Durk Kingma

Diederik P. Kingma

Publications

See my Google Scholar profile for an up-to-date list.

Brief Bio

I'm a computer scientist and researcher, with a focus on scalable methods for machine learning and generative modeling. My contributions include the Variational Autoencoder (VAE), the Adam optimizer, Glow, and Variational Diffusion Models, but please see Scholar for a more complete list. I obtained a PhD (cum laude) from University of Amsterdam in 2017, and was part of the founding team of OpenAI in 2015. Before that, I co-founded Advanza which got acquired in 2016. My formal name is Diederik, but have the Frysian nickname Durk (pronounced like Dirk).

2024 - Current: Research on large-scale machine learning at Anthropic.
2018 - 2024: Research Scientist at Google Brain / DeepMind. Lead of various research projects, mostly generative models for text, image and video.
2015 - 2018: Part of founding team and Research Scientist at OpenAI (San Francisco). Lead of the Algorithms team, focused on basic research.
2013 - 2017: Ph.D. (cum laude) at University of Amsterdam, advised by Max Welling, on the topic of deep learning and generative models. Thesis: Variational Inference and Deep Learning: A New Synthesis. Spent summers of 2014/2015 at DeepMind for collaborations.
2010 - 2012: Co-founder and technical lead at Advanza, successful exit in 2016.
2009 and 2012: Jr. Research Scientist at New York University, Yann LeCun's lab.

Variational Inference and Deep Learning: A New Synthesis

Ph.D. Thesis. Download at Dropbox or at UvA.

Awards and Honors

2024: The ICLR 2024 Test of Time Award for long-lasting impact of our VAE paper. This was the first year ICLR gave this award.
2020: The Adam optimization paper is the world's #1 most cited scientific paper of the past five years, according to Nature Index and Google Scholar.
2020: The AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Award "in recognition of outstanding and vibrant contributions in the field of Machine Learning 2009-2019".
2019: The Dutch Datascience Award, from the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, for my contributions in machine learning research.
2019: The ELLIS PhD Award for "outstanding research achievements during the dissertation phase of outstanding students working in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning".
2017: PhD with 'cum laude', highest distinction in the Netherlands, and first time it was awarded at the CS department in 30 years.
2015: Google's first European Doctoral Fellowship in Deep Learning.

Demos (Old)

Some research demos that I (co-)developed:

2017: Generating faces with Glow. Developed with Prafulla Dhariwal.
2014: Generating digits with a VAE.

The end. Want more? Click one of the blue links.