about
I’m a scientist at Yahoo! Labs based in Santa Clara, California. My research focusses on machine learning techniques and novel applications thereof.
Publications
A list of my publications can be found here.
Software I work(ed) on
- CofiRank: A collaborative filtering algorithm that supports predicting the ranking of items as opposed to mere rating.
- BMRM: Open source, modular and scalable convex solver for many machine learning problems cast in the form of regularized risk minimization problem.
- Elefant: A machine learning toolbox. My contributions include a bridge that renders UIMA annotators into feature extraction tools for machine learning. This code is Open Source under the Mozilla Public License.
- DkPro: A set of UIMA annotators. Only available under a restrictive licence.
Awards
- Best Machine Learning Paper at ECML-PKDD 2008
- Scholarship award at the Machine Learning Summer School 2006
Involvement in the academic community
- PC Member of MLOSS ‘10
- Reviewer for ACM Recommender Systems 2010
- Reviewer for ICML 2010
- Reviewer for AISTATS 2010
- Reviewer: Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on“Bridging the Gap” – Data Mining and Social Network Analysis for Integrating Semantic Web and Web 2.0
- Reviewer Deutsche KI-Konferenz 2009
- PC Member of the Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL’08) in the International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL) 2009
- Co-Organizer of iatel09
- PC-Member of ECML/PKDD 2009
- External reviewer for KDD 2009
- External advisor in the review process of COLT 2008
- PC member in the workshop “Bridging the Gap between Semantic Web and Web 2.0” at 4th European Semantic Web Conference ESWC 2007
People I work(ed) with
- Alexandros Karatzoglou
- Alex Smola
- Jürgen Steimle
- Karsten Weihe
- Kilian Weinberger
- Max Mühlhäuser
- Oliver Brdiczka
- Quoc Viet Le
Student guidance
- Daniel Glöckner: Collaborative filtering of framework code, Diploma thesis at TUD.
- Kai Michael Höver: Ranking im Web 2.0. Diplomarbeit an der TU Darmstadt.
- David Koch: Study of the discrepancy between client- and server side logging of clickstreams. Master’s Thesis at the KTH Stockholm.Jointly supervised with Steffen Hartman.
Teaching
- 2006/2007: E-Learning seminar at TUD together with Jürgen Steimle and Guido Rössling.
- 2006: Web 2.0 course at the Akademischer Verein at TUD. Together with Andreas May from cetron.
- 2005: Designed a practical course in Data Mining at IPSI together with Ulrike von Luxburg.
- 2001-2004: “Allgemeine Informatik”, the computer science course for non-cs majors at TUD. Together with Karsten Weihe
- 2002: LaTeX course at the Akademischer Verein at TUD. Together with Andreas May from cetron.
Former affiliations
- I obtained my PhD as a student in the [graduate school for the improvement of e-learning at the computer science department of the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. I worked on applications of machine learning in elearning. To do so, I was lucky enough to gather support by two supervisors: Max Mühlhäuser (TUD) and Alex Smola (Yahoo! Research / Australian National University).
- Yahoo! Research: Research intern. I worked on email spam filters in the SPARTA project.
- Statistical Machine Learning Program of NICTA: Visiting Scholar
- Data Mining Group MINE of Fraunhofer’s Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute (IPSI): Research associate
- Centre for Complex Systems and Control (CDSC) at The University of Newcastle, Australia: Visiting Scholar




