The award ceremony will take place on September 25, 2025, as part of the Leopoldina's annual meeting in Halle (Saale). The theme of this year's event will be “Artificial Intelligence”.
Explaining AI decisions by combining images and language
Zeynep Akata, Liesel Beckmann Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, will receive the 50,000 euro award for her pioneering research in the field of explainable and reliable artificial intelligence.
Akata develops AI systems that combine visual, linguistic, and conceptual information to make decision-making processes comprehensible for users. Her work thus makes an important contribution to the transparency and trustworthiness of AI - especially in sensitive fields of application such as medical image analysis.
Pioneering work in the field of zero-shot learning
A central element of her research is the combination of image and language data to improve the classification capabilities of AI systems. Back in 2013, Akata developed the Attribute Label Embedding (ALE) model, which enables new image categories to be identified based solely on linguistic descriptions – even without explicit training data. This method, known as zero-shot learning, makes it possible to identify a zebra, for example, even though the system had previously only been trained with images of dogs and cats.
In her current research, Akata is working on generative AI models that produce realistic images from text descriptions and at the same time visually mark the bases for decisions – for example by highlighting characteristic features such as stripes or hooves.
About Zeynep Akata
Zeynep Akata studied computer engineering and media informatics in Turkey and Germany and obtained her doctorate in France. Her scientific career has taken her to the Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Amsterdam, among others. From 2019 to 2023, she was a professor at the University of Tübingen before joining TUM in 2024 to head the Institute for Explainable Machine Learning at Helmholtz Munich.
She has received several awards for her research achievements, including the Lise Meitner Prize, the Alfried Krupp Prize, and an ERC Starting Grant. In 2024, Capital magazine included her in its list of the “Top 40 under 40” in Germany.