Holst Memorial Lecture 2023

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Welcome on the event website of Holst Symposium and Holst Memorial Lecture Award 2023.

The Holst Memorial Lecture and Symposium are organized by Philips Research, Signify Research and Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). This year’s Holst Lecture, the 45th since 1977, will be given by Dr. Ian Goodfellow. Ian Goodfellow is a prominent computer scientist and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically in the subfield of deep learning. He is known for his significant contributions to the development and understanding of generative adversarial networks (GANs), which are a class of AI algorithms used in generating synthetic data, image-to-image translation, and various other applications.

The Holst Symposium will be a live and interactive (networking) event and bring together specialists and students from varied disciplines from both the academic and the business world who will be challenged to present their views on future developments of Digital Twinning in their field. The selection of invited speakers is based on topics with the potential to inspire. The Holst symposium will consist of (concise) lectures, presentations, panel discussion and demo’s and will be concluded by the Holst Memorial Lecture and an Award Ceremony.

This year’s Holst Lecture will be the 45th since 1977.The nominated Holst Lecturer will join the ranks of eminent scientists and Nobel laureates like Philippe de Gennes, Hendrik Casimir, Ilya Prigogine, Arno Penzias, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Heeger, J. Craig Venter and Shuji Nakamura. The first Holst Memorial Lecture was given in 1977 to commemorate the 21st anniversary of TU/e, Eindhoven University of Technology. With support from Philips Research, and (since 2018) Signify, the Holst Lecture became an annual tradition. Candidates for the Award are selected by a committee under the chairmanship of the Rector Magnificus of the TU/e, Head of Research EU Royal Philips and the Head of Research Signify.

The general theme chosen for the Holst Memorial Lecture reflects the important contribution of dr. Gilles Holst (1886-1968) to research and technology in the Netherlands:

"The development of applied sciences, particularly mathematics and the natural sciences, for the benefit of industry on the one side and their implications for society on the other."

In his academic career Holst played an essential part in the discovery of superconductivity by Nobel Laureate H. Kamerlingh Onnes, whilst working at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. However, Gilles Holst will be first and foremost remembered as the founding director of the famous ‘Nat Lab’, the Philips Physics Laboratory in Eindhoven, where he worked between 1914 and 1946. During his lifetime, Gilles Holst was chairman of two committees that were instrumental in the foundation of Eindhoven University of Technology in 1956.

The Eindhoven Region, often referred to as Brainport Eindhoven http://brainporteindhoven.com/ is Europe's leading innovative top technology region and home to Royal Philips, Signify, NXP semiconductors and ASML. Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) has according to Times Higher Education World University Ranking the highest score for collaboration with industry in the field of academic and scientific research. One of TU/e distinguished emeriti was Edsger W. Dijkstra, one of the most influential members of computing science's founding generation and Turing Award winner 1972.