Welcome to my web page about my scientific identity.
I am leading a research group on Autonomous Learning at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen.
Before joining the MPI in Tübingen, I was postdoc fellow at the IST Austria in the groups of Christoph Lampert and Gašper Tkačik after being a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig. I am interested in autonomous learning, that is how an embodied agent can determine what to learn, how to learn, and how to judge the learning success. I am using information theory and dynamical systems theory to formulate generic intrinsic motivations that lead to coherent behavior exploration – much like playful behavior. Furthermore, I develop methods to quantify autonomous behavior in robots and animals using information theory and manifold learning. Recently, I am also working on machine learning methods particularly suitable for internal models and learning from sequences.
Current research projects and publications can be found on the website of my group: http://al.is.mpg.de.
For my older work check out our website of the research network for self-organization of robot behavior for publications, software, videos etc.
Ralf Der and I published a book: The Playful Machine.
Short Curriculum Vitae
- 2017 – present Group leader at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen (Group page is under construction)
- 2015 – 2017 Post-doctoral Fellow at IST Austria
- 2010 – 2015 Post-doctoral position at Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
- 2009 – 2010 Post-doctoral position at Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization Göttingen, Germany
- 2009 Ph.D. in Physics (Computational Neuroscience and Robotics)
- 2005 – 2009 Ph.D. student at Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience (BCCN) Göttingen, Germany
- 2002 – 2003 study of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh, UK
- 1999 – 2005 study of Computer Science, University of Leipzig, Germany
