Guillermo Cabrera-Vives

Klaus Tschira Guest Professor, September 2024 – March 2025

“I admire the way how research is done here,” Guillermo Cabrera-Vives wraps up his first months as a Klaus Tschira Guest Professor at HITS. The astronomer and computer scientist from the University of Concepción has been at the institute since September 2024.In this time period, he already participated in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, held a HITS colloquium talk in October on machine learning and astronomy, and used the opportunity to delve into deep discussions with HITS researchers.

Since 2022, the Klaus Tschira Guest Professorship Program aims to enhance international exchange and scientific collaboration at HITS. Internationally renowned scientists are invited for sabbaticals or extended research stays. They collaborate with scientists at HITS, develop joint research projects, and engage with the wider scientific community at the institute and in the Heidelberg region.

Cabrera-Vives’ research focus is on Machine learning in different application fields, including astronomy data, genomics, biomedical imaging, and satellite images. “HITS seems to me as a unique place where all this research happens at the same time.” His main contact has been Kai Polsterer (Astroinformatics). They’ve known each other for several years. “Actually, I have been to this place before, when I participated in the Astroinformatics Conference in 2018,” he says, an event that Polsterer had organized at the Studio Villa Bosch. Guillermo Cabrera-Vives also met Tilmann Gneiting (Computational Statistics) and Jan Stühmer (Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence), and their group members to discuss applications, theoretical aspects and problems in Machine Learning. “I learned a lot of techniques how I can calibrate my models and measure their uncertainty,” he states. “I would just have missed that not being here.”

As an open-minded, interdisciplinary-oriented scientist, Cabrera-Vives is also interested in other fields: “I have talked with Alexander Zeilmann from the DMQ group about how Machine Learning can help in cancer treatment.” Cabrera is pursuing a project where he uses AI algorithms to segment tumors to help radiologists monitor cancer treatment effectively. “We discussed about methods Alex uses to segment fossils, which are similar to the methods we use for tumor segmentation.”

Guillermo Cabrera-Vives has also enjoyed the atmosphere at the institute: “I like the collaborative work and the spirit, you can feel it t.” He is also fond of the surroundings. “I live on the other side of the river, and I love to walk up the hill, it’s a good exercise.” Coming back to his first statement on how science is done here, he resumes: “Scientists usually think about the next paper. Here, people talk about the field, not about short-term, but long-term projects. They have the bigger picture in mind.”

(From the HITS Newsletter “The Charts”, issue 1-2025)