I am a PhD-candidate from Bielefeld, Germany. My research topics are machine learning and human-robot cooperation. More precisely I work on active learning and cooperative intelligence in a human-robot teaching setting. If you are interested in my research, you can check out my publications here.

My biggest passion is computer science with a focus of kognitive sciences. Because of this, I started the bachelor Cognitive Informatics back in 2010 in Bielefeld University, followed by the master Intelligent Systems in 2013. In my studies I focussed on robotics, machine learning and computer vision.

It is really important for me to also practically implement my ideas within prototypes or web-based apps. My dedication for robots arises from this desire, because in my opinion (beside autonomous cars, drone or other IoT devices) robots are the perfect embodyment of machine learning approaches. However, they can not integrated with no extra effort - and my PhD thesis is basically about this bridge.

In my master studies I competed in the robocup@home league with the team of bielefeld and we got the third place in the german open and also the third place in the world championship in Hefei, China. I liked especially to work very hard in a team of passionate people beforehand and to hack day and night to get the tasks done at the competition. I also attend smaller hackathons from time to time.

As a master's project, together with a colleague I implemented an application with the Nao robot from Aldebaran, which we also evaluated within a user study. The application was a cooperative human-robot ball maze where the robot could also give suggestions where the human should navigate next. This cooperative human-robot cooperation I deepened afterwards in my PhD.

I have a deep passion for building all kind of things. Examples are drones, small gadgets and also alot of non-tech related things. What comes in handy for rapid prototyping ideas is 3D printing. I build two 3D printer kits before I constructed and build my current custom 3D printer. Building and configuring it from scratch was quite a big project but I am very happy with the result.

I also like to construct models with SCAD, which is basically a programming language for constructing 3D models. Those models are highly customizable and parameterized. You can check some of them out on my thingiverse page. In my opinion 3d printing is such a great oportunity for refurbishing things, but personally it is more of a creative tool - a painting is 2D but in 3D a whole dimension is added and it always blows my mind again if I have an idea in my mind, I construct the idea with the computer and only a few hours later I hold a real-life 3D object in my hands - unlimited possibilities!

Enough rave, but seriously: creativity is very important and desireable for me. Other creative hobbys of mine include photography, drawing and I added recently music to the list. I like to play guitar, jamming with friends or producing all kinds of differnt ([sometimes distopic and/or strange) music myself. In particular, I like to explore different subgenres and fancy crossovers.

Last but not least I am a big fan and collector of retro video games, especially N64 and SNES. This retro kink also influenced the design of this page somehow. I also enjoy different delicious filter coffee or espresso (I refurbished a Gaggia Classic for authentic experience). If you are in Bielefeld, drop me an email and come around and lets have a cup or two or three ;)