Frank Hutter
Frank Hutter is a machine-learning researcher whose work spans automated machine learning and tabular prediction. He earned a Diplom at TU Darmstadt and a PhD at UBC, then held a UBC postdoctoral fellowship and led an Emmy Noether group at Freiburg. His work includes Auto-WEKA and auto-sklearn, an ICML workshop series that became the AutoML conference, and the tabular model TabPFN. He is a Fellow of EurAI and ELLIS and has received three ERC grants. As co-founder and CEO of PriorLabs, he now works on tabular foundation models.
- Now at
- PriorLabs and University of Freiburg
- Works
- 367
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.
Timeline
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2004–2010
A degree and an AI award
He earned a Diplom (equivalent to an MSc) at TU Darmstadt in 2004 and a PhD at the University of British Columbia in 2009. His dissertation on automated algorithm configuration received the 2010 CAIAC doctoral dissertation award for the best AI thesis completed at a Canadian university.
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2009–2013
From Vancouver to Freiburg
After his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at UBC. By 2013, he led an Emmy Noether research group at Freiburg, where he studied modelling and optimization of empirical algorithm performance.
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2014–2021
Building an AutoML community
He co-founded and co-organized ICML's AutoML workshop series every year from 2014 through 2021, after which it became the AutoML conference. In the same period, he co-authored the auto-sklearn chapter in the first book on AutoML, AutoML: Methods, Systems, Challenges.
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2022–2023
Opening an AutoML conference
He was the inaugural general chair of the AutoML conference in 2022 and 2023.
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2023
Auto-WEKA earns a time award
Auto-WEKA, co-authored by Hutter with Chris Thornton, Holger H. Hoos and Kevin Leyton-Brown, received the SIGKDD Test of Time Award for Research in 2023.
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2023–2025
A transformer for tabular data
In 2023, he and colleagues presented TabPFN, a Transformer that classifies small tabular datasets in under a second without hyperparameter tuning. TabPFN v2 later appeared in Nature, and its open-source code was downloaded more than one million times.
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As of October 2026
Starting PriorLabs
He is co-founder and CEO of PriorLabs, a company focused on tabular foundation models.
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As of October 2026
Fellowships and research grants
He is a Fellow of EurAI and ELLIS and has received three ERC grants.
Sources and credits
Photo: cs.ubc.ca; Frank Hutter: Home; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: cs.ubc.ca. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
- Profile – Machine Learning Lab
- Frank Hutter: Home
- Fakultätskolloquium am 13. Juni 2013 / Dr. Frank Hutter, Emmy Noether Research Group Lead, Department of Computer Science Freiburg
- AutoML: Methods, Systems, Challenges (first book on AutoML)
- SIGKDD Awards: 2023 SIGKDD Test of Time Award Winners
- ICLR Oral TabPFN: A Transformer That Solves Small Tabular Classification Problems in a Second