I am a Research Scientist at DeepMind working on machine-learning approaches to robotic exploration and control in the team of Martin Riedmiller. I have obtained a PhD at Oxford University supervised by Ingmar Posner at the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) and Andrea Vedaldi at the Visual Geometry Group (VGG). My PhD research focused on the acquisition of physical intution and its utilization in robot learning. In this TEDx talk, I give an overview over what motivates my research and how it could be applied to teach a robot play Jenga.
Previously, I obtained a Diplom degree in Computer Science from Dresden University of Technology where I worked on grounding of natural language in images supervised by Carsten Rother. During my time as a visiting student researcher at the Stanford Vision Lab, I was supervised by Fei-Fei Li and involved in the VisualGenome project.
In my spare time, I enjoy long walks and hikes, swimming, skiing, archery, listening to music and playing the piano to take my mind off the virtual world. I am also very passionate about playing computer and tabletop games. I have been a member of an indie developer team called PhoenixTales where we worked on our own 3D Action-Role-Playing-Game Phoenix.