Work and Education

Scientific Employee

• Developed a Java Spring Boot-based platform, schooltogo, to support teachers in creating and organizing their lessons efficiently.
• Implemented a content-based recommender to help teachers organize their materials and lessons.
• Used OpenAI’s text generation models to help teachers speed up their text writing process and to extract school competences from the official Federal state Curricula PDFs which are then imported into schooltogo.
• Conducted interviews with educators to evaluate platform usability and inform future feature development.

Researcher

Developed various recommender systems and improved DevOps practices for the two following research projects:

• KUPPEL: an AI-based platform which used a sequential-based recommender to find the optimal learning path courses across two different German learning platforms.
• YouCodeGirls: developed a platform which encourages young girls to learn programming, by tailoring the courses to their interests, e.g. sports, music.

Software Engineer

• Developed the content creation platform, COLORS, to help companies internally train their employees. COLORS uses Java Spring Boot in the backend and stores all data in a PostgreSQL database.
• Implemented a content-based recommender to guide the trainer through the existing courses on the platform.

Scientific Employee

• Developed a natural language generation model of bar chart descriptions in a few-shot setting.
• Adapted an existing TensorFlow and Python codebase to work with a dataset of annotated bar chart descriptions.
• Automatically measured the correctness and quality of the GPT-2 generated descriptions.

Student Assistant

Proposed and analyzed multiple strategies for extending the Signal messaging protocol to multiple devices while preserving its security guarantees.

Student Assistant

• Theoretical analysis of security protocols for smart homes and IoT.
• Analysis of the WhatsApp encryption protocol.

Tutor

Organized and taught a weekly tutorial, which included the preparation and grading of minitests. Helped with exam preparation and grading.

Student

• Course work about Psycho-Pedagogical Training, how to organize lessons, and hands-on teaching experience.
• Taught high school students introduction to programming.

Mentor

Helped young children learn how to program in Scratch

Master in Computer Science

Thesis: How to be Grim: explaining data at different granularity levels using patterns and structure functions

• Proposed two algorithms, Grim and Brim, which approximate Kolmogorov’s structure function. They find multiple, increasingly detailed explanations for a dataset, that provide a high-level view as well as an in-depth one.
• Improved and extended an existing large codebase in C++.

Bachelor in Computer Science

Thesis: The experimental analysis of several approximation algorithms

• Implemented multiple approximation algorithms in Python for solving the Set Cover and Vertex Cover problems.
• Compared the results with an optimum solution outputted by the mathematical optimization solver Gurobi.

Bachelor in Photography

Thesis: People and books

• Course work about Art in general and Photography in particular.
• The final thesis consisted of a series of photographs depicting people reading their chosen books.