While attending the Heidelberg Laureate Forum this year, I got to meet Letitia Parcalabescu who is running a YouTube channel called the AI Coffee Break. Among other topics, we talked abou my PhD research on adversarial robustness. Part of our conversasion can now be found on her YouTube channel.
This September, I had the chance to attend the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) for the second — and probably last — time. The HLF is an incredible experince for young researchers: Mirroring the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, the organizers invite laureates from math and computer science together with young researchers pursuing their undergraduate, graduate or post-doc studies. In this article, I want to share impressions and encourage students to apply next year!
In September, I received the DAGM MVTec dissertation award 2023 for my PhD thesis. DAGM is the German association for pattern recognition and organizes the German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR) which is Germany’s prime conference for computer vision and related research areas. I feel particularly honored by this award since my academic career started with my first paper published as part of the young researcher forum at GCPR 2015 in Aachen.
Recently, I had the opportunity to be a guest on Jay Shah’s podcast where he regularly talks to machine learning professionals from industry and academia. We had a great conversation about my PhD research and topics surrounding a successful career in machine learning — finding a good PhD program and research topic, preparing for interviews in industry, etc.
Report of the 2020 Max Planck PhDNet survey results.
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.