Greater Graz
From the beginning of my professional lifetime my enthusiasm was about modelling and realising systems with relevance for human beings. Starting with my education at the Graz University of Technology, Austria, my work on the MSc. and PhD. in Computer Science was firstly focused on predictive AI and visual perception, being inspired and supported by Fernando J. Pineda (Baltimore), Volkmaar Haase, Wolfgang Maas, and Axel Pinz (Graz). This was followed by a research visit at Fraunhofer starting to be engaged on human-inspired robot-based attention models, applying cognitive computing with visual sensor information. It was a wonderful and visionary lifetime spent at Sankt Augustin (Germany) with Erich Rome and Joachim Hertzberg. Finally, I found my home base at the applied research centre Joanneum Research at Graz, always enjoying a highly motivating environment where I was able to pursue on cognitive sensing and interaction. I am very thankful for the impressive support by Matthias Schardt, Heinz Mayer, Matthias Rüther and Silvia Russegger. Since 2010 I enjoyed the development of assistive technologies for vulnerable human beings. User-centred design has always been mandatory by understanding directly the persons’ key requirements and to work with their cooperation and mandate. While the focus has been on elderly and persons with risk of dementia, I was further interested in the needs of recent immigrants, neurodiversity and mental health. The Human Factors Lab has provided a foundation for the development of numerous human-centred prototypes - using robots, VR/AR/MR/XR, mobile and stationary devices - integrating cognitive and mental models that are driven by information from wearable sensors, eye tracking, and interaction events, in the business areas of digital health and care, industry and security. It is my passion to coach and develop an enthusiastic, competent, and committed team of dear and highly valued colleagues – experienced experts in computer science, sensors and psychology - towards highest quality services for the complete diversity of society.
Head of Human Factors Lab Head of Research Team "Cognitive Sensing and Interaction" My interest is focused on research and applications towards intuitive multisensory interfaces, context and attention modeling in human factors engineering and robotic systems. In research, development of innovative wearable multisensory technologies for usability engineering, and research on AI enabled computer vision technologies. Founded/co-chaired the WAPCV/ISACS series of international symposia on attention in cognitive systems.(satellite workshop of IJCAI, CVPR, ECCV, ICVS, ICDL). Another focus is in the application of intelligent multimodal technologies (e.g., mobile AR) for social inclusion and diversity - considering migrants, elderly, illiterates, ethnic minorities, etc.
Employment at the GMD, National Research Center for Information Technology (now Fraunhofer Institute AIS) , Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems, Sankt Augustin, Germany; within the EU-TMR network VIRGO (Vision Based Robot Navigation). Research Group "Cognitive Robotics" headed by Prof. Joachim Hertzberg and Dr. Erich Rome.
Austrian Joint Research Program (Austrian Science Fund, FWF), ‘Theory and Applications of Digital Image Processing and Pattern Recognition’. Topics of research: projective geometry and computer vision (Structural Edge Classification in Planar Environments), object recognition (Active Object Recognition in Parametric Eigenspace), machine learning (Reinforcement Learning of 3-D Object Recognition from Appearance)
Joint work towards Master's Thesis with Fernando J. Pineda on "Temporal Difference Learning in Serious Games".