Work Experience
- Jun 2021 - May 2023
- 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 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 until today
- 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’).
Teaching & Guest lectures
- May 2021
- Keynote speaker at the final event of the network for digital qualification in chemistry (DQC_Net).
- March 2021
- Lecture Series entitled The AI Go Tournament at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2021.
- Winter and summer term 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.
- Winter Term 2019/2020
- Tutorial Design and Management for Applied Optimization at Bielefeld University.
- March 2019
- Tutorial Design and Management for Deep Learning at Bielefeld University.
- Jan 2019
- Guest Lectures at the University of Groningen on Neural Networks and Pattern Recognition.
- Winter Term 2018/2019
- Tutorial Design and Management for Applied Optimization at Bielefeld University.
- Summer Term 2018
- Tutorial Design and Management for Theoretical Computer Science at Bielefeld University.
- March 2018
- Lecture Series at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2018 on Myoelectric Signal Processing and Pattern Recognition.
- Jan 2018
- Guest Lectures at the University of Groningen on Neural Networks and Pattern Recognition.
- Winter Term 2017/2018
- Seminar on Applied Modelling at Bielefeld University.
- May 2017
- ERASMUS+ Guest Lectures at the University of Pisa on Transfer Learning and Metric Learning.
- Summer Term 2017
- Lectures, Tutorial Design and Management for Theoretical Computer Science at Bielefeld University.
- Winter Term 2016/2017
- Tutorial Design and Management for Theoretical Computer Science at Bielefeld University.
- Summer Term 2016
- Seminar on Applied Modelling at Bielefeld University.
- March 2016
- Guest Lecture at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2016 on Similarity-Based Machine Learning
- Jan 2016
- Guest Lecture at the University of Ulm on Metric Learning for Structured Data.
- Winter Term 2015/2016
- Tutorial Design and Management for Theoretical Computer Science at Bielefeld University.
- Summer Term 2015
- Tutorial Design and Management for Algorithms of Computer Science at Bielefeld University.
- March 2015
- Guest Lecture at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2015 on Semantic Web Technologies for Word Processing.
Academic Functions
- 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
- August 2021
- Participant of the Summer Academy on International Politics and AI of the Academy for International Affairs NRW.
- August 2021
- Participant in the 3Blue1Brown Summer of Math Exposition.
- Apr 2021
- Blog entry at ZiF Hypotheses on AI and Ethics
- Jan 2020
- Interview with Hertz 87.9 on toxic gamer culture
- Dec 2019
- Panel member at the ScienceCinema in Bielefeld
- Oct 2019
- Public demo at the Northrhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences on machine learning for changing data
- Sep 2019
- Interview with Hertz 87.9 on societal impacts of machine learning
- May 2018
- Public demo at the data science day of Bielefeld University on prosthesis research
- Apr 2016
- Presenter at the Famelab in Bielefeld
Reviews
Over fifty reviews for indexed academic journals, as well as numerous reviews for conferences, such as the International Conference on Advances in Neural Information Processing (NeurIPS), the International Conference for Machine Learning (ICML), the European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks (ESANN), and the International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN).
Supervision
I supervised eight bachelor’s theses and five master’s theses as well as two student research assistants. Some of these theses resulted in peer-reviewed publications (Paaßen, Jensen, and Hammer, 2016 as well as Kummert et al., 2016).