Information for students interested in thesis supervision and collaboration

I get many requests for thesis supervision and I cannot supervise all. I will only supervise theses that are related to reinforcement learning or similar methods, and they must be built upon our virtual robotics lab Scilab-RL. You can find information about the application process here.

About me

I am Chief Engineer at the Institute for Data Science Foundations at the Hamburg University of Technology. I am responsible for the institute’s cognitive robotics lab, and I am involved in teaching the machine learning lecture. My research focus lies in computational cognitive models of representation learning and reinforcement learning for simulated and physical agents and robots.   I am also the coordinator and principal investigator of two research projects funded by the DFG, namely MoReSpace and LeCAREbot. Previously I have coordinated several other projects, funded by the DFG, the Volkswagen Stiftung and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Overall, I have been the principal applicant and investigator of research projects worth more than €1,5 Mio. total funding volume. I have published in numerous renowned venues, including the journals Nature Machine Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) and the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). My full list of publications can be found at my Google Scholar profile page. I have self-responsibly taught various lectures and courses, including a Data Science lecture at the West Coast University of Applied Sciences and a general skills course called “From Data to Knowledge” at the Universität Hamburg.  

From 2016 to 2021, I was a postdoctoral research associate at the Knowledge Technology Institute at the University of Hamburg, working on data-driven methods for neuro-semantic systems,  data science, machine learning and cognitive robotics. Before coming to Hamburg, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California at Berkeley where my focus was on human-robot interaction using neurocognitively inspired methods for natural language understanding. I moved to Berkeley in 2015, when I was a postdoc at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC) in Barcelona, Spain, within the COINVENT project. At IIIA-CSIC, I worked on AI methods for concept representation and concept blending. I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bremen, Germany in 2014, where I gained a background in robotic applications of logical formalizations of symbolic reasoning, epistemic action theory and commonsense reasoning in assistive service robotics and smart environments. I am always open for collaborations and new ideas, so please do not hesitate to contact me.

Curriculum Vitae

Publications

Research