Hello,
The Graduate School of Data Science is pleased to announce the BK21 x ERC seminar, as outlined below, and warmly invites your participation and interest.
Speaker: Dr. Julius von Kügelgen, currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zürich
Dr. von Kügelgen is recognized internationally for his groundbreaking research in Causal Representation Learning, focusing on uncovering latent variables responsible for generating high-dimensional data and exploring causal relationships between these variables. He will deliver a lecture on this topic during the seminar.
Date: April 17, 2025, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Venue: Room 302, Building 942, Seoul National University
Speaker: Dr. Julius von Kügelgen (ETH Zürich)
Title: Causal Representation Learning: Overview and Applications to Single-Cell Biology
Abstract: Many scientific questions are fundamentally causal in nature. Yet, existing causal inference methods cannot easily handle complex, high-dimensional data. Causal representation learning (CRL) seeks to fill this gap by embedding causal models in the latent space of a machine learning model. In this talk, I will provide an overview of CRL across a variety of settings. I will then present ongoing work on leveraging CRL methods for problems in bioinformatics, specifically for predicting the effects of unseen drug or gene perturbations from omics measurements. CRL requires rich experimental data and single-cell biology offers unique opportunities for gaining new scientific insights by leveraging such methods.
Bio: Julius von Kügelgen is a postdoc at the Seminar for Statistics at ETH Zürich. His research lies at the intersection of causal inference and machine learning. He obtained his PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. His work has been recognized with the Google PhD Fellowship, a Best Paper Award at the Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning, and the Cambridge PhD Prize in Quantitative Research. Prior to his PhD, Julius studied Mathematics (BSc, MSci) at Imperial College London and Artificial Intelligence (MSc) at UPC Barcelona and TU Delft.