hippopedoid on Twitter
@amoeba at CrossValidated.SE

I am a subgroup leader (Privatdozent) in the Hertie AI institute at Tübingen University, Germany, working on machine learning and data science for biological applications.

I am interested in self-supervised and unsupervised learning, in particular contrastive learning, manifold learning, and dimensionality reduction for 2D visualization of scientific datasets. I am working with image data, text data, graph data, and single-cell RNA-seq data in neuroscience contexts.

I am also interested in statistical forensics and have been involved in the analysis of Russian electoral falsifications, war fatalities, and Covid-19 excess mortality.

In 2023/24 winter semester I was a Vertretungsprofessor (visiting professor) at Heidelberg University, Germany. I am a member of the ELLIS society, a member of the Cluster of Excellence «Machine Learning for Science», and an IMPRS-IS associated scientist.


Teaching

For several years I have been teaching an introductory course on machine learning for MSc students in neuroscience and data science in Tübingen. In winter semester 2020/21, due to the Covid pandemic, the class was held online and the lectures were recorded in a studio.

Winter semester 2023/24 (Heidelberg): BSc course Einführung ins Machinelle Lernen (in German), MSc seminar Transformers, large language models, and their use in physics.


Talks


Supervision / team

Postdocs: PhD students: MSc students:

Research

This is a list of [co-]first-/last-author papers grouped by topic; see my Google Scholar page for the complete list ordered chronologically or by citation count. Most papers are open access; for the ones that are not I provide PDFs. Twitter icons link to the respective Twitter threads (tweeprints).

Self-supervised learning

Neighbour embeddings

Topological data analysis

Statistical methods for transcriptomic and multi-omic data analysis

Machine learning & statistical theory

Patch-seq data analysis

Election forensics

Excess mortality / Covid-19 forensics / LLM forensics


Previous work and education

In 2013–2016 I was a postdoc in the Machens lab at Champalimaud Institute in Lisbon, working on statistical analysis of electrophyisological population recordings from the cortex.

In 2007–2012 I did my PhD in the Mehring lab, initially at Freiburg University and later at Imperial College London, working on computational motor control.

In 2000–2007 I studied computer science (BSc) in St. Petersburg ITMO University and then theoretical physics (MSc) in St. Petersburg State University.

Before that, I attended St. Petersburg Classical Gymnasium #610. I was part-time teaching there computer science and physics in 2002–2006 while studying in university. In 2004, together with a friend, I made a website 610.ru that is still online (with minor changes).


Reviewing

Year  Reviews
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2019  1
2020  15
2021  20
2022  22
2023  28
2024  21
Venue              Reviews (>1)
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NeurIPS            25
ICLR               13
ECML               12
ICML               12
TMLR               9
Bioinformatics     4
Genome Biology     4
AISTATS            3
JMLR               3
Nature Comm.       2
Nature Methods     2
PLoS Comp Bio      2
Political Analysis 2
Review lengths in kB
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Last updated: Oct 21, 2024

kobaks