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 I go by the Frisian nickname Durk (pronounced like Dirk).

2024 - Current: Research on large-scale machine learning at Anthropic.
2018 - 2024: Research Scientist at Google Brain / DeepMind. Led various research projects on generative models for text, image, and video.
2015 - 2018: Part of the founding team and Research Scientist at OpenAI (San Francisco). Led 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

2025: The ICLR 2025 Test of Time Award for our Adam optimizer paper (with Jimmy Ba).
2024: The ICLR 2024 Test of Time Award for the long-lasting impact of our VAE paper (the inaugural year of this award).
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, the highest distinction in the Netherlands, and the first at the UvA 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.

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