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

Lead Data Scientist/Software Engineer

2019 - Present
MaibornWolff GmbH

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.

Research Software Engineer

2011 - 2019
LMU - IPS

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.

Ph.D. student

2015 - 2019
LMU - IPS

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.

Research Assistant

2011 - 2011
Technische Universität München - Chair Informatics IX

Student Research Assistant

2008 - 2010
Technische Universität München - Chair Informatics IX

Working Student

2009 - 2010
Convious Consulting GmbH, Augsburg

Honorary

(Marginally) engaged at the Scientists 4 Future München

2019 - present
S4F München

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.

Board member (6 month)/president of AEGEE München (12 month)

2013 - 2014
AEGEE München

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.

Head of dormitory parliament

2007 - 2010
Wohnheim Lechbrücke

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.

Skills & Proficiency

Data Science

Software Engineering

Java

R

Backend Development

Data Visualization

Interdisciplinary Research

Frontend Development

C/C++

Publications - Speech

Kisler, Thomas and Schiel, Florian (2018). MOCCA: Measure of Confidence for Corpus Analysis - automatic reliability check of transcript and automatic segmentation. In Proc. of the 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Miyazaki, Japan.
Kisler, Thomas and Schiel, Florian (2018). Towards a speaker localization from spontaneous speech: north-south classification for speakers of contemporary German. In Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung - Tagungsband der 29. Konferenz.
Schiel, F. and Kisler, T. (2014). German Alcohol Language Corpus - the question of dialect. In Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Reykjavik, Iceland.
Kisler, T. and Reichel, U.D. (2013). Exploring the connection of acoustic and distinctive features. In Proc. 14th Interspeech, Lyon, France.
Kisler, T. and Reichel, U.D. (2013). A dialect distance metric based on string and temporal alignment. In Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung, Bielefeld, Germany.

Publications - Infrastructure

Kisler, T. and Reichel, U. and Schiel, F. (2017). Multilingual processing of speech via web services. In Computer Speech & Language, Volume 45, September.
Kisler, T. and Reichel, U. and Schiel, F. and Draxler, C. and Jackl, B. and Pörner, N. (2016). BAS speech science web services - an update of current developments. In Proc. of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Portorož, Slovenia.
Kisler, T. and Schiel, F. and Reichel, U.D. and Draxler, C. (2015). Phonetic/Linguistic web services at BAS. In Proc. Interspeech, Dresden, Germany.
Reichel, U.D. and Kisler, T. (2014). Language-independent grapheme-phoneme conversion and word stress assignment as a web service. In Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung, Dresden, Germany.
Kisler, T. and Schiel, F. and Sloetjes, H. (2012). Signal processing via web services: the use case WebMAUS. In Proceedings Digital Humanities, Hamburg, Germany.

Publications - Computer Vision

C. Lenz, T. Röder, M. Eggers, S. Amin, T. Kisler, B. Radig, G. Panin, A. Knoll (2010). A distributed many-camera system for multi-person tracking. In Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science.