Work Experience

April 2023 - Today: Junior Professor (tenure track) for Knowledge Representation and Machine Learning at Bielefeld University.
Dec 2021 - Dec 2023: Deputy head of the Educational Technology Lab supervised by Prof. Niels Pinkwart.
Jun 2021 - April 2024: Senior Researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany, in the Educational Technology Lab supervised by Prof. Niels Pinkwart. Funding provided by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the project AI-supported personalization in job-related education (KIPerWeb).
Jan 2021 - May 2021: Research Affiliate at Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany, supervised by Prof. Niels Pinkwart. Funding provided by the DFG in the project Teaching Computer Programming using Deep Recursive Neural Networks.
Jan 2020 - Dec 2020: Research Affiliate at The University of Sydney, Australia, supervised by Prof. Kalina Yacef and Prof. Irena Koprinska. Funding provided by the DFG in the project Teaching Computer Programming using Deep Recursive Neural Networks.
Jun 2019 - Dec 2019: Researcher at Bielefeld University, Germany. Member of the Machine Learning Research Group. Funding provided by Bielefeld University in the Bielefeld Young Researchers' Fund.
May 2015 - May 2019: Researcher at Bielefeld University, Germany. Member of the Machine Learning Research Group. Funding provided by the DFG from May 2015 to May 2018 in the project Learning Dynamic Feedback for Intelligent Tutoring Systems (DynaFIT).
Sep 2012 - Apr 2015: Scientific Assistant at Bielefeld University, Germany. Member of the Machine Learning Research Group. Funding provided by the DFG in the project Learning Feedback for Intelligent Tutoring Systems (FIT).
Sep 2011 - Aug 2012: Scientific Assistant at Bielefeld University, Germany. Member of the Practical Computer Science Group.

Academic Education

May 2015 - April 2019: PhD Studies in the doctoral programme Intelligent Systems at Bielefeld University, Germany supervised by Prof. Barbara Hammer. Dissertation on ‘Metric Learning for Structured Data’, graded ‘excellent’ (summa cum laude).
Oct 2013 - Apr 2015: Master Studies in the graduate programme Intelligent Systems at Bielefeld University, Germany. Thesis on ‘Adaptive Affine Sequence Alignment Using Algebraic Dynamic Programming’ supervised by Prof. Barbara Hammer, graded ‘very good’ (1.0).
Oct 2010 - Sep 2013: Bachelor Studies in the undergrad programme Cognitive Informatics at Bielefeld University, Germany. Thesis on ‘Search Algorithms and their Application in BiBiServ2’ supervised by Prof. Robert Giegerich, graded ‘very good’ (1.0).

Awards and Scholarships

Jan 2024 and Jul 2024: Golden Chalk teaching award by the students' council of the faculty of technology of Bielefeld University for Introduction to Data Mining and User Studies in Interactive Intelligent Systems.
Jan 2024 - Dec 2027: Member of the Young College of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts in the program Humboldtⁿ.
Jan 2021 - May 2021: Reintegration Fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Dec 2020: Winner (1st place) of the NeurIPS 2020 Education Challenge (Task 3) with Jessica McBroom.
Oct 2020 - September 2025: Junior Fellow of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research
Sep 2020: ICML 2020 Top reviewer certificate.
May 2020: Nomination for the Doctoral Disseration Award of the International Neural Network Society (INNS).
Jan 2020: Dissertation Prize of the University Society Bielefeld.
Jan 2020 - Dec 2020: Research Fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Jun 2019 - Dec 2019: Postdoctoral Career Bridge Scholarship of the Bielefeld Young Researchers' Fund.
March 2019: Best Poster Award (2nd) for the poster ‘Unfair Feedback – On Long-Term Fairness of Automatic Decision Making With and Without Affirmative Action’ at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2019.
March 2018: Best Poster Award (3rd) for the poster ‘Greedy for Diversity: The Participant Partition Problem in IK Interaction Groups’ at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2018.
March 2017: Best Poster Award (2nd) for the poster ‘Transfer Learning for Robust Control of Bionic Prostheses’ at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2017.
Sep 2016: Best Presentation Award for the paper ‘Linear Supervised Transfer Learning for Generalized Matrix LVQ’ at the New Challenges in Neural Computation Workshop (NC²) 2016.
Apr 2015: Best Student Paper Award for the paper ‘Adaptive structure metrics for automated feedback provision in java programming’ at the European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks (ESANN) 2015.
Apr 2014: Best Student Paper Award for the paper ‘Adaptive distance measures for sequential data’ at the European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks (ESANN) 2014.
Feb 2011 - Apr 2015: Full Scholarship of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (‘Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes’).

Scientific Invited Talks

September 2022: Keynote speaker at the Knowledge Sharing Festival.
September 2022: Keynote speaker at the DELFI workshop “Rahmenbedingungen für Künstliche Intelligenz in EdTech”.
May 2021: Keynote speaker at the final event of the network for digital qualification in chemistry (DQC_Net).
Jan 2016: Invited Talk at the University of Ulm on Metric Learning for Structured Data.

Teaching & Guest lectures

2024: Lecturer for User Studies in Interactive Intelligent Systems at Bielefeld University.
March 2024: Lecture Series on Machine Learning at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2024.
2023-2024: Lecturer for Introduction to Data Mining at Bielefeld University.
2023-2024: Lecturer for Human-Centric Machine Learning at Bielefeld University.
March 2023: Lecture Series on Machine Learning at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2023.
March 2021: Lecture Series entitled The AI Go Tournament at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2021.
2020: Guest lecturer at The University of Sydney for IT research methods.
March 2020: Lecture Series on Machine Learning at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2020.
March 2019: Tutorial Design and Management for Deep Learning at Bielefeld University.
2018-2019: Guest Lectures at the University of Groningen on Neural Networks and Pattern Recognition.
2018-2019: Tutorial Design and Management for Applied Optimization at Bielefeld University.
March 2018: Lecture Series at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2018 on Myoelectric Signal Processing and Pattern Recognition.
May 2017: ERASMUS+ Guest Lectures at the University of Pisa on Transfer Learning and Metric Learning.
2016-2017: Seminar on Applied Modelling at Bielefeld University.
2015-2018: Tutorial Design and Management for Theoretical Computer Science at Bielefeld University.
2015-2016: Guest Lectures at the Interdisciplinary College (IK).
Summer Term 2015: Tutorial Design and Management for Algorithms of Computer Science at Bielefeld University.

Academic Functions

June 2025: Co-Chair for the Center for Interdisciplinary Research Workshop on AI and Autonomy in Higher Education.
June 2024 to September 2025: Program Chair for the 48th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI2025).
March 2025: Co-Chair of the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2025.
May 2024: Participated in Dagstuhl seminar 24192 - Generalization by People and Machines.
March to December 2024: Area chair for the International Conference on Neural Information Processing (NeurIPS) 2024.
January 2024: Co-Founder of the Network AI and digital autonomy in science and education.
September 2023 to July 2024: Program Chair for the International Conference on Educational Data Mining 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
March 2023 to today: Speaker of the program committee for the Interdisciplinary College (IK).
May 2022 to August 2024: Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Project KI4CoLearnET.
Jan 2022 to July 2022: Co-Lead of the Mentoring Program for the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2022.
Oct 2021: Co-Chair of the Special Session Deep Learning for Graphs at the Europian Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks (ESANN) 2021.
Sep 2021: Area chair for the applied data science track at the European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) 2021.
Jun 2021: Member of the program committee for the Educational Data Mining in Computer Science Education (CSEDM) Workshop at the International Conference on Educational Data Mining.
Jun 2021: Co-Chair of the Workshop Computational Approaches to Creativity in Educational Technologies and member of the program committee for the iTextbooks workshop at the Artificial Intelligence in Education Conference.
March 2021: Chair of the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2021.
Dec 2020 to today: Member of the IEEE task force on reservoir computing.
May 2020 to today: Associate Editor for the Journal Neural Processing Letters.
Feb 2020 to today: Member of the IEEE task force on learning for structured data.
Apr 2020: Member of the Technical Program Committee for the European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks (ESANN) 2020
March 2020: Conference Management for the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2020.
Apr 2019: Chair of the Special Session Embeddings and Representation Learning for Structured Data at the European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks (ESANN) 2019.
March 2019: Conference Management for the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2019.

Outreach & Press

May 2024 to today: Podcast Autonomie & Algorithmen - Freiheit im Zeitalter von KI with Christiane Attig, part of the Year of Science 2024 “Freedom”.
June 2024: Talk AI and autonomy in higher education at the University:Future Festival.
January 2024: Blog Entry for Jan-Martin Wiarda: Why universities should now host open-source language models.
February 2023 to today: Invited talks at several outreach events on ChatGPT and education, e.g. Verband der Privatschulen NRW, Weiterbildung Hessen e.V., Hessischer Volkshochschulverband, TU Braunschweig, Bundesschülerkonferenz, VHS Höxter, Diakonie Baden, VHS-Verband Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Landkreis Uelzen.
July 2023: Interview with Deutsche Welle SHIFT on AI in education
August 2022: Featured by Matt Parker (aka standupmaths) in two videos for a graph-theoretic solution to finding five words with distinct letters an documenting later, faster solutions.
April 2022: Founding member and member of the scientific advisory board for StarCode e.V..
August 2021: Participant of the Summer Academy on International Politics and AI of the Academy for International Affairs NRW.
August 2021: Contribution to the 3Blue1Brown Summer of Math Exposition.
Apr 2016: Presenter at the Famelab in Bielefeld.

Reviews

Over ninety reviews for indexed academic journals, as well as numerous reviews for top conferences, such as the International Conference on Advances in Neural Information Processing (NeurIPS), the International Conference for Machine Learning (ICML), the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks (ESANN), and the International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN).

Supervision

I am currently supervising a team of six PhD students and one postdoctoral researcher.

I supervised nineteeen bachelor’s theses, eight master’s theses, one honors thesis (Sydney), one research internship, and four student research assistants. Some of these theses resulted in peer-reviewed publications (Rüttgers, Kuhl, and Paaßen, 2023; Paaßen, Jensen, and Hammer, 2016; Kummert et al., 2016).