Conducting PhD research can be a long endeavor, involving much more than the publications listed on Google Scholar. As I recently submitted my thesis, in this article, I look back on my time as PhD researcher in terms of numbers. This way, I hope to shed some light on what a PhD can look like in terms of everyday work.
In 2018, I was half a year into my PhD and wrote an article about choosing the right PhD program, which I personally found to be incredibly difficult even though I only had few options to decide between. This article is an updated version, preserving most of my original opinions and advice and adding some perspectives having finished my PhD in the meantime.
In 2019, I interviewed for research internships at DeepMind and Google AI. I have been asked repeatedly about my preparation for and experience with these interviews. As internship applications at DeepMind have been opened recently, I thought it could be valuable to summarize my experience and recommendations in this article.
The Heidelberg Laureate Forum brings together young researchers and laureates in computer science and mathematics. During lectures, workshops, panel discussions and social events, the forum fosters personal and scientific exchange with other young researchers as well as laureates. I was incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to participate in the 7th Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2019. In this article, I want to give a short overview of the forum and share some of my impressions.
In early May, I received the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2019 for my ongoing research on adversarial robustness of deep neural networks. After an initial application round, I was invited to the University of Amsterdam’s Science Park for the finalist round. The winners were selected based on a short research talk including questions from Qualcomm researchers.
In September, I received the STEM-Award IT 2018 for the best master thesis on autonomous driving. The award with the topic “On The Road to Vision Zero” was sponsored by ZF, audimax and MINT Zukunft Schaffen. The jury specifically highlighted the high scientific standard of my master thesis “Learning 3D Shape Completion under Weak Supervision”.
Last week, I attended my very first CVPR in Salt Lake City, where I also presented my work on weakly-supervised 3D shape completion. In the course of the week, I attended several tutorials as well as all oral and poster sessions. In this article, I want to share my notes and some general comments.
At at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, PhD students — which are enrolled in the Saarbrücken Graduate School for Computer Science — have to pass a qualification exam. In this article, I want to share the slides of my qualification exam talk.
In the last few months, I started to pursue a PhD. Although I did not have many options, also because I decided not to apply to many programs, I found choosing the right PhD incredibly difficult. In this article, I want to share some of my insights.
In April, I visited Prof. Bernt Schiele’s Computer Vision and Multimodal Computing Department at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken. Aside from a presentation on my recent superpixel benchmark, I also met many interesting people and learned a lot about a career in research.