Meelis Kull was elected Professor of Artificial Intelligence

At the meeting on 22 November, the University of Tartu senate elected Meelis Kull, Associate Professor in Machine Learning at the Institute of Computer Science, as Professor of Artificial Intelligence.  

Meelis Kull was born in Tartu in 1980. He defended his doctoral thesis in bioinformatics at the University of Tartu in 2011. From 2013 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral researcher in machine learning at the University of Bristol, UK. After that, he has worked as an associate professor at the University of Tartu. He has 45 scientific publications, incl. 16 published within the last five years.

Professor Kull’s research fields are machine learning, artificial intelligence and data science. His main research topics include uncertainty modelling in machine learning and methods for uncertainty estimation and reduction. He is currently supervising seven doctoral students whose work will contribute to ensuring the reliability of artificial intelligence systems. Kull has also supervised a postdoctoral research fellow in his research group.

From 2024, Meelis Kull has been the head of EXAI, the Estonian Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence. The centre of excellence brings together 13 research teams from Tartu and Tallinn, which work out methods for building trustworthy artificial intelligence systems, especially in areas important to Estonia, such as e-governance, healthcare, business process management, cybersecurity and education. 

This year, the Estonian Academy of Sciences elected Kull as an academy research professor in artificial intelligence. At the Institute of Computer Science, he is the principal investigator in the research projects Contextual Uncertainty and Representation Learning in Machine Perception (2022–2026) and Foundations of Secure Digital Solutions and Artificial Intelligence (2024–2028).

In 2019, Kull was elected the Lecturer of the Year of the Institute of Computer Science. He received the Outstanding Paper Awards at the European machine learning and artificial intelligence conferences ECML-PKDD 2014 and ECAI 2024. He is a member of the editorial board of the Machine Learning journal. In 2024, he was one of the program chairs of the European Conference of Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD).