Career Profile
I am Lead Data Scientist and a Software Engineer with an education in classical software engineering and a Ph.D. (Dr. des.) at the intersection between spoken language and Machine Learning. I like evaluating data, create meaning- and beautiful data visualizations, bringing ML models to production and solve real world problems by automated/improved processes. Additionally, I am looking for ways to make a contribution to stop the climate change - which is for me the biggest challenge of humankind in the 21st century. The following is a selection of the most important positions I held in the past and skills I have acquired.
Experiences
Since 2019 I am a Lead Data Scientist and Software Engineer at a medium sized software company. There I work in the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence department. My projects span the whole spectrum between consulting and implementation. Projects include the development of a software that replaces an existing solution by a more elegant and customized sofware, the development of a 5-year roadmap to bridge the gap between the current architecture and the envisioned one in the context of Natural Language Processing, and the assessment of a big data architecture regarding it's performance.
I was one of two developers of Munichs’ center of the European Infrastructure Initiative CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure). I developed the web wrapper of the processing tools at the IPS from scratch, including REST-like web services and an AngularJS front-end (in TypeScript) for phonetics related command line tools. After completing a first version of this interfaces and services, this included introducing users to the tool on international conferences and workshops. The platform had thousands of users and processed over 5 million files in 2019.
My thesis is concerned with employing machine learning for the localization of a speakers origin based on acoustic features from speech. Additionally, I validate a method for pre-processing of speech recordings for used in research of regional variation and propose a method for spotting errors in this automatic process to decrease manual labor. Further, I relate my findings to known phonetic and dialectological knowledge and try to effectively visualize the results.
Honorary
After signing the statement confirming that the actions taken by the Fridays for Future activists are legitimate and necessary, I am loosly engaged at the Scientists 4 Future in Munich mostly supporting them at demonstrations. In 2020 I took a more serious role and was part in the electoral commission that organized the election of the new S4F core team.
I was a board member and president of AEGEE München, Munich’s local group of a European students initiative with around 200 local groups around Europe. This included being part and leading an international team that planned activities in different fields which included intercultural exchange, activities to encourage young people to actively participate in society, and non-formal education.
During my time living in the students dormitory I was (almost the entire time) head of the parliament at a dormitory. This included organization of social events, meetings where the representatives of the dormitory decided over internal topics (e.g. extraordinary prolonging of contracts, measures to improve quality of live, etc.), and middleman between dormitory and the student union.