Holst Symposium and Holst Memorial Lecture Award 2018
Holst Symposium and Holst Memorial Lecture Award 2018

42nd Holst Memorial Lecture Award

This year's Holst Lecture will be the 42nd since 1977. The Holst Lecturer will join the ranks of eminent scientists and/or Nobel laureates like Philippe de Gennes, Hendrik Casimir, Ilya Prigogine, Arno Penzias, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Heeger, J. Craig Venter and Shuji Nakamura.
The first Holst Memorial Lecture was given in 1977 to commemorate the 21st anniversary of the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. With support from Philips Research, the Holst Lecture given by a most eminent scientist in a selected research domain to an audience consisting of university staff, students, representatives from industry and other guests with a general interest in science and technology became an annual tradition. Candidates for the Award are selected by an committee under the chairmanship of the Rector Magnificus of the TU/e, the CTO of Royal Philips and the CEO of Signify.


Gilles Holst

The general theme chosen for these lectures reflects the important contribution of dhr.
Gilles Holst (1886-1968) to the develpment of research and technology in the Netherlands: 'the development of applied science, particularly mathematics and the natural sciences, fot the benefit of industry on the one side and their implications for society on the other.'
In his own academic career Holst played an essential part in the discovery of superconductivity by Nobel laureate H. kamerlingh Onnes, whilst working at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. However, Gilles Holst will be first and foremost remembered as the founding director of the famous 'Nat Lab', the Philips Physics Laboratory in Eindhoven, where he worked between 1914 and 1946. During his lifetime, Gilles Holst was chairman of two committees that were instrumental in establishing the University of Technology in Eindhoven in 1956.
 

Eindhoven region

The Eindhoven Region, often referred to as Brainport Eindhoven http://brainporteindhoven.com/ is Europe's leading innovative top technology region and home to Royal Philips, Signify, NXP semiconductors and ASML. Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) has according to Times Higher Education World University Ranking the highest score for collaboration with industry in the filed of academic and scientific research. One of TU/e distinguished emeriti was Edsger W. Dijkstra, one of the most influential members of computing science's founding generation and Turing Award winner 1972.

 

Award winning speaker

After the Lecture, the rector magnificus will present the Holst Memorial Lecturer with the Holst Memorial Lecture Award, a honorary medal designed by Dutch sculptor Jos Reniers. To honor the laureate, a dinner with speakers, Management of Philips Research and TU/e and the Scientific Committee will be organized.


Yann LeCun PhD

‘Self-Supervised Learning: the next Challenge in Artificial Intelligence’

Yann LeCun (Silver Professor New York University and CP/Chief Artificial Intelligence Scientist at Facebook) will receive the Holst Memorial Lecture Award 2018 “For his important contributions to Computational Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence Research”.

Biography Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun is Silver Professor at NYU affiliated with the Courant Institute and the Center for Data Science and CP/Chief Artificial Intelligence Scientist at Facebook. He was the founding Director of Facebook AI Research and of the NYU Center for Data Science. He received an EE Diploma from ESIEE (Paris) in 1983, a PhD in Computer Science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) in 1987. After a postdoc at the University of Toronto, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories. He became head of the Image Processing Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research in 1996, and joined NYU in 2003 after a short tenure at the NEC Research Institute. In late 2013, LeCun became Director of AI Research at Facebook, while remaining on the NYU Faculty part-time. He was visiting professor at Collège de France in 2016. His research interests include machine learning and artificial intelligence, with applications to computer vision, natural language understanding, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He is best known for his work in deep learning and the invention of the convolutional network method which is widely used for image, video and speech recognition. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award, the 2015 IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Distinguished Researcher Award, the 2016 Lovie Award for Lifetime Achievement, and a honorary doctorate from IPN, Mexico.

Facebook AI Research & New York University;  http://yann.lecun.com 

 

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