On July 19, 2025, Miriam Klopotek, junior research group leader in SimTech, was invited to deliver the commencement address at the University of Tübingen’s central doctoral graduation ceremony. Each year, the university celebrates this milestone with a formal ceremony – highlighted by a speech from a distinguished alumna or alumnus. With previous speakers including political leaders and entrepreneurs, the invitation to Klopotek is a noteworthy recognition of her rising academic profile and the growing relevance of her research.
For Klopotek, the moment was both academically meaningful and personally moving. Having completed her own PhD in theoretical physics in Tübingen just four years earlier, she described the experience as “genuinely touching” and expressed deep gratitude to the university and to Rector Professor Karla Pollmann for the opportunity. “The ceremony was beautifully done. It was wonderful to return in this way,” she said afterwards.
In her speech – titled “The Cloud of Unknowing: A Journey Towards AI with Physics” – Klopotek reflected on her own scientific path, starting from simulating self-organizing, nonequilibrium systems in physics and venturing toward machine learning. She spoke with openness and clarity about how uncertainty and even failure are essential. It was behind the intellectual curiosity that shaped her work, encouraging the new graduates to remain receptive to the unknown. “Your power lies in how you engage with it", she told the audience. “To immerse yourself in that ‘cloud of unknowing' – rather than retreat from it – is a source of agency, discovery, and growth.” [1]
Klopotek’s address stood out for its combination of scientific insight, philosophical perspective, and personal honesty. She challenged the notion of intelligence as something fixed or definable, and instead invited the audience to think of it as an emergent process – something both human and, increasingly, artificial. Drawing on her research, she described how machine learning models trained on physical systems can begin to uncover fundamental physical concepts on their own. The implications, she noted, are not just technical but philosophical: What does it mean when algorithms begin to "discover" knowledge independently of us? Moreover, what would it mean to to let a self-organizing physical system ‘learn’ and compute, instead of an artificial neural network? She presented her research on physical reservoir computing, simulating how natural systems can be used as a substrate for data-driven inference tasks.
As a young researcher who has charted an unconventional course between physics and AI, Klopotek used the occasion to speak keenly about the freedom and potential inherently within early-career scientists, as individuals, but also when they come together. She conveyed a quiet sense of satisfaction in looking back: this was not just a return to her academic heritage, but a substantiation of years spent exploring difficult questions outside established paths.
For SimTech, the invitation is a reflection of the growing impact its researchers are having beyond disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Klopotek’s work sits at the heart of SimTech’s mission – bridging modeling, physics, and data-driven systems in order to better understand and ultimately engineer complex and ‘intelligent’ processes in the world. Her address captured the kind of interdisciplinary thinking that SimTech fosters: scientifically rigorous, philosophically aware, and open to collaboration across fields.
Klopotek also used her platform to call for exactly that kind of collaboration. “Talk to me,” she said toward the end of her speech, “no matter your background. We’re all going to be part of the transformations ahead.”
The keynote was a personal milestone for Klopotek – but also an example of how SimTech’s researchers are shaping the intellectual and societal conversations around AI, complexity, and the future of science and knowledge.
[1] Klopotek was inspired by the phrase ‘the cloud of unknowing’ used by the American author and academic Tom Lutz on the nature of conscious awareness and discoveries in everyday contexts.